The New Hollywood, Hollywood Renaissance, or American New Wave, was a movement in American film history from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when a new generation of filmmakers came to prominence. They influenced the types of film produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking.
It was precipitated by the demise of the studio system and the rise of television, after which the commercial success of films was diminished. In New Hollywood films, the film director, rather than the studio, took on a key authorial role.
The definition of "New Hollywood" varies, depending on the author, with some defining it as a movement and others as a period. The span of the period is also a subject of debate, as well as its integrity, as some authors, such as Thomas Schatz, argue that the New Hollywood consists of several different movements. The films made in this movement are stylistically characterized in that their narrative often deviated from classical norms.
Successful films of the early New Hollywood era include Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider while films whose box office failure marked the end of the era include New York, New York, Sorcerer, Heaven's Gate, They All Laughed, and One from the Heart.
History
Background
In fact, The Wild Angels was kind of a... it was a big success for the New Hollywood. It was Roger Corman, it was Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, it was a New Hollywood kind of movie, and it was very anti-the Old Hollywood, it was very hard-edged, violent, you know, it was not at all an Old Hollywood movie. And I didn't, I wasn't particularly aware of it. Then the following year was Bonnie and Clyde. Shadows had come out in the early '60s, so that was really the first sign of a kind of off-Hollywood movement. – Peter Bogdanovich
Following the Paramount Case (which ended block booking and ownership of theater chains by film studios) and the advent of television (where Gore Vidal, Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet worked in their earlier years), both of which severely weakened both the traditional studio system and the Motion Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code), Hollywood studios initially used spectacle to retain profitability. Technicolor developed a far more widespread use, while widescreen processes and technical improvements, such as CinemaScope, stereo sound, and others, such as 3-D, were invented to retain the dwindling audience and compete with television. However, these were generally unsuccessful in increasing profits. By 1957, Life magazine called the 1950s "the horrible decade" for Hollywood. It was dubbed a "New Hollywood" by a press.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood was dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing, and improved sound. However, audience shares continued to dwindle, and had reached alarmingly low levels by the mid-1960s. Several costly flops, including Doctor Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora! and the Julie Andrews vehicle Star!, each failed attempts to replicate the success of Mary Poppins, Doctor Zhivago and The Sound of Music, put great strain on the studios. Both British and American press dismissed filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as "frivolous entertainers and nothing more" while praising more respectable "models of American art films" like Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. American underground cinema was usually regarded as "marginal and parochial" even with the debut features of John Cassavetes (Shadows in 1959) and Shirley Clarke (The Connection in 1961) as both were being praised by Esquire film critic Dwight Macdonald (despite being hostile to other underground titles like Jonas Mekas's 1963 manifestation Guns of the Trees).
By the time the Baby Boomer generation started to come of age in the mid-late 1960s, "Old Hollywood" was rapidly losing money; the studios were unsure how to react to the much-changed audience demographics. The change in the market during the period went from a middle-aged high school-educated audience in the mid-1960s to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic: by the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college. European films, both arthouse and commercial (especially the Commedia all'italiana, the French New Wave, the Spaghetti Western), and Japanese cinema were making a splash in the United States – the huge market of disaffected youth seemed to find relevance and artistic meaning in movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity.
The desperation felt by studios during this period of economic downturn, and after the losses from expensive movie flops, led to innovation and risk-taking, allowing greater control by younger directors and producers. Therefore, in an attempt to capture that audience that found a connection to the "art films" of Europe, the studios hired a host of young filmmakers and allowed them to make their films with relatively little studio control. Some of whom, like actor Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper (who also was the main lead in Curtis Harrington's 1961 supernatural thriller Night Tide, distributed by Corman's American International Pictures) and director Peter Bogdanovich, were mentored by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman while others like celebrated cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond worked for lesser-known B movie directors like Ray Dennis Steckler, known for the 1962 Arch Hall Jr. vehicle Wild Guitar and the 1963 horror musical flick The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. This, together with the breakdown of the Hays Code following the Freedman v. Maryland court case in 1965 and the new ratings system in 1968 (reflecting growing market segmentation) set the scene for the New Hollywood.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate
A defining film of the New Hollywood generation was Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn, its combination of graphic violence and humor, as well as its theme of glamorous disaffected youth, was a hit with audiences. The film eventually won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Cinematography.
