A Decade Under the Influence

[EL__SCORCHO]

I don't know if you guys have talked about this documentary before, but I just found out about it in Entertainment weekly. This seems pretty cool, interviews with Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. The preview also said with help from Neil Labute and Alexander Payne, I'd definately watch this.

[Ghostboy]

I'm seeing this next week...can't wait, after seeing it rest assured I'll find this thread and post about it.

[Satcho9]

PTA helped out with this. Am I mistaken? I think he is interviewed...

[Jeremy Blackman]

PTA helped out with this. Am I mistaken? I think he is interviewed...

He definitely helped out, although I think he was an interviewer...

[sphinx]

pta is listed as neither an interviewer or an interviewee.

[Jeremy Blackman]

pta is listed as neither an interviewer or an interviewee.

Well... it says that great filmmakers of today will interview great filmmakers of the 70s, so I'm just assuming, and Greg broke the news that way, so he has to be an interviewer... I'm assuming along with Soderbergh...

But on the official site, it lists 'some of the' interviewers:

NEIL LEBUTE, NICK CASSEVETTES, SCOTT FRANK, TED DEMME, RICHARD LAGRAVENESE, ROBERT KAMEN, STEVEN SCHIFF, TONY GILROY, JAMES V. HART

PTA and Soderbergh should be plastered all over the site... I don't understand it...

[Ghostboy]

Just got back from seeing it (or to be more exact, just got back from discussing it and other things at the adjacent watering hole, so please forgive any errors in this text...I'm more inebriated than I intended to be).

Anyway, it's a fantastic documentary. Judging from the title, I thought it would cover the territory of 'Easy Rider, Raging Bulls' and go into the drug culture of 70s Hollywood. But its really just about the movie scene as a whole during that decade, and its really fascinating and entertaining.

PTA is nowhere in the credits...and even if he was involved with the movie, you wouldn't know since the interviewers are never actually identified until the credits.

Richard LaGravanese was at the screening. He seemed like a very nice chap. I kept thinking...this is the guy who helped get Hard Eight to the state it is now...wow.

[dufresne]

psst...did he just say Raging Bulls?

-------

anyways, looks great.  i'm definitley gonna check it out.

[cowboykurtis]

psst...did he just say Raging Bulls?

-------

anyways, looks great.  i'm definitley gonna check it out.

yea he said raging bullS(plural) -- thats the title of the book.

[MacGuffin]

Article from the Los Angeles Times about the "A Decade Under The Influence" and "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" documentaries:

That '70s era: a decade of excess and film success

Not long before filming began on "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," the movie's screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, took Bob Dylan to Durango, Mexico, to meet Sam Peckinpah, full of trepidation that the hell-raising director would do something to spook Dylan, who'd not only agreed to co-star in the movie but record a soundtrack album too.

"It was late at night," Wurlitzer recalls in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," one of two fascinating new documentaries devoted to the glory days of '70s movies. "As we walked up to the house, there was a scream and this maid ran out, terrified, and we heard a gunshot and I thought, 'Oh, man, this is going to blow the whole thing with Bob.' Sam was standing in front of this mirror, completely naked. The mirror was totally blown and he had a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. And I said, 'Sam, this is Bob Dylan.' "

It seems completely apt that the rival documentary about this period, produced and directed by respected filmmakers Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme, is titled "A Decade Under the Influence" -- '70s Hollywood was an oasis of unparalleled excess. As producer Polly Platt puts it: "These guys were doing whatever they wanted. They were drinking, smoking dope and they lost their minds."

But along the way, those guys -- Hollywood in the late '60s and the '70s being very much a man's world -- made a staggering number of terrific movies, including "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Godfather," "Midnight Cowboy," "MASH," "Shampoo," "The French Connection," "The Wild Bunch," "A Clockwork Orange," "Mean Streets," "Badlands" and "The Last Picture Show," to name but a few. The outpouring of celluloid artistry has earned the period between the 1967 release of "Bonnie and Clyde" and the arrival of "Star Wars" 10 years later a reputation as Hollywood's last golden era. Together the documentaries tell about that remarkable period of filmmaking and offer an ironic commentary on the dismal state of Hollywood today.

