Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 2

  The young directors employed a new group of actors—Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Richard Drey-fuss, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Harvey Keitel, and Elliott Gould—who banished the vanilla features of the Tabs and the Troys, and instead brought to the screen a gritty new realism and ethnicity. And the women—Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Jill Clayburgh, Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon, Diane Keaton—were a far cry from the pert, snub-nosed Doris Days of the ’50s. Most of these new faces were schooled in the Method by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, or trained by the other celebrated New York teachers: Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, or Uta Hagen. In fact, a lot of the energy that animated the New Hollywood came from New York; the ’70s was the decade when New York swallowed Hollywood, when Hollywood was Gothamized.

  By this time it has become a cliché to insist that this was, by any measure, a remarkable era, the likes of which we will very probably never see again. Every age gone by is lit up by a retrospective glow of nostalgia, and the specialness of the ’70s was by no means evident at the time. As Scorsese puts it, “We were just guys who wanted to make movies, and we knew we could be cut down any second by these people at the studios.” Certainly this period had its share of schlock. But Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno to one side, the ’70s was truly a golden age, “the last great time,” in the words of Peter Bart, who was vice president of production at Paramount until mid-decade, “for pictures that expanded the idea of what could be done with movies.” It was the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work—as opposed to the errant masterpiece—work that was character-, rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily. These were often films without heroes, without romance, without—in the lexicon of sports, which has colonized Hollywood—anyone to “root for.” In a culture inured even to the shock of the new, in which today’s news is tomorrow’s history to be forgotten entirely or recycled in some unimaginably debased form, ’70s movies retain their power to unsettle; time has not dulled their edge, and they are as provocative now as they were the day they were released. Just think of Regan stabbing her crotch with a crucifix in The Exorcist or Travis Bickle blowing his way through the ending of Taxi Driver, fingertips flying in all directions. The thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it.

  And it wasn’t only the landmark movies that made the late ’60s and ’70s unique. This was a time when film culture permeated American life in a way that it never had before and never has since. In the words of Susan Sontag, “It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.” Film was no less than a secular religion.

  Finally, the dream of the New Hollywood transcended individual movies. At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the ’70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination. The avatars of the movement were “filmmakers,” not “directors” or “editors” or “cinematographers”; they tried to break down the hierarchies that traditionally dominated the technical crafts. Indeed ’70s people were the original “hyphenates,” starting as writers, like Schrader, or editors, like Ashby, or actors, like Beatty, then moving into directing without necessarily giving up their original vocation.

  The New Hollywood lasted barely a decade, but in addition to bequeathing a body of landmark films, it has a lot to teach us about the way Hollywood is run now, why today’s pictures, with a few happy exceptions, are so unrelievedly awful, why Hollywood is in a perpetual state of crisis and self-loathing.

  If this book had been written during the ’70s, it would have focused exclusively on directors. It would have been a book about the art of the director, how director Y made X shot with Z lens because he was crafting a homage to Citizen Kane or The Searchers. Many excellent studies and innumerable biographies with exactly this approach already exist. If this book had been written in the ’80s, when executives and producers became media darlings, it would have been about the film business. But written in the ’90s, it tries to look at both sides of the equation, the business and the art, or more precisely, the business-man and the artist. This is a book about the people who made the movies of the ’70s, and who more often than not destroyed themselves in the process. It tries to explain why the New Hollywood happened, and why it ended.

  THE NEW HOLLYWOOD implies an Old Hollywood, of course. In the mid-’60s, when Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were gestating, the studios were still in the rigor-mortis-like grip of the generation that invented the movies. In 1965, Adolph Zukor at ninety-two, and the only slightly younger Barney Balaban, seventy-eight, were still on the board of Paramount; Jack Warner, seventy-three, ran Warner Bros. Darryl F. Zanuck, sixty-three, was firmly in command at 20th Century-Fox. “If you were these guys, you weren’t going to give this up,” says Ned Tanen, who at the time was a young man with the music division of MCA, and later headed motion pictures at Universal. “To do what, go sit at Hillcrest Country Club and play pinochle?”

  In the palmy days of the old studios, there was something of an apprentice system that allowed the sons of union members to enter the industry. When the studios cut back in the ’50s, these men, often veterans back from World War II, were last hired and the first to go. The day-to-day operations were still in the hands of the prewar generation of producers, directors, department heads, and crews who were in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. New Hollywood producer Irwin Winkler likes to tell the story of his first job as a young man, in 1966, at MGM. As a novice, Winkler got stuck with an Elvis Presley movie, Double Trouble. Having obviously read too much Sarris, he puzzled Presley’s manager, the famously ill-humored Col. Tom Parker, by asking, “Please, sir, I’d like to meet the director.” Parker replied, “You be in front of the Thalberg Building at eleven o’clock in the morning, your director will be there.” Sure enough, at eleven o’clock in the morning a car pulled up, not a limousine, but a Chevy, with a black chauffeur. Next to the chauffeur was the man Winkler wanted to meet, an elderly gentleman named Norman Taurog, a Hollywood veteran best known for Boys Town with Spencer Tracy in 1938. He got out of the car with difficulty, tottered slowly up the steps, and extended a frail hand, covered with liver spots, as Winkler burbled, “Mr. Taurog, sir, great to meet you, isn’t that nice you have a driver and all, that’s wonderful.” Taurog replied, “I like to drive myself, but I can’t see very well.”

