New Hollywood: The Auteur Renaissance

In the last minute of Bonnie and Clyde, the killing does not cut away. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are cut down in a hail of gunfire that goes on far past the point of comfort, their bodies jerking in slow motion, and then the screen simply stops. Audiences in 1967 had never seen an American studio picture die like that — beautiful, prolonged, obscene. Some walked out. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times savaged it repeatedly, and his hostility helped end his own career; a younger writer named Pauline Kael answered him in a long rave in The New Yorker that read like a manifesto. Something had shifted. The old Hollywood, which the previous era had left wheezing under the weight of television and bloated roadshow epics, was about to be taken apart from the inside.

The Old Order Collapses

By the late 1960s the studios were in genuine trouble. The men who built them were dying or gone — Jack Warner sold his stake in 1967 — and their instincts had curdled into expensive nostalgia. Chasing the memory of The Sound of Music, the studios poured fortunes into lumbering musicals like Doctor Dolittle (1967), Star! (1968), and Hello, Dolly! (1969), and watched them fail one after another. The companies were cash-starved, leaderless, and suddenly willing to gamble on things they did not understand.

They did not understand Easy Rider. Made in 1969 for roughly $400,000 by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, with a young Jack Nicholson stealing the picture, it earned many times its cost — a scruffy motorcycle odyssey that spoke directly to an audience the studios had lost. The lesson was unmistakable: give a small amount of money to young people who knew what the country now looked like, and stand back. Overnight, the executive class went hunting for talent it had spent decades ignoring.

The other pillar to fall was the Production Code, the moral rulebook that had governed screen content since 1934. It was already crumbling — Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both 1967, had shown what audiences would accept — and in November 1968 the industry's chief lobbyist, Jack Valenti, scrapped it entirely for a ratings system: G, M, R, and X. Filmmakers no longer had to smuggle sex, violence, and moral ambiguity past a censor. They could put it on the screen and let a letter sort out the audience. It is impossible to imagine the decade that followed without that single administrative decision.

The Movie Brats Take the Wheel

Into this vacuum walked a generation unlike any Hollywood had produced. They had gone to film school — Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA, Martin Scorsese at NYU, George Lucas and John Milius at USC — and they had grown up worshipping foreign directors the old moguls had never heard of: Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, Kurosawa, Antonioni. They believed, as the French critics had argued, that the director was the true author of a film. In America, for one improbable stretch, the industry agreed with them.

The films came in a torrent. Coppola turned a pulp bestseller into The Godfather (1972), which became one of the highest-grossing films made to that point, then answered it two years later with the even more ambitious The Godfather Part II — and, the same year, the paranoid miniature The Conversation (1974). Robert Altman shredded the war film with MASH (1970), the Western with McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and the whole country with the overlapping, twenty-four-character mosaic of Nashville (1975). William Friedkin gave the era its adrenaline in The French Connection (1971), the first R-rated film to win Best Picture, and then its terror in The Exorcist (1973). Hal Ashby, gentlest of the group, moved from the deadpan romance of Harold and Maude (1971) to the aching Vietnam homecoming of Coming Home (1978).

And Scorsese made Taxi Driver (1976), a fever dream of urban rot that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and gave the decade one of its indelible images — Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle rehearsing violence alone in a mirror, in a line the actor largely improvised.

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?

What unified these pictures was not a style but a stance. They were morally unresolved, downbeat, in love with texture and ambiguity, and shaped end to end by a single sensibility. Endings did not reassure. Heroes lost, or won something worse than losing. Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski from Robert Towne's diamond-cut screenplay, closes on a note of pure despair — "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" — and audiences accepted it, because for a few years despair felt truer than the studio's old consolations.

The Boom That Ate the Renaissance

The strange thing is that the auteurs killed their own era — not through failure, but through a spectacular kind of success. In the summer of 1975, a twenty-eight-year-old named Steven Spielberg released Jaws. Opened wide across the country and pounded into the public consciousness by national television advertising, it became the highest-grossing film to that point and invented a new season: the summer blockbuster. Two years later Lucas, who had made the delicate American Graffiti (1973), released Star Wars, and the ground shifted again. The money was no longer in small, personal, ambiguous films. It was in event pictures, merchandise, and sequels — in giving the audience exactly what it wanted rather than what a director insisted it see.

The old freedom did not vanish at once. Coppola dragged Apocalypse Now (1979) out of a nightmare Philippine shoot and onto the screen, an act of monomaniacal ambition that felt like the era's last full-throated statement. Scorsese answered in 1980 with Raging Bull, brutal and black-and-white and uncommercial, now widely called the finest American film of its decade. But the executives who had once handed the keys to unproven young directors had watched too many budgets balloon, and their patience was gone.

The tombstone is usually dated 1980. Michael Cimino, fresh off the Best Picture win for The Deer Hunter, was given near-total freedom on a Western called Heaven's Gate. The production spiraled to roughly $44 million, the film was met with derision, and its failure helped destroy United Artists — a studio that traced back to Chaplin and Griffith — as an independent company. To the executives, the moral was plain: never again. The director-driven decade was over.

What it left behind is the strange gift of that thirteen-year window. For once, the American commercial movie and the American art movie were the same object, playing the same theaters, made by the same people. The generation that came next would inherit the blockbuster machinery those very films had built — bigger, richer, and far more cautious. But that is the next chapter. First the moguls had to die, and a handful of film students had to prove, briefly and gloriously, that the movies could belong to whoever cared about them most.