by Mark Cousins
Take William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist. Rather than going to film school or worshipping European films in art cinemas, he got a foot in the door by working in the mail office of a TV station, then worked his way up to documentary directing. In 1971 he had a big hit with the gritty detective film The French Connection. His next movie, The Exorcist, was about a white, middle-class, pubescent girl who becomes possessed by the devil and who battles with priests who attempt to exorcise her (282). As Polanski had done with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Friedkin took this story seriously, filmed it with technical brilliance, turning its apparently innocent girl into an abject creature, her body battered, her features porcine, her mind and speech poisoned by evil. What if we treated a supernatural tale as if it were a documentary? he seemed to ask himself. He fired guns on the set to scare people, slapped an actor hard on the face, then immediately filmed his trembling response. Such techniques created tensions on the set, which ended up on screen. His constant aim was to suggest the ferocity of the devil’s power rooted in an absolutely credible middle-class American setting. The Exorcist caroused through delicate sensibilities. Reviews were mixed but audiences flocked. People lined around the block to see the film, to test their stamina as they would on a roller coaster. Some fainted, others were sick, many had nightmares for years to come.
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The beginning of a new era in commercial cinema: event movies such as The Exorcist emphasized sensation rather than contemplation, and broke box office records. Director: William Friedkin. USA, 1973.
Although The Exorcist would demolish many taboos about religion, profanity and childhood, Friedkin’s approach to telling its story was traditional. His attitude to the more ambitious filmmaking of the time is neatly captured in his reaction to the first draft of The Exorcist screenplay, which was more tricksy than the bestselling novel on which it was based. After reading it he told its writer, William Peter Blatty, “I just want to tell a straight story from beginning to end, with no craperoo.”22 Friedkin got this no-nonsense approach to storytelling from veteran director Howard Hawks. He had been going out with Hawks’ daughter Kitty and when she introduced him to her father he told Friedkin that audiences don’t want “that psychological shit.”23 Friedkin was shaken by this blast from Old Hollywood’s past. “I had this epiphany that what we were doing wasn’t making fucking films to hang in the Louvre”, he said.24 He would begin to make films which used the straight storytelling techniques of closed romantic realism, rejecting anything too subjective, autobiographical, experimental or philosophical. By heeding Hawks, by ditching what he called the craperoo, by equating New Hollywood with pictures hanging in an old art gallery, he did nothing less than sound the first cry of the counter-revolution. “I have my finger on the pulse of America”25 was his rationale. These nine words killed New Hollywood.
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Like Friedkin, Steven Spielberg emphasized the thrill of American cinema, re-exciting audiences in traditional storytelling. Jaws. USA, 1975.
They could also have been spoken by the director whom Time magazine eventually called the most influential in cinema history. Like Friedkin, he was a lower middle-class Jewish American. Two years after The Exorcist, he made a film which similarly tapped into the nervous systems of baby boomers, the new generation of young Americans who were conceived in the years of post-war optimism.
Steven Spielberg had been making amateur films since boyhood. He was more influenced by directors like Victor Fleming, who had made The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the sentimental A Guy Named Joe (1944) than the new crop of Europeans. “I was more truly a child of the establishment,” he said later, “than I was a product of USC or NYU or the Francis Coppola protégé clique.”26 He tricked his way into the Universal studio and soon directed the strikingly intense chase TV movie Duel (1971) there. It was clear that he was a master storyteller, a graceful re-invigorator of closed romantic realism. Jaws (1975) was about a small holiday community terrorized by what seems to be a homicidal Great White shark. In order not to dent business the local mayor refuses to close the beaches. Eventually a Hawksian band of professionals – a salty fisherman, a nerdy shark scientist and a police chief – go out in a small boat and hunt and kill the beast.
At first Spielberg felt that a film about a killer shark was beneath him. He was more interested in modernism than Friedkin. Eventually he took the job of directing it. Traditionally this would have involved casting movie stars and shooting in a tank but Spielberg, in the manner of Friedkin’s aggressive realism, wanted to film on the open sea with less well-known actors. To make the material more personal he re-fashioned a nerdy scientist character, to be played by Richard Dreyfuss, into a version of himself, having his actor at one point crush a polystyrene cup in his hand in mockery of the macho way of crushing a beer can. This was comically Hawksian. Dreyfuss’s character was an ordinary, slightly childish, not very heroic or handsome man. This became Spielberg’s signature character, and the actor would play him again in Spielberg’s next film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
The shoot of Jaws went badly; there was sea sickness and argument, and the production overspent by a factor of three. The twenty-seven-year-old director almost reached breaking point. As the mechanized shark failed to work for much of the shoot and was unconvincing when it did, it was decided not to reveal it until the final section of the film, when the men are in the boat. When Dreyfuss first sees the full size of the shark, his face goes blank, he’s choked, he backs away (283). This would be one of Spielberg’s first awe-and-revelation scenes. Key moments in many of his films thereafter, they were masterpieces of camera positioning and acting. The one in Jaws was effortless storytelling and turned the film into an epic.