  “You can’t see?”

  “No, I’m blind in one eye, and the other eye is going real fast.” Two years after Taurog completed Double Trouble, he lost his eyesight entirely.

  In those days, there was apparently nothing anomalous about a blind director. Way back in the ’30s and ’40s, the producer on the studio payroll was the only person who would see a picture through from beginning to end. Directors, on salary, were there to make sure the actors hit their marks while the camera was running. They exited the production after the shooting phase was over. They were low on the totem pole, barely higher than writers. “Directors weren’t even allowed in the room,” says John Calley, who headed production at Warners throughout the ’70s and now is president and COO of Sony Entertainment. “Warner would run the dailies, would tell the producer what he wanted—‘I want a close-u
p on Jimmy Cagney’—and the producer would tell the director, who only then was allowed to see the dailies.”

  There was only one maverick in this producer-dominated system: United Artists. This was a company that had empowered directors from its inception, back on January 15, 1919, when it was founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. The idea was that the film-makers would control their own destinies, cut out the middlemen, the meddling moguls who got rich off their labor. It seemed like a great idea, but it never quite worked the way it was supposed to, and by the end of the ’40s, the company was losing $100,000 a week. The surviving owners, Chaplin and Pickford, were not speaking to each other, and in 1951 they sold the company to Arthur Krim and Bob Benjamin, two smart lawyers with some motion picture experience.

  With the divorcement decrees of the late ’40s separating the studios from their theater chains, the courts invalidating the old contract system with which the studios held the talent in veritable thralldom, and a growing number of stars participating in profits and starting their own production companies, Krim recognized, before anyone else, that the staggering investments in overhead—back lots with their wardrobe departments, acres of props, contract players, and so on—were a thing of the past. Krim understood that the only way for a motion picture company to prosper was to be run as a studio without a lot, that is, as a financing and distribution entity. What UA had to sell, the thing that would make the tiny company more desirable than its big brothers, was artistic freedom, and a bigger slice of the profits. By the mid-’60s, the upstart that no one would take seriously had become fat and saucy. UA prospered with the hugely successful James Bond pictures, the Pink Panther series, and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood. They even cornered the movie rights to the Beatles before anyone had ever heard of them, and would mint money with A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

  But even UA was a geriatracy. If you didn’t know someone, didn’t have an uncle in distribution or a cousin in costumes, it was almost impossible to crack the system, especially for directors. It was a catch-22 situation: you couldn’t direct a picture unless you had already directed a picture. True, by the mid-’60s, the first students had entered what few film schools there were, but they were told they couldn’t get there from here. Sound designer Walter Murch started at USC in 1965. He says, “The first day that we all got together, the head of the camera department surveyed us with a baleful eye, and said, ‘My advice to you, is quit now. Get out fast. Don’t continue with this because you all have expectations that are not going to be fulfilled.’”

  “It was not like the older generation volunteered the baton,” says Spielberg. “The younger generation had to wrest it away from them. There was a great deal of prejudice if you were a kid and ambitious. When I made my first professional TV show, Night Gallery, I had everybody on the set against me. The average age of the crew was sixty years old. When they saw me walk on the stage, looking younger than I really was, like a baby, everybody turned their backs on me, just walked away. I got the sense that I represented this threat to everyone’s job.”

  Still, the studios, which seemed impregnable from afar, had been rotting from within since the late ’40s, when the judgments against them had made the industry more vulnerable to the onslaught of television. The old men who ran the studios were increasingly out of touch with the vast baby boom audience that was coming of age in the ’60s, an audience that was rapidly becoming radicalized and disaffected from its elders. The studios were still churning out formulaic genre pictures, an endless stream of Doris Day and Rock Hudson vehicles; big-budget epics, like Hawaii, The Bible, and Krakatoa, East of Java; war films, like Tora! Tora! Tora! and D-Day the Sixth of June. Even when a few of the expensive musicals, like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, did spectacular business in the mid-’60s, they spawned an orgy of imitations like Camelot, Doctor Dolittle and Song of Norway, whose budgets spiraled out of control. At the same time, the stars who ornamented these creaky vehicles were not drawing the way they used to. The Sound of Music represented the last gasp of family entertainment, and in the half decade that followed, the war in Vietnam grew from a blip on the map somewhere in Southeast Asia to a reality that might easily claim the life of the boy next door.

