Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

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film was produced by BBS Productions/Columbia Pictures, with the executive

producer for Columbia being Bert Schneider, who had been instrumental in

the production of Easy Rider in 1969.

For several members of the cast, the film marked career breakthroughs.

Jeff Bridges (Duane Jackson), Cybill Shepherd (Jacy Farrow, the high school

beauty), Timothy Bottoms (Sonny Crawford), and Cloris Leachman (Ruth

Popper, the wife of the high school sports coach who has fallen in love with

Sonny) are each entirely convincing in a production designed to achieve great

accuracy in its depiction of time and place. In many ways, the film has ele-

ments of sexual intrigue and the disillusionment of growing, along with the

portrayal of boredom and the peccadilloes of the local population, that became

formulaic for depicting small-town America in film and on television during

the final third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the authenticity of this

portrayal works especially well in Bogdanovich’s movie.

Jacy persuades Sonny to marry her, coaxing him away from his affair

with the older Ruth but making sure her parents discover the young couple’s

plans in time to pack her off to college before she and Sonny can go through

with them. Duane joins the Army and spends his last night in the town before

embarking for Korea, where he and Sonny are together at the last motion

picture showing in town at the local movie theater (Howard Hawks’s Red

River) just before the theater closes for good. Sonny, now running the local

pool hall that had been willed to him, is at it when he sees the sympathetic

Billy (Sam Bottoms) killed by a passing truck. Sonny, in his loneliness, goes

back to Ruth for consolation, where the film ends with them sitting mute,

holding hands in her kitchen.

The Last Picture Show was filmed on location in Archer City, Texas. The

movie employed no original music, taking songs from the lists of 1951 and

1952 country-western and pop music charts found in Billboard and Cashbox in-

stead. As an artistic choice, this was an effective approach, and the soundtrack

lent itself well to the movie, but as a business decision, it was more problem-

atic. The video release of The Last Picture Show was delayed until 1991 because

the music rights had been cleared for theatrical screenings in 1972 but not for

broadcast or ancillary video distribution.

Stephen Kanter wrote in Time that Bogdanovich had made ennui fas-

cinating, calling him “the most exciting new director in America today.”

Judith Crist, in New York magazine, anointed it the best picture of the year,

introducing a large group of young, new talent to the screen. Of the major

national movie critics, only Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic,

was unkind: “It all seems true enough, but almost every scene reminds us

vaguely of something we’ve seen before and generally have seen better.” Win-

fred Blevins of the Los Angeles Times called it “stunning, vivid,” while in the

Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 203

New York Times, critic Vincent Canby declared the movie “lovely.” Stephen

Farber, however, writing in the New York Times at the beginning of the fol-

lowing year, called it overrated.

The Last Picture Show garnered eight Academy Award nominations and

won two Oscars. Ben Johnson (for his role as Sam the Lion) won for Best Sup-

porting Actor, and Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. Columbia Pictures

subsequently produced a sequel to The Last Picture Show in 1990 called Texas-

ville, an $18 million project that failed at the box office; according to Bogda-

novich, this failure was caused by the film’s inappropriately wide release.

COPPOLA’S JEWEL

Prior to his publication of The Godfather, Mario Puzo had written two

other novels, Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), both of

which were considered more “literary” than his best-seller success that sold

500,000 in hardcover and over 10 million copies in paperback. Paramount

had negotiated rights for a film adaptation of The Godfather in 1967 even

before Puzo began to write it. Its release as a film, then, came swiftly after

its release as a book.

The studio is said to have considered several different possibilities for

its direction. Industry insiders believe that Otto Preminger was first asked to

direct it, but declined, ostensibly because Frank Sinatra could not be secured

for a leading role. As the legendary producer Robert Evans, who had risen

to a position of creative power as the executive vice president of Paramount

in 1969, is reported to have decided, however, the film needed an Italian-

American as its director. The selection of Francis Ford Coppola for that role,

however, was a gamble, because his track record did not necessarily establish

him as a proven candidate to undertake the direction of such an ambitious

project with a large cast and complex art direction. Well established as a

screenwriter and having won a screenwriting Oscar for Patton, Coppola’s di-

recting credentials were far less impressive: You’re a Big Boy Now (1967) was

a modest success, while Finian’s Rainbow (1968) and The Rain People (1969)

were box office failures. Additionally, the Hollywood rumor mill had it that

Coppola himself was reluctant to direct The Godfather because he considered

Puzo’s popular novel to be an inferior piece of writing.