When Jack L. Warner, then-CEO of Warner Bros. Pictures, first saw a rough cut of Bonnie and Clyde in the summer of 1967, he hated it. Distribution executives at Warner Bros. agreed, giving the film a low-key premiere and limited release. Their strategy appeared justified when Bosley Crowther, middlebrow film critic at The New York Times, gave the movie a scathing review. "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy," he wrote, "that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie..." Other notices, including those from Time and Newsweek magazines, were equally dismissive.
Its portrayal of violence and ambiguity in regard to moral values, and its startling ending, divided critics. Following one of the negative reviews, Time magazine received letters from fans of the movie, and according to journalist Peter Biskind, the impact of critic Pauline Kael in her positive review of the film (October 1967, New Yorker) led other reviewers to follow her lead and re-evaluate the film (notably Newsweek and Time). Kael drew attention to the innocence of the characters in the film and the artistic merit of the contrast of that with the violence in the film: "In a sense, it is the absence of sadism — it is the violence without sadism — that throws the audience off balance at Bonnie and Clyde. The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers." Kael also noted the reaction of audiences to the violent climax of the movie, and the potential to empathize with the gang of criminals in terms of their naiveté and innocence reflecting a change in expectations of American cinema.
The cover story in Time magazine in December 1967, celebrated the movie and innovation in American New Wave cinema. This influential article by Stefan Kanfer claimed that Bonnie and Clyde represented a "New Cinema" through its blurred genre lines, and disregard for honored aspects of plot and motivation, and that "In both conception and execution, Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend." Biskind states that this review and turnaround by some critics allowed the film to be re-released, thus proving its commercial success and reflecting the move toward the New Hollywood. The impact of this film is important in understanding the rest of the American New Wave, as well as the conditions that were necessary for it.
Also released the same year was another era-defining hit about the celebration of youthful rebellion The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman, with soundtrack by the popular folk duo Simon & Garfunkel and directed by Mike Nichols (for which he won the film's sole Oscar for Best Director), about Benjamin, a young college graduate rejecting the traditional values of his parents and their hypocritical society alongside a future in "plastics".
These initial successes paved the way for the studio to relinquish almost complete control to these young filmmakers. In the mid-1970s, idiosyncratic, startlingly original films such as Paper Moon, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, among others, enjoyed critical and commercial success. These successes by the members of the New Hollywood led each of them in turn to make more and more extravagant demands, both in the studios and eventually on the audience.
Characteristics
The new generation of Hollywood filmmakers was most importantly, from the studios' view, young, therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing. This collective of actors, screenwriters and directors, dubbed the "New Hollywood" by the press, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past as Todd Berliner has written about the period's unusual narrative practices.
The 1970s, Berliner says, marks Hollywood's most significant formal transformation since the conversion to sound film and is the defining period separating the storytelling modes of the studio era and contemporary Hollywood. New Hollywood films deviate from classical narrative norms more than Hollywood films from any other era or movement. Their narrative and stylistic devices threaten to derail an otherwise straightforward narration. Berliner argues that five principles govern the narrative strategies characteristic of Hollywood films of the 1970s:
- Seventies films show a perverse tendency to integrate, in narrative incidental ways, story information and stylistic devices counterproductive to the films' overt and essential narrative purposes.
- Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s often situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and those of European and Asian art cinema.
- Seventies films prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than those of more typical Hollywood cinema.
- Seventies narratives place an uncommon emphasis on irresolution, particularly at the moment of climax or in epilogues, when more conventional Hollywood movies busy themselves tying up loose ends.
- Seventies cinema hinders narrative linearity and momentum and scuttles its potential to generate suspense and excitement.
Seventies cinema also dealt with female identity in the era of second wave feminism, masculine crises featuring flawed male characters, downbeat conclusions and pessimistic subject matters alongside emotional realism in female identity stories, negative attitudes toward authoritative institutions and other aspects of American life and hard-nosed depictions of an America reeling from tense conflicts like The Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. Some New Hollywood titles like Hopper's acid western The Last Movie and Brian De Palma's musical Phantom of the Paradise had more eccentric characteristics including indulgent storylines and dizzying disregard of genre conventions.
Thomas Schatz points to another difference with the Hollywood Golden Age, which deals with the relationship of characters and plot. He argues that plot in classical Hollywood films (and some of the earlier New Hollywood films like The Godfather) "tended to emerge more organically as a function of the drives, desires, motivations, and goals of the central characters". However, beginning with mid-1970s, he points to a trend where "characters became plot functions".