Американское кино 70-х
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TIMELINE
The 1970
s
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1970
7 JANUARY Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Iraq sign agreement prefiguring OPEC.
10 APRIL Paul McCartney leaves the Beatles.
22 APRIL Celebration of the first Earth Day.
4MAY Four students are killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State
University.
15 MAY Two students are killed by police at Jackson State University.
3 NOVEMBER President Richard Nixon coins the term “silent majority.”
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1971
12 JANUARY “All in the Family” debuts on CBS.
29 MARCH Lt. William Calley is found guilty of murdering twenty-two
civilians at My Lai, Vietnam.
20 APRIL The U.S. Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board
of Education establishes that the preservation of neighborhood
schools no longer justifies racial imbalance.
13 JUNE The Pentagon Papers are published by the New York Times.
25 JULY The Twenty-sixth Amendment is ratified, lowering the voting
age to eighteen.
9 SEPTEMBER A prison riot at Attica State Correctional facility in New York
results in forty-two deaths.
20 DECEMBER The feminist magazine Ms. premieres.
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1972
1 JANUARY All cigarette advertising is banned from television.
7 FEBRUARY President Richard Nixon visits China.
15 MARCH Alabama governor George Wallace is shot while campaigning in
Maryland’s presidential primary.
17 JUNE Five men are arrested at the Watergate Office Building for
breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters.
5 SEPTEMBER At the Summer Olympics in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes and
coaches are killed by terrorists.
xi
7 NOVEMBER Richard Nixon is reelected to a second term in a landslide
victory over the Democratic challenger, Senator George
McGovern.
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1973
22 JANUARY The U.S. Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Roe v. Wade.
27 JANUARY The United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam sign the
Paris Peace Accords, ending America’s combat role in Vietnam.
27 FEBRUARY Native Americans occupy Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
29 MARCH The last U.S. combat troops leave Vietnam.
6 OCTOBER Egypt and Syria attack Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
10 OCTOBER Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns following his plea of “no
contest” against charges of tax evasion.
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1974
4 FEBRUARY Heiress Patricia Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese
Liberation Army.
8 APRIL Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s record with his 715th home
run.
27 JULY The House Judiciary Committee votes to approve articles of
impeachment against President Nixon.
9 AUGUST Nixon resigns; Vice President Gerald Ford takes the oath of
office.
8 SEPTEMBER President Ford grants former President Nixon a pardon for any
crimes “he committed or may have committed” as president.
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1975
18 JANUARY “The Jeffersons” debuts on CBS.
16 APRIL The videocassette recorder is invented.
30 APRIL Saigon falls. The U.S. Navy evacuates U.S. personnel and South
Vietnamese refugees. South Vietnam surrenders to North
Vietnam, reunifying the country under Communist control.
31 JULY Former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa is reported missing. He is
never found.
5 SEPTEMBER Jaws becomes the top-grossing film of all time.
11 OCTOBER “Saturday Night Live” premieres on NBC.
20 NOVEMBER President Francisco Franco dies in Spain.
xii TIMELINE — THE 1970s
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1976
31 MARCH The New Jersey Supreme Court grants the parents of Karen Ann
Quinlan the right to end life support during her continued
vegetative state.
1 APRIL Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak design the Apple personal
computer.
4 JULY Celebration of the American Bicentennial.
9 SEPTEMBER Chairman Mao Tse-tung of China dies.
2 NOVEMBER Jimmy Carter is elected president over Gerald Ford.
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1977
23–30 JANUARY ABC broadcasts the miniseries “Roots” (based on Alex Haley’s
book).
25 MAY Star Wars opens.
13 JULY New York City power blackout.
12 AUGUST NASA flies the first space shuttle.
16 AUGUST Elvis Presley dies.
19 NOVEMBER Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader officially to visit
Israel.
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1978
28 JUNE The U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California v.
Bakke declares that race-based affirmative action programs are
illegal.
25 JULY The first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is born in England.
7 AUGUST Families leave the heavily polluted Love Canal area of Niagara
Falls.
17 SEPTEMBER Prime Minister Begin of Israel and President Sadat of Egypt sign
the Camp David Peace Accords.
16 OCTOBER Karol Wojtyla becomes Pope John Paul II.
18 NOVEMBER Reverend Jim Jones and over 900 of his cult members are
murdered or commit suicide in Guyana.