  The net result was that by the late ’60s, the studios were in dire financial shape. According to Variety, 1969 marked the beginning of a three-year slump. Attendances, which hit an all-time high of 78.2 million a week in 1946, plunged to a low of 15.8 million a week in 1971. Box office was down, inventories were up. Money was tight, therefore costly to borrow. According to Bart, “The movie industry was more on its ass than any time in its history, literally almost wiped off the face of the earth.”

  To change metaphors, the once proud studio system, already a leaky vessel, was listing badly, and the conglomerates were circling beneath the chop, looking for dinner. Although Hollywood watchers looked on gloomily as studio after studio became no more than an appetizer for some company whose primary business was insurance, zinc mining, or funeral homes, there was a ray of sunshine. The same upheavals that had left the studios bruised and battered made room for fresh blood in the executive suites.

  Youthful veterans of the Golden Age of live television in the ’50s joined the rebellious refugees from the New York theater and other mavericks to fashion a new kind of movie, light years ahead of the prevailing fare. In 1960, Cassavetes scraped together enough money to make a feature called Shadows in New York, entirely outside the system. Kubrick, working in England, made Lolita in 1962, and then followed it with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, a savage and scathingly funny demolition of Cold War culture. Lumet directed The Pawnbroker the following year, and the year after that, Mike Nichols made Edward Albee’s scabrous Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Warners, which did for the family what Strangelove did for the arms race.

  Still, the handful of daring American movies was nothing compared to what was going on in the rest of the world. Wherever you looked—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Japan, Latin America—directors with unpronounceable names were making stunning movies. It was the Golden Age of postwar European and Japanese cinema, the era of the French New Wave, of Ingmar Bergman, of Akira Kurosawa, of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Although these films were “foreign,” they seemed more immediate, more “American” than anything Hollywood was turning out. They hit home with a shock of recognition. Sean Daniel, who grew up to become an executive at Universal and shepherded National Lampoon’s Animal House to the screen, was an antiwar activist in high school in Manhattan in the ’60s. He recalls, “You saw The Battle of Algiers ten times so you could memorize how to build the proper cell structure. I’ll never forget seeing a platoon of Black Panthers, in matching black leather jackets and berets, sitting in front of me, taking notes during the show.”

  In America, real innovation was coming not so much from feature directors as from the practitioners of cinema verité like Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers, who had developed cheap, lightweight equipment that enabled a whole generation to take to the streets to capture a reality that was rapidly becoming more fantastical than anything springing from the febrile brow of even the most inventive screenwriters. Assassinations, love-ins, prison breaks, bombings, airplane hijackings, hundreds of thousands of people flocking to Washington to levitate the Pentagon, dollar bills tumbling slowly through the air onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, were daily occurrences.

  There were no maps to this wilderness of change. No one had blazed a trail. “When the movie factories were blown apart by television in the ’50s, there weren’t a bunch of people who said, ‘This is where we go now,’ “ says Scorsese. “People had no idea. You pushed here, and if it gave there, you slipped in. And as all that pushing and shoving was going on, the equipment was changing, getting smaller and easier to use. Then the Europeans emerged. Combine all those elements together, and suddenly by the mid-’60
s, you had a major explosion.”

  In the context of the financial hemorrhaging of the late ’60s, the new group of young executives was considerably more inclined to take risks than its predecessors, especially if the risks were confined to picking up the occasional American independent or stray British or European art film, such as Alfie, Georgy Girl, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Not only did Antonioni’s picture afford the first glimpse of full frontal female nudity in the living memory of filmgoers, it also boasted of a meandering, opaque narrative structure that left most of the older executives scratching their heads. They didn’t have a clue, but they knew it, and were flailing about for help. When neophyte director Paul Williams, then in his early twenties, went to MGM to pitch a project in 1967, he was told, “ ‘No, no, no, we want to make movies that aren’t about anything. Like that Blow-Up picture.’” Williams adds, “Blow-Up had confused the hell out of them. People really started feeling they didn’t know what was going on. It was much easier to get stuff going.” While Winkler was making Presley movies, next door at the same studio British director John Boorman was making Point Blank (1967), a groundbreaking elliptical thriller bristling with sudden bursts of violence. “There was a complete loss of nerve by the American studios at that point,” says Boorman. “They were so confused and so uncertain as to what to do, they were quite willing to cede power to the directors. London was this swinging place, and there was this desire to import British or European directors who would somehow have the answers.”

  Adds Paul Schrader, who was then the film critic for the major underground newspaper in L.A., the Free Press, “Because of the catastrophic crisis of ’69, ’70, and ’71, when the industry imploded, the door was wide open and you could just waltz in and have these meetings and propose whatever. There was nothing that was too outrageous.” Says Guber, “If you were young or you came out of film school, or you made a little experimental film up in San Francisco, that was the ticket into the system. It was like a petri dish with an enormous amount of agar, so that anything you dropped in there grew.”