national yearning for simpler, quieter times” (124). And while this national
nostalgia appeared on the political scene in the guise of Carter’s cardigans
and fireside chats, it manifested itself in an entirely different way in popu-
lar culture, particularly Hollywood filmmaking, which in its own way was
experiencing a “counterattack by small-town and suburban values”
(Biskind, Easy Riders 343). For Washington it was Carter; for Hollywood it
was George Lucas and Steven Spielberg; and for film audiences it was a
return to either familiar genres, including the science fiction film, the musi-
cal, and the melodrama, or to films that questioned, via narrative, the cur-
rent sociopolitical environment. Representative films include High Anxiety,
Annie Hall, The Deep, The Goodbye Girl, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Turning
Point, Fun with Dick and Jane, Greased Lightning, A Piece of the Action, and the
films discussed here: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, New York,
New York, Saturday Night Fever, and Killer of Sheep.
■■■■■■■■■■
Hollywood: The Return of Small-Town Values
American film began to be defined by a younger group of
filmmakers, such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg,
and Martin Scorsese, most of whom had grown up at the movies and who
transformed a love for the cinema and a detailed knowledge of interna-
tional film history into films with small budgets, character-driven plots, and
an innovative approach to film form and style. Unlike filmmakers from the
generation before who had worked their way through Hollywood’s strict
apprenticeship hierarchy, most of these directors possessed some university-
level education in filmmaking and film history: Coppola (USC), Lucas
(UCLA), Spielberg (Cal State-Long Beach), and Scorsese (NYU). Addition-
ally, like a number of the slightly older New Hollywood directors (Robert
Altman and Mike Nichols, among them), Spielberg and John Badham
began in television, directing either weekly series or made-for-TV films. The
young directors brought two key factors from these academic and industrial
experiences; first, they had a wide-ranging grasp of the technical aspects of
filmmaking, including sound design, editing, and cinematography. Second,
they enjoyed a solid knowledge of film story and almost all their films
rework familiar genres, particularly the gangster, science fiction, musical,
and horror film.
Perhaps ironically, this very same group of young “movie brats” (Pye
and Myles 12) spearheaded a gradual shift in Hollywood from small, low
budget movies into the production of larger budget genre films, a phenom-
enon that contributed to the rapid rise of the average film budget. Thus, the
1977 — MOVIES AND A NATION IN TRANSFORMATION 183