At Jaws’ first previews, a man ran from the cinema. Spielberg thought he hated the film but in fact he was scared. The film electrified audiences. Studios had started to advertize their films on television in 1973, but Columbia made a quantum leap, spending $700,000 on thirty-second TV promotions, and they opened it on over 400 screens at once, far more than usual. Not only was the visceral effect of Jaws immediate, so too was its selling. The market was immediately saturated by it. There was no time for reviews or word of mouth to affect its box office. Everybody knew about it, everywhere, at once. Since it’s a good and nuanced film, Jaws would probably have performed very well under the old system of releasing films, but that is irrelevant now. Its huge success made film storytelling and film marketing alike a science of the momentary big impact. This approach more than anything, weakened the practice of releasing smaller, more complex films in a more limited way at first, so that word of mouth about them could slowly build.
The themes which were touched on in Jaws – the decency of ordinary men, troubled father figures, the security of family life, the awe felt at something sublime or terrifying – would become central to Spielberg’s career thereafter. The new multiplexes were where that career developed. That they are often in the suburbs, on the edges of towns, is appropriate, because it is there that Spielberg’s imagination was most fertile.
It seemed that the success of Jaws would be the benchmark for commercial American cinema for years to come but less than thirty months later another film almost doubled its box-office take. Unlike Spielberg, George Lucas did go to film school and was a protégé of Francis Coppola. A native Californian and former racing driver, he was artistically somewhat ambitious and made prize-winning films. After the success of his second feature, American Graffiti (USA, 1973), he thought, “Maybe I should make a film for even younger kids. Graffiti was for sixteen-year-olds; this [Star Wars] is for ten- and twelve-year-olds”. This film for ten-year-olds turned out to be the most influential film in post-Second World War cinema. Critic and director Paul Schrader said that it “ate the heart and soul of Hollywood.”28 It cost $11m and took $460m.
The film starts like a fairy tale – “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The sound track, which was immensely powerful and engulfing,
was recorded in the relatively new format of Dolby six-track stereo. Few cinemas were able to reproduce the full richness of this system but those that could were so successful with Star Wars that most of the others followed suit. After the credits, spaceships as big as cities loom into shot (284). These were detailed models filmed with motion control cameras called DykstraFlexes after John Dykstra, the special-effects expert who designed them for this film. Similar ones had been used in television but not much in cinema. Instead of dolleying on a machine moved by grips, their desired moves were programmed by computers. Such moves could then be replicated precisely so that separate shots of models moving in different directions through space could be superimposed onto a single image. The fight scenes later in the film revealed the new dynamism possible with this technique. Most of the production’s 400 special effects shots were undertaken by a subsidiary company, Industrial Light and Magic, which would become central to American special effects cinema in the years to come.
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Below: The third film which adrenalinized American cinema at this time was Star Wars. Like The Exorcist and Jaws it reversed the modern and mature themes of New American Cinema, replacing them with the pleasures of escapism and shock. Director: George Lucas. USA, 1977.
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Many of Star Wars’ story elements were drawn from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Forest. Japan, 1958.
Then the film introduces us to an apparent orphan, Luke, who lives on a farm with his aunt and uncle and who yearns for adventure. Lucas, who had spent more than two years writing the script, saw him in literary or even mythic terms, as a knight who would eventually save the universe. He does so by assisting a princess who has programmed into a small robot – the famous R2D2 – the plans of the Death Star, the vast spaceship vessel of the evil emperor who has temporarily taken over the planet. The director later claimed that he had the recently shamed American President Richard Nixon in mind when he wrote this part. R2D2 goes in search of the greatest knight of them all whose wisdom has allowed him to master the force of the universe. Luke follows the robot, meets the great knight and learns from him the mystical techniques of will to conquer evil.
This is the most absurd scenario of any detailed so far in this book. Yet even its outline suggests the breadth of its schema. The business about knights and their self-discipline came from Kurosawa’s samurai films. Kakushi Toride No San-Akunin/ The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1958) in particular – about a princess, a master warrior and an R2D2–C3PO pairing of characters Tahei and Matashichi – seems to have provided Lucas with elements of his story. The evil characters in the tale were filmed in a way that was reminiscent of German director Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1935). The quest narrative structure, with its series of defeats and recoveries, derived from short adventure serials shown before feature films in earlier decades. These were certainly not obvious starting points for the most commercially successful American film of all time but Lucas used them to enrich what was in fact a fable for boys. Shot with bright flat lighting and edited in part using “wipes” moving horizontally across the screen, it had the moral clarity of a 1930s B-movie Western, cutting between goodies and baddies, building excitement through action, offsetting it with romance and humour.
