Talk:New Hollywood

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"The studios were still being run by the moguls who had created them back when Hollywood was a baby."

This is not completly true. Warners was still run by Jack Warner until 1967. Daryl Zanuk had an on-again, off-again relationship with running Fox. Adolph Zuckor was still on Paramount's board of directors. However, Paramount's functions were run by others. Louis B. Mayer was dead. Also, he was removed as head of MGM in the early 1950s. He was the king of all the studio moguls. Harry Cohn at Columbia was also dead. Carl Lemme, the man who founded Universal, had died long ago. So, by the 1960s, there were actually very few moguls incharge of the studios.

I know Peter Biskind wrote a similar pharse to this in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." However, you must take that book with a grain of salt. He wrote this phrase to create the sort of "us vs. them" atmosphere that he likes in his books. The book is filled with inaccuracies that he came up with just for dramatic effect. Remember the part at the beginning where he states it was unusual for an actor to also produce a film (in reference with Warren Beatty on "Bonnie and Clyde"). He had forgotten what Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, John Garfield, and Ida Lupio had done. Also, at the end, when he makes it sound like this was the first time budgets had gone into the range of $30 and $40 million, he forgot to mention "Cleopatra." So, rather than just getting rid of this phrase, I would like to bring it to everyone's attention and hope to fix not only this but other aspects of the article.

Jaws & Star Wars were fine on their own, great even, the problem is that for 31 years now every freakin' studio has been following that pattern. Blame the bean counters not Spielberg & Lucas. Its also unfair to charge them with starting the 'block buster mentality' since the studios had previously gone a similar route with the Epics which started out as response to TV, and those two films had the same slow gradual role out release and stayed in cinemas for weeks & months of every other film of that time, very different to the ‘thousands at once and gone in a week’ releases of today.

EDIT:

The New Hollywood did not "come crashing down" with the arrival of Jaws. The term New Hollywood encapsulates the modernisation of the industry from this point - the Blockbuster form is infact cental to the New Hollywood. Is the writer infact referring to The Hollywood Renaissance, a period between the late 60s and early 70s of smaller, character based films centred around autership - seems like it!

1 Prison?
2 Peckinpah
3 Studio control
4 Lumet
5 Cassavetes & Van Peebles
6 Logan's Run
7 How about Rocky I (1976)?

[edit] Prison?

Uh, this is pretty seriously POV:

This was when the Movie Brat generation broke in and Hollywood became an asylum that was truly run by the inmates.

--Saforrest 09:04, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Peckinpah

Peckinpah wasn't a member of the New Hollywood generation, neither by age nor by career trajectory. --TallulahBelle 01:48, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Robert Altman and Arthur Penn were also older than the other figures listed, and were close in age to Peckinpah. Arguably, Altman's films did reflect the "New Hollywood" sensibility more than Peckinpah's, as did some of Penn's ; but Penn's career trajectory was more similar to Peckinpah's then the other figures on the list. Penn, after all, did make a film for a major studio and with major stars in the late 1950s, The Left Handed Gun.

[edit] Studio control

Contrary to what the article says, some of the figures listed DID make films outside of the studio system as well as within it, such as Scorsese, De Palma, Polanski, Schlesinger,and Altman. If one does not count American International Pictures and Avco Embassy Pictures as "major studios", then Allen, Bogdanovich, and Brooks could have been considered to have worked outside of the studio system as well as within it. Prairie Dog, 12:15, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The article seems to make ambiguous, disputable and unreferenced claims such as "None of them ever independently financed or independently released a film of theirs, or ever worked on an independently financed production during the height of the generation's influence" and then lists examples of exceptions to that rule, whilst seemingly omitting various other examples (Apocalypse Now for example) that would further weaken the original assertion, resulting in a confused and convoluted argument. - 85.210.44.98 08:28, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lumet

Unquestionably a great director, Sidney Lumet cannot be categorized as a member of the "New Hollywood" generation. Aside from age and career trajectory, the kinds of films he had been making for most of his career were clearly Classic Hollywood. Furthermore, he himself distanced himself from the generation.

The confusion lies in the fact that, though Lumet was not a New Hollywood director, he did make two unquestionably "New Hollywood" classics, Network and Dog Day Afternoon. --TallulahBelle 22:40, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Dog Day Afternoon was definitely New Hollywood, and SO WAS Serpico (1973)!!!! AppleJuggler 03:37, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cassavetes & Van Peebles

There's been discussion about this before—neither Cassavetes nor Van Peebles properly are New Hollywood. For one, their ages, nearly a decade older than the norm. For another, their origin: they migrated from theater to film, whereas New Hollywood came straight to Hollwyood via film school. Finally, they themselves did not consider themselves a part of the Hollywood environment; Cassavetes consciously considered himself a New York filmmaker. New Hollywood filmmakers, on the other hand—even Scorcese—instinctively knew they were Hollywood people.

Furthermore, no one serious debates that Cassavetes and Van Peebles were not New Hollywood—neither the two filmmakers, nor scholars, nor other New Hollywood types. --TallulahBelle 23:55, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Logan's Run

Okay, perhaps this is just a personal favorite, but I see it as somehow defining of the period's science fiction identity (between 2001 and Star Wars)- so I wonder if MGM's Academy Award-winning Logan's Run would be considered New Hollywood? - Eric 22:06, 23 December 2006 (UTC)