New Hollywood

New Hollywood, American film movement that took place roughly from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. The movement marked a shift both in how movies were made and in the subjects and themes depicted onscreen. In terms of production, New Hollywood films represent a decisive rejection of the old studio system in favor of director-driven creativity and experimentation. In their subject matter, New Hollywood films reflect the concerns of the then rising Baby Boomer generation and are known for their frank depictions of sex and violence, antiauthoritarian and cynical attitudes, and engagement with social issues. The movement began with the surprise success of movies such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) and reached its height in the 1970s with films including The Godfather (1972), Chinatown (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976).

History

The structural changes in the film industry that enabled the New Hollywood movement had been underway for several decades. In the heyday of the studio system, roughly from the introduction of sound in 1927 to the end of World War II, most films were made on southern California studio lots using in-house crew, including directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers, and featured actors and actresses under exclusive, long-term contracts. Creative control rested with the studio’s producers and executives, and the finished films were often exhibited in movie theaters that were also owned by the studios. This rigorous industrial control was complemented by the Hays Code, which regulated the content of films within conservative parameters.

By the mid-1960s that filmmaking regime was on its last legs. The Hollywood studios’ vertically integrated model was broken in 1948 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures, which forced the studios to divest themselves of movie theater ownership. This decision paved the way for more independent theaters to open and more foreign films to be screened. American audiences—including future New Hollywood filmmakers—flocked to see innovative international films, such as those of the French New Wave and cinéma vérité, Italian Neorealism, and the Japanese director Kurosawa Akira. About the same time, audiences were increasingly being drawn to television programming as an alternative to the traditional moviegoing experience.

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The influence of the Hays Code was also gradually reduced, first by another Supreme Court case, Burstyn v. Wilson (1952), which affirmed that movies enjoy First Amendment protections. Over the 1950s and ’60s artistically ambitious filmmakers pushed for and won fights with the Code’s censors to include language and themes that spoke to contemporary audiences living through the sexual revolution, the American civil rights movement, and the early stages of the Vietnam War. In 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America conceded that the Code was hopelessly out of step by replacing it with a new ratings system that effectively opened the floodgates to experimentation in American cinema.

All of these factors led the studios to begin to relinquish control and bankroll creatively adventurous and socially relevant movies to appeal to the younger demographic. Enter the New Hollywood.

Notable New Hollywood films

More than 70 movies released between 1967 and 1982 have been classified as New Hollywood films. The following four films help illustrate key aspects of the movement.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Bonnie and Clyde is the film most often credited with inaugurating the New Hollywood movement. Released in August 1967, the Arthur Penn-directed true crime drama, starring Warren Beatty as famed outlaw Clyde Barrow and Faye Dunaway as his accomplice Bonnie Parker, tells the story of the lovers’ violent crime spree that ended in their deaths in a torrent of police gunfire. The film’s sensational final sequence, which was created with editing techniques inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and graphically shows Bonnie’s and Clyde’s bodies being riddled with bullets, was considered one of the most shocking endings to a movie at the time.

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Bonnie and Clyde’s nonjudgmental—some critics said glamorizing—depiction of its antihero characters and its unabashed blend of sexuality and anti-police violence resonated with audiences in a year that saw the Summer of Love and the October antiwar march on the Pentagon. Beatty was also the producer of the movie, rare at the time for an actor, and insisted that it mostly be shot on location in Texas. The film’s breakout success flabbergasted the studio that funded it, Warner Brothers, which that year had given the box-office dud musical Camelot a $17 million budget, compared with $2.5 million for Bonnie and Clyde.

The Graduate (1967)

While Bonnie and Clyde infused a 1930s story with a modern flair, The Graduate, released in December 1967, is among the first 1960s movies to directly appeal to contemporary middle-class youth and to address their anxieties and uncertainties about living in a turbulent era. Directed by Mike Nichols, the movie follows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), an awkward, sexually inexperienced recent college graduate who embarks on an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), an older, married woman, and ends up falling in love with her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). Benjamin’s driftlessness and inability to relate to the expectations of his parents’ generation spoke to the anticonsumerism of the hippie era.

The film, which earned Nichols an Oscar for best director, was also innovative for using the pop songs of Simon and Garfunkel for its soundtrack rather than an orchestral score, a practice that audiences embraced and many later films adopted. In addition, the unconventional casting of the small-statured, relatively unknown Hoffman in the leading role went against the instincts of studios that were used to hiring towering, established stars such as Gregory Peck and John Wayne. Hoffman’s success in the part paved the way for a wider array of actors and actresses to take center stage.

(Read Britannica’s article “What Was the Best Year for Movies?”)

Easy Rider (1969)

Easy Rider (1969) is considered a quintessential counterculture film that illustrates the estrangement felt by idealistic American youth in the 1960s. The road movie, directed by and starring Dennis Hopper alongside Peter Fonda, follows hippie bikers Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) as they take to the road on a cocaine-fueled trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans and are joined by a hard-drinking lawyer (Jack Nicholson). In a further shift away from the studio system, Hopper and Fonda created the film entirely via two independent production companies, which made a deal with Columbia Pictures, in which the major studio served merely as the film’s marketer and distributor. Easy Rider’s mix of celebratory freedom and dark foreboding found parallels in that year’s Woodstock music festival and the Tate murders committed by followers of cult leader Charles Manson, both of which occurred while the movie was in theaters.

The Godfather (1972)

While the people behind the first wave of the New Hollywood were often disaffected veterans of the old Hollywood or recruited from television or New York City theater, the early 1970s saw the rise of a new cohort, nicknamed the “movie brats,” who were younger and often came to the industry by way of newly established film schools. These filmmakers—who include George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma—had deep knowledge of the history of cinema and subscribed to the auteur theory, which holds that films should represent the personal authorship and vision of the director. An exemplar of this trend is Francis Ford Coppola, who earned an M.F.A in film from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1967.

Coppola’s The Godfather is considered one of the greatest artistic and commercial achievements of the New Hollywood. The director fought the studio, Paramount Pictures, to be allowed to shoot on location and cast mostly Italian American actors (with the notable exception of Marlon Brando, who was of Irish, English, and Dutch heritage), both factors that increased the authenticity and realism of the finished movie. The wild critical and financial success of The Godfather further empowered Coppola and other young directors to pursue their singular artistic paths.

Decline

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The beginning of another major shift in American cinema occurred in 1975 with the release and massive success of Spielberg’s Jaws, the first film to be billed as a summer blockbuster. Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977), originally titled Star Wars, followed suit by becoming another hugely successful summer blockbuster. Studios thus began prioritizing potential blockbusters and steered away from experimental, director-driven projects, marking the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood. Additionally, the transition away from the restless cultural atmosphere of the 1970s toward the more conservative cultural milieu of the 1980s contributed to a shift in studios’ priorities.

In later decades the New Hollywood era was lionized as a uniquely creative period of expression. Some critics have expressed skepticism of that narrative, arguing that Hollywood has always been marked by generational turnover resulting in both innovation and tensions between art and commerce. Manohla Dargis held that view in the Los Angeles Times in 2003, writing, “The great and banal truth of the New Hollywood is that for all the cant, the drama, the love beads, the hot tubs, the jump cuts, the acid and dope, the New wasn’t all that different from the Old.” Others have pointed out that New Hollywood movies were only a small portion of the films produced in the United States from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s and that focusing on the output of a limited group of white, male, mostly American directors provides an incomplete picture of the period.