For a considerable period of its development, then, The Godfather

appears to have been a movie that practically no one in Hollywood re-

ally wanted to make. And, even after Coppola was signed on to direct it,

Paramount executives appeared to be jittery and were reported to want to

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dismiss the thirty-two-year-old as director in favor of the legendary and sea-

soned Elia Kazan just as filming was to begin. Even once into production,

the movie was far from a guaranteed winner at the box office. In addition to

the comparative youth and unproven directorial record of Coppola, Marlon

Brando was considered by many observers to be a has-been who was well

past his prime, and Al Pacino, who, as Michael Corleone, truly emerges as

the primary figure in the film, was an unknown to screen audiences. More-

over, up until 1972, movies about the Mafia or organized crime had not

achieved any particular success for Hollywood at the box office.

The accomplishments of the completed film, of course, promptly threw

whatever concerns had haunted its development out the window. The God-

father reinvented the gangster film as a genre, and, in so doing, was a roaring

commercial success, becoming the first movie ever to earn more than $100

million in its initial release. Puzo and Coppola collaborated on the screen-

play, which probably benefited from the fact that neither of them actually

knew very much about the Mafia. So, while a number of the incidents in

the movie appear to be based on well-known struggles within the New

York City mob during the two decades following World War II, the script

focuses instead on family dynamics and on character. It was this emphasis

that induced veteran movie critic Charles Champlin to call it “the fastest

three-hour movie in history.”

Throughout the movie, The Godfather goes back and forth between its

action sequences and its family saga. Nowhere is this more striking than in the

cross-cutting sequence between Michael Corleone standing as godfather to

his sister’s baby at its baptism while his henchmen annihilate his enemies from

the other Mafia families. This memorable sequence, delivered so engagingly

through the device of parallel editing—cutting back and forth between differ-

ent scenes to portray action appearing to occur at the same time—encapsulates

the essence of what makes The Godfather such a compelling movie.

From the beginning, critical response to The Godfather was positive, with

much of the commentary recognizing that it would claim an important place

in cinema history even at the time of its initial release. One of the very few

negative voices came from A. D. Murphy’s review in the industry’s leading

trade journal, Variety. Noting only “flashes of excitement,” Murphy called The

Godfather overlong and occasionally confusing. He wrote, “While never so

placid as to be boring, it is never so gripping as to be superior screen drama.”

By contrast, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called the movie “the

year’s first really satisfying big commercial American film.” Time and News-

week both agreed, and each recognized its mainstream importance by devoting

laudatory multipage spreads to it upon its initial release. Pauline Kael’s review

in the New Yorker praised it as a shining example of the premise that the best

Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 205

movies come from some merger of commerce and art, with The Godfather be-

ing a stellar example of this hypothesis.

Produced by Albert S. Ruddy, The Godfather displayed stellar cinematogra-

phy by its director of photography Gordon Willis. Nearly 90 percent of the film

was shot at locations in New York City or its immediate environs. This was one

instance in which the viewer could clearly see the significance of the Hollywood

production values and the polished overall look of the movie. Its reputation has

persevered. On the American Film Institute’s 2006 list of the hundred greatest

American films, it stands at second only behind Citizen Kane.

MONEY MAKES THE WORLD—

AND HOLLYWOOD—GO ’ROUND

Beaten out for the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar in 1972 by The Godfather,

the musical Cabaret nonetheless captured eight Oscars that year: Bob Fosse for

Best Director; Joel Gray, Best Supporting Actor; Liza Minnelli, Best Actress;

Rolf Zehetbauer and Jurgen Kiebach for Art Direction; Herbert Strabel for

Set Direction; Geoffrey Unsworth for Cinematography; David Bretherton for

editing; Ralph Burns for Music Scoring, Adaptation, and Original Song Score;

Robert Knudson and David Hildyard for Sound.

