Sucking in the 70s

This is my contribution to Goatdog’s Movies About Movies Blogathon

A Decade Under the Influence (2003; directed by Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme) A dizzying glance at an intriguing epoch, A Decade Under the Influence hums with a sycophantic spirit. Armed with dozens of interviews and film clips, directors Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme adore their subject — “the 70’s films that changed everything,” according to the picture’s tagline — at the risk of sacrificing objectivity. And, to be perfectly honest, who cares? Originally a three-part series for the Independent Film Channel, clocking in at 180 minutes, it’d be captivating if it were triple that length.

    It opens on the demise of the studio system, the mid-century passing of the baton when the moguls (Warner, Zanuck, Selznik, etc.) retired and sold their interests to lawyers and accountants. Television and a collective move away from outmoded values ultimately killed the dinosaurs of old Hollywood, sending the place down in gaudy, graceless denial. LaGravenese and Demme disinter footage of the star studded premiere of Hello, Dolly! (1969), where yesteryear’s celebrities whoop it up for a white elephant that nearly dispatched a studio into bankruptcy.

    “The film business was a decadent, decaying, empty whorehouse, and it had to be assaulted,” reflects Paul Schrader, one of the film’s jubilant interviewees. Like many who either worked in television during the 50’s or spent too much of their adolescence at the movies, Schrader embraced an impending upheaval. “You had that student-film mentality: let’s pick up the banner of Godard and walk in there and take over!”

    They had a ready-made audience, one supportive of foreign and experimental films and apprehensive of conformity. “It was an audience that had been politicized by Vietnam and Watergate, whose consciousness had been changed with drugs,” explains Julie Christie. “It was an open audience.”

    Or, heady films for heady viewers. Approaching the terrain skewed earlier by Peter Biskind in his book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), A Decade Under the Influence recognizes the groundbreaking advance of mature themes in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the improvisational work of John Cassavetes, when American drama became visibly affected by European naturalism. The writers, actors and directors who’d be most influenced the were then working at the opposite end of the spectrum, honing their craft in low budget exploitation pictures. Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern (here providing a killer Jack Nicholson impression) have no shortage of stories about “Roger Corman’s guerilla university of filmmaking,” as Peter Bogdanovich calls it, churning out movies remembered chiefly for their meager budgets and tight shooting schedules than any aesthetic or socially redeeming values.

    Members of the then-“new American cinema,” this far-from-beat generation remain enthusiastic about their art and generally respectful of those who came before. When asked to name their influences, Bogdanovich replies, “There was Renoir, and then there was everybody else.” Robert Altman, conversely, has his own distinct slant: “The filmmakers who influenced me the most, I don’t know their names. Because I would go see a film, hate it, and say ‘I’ve got to remember never to do anything like that again!’”

    Young, bursting with ideas and inexpensive to hire, they were a persuasive lot who finagled a degree of autonomy from broadminded backers and distributors. One important factor that allowed their films to display sexuality and use profanity was the MPAA ratings system, which had been initiated in 1968. Curiously, A Decade Under the Influence overlooks that milestone entirely. Without it, no distributor would’ve touched The Last Picture Show (1971) for its nudity, or Deliverance (1972) for its homosexual rape. And Robert Towne wouldn’t have had the dispute he relates here, an amusing quandary with producers over how many times the term ‘motherfucker’ should be used in his script for The Last Detail (1973).

    The liberation and creativity under the ratings system allowed Francis Coppola and Sidney Lumet to expand the parameters of drama, and enabled Altman, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson to subvert traditional forms. “The director was trump,” says producer John Calley, then presiding over Warners. Studios and financiers and directors, William Friedkin declares, “were all on the same page.” This is not to say that mindless fluff movies evaporated entirely — this was the heyday of the disaster picture, after all. But for approximately seven years, beginning with Easy Rider (1969) and lasting through Network (1976), an environment existed where, to borrow from Sissy Spacek, “the artist ruled,” when a new branch of cinema turned the glamour and safety of old Hollywood inside-out.

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver

    But the artist ruled for only so long. Metaphysic, satiric, introspective and nose-thumbing films like Hi, Mom! (1970), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) and Chinatown (1974) were also intellectually and emotionally exhausting. Money, power, cocaine and excess would soon harm the reputations of superstar directors: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) all fell victim to (highly publicized) unrestrained budgets and egos. By the time they hit the theatres, not enough people were interested in seeing them.

    After the remarkable popularity of The Exorcist escapism was king, and when A Decade Under the Influence reaches Jaws (1975) we witness the dawn of yet another new Hollywood. Here the documentary palls in tone and spirit: is that grief in the voices and faces of Monte Hellman, Julie Christie and Francis Coppola? For almost overnight, mature themes and characters were tossed out in a candy-coated epiphany. Jaws isn’t a bad movie — indeed, it’s one of the best things Spielberg’s ever done — but it opened the floodgates for epic bubblegum. With Star Wars (1977), a picture devised at the lowest rung (the vacuous Saturday matinee serial gussied up as celebratory event), the crossover to superficiality was manifest, marking the arrival of the producer as auteur. Which, in turn, shifted the concerns of the media and public from art to capital: budgets, merchandising, ‘opening weekend,’ franchises and the unintentional double-entendre of ‘back end’ deals.

    Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme close at this point and rightfully so. Where else can you go? Coppola, Bogdanovich, Towne, Scorsese and Friedkin wandered out of the 70’s in a fog. Altman dipped into obscure filmed stage plays, Clint Eastwood found his voice as an artist, and Sidney Pollack abided by the rules and made a fortune. Ellen Burstyn sank below radar, while Dennis Hopper served up anger issues (Blue Velvet) and yarns about drug abuse, a who’s who for a depressing chapter for a future volume of Hollywood Babylon we hope will never be written.

    A Decade Under the Influence neglects some areas entirely — the arresting psychological fringe of early Henry Jaglom and Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (1969); the controlled violent horror of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — and gives short shrift to the rise and commercial viability of 70’s black cinema. (Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles go unmentioned, while a brief inclusion of Pam Grier concentrates on her “hooties in the jungle” flicks for Roger Corman.) Though these omissions are not minor, LaGravenese and Demme shouldn’t be faulted for shortsightedness. (At the end, they apologize for any exclusions.) It was a long, arduous decade, and the uneasy alliance of high- and lowbrow films is too vast a subject for any one documentary. Indeed, A Decade Under the Influence is miraculous for covering as much ground as it does.

This film is available from Amazon