The New Hollywood and Independent Filmmaking

From the e-book Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
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(What I’m about to share to you today is my notes and summarization on the topic: The New Hollywood. As a student who takes up Cinema class, I definitely respect others work of art and so let me tell you that I don’t take credit for mostly of the words used here, as they are mostly from the book mentioned above. History is history so it’s kind of hard to come up with something of my own.)

During the 1960s, the supposedly healthy industry of Hollywood filmmaking had to deal with dwindling audience due to competition, part of which is the television. American movies lose billion of tickets per year until the early 1990s.

With that as a challenge, producers thought that the strategy to produce counterculture-flavored films will entice younger audiences and so they started creating films for younger generation. The most popular and influential were Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969) and Robert Altman's MASH (1970).

Eventually, these producers needed the help of independent film directors to come up with movies who can give the viewers larger-than-life experience. These and other directors became known as the "movie brats" who had gone to film schools. At New York University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at Los Angeles, they had not only mastered the mechanics of production but also learned about film aesthetics and history which they learned from the earlier directors of the Old Hollywood. Remember my previous entry about The Film School Generation? They’re them. You may click here to read that entry.   

What lifted the industry's fortunes were films aimed squarely at broader audiences. The most successful were:

• William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1913)
• Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972)
• Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• John Carpenter's Halloween (l9l8)
• George Lucas's American Graffiti (1913), Star Wars (1977), and The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Brian De Palma (Obsession, 1976)
• Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, 1976; Raging Bull, 1980)

As had been the case with the French New Wave, these film-buff directors produced some personal, highly self-conscious films. The movie brats worked in traditional genres, but they also tried to give them an autobiographical coloring. 

• American Graffiti was not only a teenage musical but also Lucas's reflection on growing up in California in the 1960s. 
• Martin Scorsese drew on his youth in New York's Little Italy for his crime drama Mean Streets (1973). 
• Coppola imbued both Godfather films with a vivacious and melancholy sense of the intense bonds within the Italian American family. 
•  Paul Schrader poured his own obsessions with violence and sexuality into his scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and the films he directed, such as Hard Core (1919).
•  At the same time, many directors admired the European tradition, with Scorsese drawn to the visual splendor of Luchino Visconti and British director Michael Powell. 
• Some directors dreamed of making complex art films in the European mold. 

More influential were their innovations on other fronts. Some directors revived American comedy of manners that displayed rough-edged performances, dense soundtracks, and a disrespectful approach to genre. Another plot was the casual encounters among two dozen characters, none of whom is singled out as the protagonist.

Many movie brats became continuously successful directors of the era. Lucas and Spielberg became powerful producers, working together on the Indiana Jones series and personifying Hollywood's new generation. Coppola failed to sustain his own studio, but he remained an important director. Scorsese's reputation rose steadily. By the end of the 1980s, he was the most critically acclaimed living American filmmaker.

During the 1980s, fresh talents won recognition, creating a New Hollywood. Many of the biggest hits of the decade continued to come from Lucas and Spielberg, but other, somewhat younger directors were successful such as James Cameron, Tim Burton and Robert Zemeckis among many other. This was also the era when more women filmmakers became commercially successful, such as Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, and Penelope Spheeris.

 Many of the successful films of the 1990s came from directors from both these successive waves of the Hollywood renaissance: Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), De Palma's Mission: Impossible (1996), and Lucas's The Phantom Empire (1999), as well as Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), Cameron's Titanic (1991), and Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999).

The New New Hollywood also absorbed some minority directors from independent film. Wayne Wang was the most success of Asian American filmmaker. Spike Lee led the way for young African American directors such as Reginald Hudlin.

Still other directors remained independent and more or less marginal to the studios.

Stylistically, no single coherent film movement emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. The most mainstream of the young directors continued the tradition of classical American cinema. Continuity editing remained the norm, with clear signals for time shifts and new plot developments. Some directors embellished Hollywood's traditional storytelling strategies with new or revived visual techniques.

In films from Jaws onward, Spielberg used deep-focus techniques reminiscent of Citizen Kane. Lucas developed motion-control techniques for filming miniatures for Star Wars, and his firm Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) became the leader in new special-effects technology. With the aid of ILM, Zemeckis astutely exploited digital imaging for Forrest Gump. Spielberg and Lucas also led the move toward digital sound and high-quality theater reproduction technology.

Less well funded Hollywood film making cultivated more flamboyant styles. The use of camera movement and slow motion helped to extend the emotional impact of a scene. De Palma has been an even more outrageous stylist; flaunting split-screen devices on his films. Coppola has experimented with fast motion black-and-white, phone conversations handled in the foreground and background of a single shot, and old- fashioned special effects to lend a period mood.

Several of the newer entrants into Hollywood enriched mainstream conventions of genre, narrative, and style. In presenting the women's lives, the film adheres to narrative principles that recall Citizen Kane. Flashbacks, creating sharp contrasts, voice over commentaries were used to intensify the emotional effect.

A similar effort to revise conventions pervades the work of other independent directors. Independent directors of the 1980s and 1990s have also experimented with narrative construction. So, while in the 1980s and 1990s younger studio directors adapted classical conventions to modern tastes, an energetic independent film tradition began pushing the envelope. 

By the end of the 1990s, the two trends were merging in surprising ways. As independent films began to win larger audiences, major studios eagerly acquired distribution companies such as Miramax and October Films. Much media journalism fostered the impression that Hollywood was becoming subverted by independent filmmaking but in fact, more and more major studios controlled audience's access to formerly independent productions. The Sundance Film Festival, founded as a forum for the off-Hollywood scene, came to be treated as a talent market by the studios, which often bought films in order to line up the filmmaker for more mainstream projects. 

At the start of the new century, many of the most thrilling Hollywood films were being created by a robust new generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s and brought up on videotape, video games, and the Internet. Like their predecessors, these directors were reshaping the formal and stylistic conventions of the classical cinema while also making their innovations accessible to a broad audience.

(credits: all photos courtesy of Google.com)