The New Hollywood, Hollywood Renaissance, or American New Wave, was a movement in American film history from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when a new generation of filmmakers came to prominence. They influenced the types of film produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking. In New Hollywood films, the film director, rather than the studio, took on a key authorial role.
The definition of "New Hollywood" varies, depending on the author, with some defining it as a movement and others as a period. The span of the period is also a subject of debate, as well as its integrity, as some authors, such as Thomas Schatz, argue that the New Hollywood consists of several different movements. The films made in this movement are stylistically characterized in that their narrative often deviated from classical norms. After the demise of the studio system and the rise of television, the commercial success of films was diminished.
Successful films of the early New Hollywood era include Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider while films whose box office failure marked the end of the era include New York, New York, Sorcerer, Heaven's Gate, They All Laughed, and One from the Heart.
It is also the name of a 1990 NBC News special hosted by Tom Brokaw about the then "new" Hollywood industry of the 1980s and early 1990s making epic mainstream blockbusters, personal mid-budget fare and smaller independent efforts.
Contents
History
Background
Following the Paramount Case (which ended block booking and ownership of theater chains by film studios) and the advent of television (where Gore Vidal, Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet worked in their earlier years), both of which severely weakened both the traditional studio system and the Motion Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code), Hollywood studios initially used spectacle to retain profitability. Technicolor developed a far more widespread use, while widescreen processes and technical improvements, such as CinemaScope, stereo sound, and others, such as 3-D, were invented to retain the dwindling audience and compete with television. However, these were generally unsuccessful in increasing profits. By 1957, Life magazine called the 1950s "the horrible decade" for Hollywood. It was dubbed a "New Hollywood" by a press.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood was dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing, and improved sound. However, audience shares continued to dwindle, and had reached alarmingly low levels by the mid-1960s. Several costly flops, including Doctor Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora! and the Julie Andrews vehicle Star!, each failed attempts to replicate the success of Mary Poppins, Doctor Zhivago and The Sound of Music, put great strain on the studios. Both British and American press dismissed filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as "frivolous entertainers and nothing more" while praising more respectable "models of American art films" like Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. American underground cinema was usually regarded as "marginal and parochial" even with the debut features of John Cassavetes (Shadows in 1959) and Shirley Clarke (The Connection in 1961) as both were being praised by Esquire film critic Dwight Macdonald (despite being hostile to other underground titles like Jonas Mekas's 1963 manifestation Guns of the Trees).
By the time the Baby Boomer generation started to come of age in the mid-late 1960s, "Old Hollywood" was rapidly losing money; the studios were unsure how to react to the much-changed audience demographics. The change in the market during the period went from a middle-aged high school-educated audience in the mid-1960s to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic: by the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college. European films, both arthouse and commercial (especially the Commedia all'italiana, the French New Wave, the Spaghetti Western), and Japanese cinema were making a splash in the United States – the huge market of disaffected youth seemed to find relevance and artistic meaning in movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate
A defining film of the New Hollywood generation was Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn, its combination of graphic violence and humor, as well as its theme of glamorous disaffected youth, was a hit with audiences. The film eventually won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Cinematography.
When Jack L. Warner, then-CEO of Warner Bros. Pictures, first saw a rough cut of Bonnie and Clyde in the summer of 1967, he hated it. Distribution executives at Warner Bros. agreed, giving the film a low-key premiere and limited release. Their strategy appeared justified when Bosley Crowther, middlebrow film critic at The New York Times, gave the movie a scathing review. "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy," he wrote, "that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie..." Other notices, including those from Time and Newsweek magazines, were equally dismissive.
Its portrayal of violence and ambiguity in regard to moral values, and its startling ending, divided critics. Following one of the negative reviews, Time magazine received letters from fans of the movie, and according to journalist Peter Biskind, the impact of critic Pauline Kael in her positive review of the film (October 1967, New Yorker) led other reviewers to follow her lead and re-evaluate the film (notably Newsweek and Time). Kael drew attention to the innocence of the characters in the film and the artistic merit of the contrast of that with the violence in the film: "In a sense, it is the absence of sadism — it is the violence without sadism — that throws the audience off balance at Bonnie and Clyde. The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers." Kael also noted the reaction of audiences to the violent climax of the movie, and the potential to empathize with the gang of criminals in terms of their naiveté and innocence reflecting a change in expectations of American cinema.
