Star Wars made an enormous shit-ton of money in 1977. We’ve clarified that already, but it’s worth bringing it up over and over again, because it was the definitive truth in American filmmaking in the latter half of the 1970s, basically until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial finally proved that a movie could make an even more […]
Grease is a movie with a very specific, idiosyncratic, and telling pedigree: it was the highest-grossing film of the year immediately following Star Wars. And in that year, it spent 15 non-consecutive weekends as the #1 film at the U.S. domestic box office. Which was, for what it’s worth, five weekends more than Star Wars […]
We are now in the 64th year of this Hollywood Century project, stretching all the way back to movies which were made in a time before narrative cinema had stumbled into such essential innovations as close-ups, shot-reverse shot, or camera movement. The earliest years of the Hollywood feature film found an aesthetic that frequently does […]
One of the grandest clichés in the critics toolkit is to refer to a classic work of satire or social commentary as being “ahead of its time”, with the passage of years not serving to blunt the impact of a film’s satiric insight but to make them seem less like satire at all, and more […]
1975’s The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it’s especially unfortunate for this film, which […]
It is not uncommon, when people swan about, cooing with praise for the New Hollywood Cinema and the exciting American cinema of the 1970s, to act as if the whole of the film industry was engaged in thrilling experiments that met with broad favor from audiences, who for once in history were interested in being […]
The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the most successful American movies marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience’s nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, “Where were you in ’62?” For the film’s director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that […]
Cinema history, as an intellectual pursuit, is not nearly as old as cinema itself. In different countries, the rise of a semi-professional class of cineastes emerged through different processes at different time, and in America it began in the 1960s as a response to ideas filtering in from France, and the French critic/directors of the […]
There’s no shortage of aesthetic and cultural upheavals that rocked the American film industry in the 1970s, but the most important from a sociological standpoint absolutely has to be the sudden discovery made by the studios early in the decade that nonwhite people liked to watch movies, too. A lesson that has been forgotten and […]
The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man’s game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in […]
Earlier this year, I reviewed the legendary dismal 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon; and would would like to suppose that it’s enough to have hacked through just one of that year’s most notorious genre misfires. But if one is looking at the ebb and flow of Hollywood filmmaking over the years, it would be a […]
1968 is a symbolically freighted year in the history of American filmmaking, for it was in 1968 that the Motion Picture Association of America, two years into the nearly four-decade tenure of president Jack Valenti, abolished the Production Code that had been zealously enforced (though increasingly less so) ever since 1934. In place of the […]