Of the two documentaries, "Easy Riders," which played at the Cannes Film Festival and will air again on the Trio cable network in August before making its DVD debut later this year, offers more entertainment value. Writer-director Kenneth Bowser has great, rarely seen footage of the young Francis Ford Coppola at work, accompanied by a painfully shy "personal associate" -- the scrawny young George Lucas. He's also got a knack for loosey-goosey interviews. Trying to explain why Dennis Hopper botched the Mardi Gras footage in "Easy Rider," Karen Black, who plays one of the hippie chicks in the movie, gives a classic '60s answer: "Everyone was stoned out of their mind."

Now playing at the Nuart Theater in West L.A. and airing in an extended version in August on the Independent Film Channel, "Decade" is more illuminating, with the respectful tone you'd expect from a graduate school seminar. It gives filmmakers a welcome opportunity to discuss their craft and technique. Billy Friedkin, for example, drew on his experience as a documentary filmmaker shooting "The French Connection," especially when shooting its bravura under-the-elevated-train chase sequence. "Decade" gained access to more key figures, using filmmakers to interview their peers (Alexander Payne did a great interview with Coppola; likewise, Neil LaBute with Paul Mazursky and Michael De Luca with John Calley).

LaGravenese and Demme, who died shortly after the film went into production, also sent out a letter distancing the film from Peter Biskind's acerbic "Easy Riders" bestseller, which provides source material and the title for Bowser's film. Nevertheless, some of the most formidable figures, namely Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, wouldn't talk. LaGravenese spent an afternoon at Beatty's home, listening to him tell Hal Ashby stories, but he could never pin him down for an on-camera interview. Not everyone was a breeze.

"I was so nervous that I didn't sleep the night before I interviewed Robert Altman," LaGravenese recalls. "Before we were on camera, I asked him one question and he immediately said, 'Well, I don't agree with that.' After that, I just threw away all my prepared questions."

Of risk and adversity

As both documentaries point out, by the late 1960s the monolithic studio system was in dire straits, run by aged moguls who had no idea that the country was in the grip of a youth-culture revolution. It's a chapter of film history that's useful to remember. When business is booming, as in today's Franchise Film-dominated Hollywood, studios are loath to take any chances -- why mess with success? It's when things are going bad that people are open to taking risks, figuring as the moguls of the early '70s did, what have we got to lose?

When Paramount couldn't get a top director interested in "The Godfather," the studio took a flier on Coppola, a young unknown whose movies hadn't made a dime. Seeing archival pre-"Godfather" footage of the director scratching his beard and wandering around in powder-blue shorts, it's a wonder he ever got past the studio guard gates. But as Coppola says today, in a quote that should be emblazoned in marquee-sized neon lights over the desks of the executives responsible for this summer's parade of brain-numbing sequels:

"There can't be art without risk. It's like saying there's no sex, but then expecting there to be children."

Coppola and his contemporaries were irrepressible and often self-destructive. But they possessed a fiery passion for filmmaking that is rarely on display today. Paul Schrader wrote "Taxi Driver" in a two-week creative binge, saying "it jumped out of my head like an animal." As my colleague Manohla Dargis wrote in a recent review of the wan indie drama "XX/XY," "The American indie scene is filled with tame, polite movies, agleam with professionalism and laden with characters that are content to remain willfully unaware of the world." LaGravenese, who at 43 is old enough to remember seeing "The Godfather" and "Serpico" as a kid at Loew's Oriental in Brooklyn, believes most of today's filmmakers are wary of putting any naked feeling into their films. "They're trying so hard to be hip that they don't have room for a lot of emotion," he says. "It's odd to hear young people today equate passion with being uncool. No one wants to say what they're feeling at the risk of sounding foolish."