27 NOVEMBER Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk are
murdered in San Francisco.
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1979
7 JANUARY Fall of the Cambodian capital and the collapse of the Pol Pot
regime.
TIMELINE — THE 1970s xiii
16 JANUARY The shah of Iran flees the country.
28 MARCH A nuclear accident occurs at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant
in Pennsylvania.
4 MAY Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister of Great Britain.
7 SEPTEMBER ESPN begins broadcasting.
4 NOVEMBER Iranians seize the American embassy in Tehran and take U.S.
citizens hostage.
xiv TIMELINE — THE 1970s
American Cinema of the 1970s
Jake “J.J.” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, Paramount, 1974), one of
the era’s cynical films that explored the dark side of human nature and the corruption of
social institutions. Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.
INTRODUCTION
Movies and the 1970s
LESTER D. FRIEDMAN
We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it
back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe
experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character
of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a
succession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and
reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, televisions, and
sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by
electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if our
actions—and their own—were being recorded and simultaneously
transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at a
later time.
—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American
Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
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Beyond the Strobe Lights
It is easy to make fun of the seventies. A smug glance at the
so-called “Me Decade” unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and
broken politics—all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even
nostalgia: “The 70’s epitomize bad taste, evoking a wasteland of synthetic
disco clothing and avocado-and-gold kitchens” (Spindler 6). For many com-
mentators, the first five years of the seventies remain merely a reverber-
ation of the countercultural sixties and the last five a foreshadowing of the
conservative eighties. As one wit remarked, “The perfect seventies symbol
. . . was the Pet Rock, which just sat there doing nothing” (Schulman xii).
Recently, however, a new generation of scholars has looked beyond the
strobe lights to illuminate how profoundly the seventies have influenced
American life. For these scholars, the “long, gaudy, depressing Seventies
reinvented America” (Schulman 257) and “marked the end of a postwar
consensus” (Berkowitz 6). It was a “decade of social earthquakes” (Slocum-
Schaffer 211) that resulted in “real and permanent” (Frum xxiv) upheavals
that brought “American thought and culture into a new era” (Hoeveler
1
xiii), an “almost subliminal revolution altering the contours of the cultural
landscape” (Carroll xii). The 1970s did indeed witness an extensive ideo-
logical and social transformation in American culture and history, one mir-
rored in the industrial practices of making and distributing motion pictures,
the new aesthetics of American movies, and the broad themes that charac-
terized the cinema of this decade.
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The American Motion Picture Industry
in the 1970s
The most comprehensive book about the American film
business during this period remains David Cook’s masterful Lost Illusions:
American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam (1970–1979). Cook
describes the industry at the start of the decade as being in a “state of dis-
location matched only by the coming of sound” (9). Basically, this was
due to over-production in the last years of the sixties—particularly lav-
ishly expensive musicals—and the recession of 1969 that culminated in
combined studio losses of $200 million, a precipitous drop in the number
of films released by the major studios, and the resulting widespread un-
employment (40 percent of all Hollywood filmmakers in 1970) in the
production business. The dismal state of the industry spurred the federal
government to provide relief in the form of two measures that ultimately
revolutionized the financial structure of making movies. The first was the
implementation of income tax credits on losses, a measure that allowed
for the creation of tax shelters that, in turn, became the major method
for financing films during the decade. The second, a 7 percent investment
tax credit on domestic production, permitted investors to defer taxes on
profits if they reinvested them in domestic moviemaking. Together, these
two initiatives “provided, for the first time in film history, a solid base for
investment. . . . Such extensive Federal tax breaks amounted to a govern-
ment subsidy for the industry during the 1970s and early 1980s” (Cook
12, 14).
To further complicate matters, film attendance in the United States fell
to an all-time low at the start of the decade (15.8 million in 1971) while
production costs were rising (from $1.9 million in 1972 to $8.9 million in
1979), a disheartening mirror of the stagflation that gripped the country
during the Carter years. As Cook summarizes it, “The 1970s surely was the
decade when the theatrical moviegoing experience hits its nadir in the
United States” (397). To explain this low, historians often cite changing
demographics, emphasizing how the population shifts from the cities to the
2 LESTER D. FRIEDMAN
suburbs and the maturation of the Baby Boom generation permanently
altered moviegoing habits and ultimately defined a new audience.
