6.The Movie Brats
The New Hollywood movement saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers with auteuristic sensibilities. A certain subset of them were collectively nicknamed the Movie Brats because they had learned filmmaking not through the studio system but through watching classical Hollywood films, studying at universities with newly formed film studies curriculums, and generally going about making their own films from a young age. Intriguingly, many of the Movie Brats can be grouped into those who embodied a West Coast sensibility and those who embodied an East Coast sensibility.
Francis Ford Coppola, one of the leading members of the so-called Movie Brats, stands out in the sense that he embodies elements from both the East Coast and the West Coast. Coppola was born into a family of Italian immigrant ancestry with a legacy in classical music (his father was a flutist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and his maternal grandfather was a composer). He grew up on the East Coast, in a New York suburb, becoming obsessed with movies as a teenager, and eventually enrolling in UCLA Film School. After graduating, he directed short films and TV movies before making his Hollywood debut as a director and screenwriter. In 1970, he cowrote the script for Patton, which won him his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 1972 saw the release of his masterpiece and a milestone in cinema, The Godfather—the epic saga of a fictional Sicilian-American organized crime family in New York. His 1979 film Apocalypse Now is an exploration of the Vietnam War, but notably includes a number of West Coast influences in its attitude towards drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and surfing.
The Movie Brat that perhaps best embodied the West Coast sensibility was George Lucas, whose second film, American Graffiti, was based on his own experiences growing up in the inland city of Modesto, California. Lucas attended the film school at the University of Southern California (USC), the rival school to UCLA, and went on to found the movie company American Zoetrope with Coppola after graduating. Coppola served as producer on both American Graffiti and Lucas’s debut feature, the sci-fi film THX 1138.
Steven Spielberg is one of the biggest names to come out of this group of filmmakers in the 70s. Spielberg and his family moved to the West Coast when he was a child, and he started making his own films at a young age. When he was rejected by USC because of his middling grades, he enrolled in California State University, Long Beach, where he studied film while continuing to make his own films in his spare time. He made his debut directing for TV and made his feature-length directorial debut with 1974’s The Sugarland Express, which is heavily influenced by other countercultural road movies of the era. The film was well received and Spielberg became one of the most exciting new names in Hollywood.
Other directors embodied an East Coast sensibility. Perhaps most famous among them is Martin Scorsese. Scorsese was born into an Italian-American family living in Queens, New York. When asthma kept him from being able to go outside and play with the other kids, he began going to the movie theater. As a teenager, he got into the Italian Neorealism and French New Wave filmmakers, and went on to study film at New York University’s School of the Arts (now known as the Tisch School of the Arts). After making his debut in the late 60s, he became friends with the Movie Brats; Brian De Palma introduced him to Robert De Niro, sparking one of the most fruitful partnerships in filmmaking history, including films like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. These films all depict a dark, gritty, dangerous side of New York City.
In contrast, director Woody Allen is known for depicting a brighter, safer, albeit vaguely cynical side of New York City. Allen was born in New York and made his debut in the 50s as a comedy writer for TV. In the 60s he made a name for himself as a standup comedian while also moonlighting as a jazz clarinetist. Starting in the 70s, he made a string of highly reviewed films set in New York, including the seminal Annie Hall. Allen’s affinity for New York has long allowed to him to maintain a certain distance from the Hollywood mainstream; with the sexual abuse allegations against him receiving renewed attention with the #MeToo movement, Hollywood has further distanced itself from him.
Other East Coast filmmakers demonstrate a strong European influence. Peter Bogdanovich, born to a Serbian painter father and an Austrian-born Jewish mother, became obsessed with going to the cinema at a young age. He studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory before becoming a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the early 1960s. He became highly influenced by the work of French movie critics, especially the critic-turned director Francois Truffaut, whose work inspired him to build his own reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire before getting into filmmaking himself.
The New Jersey-born Brian De Palma is another famous East Coast director. As a college student he was inspired to get into filmmaking by Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. At one point De Palma stated that his intention was to integrate some of the themes in Hitchcock’s work and to become the “American Godard". Today he is regarded as one of the American masters of suspense.
7.Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco
Hollywood went through many changes in the 20 years between the end of World War II and the start of New Hollywood. The dismantling of the studio system and other factors mentioned in the first half of this article led filmmakers to shoot increasingly on location instead of in-studio. New Hollywood added a further layer of realism by setting out to capture the era-specific feel of locations. Many of the films that came out of the movement bring to life West Coast cities like Los Angles and San Francisco and East Coast cities like New York.
Many of the films that were set in Los Angeles were so-called neo-noirs, where filmmakers used the aesthetic and approach of the film noirs of the 1940s and 50s in order to address the social issues of the 70s. Two seminal neo-noirs from this era are Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polansky’s Chinatown (1974). The former focuses on the dark underbelly of sunny, glamorous L.A., while the latter was inspired by the California Water Wars—very prescient given the state’s ongoing wildfire and drought problems. Other films, like Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), co-written by the film critic Roger Ebert, and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), satirized the Hollywood entertainment industry.
Many of the New Hollywood films set in New York City are about the lives of European immigrants. Both Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) are about the Italian-American experience; meanwhile Annie Hall and Allen’s other films are about the Jewish-American experience. The other commonality between the The Godfather and Mean Streets is that they are crime films. Other crime films set in New York include 1976’s Marathon Man, which is about a long-distance runner that finds himself embroiled in a plot involving a Nazi war criminal, and 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, which is about a man who attempts to rob a Brooklyn bank in order to fund a sex-change operation for his gay lover. Then there’s William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), which features one of the greatest car chase sequences in film history.