In fairness, today's young filmmakers have less rope to hang themselves with. When Arthur Krim ran United Artists, home to many of the most daring '70s films, he'd invite a filmmaker to a Sunday brunch of lox and cream cheese. "He'd look into your eyes," recalls screenwriter Marshall Brickman. "And if you didn't look that crazy and [the film] didn't seem that expensive, he'd say, 'Go make your movie, invite me to the opening.' "

An age of irony

It's hard to believe that so many '70s movies, despite their restless abandon, were box-office hits. Were audiences more open to experimentation and artistry? Did they have higher expectations? As befits an era shaped by the Watergate scandal, urban decay and the Vietnam War, '70s films were packed with irony, irreverence and a nagging sense of moral ambiguity. Today's moviegoers have grown up with radically different cultural signposts. Arriving at the height of an unpopular war, "MASH" was a huge box-office success. But how much resonance would it have today, when according to a recent survey 75% of all college kids say they trust the military "to do the right thing" most or all of the time? As Julie Christie observes in "Decade," '70s audiences "didn't want the same old stuff -- like nowadays."

It was a rare moment in American pop culture when moviegoers preferred the rough trade of reality over escapist fantasy. From "Bonnie and Clyde" to "Chinatown," the movies were full of ambiguity, populated with antiheroes who lost their souls or died before the credits rolled. Today we crave good guys with squishy-soft hearts of gold. Perhaps the most telling moment in either film occurs in "Easy Riders" when Roger Corman, the B-movie impresario who made teen drive-in quickies about fast cars and mutant monsters, says he went to see "Jaws" and realized the jig was up.

The big studios, who'd long ceded him the youth market, had their own killer shark B-movie, except it had A-list stars and effects. Opening on hundreds of screens the same weekend, it marked the dawn of today's visual-effects extravaganzas. Too often today's movies are all about excess; every summer seems like a hollow exercise in "can you top that" filmmaking. Back in the '70s, Schrader saw Hollywood as "a decaying whorehouse that had to be assaulted." I wonder how many young filmmakers today feel the same way -- or have the courage to lead the charge.

[MacGuffin]

A longer version of "Decade Under The Influence" airs on IFC beginning Wednesday. Article from The Los Angeles Times:

The '70s: Get over it
A thriving cult deifies the decade's filmmaking, but the 'halcyon age' was less revolution than business as usual, with rebel hype.

"We blew it."

The year was 1969 and the movie was "Easy Rider." Spoken by Peter Fonda to Dennis Hopper with such inscrutable cool that audiences debated their meaning long after they'd left the theater, these three words sum up the broken dreams of a couple of bikers after a proverbially long and strange trip. Like their characters, Fonda and Hopper were after a big score. They got it. A smash hit, "Easy Rider" connected with the youth culture and helped pave the way for an extraordinary decade-long run of films — "Mean Streets," "The Exorcist," "The Last Detail," "Badlands" and "American Graffiti" were all released in 1973 — the likes of which haven't been seen since.

Or so the legend goes.

In the last 10 years, 1970s cinema has become an unqualified cult. Directors like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Spike Jonze make films under its influence; fan-boy Web sites extol its glories. Not long before she died, Pauline Kael wrote that the 1970s were "when the movies seemed to be about things that mattered." Peter Biskind says the same in his 1998 bestseller about New Hollywood, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." In brief, Biskind argues that a group of young cinematic upstarts — turned on by the era's social turmoil — sparked a revolution in Hollywood that rejuvenated the moribund industry. As the subtitle of his book puts it: "How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood."

Last January, a documentary based on "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. The next day, the rival Sundance Film Festival hosted the premiere of another, similarly reasoned documentary about this halcyon age called "A Decade Under the Influence" directed by Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme. (A longer version of "Decade" airs on IFC beginning Wednesday.) In June, the cult continued with the publication of "It Don't Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies," an appreciation written by a British critic who was all of 2 when "Mean Streets" opened.