The most dramatic result of these demographic shifts was the advent
of multiplex theaters in shopping malls and, in the wake of that develop-
ment, the progressive elimination of one-screen theaters in urban areas:
“The idea of an enclosed place in which to shop and play became one of
the defining icons of the 1970s” (Cook 402). With its ample free parking,
apparent safety, cluster of diverse stores, freedom from inclement weather,
and panoply of entertainment offerings, the shopping mall became the
new town square of American life. That movie theaters needed to be part
of the mélange was obvious to industry insiders, but the change from large
screen picture palaces to far smaller multi-screen environments altered the
distribution of films, creating facilities with more screens but fewer seats
per theater. Thus, a multiplex offered consumers a menu of choices where
previously only a single main course was available to patrons.
But the decade saw a revolution that was even more dramatic than the
momentous social adjustment from large theaters to multiplexes. It was a
time during which the how, the where, and the when of going to movies
shifted radically: “At the beginning of the 1970s, the movies were primarily
a collective experience—something seen regularly on large screens in spe-
cially designed theaters with masses of other people. By the decade’s end they
had become something that could also be carried around in a briefcase or
shopping bag for video playback at home” (Cook 5). In effect, the seventies
were the last time when people had to go outside their homes and travel to
a theater in order to watch a movie (Berkowitz 178). Instead, a viewer
could control the speed, time, location, repetitions, and conditions under
which he/she viewed movies. Films were now quite literally moveable
feasts, and audiences controlled far more of the viewing process than was
possible in theatrical settings.
The studio system that had dominated Hollywood filmmaking since the
coming of sound changed drastically in the sixties in ways that profoundly
affected the seventies. Virtually all the major studios were engulfed by
large, multinational corporations for whom moviemaking was just one
component of their diverse investments: Universal became part of MCA
(1962), Paramount became part of Gulf and Western Industries (1966),
United Artists became part of Transamerica Corporation (1967), Warner
Bros. became part of Kinney National Service Corporation (1969), and
MGM became part of Kirk Kerkorian’s financial empire (1969). The boards
of directors who ran these companies, and one can assume the stockholders
as well, were not primarily interested in making great movies, and certainly
INTRODUCTION 3
not in creating great art. Concerned mainly with profits and losses—with
balance sheets and earning ratios—they saw filmmaking “as an investment
strategy, not unlike commodities trading, which combined the risks of
high-stakes speculation with a virtually limitless potential for corporate
tax-sheltering” (Cook 3).
As such, the decade witnessed an essential shift in the fundamental role
of the studios within the industry. In early years, the studios established
vertical integration, a system that allowed them to produce, distribute, and
exhibit movies—in other words, to control the process from the point of
creation to the moment of viewing. When the courts broke up this monop-
oly in 1948, studios were forced to divest themselves of their theater chains
but still produced and distributed the films. In the seventies, however, the
cost of production became so great that the studios sought methods to
hedge their huge bets. One way to provide a modicum of safety was to let
independent production companies assume the inherent risks in making
movies while offering them some financing and a distribution network.
Therefore, the studio system throughout this era bought and distributed
products made by others rather than generating them. They were the mid-
dlemen between the creators and the audiences, the merchants who helped
package and sell the products rather than invent them.
Accompanying this focus on the packing and distributing process, the
studios were desperate to develop new and more effective ways to promote
their films. Cook notes that “strategic or scientific marketing” began with
The Godfather (1972), when Paramount turned its release into a not-to-be-
missed “event” via an intense publicity campaign that overtly “synchro-
nized production with marketing” (14). Jaws (1975) took this process a
giant step further by fusing “saturation booking”—simultaneous openings
in as many theaters as possible (the film opened in 409 theaters across the
country; by the end of the decade such practices included anywhere from
1,700 to 2,000 theaters)—with a massive advertising campaign based on
tailored television spots. Such a process made audiences well aware of films
even before they opened, but they were costly: “By 1979, the commonly
accepted cost for marketing a major film through general release was $6
million—much of it going to huge purchases of network television time”
(Cook 15).
The seventies saw another important development in the business of
marketing motion pictures, the merchandising tie-in. This included an ever-
widening array of ancillary goods ranging from sound-track albums and
novelizations to children’s toys and action figures, from embossed clothing
and fast-food products to pins and posters. Anything that carried the film’s
4 LESTER D. FRIEDMAN