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New Hollywood: Difference between revisions
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== The rise and fall of the New Golden Age ==
The point that is often given for the beginning of the New Hollywood era is the collapse of the [[Hays Code]] in the mid-'60s. The Code had already lost its primary reason for being in 1952 when the US Supreme Court declared film to be a protected art form under the First Amendment. By the '60s, major studios had forced it to bend to approve "special exceptions" for critically-hailed, challenging fare, like ''[[The Pawnbroker]]'' with its short scene of plot-relevant nudity and ''[[Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?]]'' with its equally plot-relevant harsh language. Furthermore, when the Code tried to hold its ground with the sexually explicit film ''[[
Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1968 the new boss, Jack Valenti, replaced the Code with a much more liberal system of [[Moral Guardians|moral guardianship]], the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) film rating system. Unlike the Hays Code, which only allowed [[Rule-Abiding Rebel|sorta-edgy]] [[Reactionary Fantasy|content]] that, today, would probably qualify for a PG (or a ''very'' light PG-13), the MPAA rating system created a compromise between anti-censorship artists and the [[Think of the Children]] crowd by establishing four tiers for films: "G" for family-friendly films, "M" for films with potentially disturbing subject matter that were still determined to be all-ages appropriate, "R" for films that were deemed objectionable for children to view, and "X" for explicit and potentially offensive movies. "M" was changed to "GP" (and later "PG") in the early '70s due to audience confusion as to whether "M" or "R" was a higher rating. A modified version of this system is still in effect today, with the main changes being the addition of a "PG-13" rating between "PG" and "R" in 1984 (in response to graphic violence in PG films like ''[[Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom|Temple of Doom]]'' and ''[[Gremlins]]''), and the replacement of "X" with "NC-17" in 1990.<ref>The "X" rating, unlike the others, was never trademarked by the MPAA, meaning that producers of pornographic and [[Exploitation Film|exploitation films]] often slapped it onto their own films (along with ratings like "[[Hotter and Sexier|XXX]]") in order to [[Sex Sells|increase their]] [[Rated "M" for Money|marketability]]. As a result, the X rating came to be associated almost exclusively with skin flicks and grindhouse schlock, to the point where more "respectable" films that would have qualified for X ratings (like ''[[The Cook the Thief His Wife And Her Lover|The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover]]'' and ''[[Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer]]'') were released unrated instead in order to avoid the stigma, at the cost of reduced exposure. The name change to "NC-17" was designed to get rid of this problem; unfortunately, theaters and advertisers placed the same restrictions on NC-17 rated films as they did on the old X rated films. The first mainstream film to try and buck this, ''[[Showgirls]]'', flopped horribly at the box office, and the rating quickly got the same porno/grindhouse stigma as X before it. To this day, no major theater chain will carry an NC-17 film.</ref>
With the floodgates opened, the benefits started pouring through almost immediately. Films like ''[[Bonnie and Clyde]]'', ''[[The Graduate]]'', ''[[Midnight Cowboy]]'', ''[[Cool Hand Luke]]'', ''[[The Producers]]'' and ''[[Easy Rider]]'' broke countless taboos, earning immense critical acclaim and box office returns in the process. Realism and immersion were major themes in such movies, a backlash against the [[Spectacle]] and artificiality that defined the studio system. A symbol of this emphasis on realism was the choice of many filmmakers to shoot on location—not only was this now far less expensive than shooting on set due to advances in technology, it also heightened the feeling that the people on screen were in a real place. In addition, such films were infused with [[Hotter and Sexier|sexuality]], [[Bloodier and Gorier|graphic]] [[Gorn|violence]], drugs, rock music, [[Anti-Hero|anti-heroes]], anti-establishment themes and other symbols of the '60s counterculture that would've been unthinkable in mainstream American cinema just a few years earlier. Many New Hollywood filmmakers openly admitted to using marijuana and psychedelic drugs, furthering their popularity in the general climate of the '60s. In addition, the rigid white bread cliche of the movie star was challenged with the rise of actors who forced the parameters open like the black [[Sidney Poitier]] and the Jewish and [[Adorkable]] [[Dustin Hoffman]] who hit it big by being seemingly nothing like any major movie star before.
The success of New Hollywood's early films caused the studios to grant [[Protection From Editors|almost complete creative control]] to these filmmakers. As [[The Seventies]] rolled in, such films as Francis Ford Coppola's ''[[The Godfather]]'', Sidney Lumet's ''[[Dog Day Afternoon]]'' and ''[[Network]]'', [[Roman Polanski]]'s [[Film Noir|neo-Noir]] ''[[Chinatown]]'' and [[Martin Scorsese]]'s ''[[Taxi Driver]]'' were released to not only near-universal critical acclaim, but also massive ticket sales, earning their studios boatloads of cash in the process. For a time, it appeared that this strategy was paying off big time, and that Hollywood was [[Hope Spot|finally out of its post-war slump]].
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