Originally based on British author Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 mem-

oir Goodbye to Berlin, the material had been adapted into a stage play in 1951

entitled I Am a Camera, with a subsequent feature film version (produced in

Great Britain in 1955) by the same name. In 1966, the property opened on

Broadway as a stage musical with the title Cabaret. Subsequently, Allied Artists

bought the film rights to the stage musical and developed the property as a

movie, with ABC Pictures as a producing partner. Producer Cy Feuer eventu-

ally put together Jay Presson Allen as the screenwriter, the legendary Fosse as

director, and star Minnelli (the daughter of the director of famed musical films

at MGM Vincente Minnelli and the celebrated screen star Judy Garland).

At the very outset, Feuer and Fosse agreed that all the songs in the

production should be sung in a natural context, which meant that characters

would not simply break out abruptly into song as had become standard in

many movie musicals. This seemingly simple decision marked a turning point

for the motion picture musical, marking a distinct change in style for future

film musicals as compared to Hollywood’s traditional ones. Hence, nearly all

the songs in Cabaret act as political, social, or sexual metaphors for the charac-

ters and their dangerous—and decidedly decadent—milieu.

The aesthetic of the entire movie is meant to blend with this basic idea.

Bretherton’s editing serves so well, for example, by cross-cutting from the

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songs being sung inside the club to images outside—a man being beaten to

death by Nazi street thugs, leading character Sally Bowles’s (Liza Minnelli)

postcoital bliss in the splendor of her boudoir, and so on. To many commen-

tators, it was this editing that gave the film its strong satirical bite and enabled

Cabaret to use of its music so effectively as ironic commentary on Berlin

shortly before Hitler’s rise to power.

Even before the movie went into production, it was known in Holly-

wood circles that Hugh Wheeler had done extensive rewrites on the screen-

play and added new scenes. Nevertheless, Allen retained full credit as the sole

author of the screenplay; Wheeler is credited on Cabaret only as a research

consultant. In the adaptation for the screen, several songs from the Broadway

version of the musical were dropped entirely. Fred Ebb wrote the lyrics for

three new songs, each of which may be considered among the film’s most

memorable: “Mein Herr,” “Money, Money,” and “Maybe This Time.”

For authenticity, Fosse had the cabaret’s “Kit Kat” dancers gain weight

and allow the hair to grow under their arms. The interiors for the movie were

filmed at the Bavaria Studios in Munich, the exteriors on the streets of West

Berlin. Feuer called the picture’s $3 million budget “a tight collar.” Fosse

wanted a look from his cinematographer, Unsworth, that was reminiscent of

German Expressionist paintings of the 1920s and early 1930s. It is reported that

Vincente Minnelli attended the first screening of the film in Los Angeles and,

after it, walked up to Fosse and said, “I have just seen the perfect movie.”

COPPOLA AS PRODUCER

The success of The Godfather both at the box office and with critics catapulted

Francis Ford Coppola onto the Hollywood A-list of directors. Coppola, how-

ever, had greater ambitions, and his role in the American cinema immediately

became much larger. For one thing, he was the first of the “movie brats”—

young men who graduated with M.F.A. degrees in film in the mid- to late

1960s—to achieve prominence as a director. A graduate of UCLA, Coppola

came to the Hollywood movie industry on the basis of an advanced education

in the craft of filmmaking, as well as a background in the formal study of film

history and criticism.

Two other movie brats of this generation were George Lucas, a graduate

of the University of Southern California, and Martin Scorsese, who earned his

M.F.A. in film from New York University. Taken together, these three were

something new for the movie industry. In previous generations, personnel

drawn to Hollywood had nearly always found some kind of entry-level posi-

tion at a studio and then worked their way up to positions of creative and craft

Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 207

responsibility. Instead, the movie brats were educated at major universities for

their filmmaking careers. Older professionals in the movie industry who had

worked their way up in traditional ways might consider them “brats,” a term

that was intended to point out not only their youth but also their presumed

arrogance, but few could deny the thoroughness of their preparation and their

commitment to moviemaking as a calling. Each of these three was to have a

significant impact on Hollywood in the last third of the twentieth century,

although each would make his impact in a different way.