There's something troubling about the way that 1970s cinema has evolved from mere fandom to become its own genre, especially among younger cinephiles. It's one thing when a director like Wes Anderson, yet another 1970s fan, cops to his love for the era because his films are more than allusions and recycled style. His work transcends his influences, but this isn't the case with the dozens of others waving the personal-vision banner and pining for New Hollywood. Filmmakers like Joe Carnahan, who channeled Sidney Lumet in "Narc," and David Gordon Green, whose jones for Terrence Malick nearly upended "All the Real Girls," demonstrate talent. But strip away their influences and it's hard to see any "there" there.

Undeniably, something was new and different in the Hollywood in the 1970s; it's questionable, however, if new meant better. Filmmakers working in Hollywood then fired off terrific movies. But so did Hollywood filmmakers working in the teens, the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and the much-maligned early 1960s. One crucial distinction between Old and New Hollywood wasn't the level of talent but the self-consciousness of the Young Turks' movie love. Like their counterparts abroad, New Hollywood filmmakers took movies — old studio slicks and foreign-language films — seriously as art. Movies didn't have to be sausages, churned out for mass consumption, but could be personal expressions and political statements.

The old studio system wasn't as soul-killing and brain-deadening for everyone as is often tediously claimed. However, by the early 1960s the old studio factory was no more and the studio chiefs hadn't yet mastered the new fiscal realities of their decentralized industry. By the late 1960s, a combination of aesthetic malaise and a financial crisis left the industry open to change — and so it changed, just like it always had. Hollywood has a long history of brilliant adaptation to crises. Good and great movies were made, but most didn't look all that different from Old Hollywood. The language and the sex were racier, and violence certainly more bloody, but for the most part these were not radical films.

The sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll generation didn't save Hollywood. Hollywood swallowed them whole, absorbed its talent, spat out its dross and a few of its geniuses, and saved itself.

That era's youth market

The great and banal truth of the New Hollywood is that for all the cant, the drama, the love beads, the hot tubs, the jump cuts, the acid and dope, the New wasn't all that different from the Old. It was just Hollywood. Yes, it was reconfigured, rearranged, restaffed and brought up to date; more important, it learned how to sell to the very youth market that now often takes the blame for the industry's aesthetic stagnation and crazy business practices. Undoubtedly there was new energy and vitality. But Hollywood's real revolution — the one that paved the way for the culture shocks to come — began in the 1940s when the federal government issued a series of consent decrees that forced the industry to abandon vertical integration and get out of the exhibition business.

Other pressures, including television, further decentralized the industry so that by the early 1960s Hollywood no longer seemed the vibrant dream factory once run by the likes of Twentieth Century Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, a crisis in creativity that was later exacerbated by pricey flops like "Star!" In the early 1970s, at the urging of industry leaders, the Nixon administration signed into law a series of tax breaks, including tax shelters, that amounted to a government subsidy for the movie business. In 1974, the president of Columbia Pictures — the studio that, incidentally, made "Shampoo," one of the sharper attacks on the Nixon era — said "the availability of this kind of financing is the single most important occurrence in the recent history of the industry."

Buoyed by new money and supported by a boomer audience that was digging the same new Truffaut comedies they were, the young directors who came knocking at the industry's door were in the right time at the right place. Foreign-language films were a galvanizing influence; with their formal innovations and adult themes, these were films that seemed plugged into the world as it was and not as it was being invented on the "Doctor Dolittle" backlot. And like their French peers, the filmmakers of New Hollywood saw themselves as "auteurs," which, in turn, made them acceptable to the reading classes that made movies "matter" as much as high culture. You no longer just went to the movies; you ruminated about them endlessly at cocktail parties.

