Blockbuster - Rise of a new generation of filmmakers - the birth of the Director

The New Decade for Film-Makers:

Although the 1970s opened with Hollywood experiencing a financial and artistic depression, the decade became a creative high point in the US film industry. Restrictions on language, adult content and sexuality, and violence had loosened up, and these elements became more widespread. The hippie movement, the civil rights movement, free love, the growth of rock and roll, changing gender roles and drug use certainly had an impact. And Hollywood was renewed and reborn with the earlier collapse of the studio system, and the works of many new and experimental film-makers (nicknamed "Movie Brats") during a Hollywood New Wave.

The counter-culture of the time had influenced Hollywood to be freer, to take more risks and to experiment with alternative, young film makers, as old Hollywood professionals and old-style moguls died out and a new generation of film makers arose. Many of the audiences and movie-makers of the late 60s had seen a glimpse of new possibilities, new story-telling techniques and more meaningful 'artistic' options, by the influences of various European "New Wave" movements (French and Italian) and the original works of other foreign-language film-makers, and by viewing these surprise hits in the previous decade:

• Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966)
• Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
• Nichols' The Graduate (1967)
• Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968, UK)
• Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)
• Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969)
• Hopper's Easy Rider (1969)
• Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969)
• Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope (1969)
• Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969)

TASK:

Research at least three of the following ‘movie brats’ and the effect their film/s had on the path to the blockbuster.

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