The cover story in Time magazine in December 1967, celebrated the movie and innovation in American New Wave cinema. This influential article by Stefan Kanfer claimed that Bonnie and Clyde represented a "New Cinema" through its blurred genre lines, and disregard for honored aspects of plot and motivation, and that "In both conception and execution, Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend." Biskind states that this review and turnaround by some critics allowed the film to be re-released, thus proving its commercial success and reflecting the move toward the New Hollywood. The impact of this film is important in understanding the rest of the American New Wave, as well as the conditions that were necessary for it.
Characteristics
The new generation of Hollywood filmmakers was most importantly, from the studios' view, young, therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing. This collective of actors, screenwriters and directors, dubbed the "New Hollywood" by the press, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past as Todd Berliner has written about the period's unusual narrative practices.
The 1970s, Berliner says, marks Hollywood's most significant formal transformation since the conversion to sound film and is the defining period separating the storytelling modes of the studio era and contemporary Hollywood. New Hollywood films deviate from classical narrative norms more than Hollywood films from any other era or movement. Their narrative and stylistic devices threaten to derail an otherwise straightforward narration. Berliner argues that five principles govern the narrative strategies characteristic of Hollywood films of the 1970s:
Seventies films show a perverse tendency to integrate, in narrative incidental ways, story information and stylistic devices counterproductive to the films' overt and essential narrative purposes.
Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s often situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and those of European and Asian art cinema.
Seventies films prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than those of more typical Hollywood cinema.
Seventies narratives place an uncommon emphasis on irresolution, particularly at the moment of climax or in epilogues, when more conventional Hollywood movies busy themselves tying up loose ends.
Seventies cinema hinders narrative linearity and momentum and scuttles its potential to generate suspense and excitement.
Seventies cinema also dealt with female identity in the era of second wave feminism, masculine crises featuring flawed male characters, downbeat conclusions and pessimistic subject matters alongside emotional realism in female identity stories, negative attitudes toward authoritative institutions and other aspects of American life and hard-nosed depictions of an America reeling from tense conflicts like The Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. Some New Hollywood titles like Hopper's acid western The Last Movie and Brian De Palma's musical Phantom of the Paradise had more eccentric characteristics including indulgent storylines and dizzying disregard of genre conventions.
Interpretations on defining the movement
For Peter Biskind, the new wave was foreshadowed by Bonnie and Clyde and began in earnest with Easy Rider. Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls argues that the New Hollywood movement marked a significant shift towards independently produced and innovative works by a new wave of directors, but that this shift began to reverse itself when the commercial success of Jaws and Star Wars led to the realization by studios of the importance of blockbusters, advertising and control over production (even though the success of The Godfather was said to be the precursor to the blockbuster phenomenon).
Writing in 1968, critic Pauline Kael argued that the importance of The Graduate was in its social significance in relation to a new young audience, and the role of mass media, rather than any artistic aspects. Kael argued that college students identifying with The Graduate were not too different from audiences identifying with characters in dramas of the previous decade. She also compared this era of cinema to "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s".
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino identified in his 2022 book Cinema Speculation that:
"regular moviegoers were becoming weary of modern American movies. The darkness, the drug use, the embrace of sensation-the violence, the sex, and the sexual violence. But even more than that, they became weary of the anti-everything cynicism... Was everything a bummer? Was everything a drag? Was every movie about some guy with problems?"
In 1980, film historian/scholar Robert P. Kolker examined New Hollywood film directors in his book A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, and how their films influenced American society of the 1960s and 1970s. Kolker observed that "for all the challenge and adventure, their films speak to a continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change."