Speaking of films featuring iconic car chases, Peter Yates’s 1968 film Bullitt is a seminal San Francisco film. Steve McQueen’s laconic police lieutenant would be a precursor to a new anti-hero archetype, perhaps none more famous than the titular character played by Clint Eastwood in 1971’s Dirty Harry, whose righteous end-justifies-the-means approach to his job as a police inspector speaks volumes about the police brutality problems that continue to plague America today. Also notable is Bogdanovich’s romantic screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? (1972), which features a scene that spoofs the car chase scene from Bullitt.
In addition, The Graduate (1967) and Harold and Maude (1971) are also both set in and around San Francisco. Side note, there is a scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character crosses the double-decker San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on his way to Berkeley; although he is shown as crossing the top of the bridge, that side actually carries traffic westbound, from Oakland into San Francisco.
Although Woody Allen is known for making movies set in New York, it’s interesting to note that in 1972 he appeared in the comedy film Play It Again, Sam, which is set in San Francisco. It is the film adaptation of a stage play written by Allen himself; while he had originally planned to film it in New York, he was forced to change the location to San Francisco when New York film workers went on strike in the summer of 1971.
8.The End of New Hollywood
As we've seen in this article, there are many ways to define New Hollywood. It represented a new frontier for the American movie industry in the sense that it acknowledged the counterculture movement that was coming of age in the late 60s and early 70s, and actively sought to produce films that resonated with the younger generation. At the same time, its willingness to address problems related to the Vietnam War and the distrust many Americans harbored of the government was an about-face from the World War II era, where Hollywood had thrown its full weight behind the war effort. And finally, the rise of a new generation of filmmaking auteurs largely left by the movie studios to indulge freely in their visions was a seismic shift from the well-oiled Hollywood machine of the past.
Unsurprisingly, there are many thoughts as to when the New Hollywood movement came to an end. In terms of the counterculture movement, there were already signs of its decline in the earliest New Hollywood films, and as the Vietnam War dragged on the idealism of the youth turned into disillusion. The malaise and uncertainty depicted in the films from this era in many ways became a reality. In that sense you could say that the New Hollywood movement ended in the early 70s.
In terms of the filmmakers associated with New Hollywood, as the 70s wore on movie studios would increasingly attempt to rein in their impulses. As auteurs, they were in many ways dedicated to pursuing their creative vision at all costs—something that ended up derailing, or nearly derailing, a number of key projects. Most famous among those projects is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which is a Vietnam War movie about an army Captain played by Martin Sheen sent on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, an Army Special Forces officer who has gone rogue. As Sheen’s character goes deeper and deeper into the jungle, he finds himself increasingly affected by the madness and misery of the war. He finds that Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, has become a sort of demi-god in the eyes of the local tribesmen—which perhaps says as much about Coppola himself as it does about America and the Vietnam War. As filming fell increasingly behind schedule and the production went over budget, Coppola was driven to the brink of actual madness. In the years that followed, movie studios would gradually take back the reins from directors.
While some of the Movie Brats found themselves lost in the jungle, others, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, pursued a new vision of the Hollywood epic. Films like Jaws and the Star Wars series heralded the era of the Hollywood blockbuster, which were spectacles that demanded people’s attention and continued to dominate conversation even after they had left the theaters; many went back and watched the films multiple times. The summer blockbuster season has been the centerpiece of movie studios’ annual offerings for decades now, and the lack of one in 2020 is a disaster on a scale Hollywood has never experienced.
Blockbusters were also a sign that audiences were starting to grow tired of the social commentary and gritty realism of the New Hollywood films; they wanted pure escapist entertainment. In that sense, the arrival of the blockbuster can be seen as spelling the end of New Hollywood.
9.Epilogue
After the end of the New Hollywood movement, movie studios returned to a system where the producer wielded the majority of the decision-making power. That being said, the division of labor was no longer as rigid as it once was in the sense that so many filmmakers—including the Movie Brats—increasingly took on multiple roles, sometimes serving as director, sometimes serving as producer, sometimes both. A few of them had proven their box office appeal beyond a shadow of a doubt and continued to exert a high degree of control over their projects—as long as the projects had widespread appeal. In recent years, more and more actors have also started their own production companies—the only way they can advocate for the projects they are passionate about in an era when so much of decision-making is left up to marketing surveys and big data.
In the 21st century, Hollywood’s reliance on blockbusters has morphed into a dependence on film franchises, and especially on superhero films. On many of those projects studios have hired up-and-coming filmmakers with only one or two significantly smaller-scale successes under their belts. But far from being a return to the auteurist-driven New Hollywood years, it is Hollywood tapping the cachet of those young directors in order to generate buzz for their movies. Many of those directors have ended up burning out, sometimes in full view of the public.
Another change that is evident when you look at the films produced by Hollywood in the 21st century is that it has shifted its attention from the young adults and twentysomethings of America to teens and children. The rise of the superhero film is the most obvious example. The industry’s increasing reliance on cross-media marketing, spin-offs, sequels, and remakes reflects arrested development; meanwhile, merchandising, which appeals to children and otaku-obsessives, has become big business since the Star Wars days.
The industry has also shifted from on-location shooting to the liberal and often excessive use of CGI. New Hollywood films sought to capture the geography and vibe of a location, with special focus on the East and West coasts. Films today that rely on green screen and special effects may, when done right, look spectacular, but the technology is not yet at the place where it can replicate the lived-in feel and vibrancy of a true human presence. New Hollywood films feel realer, more alive, and more emotionally resonant than the many CGI spectacles that have demolished every widely-known landmark in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City.
