- Director:
Kenneth Bowser - AMG Rating:
- Genre: Film, TV & Radio
- Movie Type: Film & Television History
- Themes: Rise and Fall Stories, Filmmaking
- Main Cast: Dede Allen, Peter Bart, Andrew Cohen, Tony Bill, Karen Black
- Release Year: 2003
- Country: US/UK
- Run Time: 119 minutes
Plot
Based upon Peter Biskind's book of the same name, this BBC-produced documentary traces the rise of a generation of Hollywood filmmakers who briefly changed the face of movies with a more personal approach that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable onscreen. Influenced by such European directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini, the movement kicked off in the mid-'60s with two films directed by Arthur Penn: Mickey One and Bonnie and Clyde. (The latter had been offered to both Godard and Truffaut before it wound up with producer/star Warren Beatty and Penn.) What really kicked it into gear was the unexpected success of Easy Rider, a biker-road movie that became that rare film phenomenon: acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival and a huge commercial success. Film school graduates, the first generation brought up with movies as their main cultural reference, flooded the studios (whose own regimes were changing) with production chieftains such as Robert Evans of Paramount and David Picker at United Artists; they approved risky-looking projects and allowed relatively untested filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola to take on heavyweight movies such as The Godfather or Hollywood newcomers like Britain's John Schlesinger to make quirky stories like Midnight Cowboy. Enriched by success with their TV show The Monkees, producer Bert Schneider and director Bob Rafelson formed a company that produced not only Easy Rider but seminal '70s films such as Five Easy Pieces and the Oscar-winning Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds. Another godfather to the new movement was producer Roger Corman, who gave early career opportunities to Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Demme on low-budget projects that allowed them to learn their craft.Two things brought this movement to an end: Some individual filmmakers' personal excesses (such disastrous flops as Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider, appropriately titled The Last Movie, and Scorsese's New York, New York), and the studios growing fascination with special effects-driven B-movies. An outgrowth of two box-office and marketing juggernauts -- Jaws and Star Wars -- the resulting films became entertainments rather than personal statements of the directors. Narrated by William H. Macy, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls features vintage clips of Coppola, Scorsese, Beatty, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, and Pauline Kael. It also includes original interview material with Penn; Corman; Bogdanovich; Hopper; Picker; writer/directors John Milius and Paul Schrader; actresses Karen Black, Cybill Shepherd, Margot Kidder, and Jennifer Salt (the latter two shared a house in Malibu, a social center for young filmmakers); actors Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, and Richard Dreyfuss; producers Jerome Hellman, Michael Phillips, and Jonathan Taplin; editor Dede Allen; production designer Polly Platt; writers David Newman, Joan Tewksbury, Gloria Katz, and Willard Huyck; cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond; agent Mike Medavoy; and former production executive Peter Bart. Among the films discussed are Rosemary's Baby, The Wild Bunch, Mean Streets, American Graffiti, The Rain People, Midnight Cowboy, M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Last Picture Show, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. (Three interviewees -- cinematographer Gordon Willis, critic Andrew Sarris, and writer-director Monte Hellman -- listed in the Variety review of this film, were not included in this version from a screening on Bravo.) ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Review
Dancing through a decade or so of tumultuous Hollywood history -- from the studio system that produced elephantine spectaculars like Hello, Dolly to the bottom line-oriented film industry that turns out loud, noisy, and witless "franchises" like Charlie's Angels -- requires some nimble footwork to get all of its highlights packed into two hours. For the most part, writer/director Kenneth Bowser is up to the task, stumbling only a few times and generally offering a solid overview of an era when the studios allowed more freedom to talented filmmakers than at any other time in its history. Bowser avoids getting bogged down in the kind of celebrity gossip that made Peter Biskind's book a guilty pleasure for some and a catalogue of excesses for others. There is one exception: a she said/she said account by Polly Platt and Cybill Shepherd of the goings-on during the shooting of The Last Picture Show. (For the record, Platt was married to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich, who proceeded to have an affair with Shepherd, his ingénue star.) Although the filmmakers were not able to obtain original interviews with the A-list set of figures discussed here (Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Warren Beatty, Robert Altman), they did come up with some interesting archival footage, including Coppola and Lucas on the set of The Rain People (shot at the same time as Easy Rider, the two film crews were each crossing America in different directions). And those who did agree to participate are pretty impressive, going beyond just the actors and directors to such essential behind-the-scenes personnel as writers and cinematographers. Their insights, allowed to mellow and settle with the passage of time, are generally helpful.There are occasional lapses in chronology, as when M*A*S*H, an early 1970 release, is included with 1969 releases, and, more egregiously, when the mid-'70s is described as a time when urban riots and anti-Vietnam protests were still engulfing America. What's most sobering, however, is the observation by writer Joan Tewskbury that the beginning of the end of this short-lived movement came when TV shows such as Entertainment Tonight (and newspapers like USA Today) began reporting weekend box-office figures. When Paramount opened The Godfather on 400 screens in 1972, they went against the grain of the usual pattern of playing a film in a few major cities, allowing critical reviews and word of mouth to work its magic before slowly releasing the film to the rest of the country. So when Coppola's film went on to make box-office history, it opened the floodgates for highly promotable (and less artistically ambitious) films such as Jaws and Star Wars. Backed by endless months of hype and cross-promotion, these movies became first-weekend events, designed to return a significant portion of their budgets before critics could see them and any bad word of mouth could have a chance to affect ticket sales. (And, as the film points out, '70s critics such as Pauline Kael played a more important role then in shaping public taste. Now critical opinion is limited to "thumbs up" assessments or blurbs supplied by publicity-hungry reviewers.) "It didn't matter whether the film was good or not," says one observer of the late-'70s rash of special-effects spectaculars, "as long it made a good trailer." Nearly three decades after Jaws created the very model of a modern major blockbuster, studio filmmaking became all about either the box office or the Oscars. For the most part, Hollywood studios has stopped taking risks on quirky projects, and what quality films the studios do choose to make are the well-crafted, though hardly idiosyncratic, movies held for release in the last three months of the year, so they'll be fresh in the minds of Academy voters come Oscar time. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Cast
- Dede Allen
Peter Bart Andrew Cohen - Tony Bill
- Karen Black