The filmmakers of New Hollywood were primed for success and in some cases achieved it, spectacularly. As Biskind makes depressingly clear, though, it didn't take long for the movement to implode. There were all sorts of reasons for the fall; among the most painful are the unchecked ego and rampant greed of many of the best and the brightest — just like in Old Hollywood. As Jack Nicholson's character says in "Easy Rider," "it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace." You can't ignite a revolution while sitting in a gilded cage.

"Today's young people hide behind their youth," John Cassavetes said in the early 1970s. "Film is as much a business for the young as for the old. They're criticizing older people because they're wanting it and they're not getting it — the haves and the have-nots We're all the Establishment."

It's worth noting that LaGravenese and Demme's documentary is named after Cassavetes' most commercially successful film, 1974's "A Woman Under the Influence," which he had to self-distribute because no one in the "new" Hollywood would. Despite his radical independence, Cassavetes doesn't figure prominently in most New Hollywood histories — or maybe the problem was his radical independence. Cassavetes wasn't part of the overlapping circles of friends and lovers at the center of Biskind's book. His father wasn't a Hollywood legend like Fonda's, and he didn't marry into Hollywood royalty like Hopper, who had wed actress Margaret Sullavan's daughter. And unlike Bert Schneider — who co-ran the legendary company Raybert (later BBS) — Cassavetes' father didn't run a big studio. Schneider's did. He ran Columbia Pictures, which is where Raybert had its office when it greenlighted "Easy Rider."

Hollywood welcomes rebels, not revolutionaries, which is why the most significant directors of the New Hollywood — Coppola and Scorsese — have had a far rougher ride than Spielberg and Lucas, who are often blamed for helping to bring an end to the movement. The received wisdom about 1970s cinema is that when "Jaws" and "Star Wars" smashed box-office records, they effectively ushered in the blockbuster age that destroyed the New Hollywood and defined the decade to come. But Hollywood always had something of a blockbuster mentality (think of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance"), and, really, the 1980s weren't all that terrible. Neither were the 1990s, when another generation emerged — this time in the indie film movement — and helped change Hollywood once again.

Marx said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In Hollywood, the land of franchises and sequels, history never stops repeating itself — it just endlessly oscillates from tragedy and farce. Just like in the 1970s, some great movies have been made in the last 15 years; and just like before, some of the most talented filmmakers — Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne, among them — work for studios. Meanwhile, some of the most visionary, like Jim Jarmusch, have faded from view because their work is too independent for even most independent companies. This, too, is the American movie business as usual.

Despite easy access to the studio tradition on video and DVD, young filmmakers are not deeply immersed in the Hollywood that nurtured the likes of Scorsese, and they evince little interest in the foreign-language cinema that was so important to their 1970s heroes. As too many American independent films underscore, it isn't good for the state of the art when one generation feeds almost exclusively on an earlier generation. It may be too early to write the history of this latest generation to breach the Hollywood citadel, but Biskind may have already. His new book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Robert Redford, Miramax, and the Improbable Rise of Independent Film" hits the zeitgeist in January — just in time for Sundance.

[RegularKarate]

I rented this finally... it was pretty decent... good to see all the cool directors, but it wasn't as informative as one would hope... just all of them talking about things most people who are into film ('specially 70s film) already know.

I would recomend it as a rental... it's chopped up into three episodes... I don't think I would have dug it as a three hour sitting... much better seperated.

[Jeremy Blackman]

I thought it was a pretty good documentary, and it's especially helpful for anyone (like me) who wants to have their facts straight. And you can trust these people. I was more interested in how the movement ended. Rocky, Jaws, Star Wars. It makes so much sense.

[MacGuffin]

I rented this finally...

 I thought it came out on DVD next Tuesday?

[Jeremy Blackman]

 I thought it came out on DVD next Tuesday?

Hmm, I guess it does, but I rented it through Netflix more than a week ago. (which I'm guessing is how RK saw it). I think I was the first to rent that copy... the little envelope was in perfect condition and the DVD was completely unscathed.