John Belton points to the changing demographic to even younger, more conservative audiences in the mid 1970s (50% aged 12–20) and the move to less politically subversive themes in mainstream cinema, as did Thomas Schatz, who saw the mid- to late 1970s as the decline of the art cinema movement as a significant industry force with its peak in 1974–75 with Nashville and Chinatown.
Criticism
Los Angeles Times article film critic Manohla Dargis described New Hollywood as the "halcyon age" of 1970s filmmaking, that "was less revolution than business as usual, with rebel hype". She also pointed out in her New York Times article that the era's enthusiasts insist this was "when American movies grew up (or at least starred underdressed actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio's dime)."
Molly Haskell, in her book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, described how this era of cinema "with its successive revelations, progressed like a stripper, though awkwardly—like a novice in a hurry to get off the stage".
This era was also infamous for its excessive decadence and on-set mishaps (as was the case for Apocalypse Now when the tumultuous production was documented by Eleanor Coppola which in turn became her 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse). Incidents plaguing the behind-the-scenes of some of the horror films from this era (such as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Poltergeist and The Omen) were also the subjects for the docuseries Cursed Films. Even Spielberg, who co-directed/co-produced Twilight Zone with John Landis, was so disgusted by the latter's handling of a deadly helicopter accident that resulted in the death of three actors (Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children), that he ended their friendship and publicly called for the end of New Hollywood. (De Palma and Friedkin shared similar sentiments about the crash.) When approached by the press about the accident, he stated:
"No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now, than ever before, to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn't safe, it's the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, 'Cut!'
Turner Classic Movies personality John Malahy, in his book Rewinding the '80s, noted that a growing problem with this era was the director's ego spending millions on elaborate cinematic dreams that almost no one shared (e.g. Cimino's Heaven's Gate).
The Golden Raspberry Awards — better known as The Razzies — emerged during the twilight of this era dishonoring productions such as Freidkin's Cruising and Cimino's Heaven's Gate alongside two megamusicals responsible for setting up the awards: Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music, the latter of which eventually became the first recipient of Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture).
Legacy
The films of New Hollywood influenced future mainstream and independent filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach. Todd Phillips's 2019 DC Comics adaptation Joker, alongside the film's period setting, was inspired by the Martin Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, while Alexander Payne's 2023 film The Holdovers took inspiration from Ashby's works. Tarantino's 2019 Academy Award-winning Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lamented the end of the Golden Age while signalling the beginning of this era. The Godfather Part III; Texasville; and The Two Jakes—each released in 1990—count as "sequels" to three New Hollywood classics, respectively: The Godfather Part II; The Last Picture Show; and Chinatown. (The sequels were directed respectively by Francis Ford Coppola; Peter Bogdanovich; and Jack Nicholson, who played the lead in Polanski's 1974 neo-noir and reprises his role here in The Two Jakes.
Such films also influenced both the Poliziotteschi genre and discoploitation films in Italy, and a decade later the Cinéma du look movement in France. The narrative for the 1983 British shot-on-video film Suffer Little Children was influenced in part by Brian De Palma's Carrie and John Carpenter's Halloween.
American Eccentric Cinema has been noted as influenced by this era. Both traditions have similar themes and narratives of existentialism and the need for human interaction. New Hollywood focuses on the darker elements of humanity and society within the context of the American Dream in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, with themes that were reflective of sociocultural issues and were centered around the potential meaninglessness of pursuing the American Dream as generation upon generation was motivated to possess it. In comparison, American Eccentric Cinema does not have a distinct context, as its films show characters who are very individual and their concerns are very distinctive to their own personalities.
The New American Cinema has been ripe for parody, as in Peter Jackson's 1989 Muppet satire Meet the Feebles (spoofing the Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter); Ernie Fosselius's spoofs Hardware Wars (1978) and Porklips Now (1980);
Jim Reardon's cult 1986 animated student film Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, spoofing Taxi Driver, The Wild Bunch, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; and Canadian video artist Todd Graham's 1987 cult fan film Apocalypse Pooh, a bizarrely comedic mash-up of Disney's Winnie the Pooh and Coppola's Apocalypse Now.