Star Wars had no sex and little graphic violence, it was the story of a young man becoming a hero, achieving his destiny, awaking to the mystery of life and saving the universe along the way. He was masculine and had an inner life of sorts. Watching it felt like no other film experience. It was louder, it seemed to make the cinema shake, it moved through space with more dynamism than any previous film. It was also less about adult human beings than most films of its time. It made no attempt to “open up the form” of sci fi, as 2001: A Space Odyssey had done. Twice as many people saw it as Jaws. It got young people and families into cinemas more than previous films. Lucas doubled his already huge profits by having models made of Luke, the Princess and the space ships and selling them to children. Not since Mickey Mouse had merchandising been so successful. Also, it came along just as yet another invention extended film even further into people’s lives: a little rectangular box containing video tape.
The Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars were a phenomenon that would probably have been enough to re-orient American cinema away from the personal visions of serious directors towards the pulse of suburban teenagers, but this grand three-point-turn was confirmed by the box office failure of two expensive personal films. Martin Scorsese’s reimagining of an MGM musical as a brilliant but deadlocked piece of creative pessimism, New York, New York, cost a fortune, lost most of it, nearly ruined the director and was taken by many as New Hollywood’s bridge too far. Three years later his fellow Italian-American Michael Cimino made a bleak, dreamlike and personal Marxist Western Heaven’s Gate (1980), which lost so much money that it crippled its studio United Artists (286). No matter that it was serene and magnificent. Both films were seen as monstrous works of ego, disdainful of audience pleasure, self-indulgent and even self- destructive. They were the final nails in the coffin of New Hollywood.
The 1970s saw the extension and then reversal of the 1960s idea of cinema. African, Middle Eastern and South American filmmakers made political films about their own countries, rejecting the form and content of traditional western cinema. Over in Germany, a series of bold new films frequently adopted this traditional form to address new historical, sexual and national content. American directors in the early part of the decade did something like the opposite of this, taking the war, gangster, musical and western genres of their nation’s past and, influenced by European directors and great cinematographers, applied new formal approaches to them to explore complex human and philosophical ideas. In an echo of the 1920s, all these things extended the art of cinema.
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One of the final nails in the coffin of personal American filmmaking was Michael Cimino’s epic, glacially paced Western Heaven’s Gate. Its box office failure was blamed on the indulgence and hubris of its director and, thereafter, filmmakers were kept on a tighter leash. USA, 1980.
But perhaps it was at the expense of thrill and spectacle. Baby boomers seemed to tire of change, of activism, of new types of art, and wanted to switch off for a bit. They joined the younger ones in the front row of the new multiplex cinemas, blasted away by light sabres, the Force and the Millennium Falcon. It was back to the thrills of the earliest years. Humanism, for better and worse, leeched out of American cinema and by the end of the 1970s, its movies were no longer a means of self-expression.
1. Pier Paolo Pasolini in A Future Life, op. cit., p. 159.
2. Interview used in Luchino Visconti, Arena, BBC Television, 2002.
3. Former Paramount executive Peter Bart, quoted in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Simon and Schuster, p. 20.
4. Martin Scorsese in an interview with Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, op. cit., p. 152.
5. Martin Scorsese in Martin Scorsese, A Journey, Kelly, Mary Pat, Secker and Warburg, p .71.
6. Paul Schrader in an interview with the author, Scene by Scene, BBC Television.
7. Fat City was amongst the first fiction films not to compensate for exterior overexposure and interior underexposure, but the Direct Cinema documentarians of more than a decade earlier pioneered this disregard for the conventions of balanced lighting.
8. Gordon Willis in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, op. cit., p. 154.
9. Thomas Elsaesser, quoted in author’s essay on New German Cinema, unpublished.
10. Quoted in “Forms of Address”, Tony Rayns, Sight and Sound 44, vol. 1, pp. 2–7.
11. Thomsen, Christian Braad, Fassbinder.
12. Richard Dyer, op. cit.
13. Werner Herzog in Time magazine, 20 March 1978, p. 57.
14. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, op. cit.
15. Quoted in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, op. cit.
16. The Philippines’ most political filmmaker of the period was former TV writer Lino Brocka.
Brocka debuted in cinema in 1970, but it is his 1980s work that is most significant. Bayan ko: Kapit sa patalim/My Country: Gripping the Knife’s Edge (1984) is a powerful social drama about a print worker who robs his bosses to pay for his child’s medical bills. Macho Dancer (1988) looked at the country’s teenage sex industry but was criticized for what some considered its ambivalence about the sexual activity portrayed.
17. Youssef Chahine in the documentary Camera Arabe, BFI.
18. Ibid.
19. Manthia Diawara.
20. Hamod Dabash, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future.
21. Quoted in Armes, Roy, Third World Filmmaking and the West, op. cit.
22. William Friedkin, ibid., p. 203.
23. Howard Hawks, ibid., p. 203.
24. William Friedkin, ibid., p. 203.
25. William Friedkin, ibid., p. 203.
26. Steven Spielberg, ibid., p. 278.