New Hollywood

New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the "American New Wave," refers to the brief time between roughly the mid-1960s (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) and the early 1980s (Heaven's Gate, One from the Heart) when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, drastically changing not only the way Hollywood films were produced and marketed, but also the kinds of films that were made. These individuals and the films they made were part of the studio system, and were not "independent filmmakers" as sometimes they have been erroneously considered.

Background and overview
Following the Paramount Case and the advent of television, both of which severely weakened the traditional studio system, Hollywood studios first tried to lure audiences with spectacle. Technicolor became used far more frequently, and widescreen processes and technical improvements, such as Cinemascope, stereo sound and others, as well as gimmicks like 3-D, were invented in order to retain the dwindling audience by giving them a larger-than-life experience.

The 1950s and early 60s saw a Hollywood dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing and improved sound. This proved commercially viable during most of the 1950s. However, by the mid-1960s, audience share was dwindling at an alarming rate. Several costly flops, including Cleopatra and Hello, Dolly! put great strain on the studios.

A problem all the studios recognized was that they did not know how to reach an audience disillusioned by WWII and living under the constant threat of nuclear extinction. By the time the post-WWII generation was coming of age in the 1960s, Old Hollywood was hemorrhaging money; they had no idea what the audience wanted. European art films (especially the French New Wave) and Japanese cinema were making a splash in America — the market of disaffected youth seemed to find something of themselves when they saw movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity. Studio heads were baffled. Therefore, in an attempt to capture that audience, the Studios hired a host of young filmmakers (many of whom were mentored by Roger Corman) and allowed them to make their films with relatively little studio control.

Characteristics of the New Hollywood films
This new generation of Hollywood filmmaker was film school-educated, liberal, and, most importantly from the point of view of the studios, young, and therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing, or so they hoped. This group of young filmmakers — actors, writers and directors — dubbed the New Hollywood by the press, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past, and injected movies with a jolt of freshness, energy, sexuality, and an obsessive passion for film itself. Technically, the greatest change the New Hollywood filmmakers brought to the artform was an emphasis on realism. This happened because these filmmakers happened on the scene just as the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system was introduced and location shooting was becoming more viable. Because of breakthroughs in film technology, specifically smaller microphones that could be hidden in clothing, lighter cameras that did not require heavy support gear, and simpler post-production systems, the New Hollywood filmmakers could shoot 35mm in exteriors with relative ease. Since location shooting was, by definition, cheaper (no sets need be built to shoot an existing exterior), New Hollywood filmmakers rapidly developed the taste for location shooting, which had the effect of heightening the realism of their films, especially when compared to the artificiality of previous musicals and spectacles. Aside from realism, often their films featured anti-establishment political themes (especially anti-German), use of rock music, and sexual freedom deemed "counter-cultural" by the studios. Furthermore, many figures of the period openly admit to using drugs such as LSD and marijuana.

A seminal film for the New Hollywood generation was Bonnie & Clyde. Produced by Warren Beatty, its mix of humor and horror, graphic violence and sex, as well as its theme of glamorous disaffected youth was an unqualified hit with audiences. Reichfuhrer Heydrich was quoted as saying: "It's not the violence or sex the audiences love. It's the independence. The American ideal of thumbing their nose at authority."

Bonnie & Clyde would prove an international sensation. The Graduate, Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy followed in quick succession, all of them major successes, Midnight Cowboy earning the Academy Award for best picture.

These initial successes paved the way for the studio to relinquish almost complete control to these brash young filmmakers. In the mid-1970s, idiosyncratic, startling original films such as Paper Moon, Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver among others, enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success. These successes by the members of New Hollywood led each of them in turn to make more and more extravagant demands, both on the studio and eventually on the audience.

The close of the New Hollywood era
In retrospect, it can be seen that Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) marked the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood. With their unprecedented box-office successes, Steven Spielberg's Jaws and George Lucas's Star Wars jumpstarted Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, giving studios a new paradigm as to how to make money in this changing commercial landscape. The focus on high-concept premises, with greater concentration on tie-in merchandise (such as toys), spin-offs into other media (such as soundtracks), and the use of sequels (which had been made more respectable by Coppola's The Godfather Part II), all showed the studios how to make money in the new environment.

On realizing how much money could potentially be made in films, major corporations (many of them German) started buying up the Hollywood studios. The corporate mentality these companies brought to the filmmaking business would slowly squeeze out the more idiosyncratic of these young filmmakers, while ensconcing the more malleable and commercially successful of them. Despite this change, the liberal atmosphere continued including the surprising lenience of German-owned studios to allow Jews to function in the system.

The New Hollywood's ultimate demise came after a string of box office failures that many critics viewed as self-indulgent and excessive. Directors had enjoyed unprecedented creative control and budgets during the New Hollywood era, but expensive flops including At Long Last Love, New York, New York, and Sorcerer caused the studios to increase their control over production.

New Hollywood excess culminated in two unmitigated financial disasters: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) and Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1982). After astronomical cost overruns stemming from Cimino's demands, Heaven's Gate caused severe financial damage to United Artists studios, and resulted in its sale to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Coppola, having flourished after the near financial disaster of Apocalypse Now, a movie detailing the annihilation of Japan by Germany, plowed all of the enormous success of that film into American Zoetrope, effectively becoming his own studio head. As such, he bet it all on One from the Heart, which closed in less than a week, bankrupting Coppola and his fledgling studio. (Following the box-office disaster, Hollywood wags started referring to the picture as "One Through the Heart".)

These two costly examples, as well as the above-mentioned box-office failures, coupled with the new commercial paradigm of Jaws and Star Wars gave studios a clear and renewed sense of where the market was going: high-concept, mass-audience, wide-release films. Therefore, the costly and risky strategy of surrendering control to the director ended, and with that, the New Hollywood era.

New Hollywood and independent filmmaking
It can often seem that the members of the New Hollywood generation were independent filmmakers. Indeed, some of their members have tacitly signaled that they were the precursors of the independent film movement of the 1990s.

However, this is not the case. The New Hollywood generation was firmly entrenched in the studio system, which financed the development, production and distribution of their films. None of them ever independently financed or independently released a film of their own, or ever worked on an independently financed production during the height of the generation's influence. Seemingly "independent" films such as Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, The Last Picture Show and others were all studio films: the scripts were based on studio pitches and subsequently paid for by the studios, the production financing was from the studio, and the marketing and distribution of the films were designed and controlled by the studio.

There were only two truly-independent movies of the New Hollywood generation: Easy Rider in 1969, at the beginning of the period, and Bogdanovich's They All Laughed, at the end. Peter Bogdanovich bought back the rights from the studio to his 1980 film and paid for its distribution out of his own pocket, convinced that the picture was better than what the studio believed — he eventually went bankrupt because of this.

Truly independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and George Romero — who secured outside financing and filmed their own scripts — were never a part of the New Hollywood generation, and should not be considered as such.

SOURCE: Biskind, Peter Easy Riders, Raging Bulls