Coppola envisioned himself as a producer as well as a director. He

founded his own studio, Omni Zoetrope, and took on a series of movies that

he personally marshaled through from development to the screen. The first of

these, American Graffiti (1973), produced by Coppola and written and directed

by Lucas, became one of the most successful films of the era. It was a low-

budget movie with personal points of reference that seemed autobiographical,

and it featured a cast of newcomers: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul

LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie

Phillips, and Harrison Ford. Lucas had grown up in Modesto, California,

and American Graffiti was set in 1962 in a similar place. Variety called it an

“outstanding evocation of ’50s teenagers, told with humor and heart. Strong

outlook.” It continued: “Of all the youth-themed nostalgia films in the past

couple of years, George Lucas’ American Graffiti is among the very best.”

Lucas wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Gloria Katz and Willard

Huyck and set it against a chrome and neon of one long summer night in the

lives of four high school friends. Shooting was scheduled for twenty-seven

days in Petaluma, California. Karin Green served as music coordinator for the

film, as Walter Murch’s soundtrack uses roughly forty rock-and-roll hits from

the period. The budget for the film was $750,000, and the music synchro-

nization rights needed for the use of classic copyrighted rock-and-roll songs

in the soundtrack alone roughly equaled the costs of the production itself.

Studio executives were cautious about its release, but Universal did a number

of “pickup” test screenings of American Graffiti, and word soon filtered back to

the executives at Universal that these test audiences loved the movie.

AN INDUSTRY ADJUSTS

American Graffiti was a very significant movie because it showed the Holly-

wood studios that films connecting closely to the stories of typical teenagers,

even without known stars but buttressed by music that was popular with ado-

lescents and young adults, could be very successful at the box office. The movie

sent a message to the studios, namely, that this was one kind of film that could

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appeal to a changing audience for movies that the motion picture industry did

not yet fully understand. Nonetheless, that message was received in the midst

of a complex and changing cultural environment. Who the audience was and

what movies to make for that audience had been the key questions at the heart

of Hollywood’s existence since World War I. Hollywood was now confronted

with the perceived social changes of the late 1960s, the sense that there was

now a distinct youth culture that had not existed before, and the attempt to

grasp just how widespread and important the counterculture was. The era was

a tumultuous one for American movies, but also, in the view of many observ-

ers, an especially rich and creative era.

By 1971, each of the major Hollywood studios had been bought and

taken over by a different conglomerate corporation except Columbia Pic-

tures. But conglomerate control did not mean the same thing in every case.

Warner Bros. seemed to be at one end of the spectrum, with conglomerate

control meaning tight management and a bottom-line approach to movie

projects from an aloof business perspective. By contrast, at Paramount, Gulf

and Western’s CEO, Harry Bluhdorn, had chosen the young Robert Evans as

head of production, and Evans was like an old Hollywood mogul of the early

Classic Era: he had a strong sense of cinema art, he sought out and nurtured

unconventional talent for major creative projects, and he produced compara-

tively edgy movies that were considered high risk, from Rosemary’s Baby to

The Godfather to Chinatown.

A period of tumult in the movie industry saw unusual and unexpected

movies reach the theaters. There was a turnover in craft talent, especially

among directors, giving a chance to many newcomers who likely would not

have gotten opportunities to work on feature films in earlier eras. Right along-

side this environment, the revisiting of tried-and-true Hollywood methods

and formulas continued, as well.

A FORMULA FILM

Increasingly, the Hollywood business welcomed new entrepreneurs who put

together funding and packaged new feature-film productions in different ways.

Frequently, such movies received funding from many different sources, some

of them traditional and some not—from bank loans or other credit, as well

as from people in nearly all walks of life who were seeking tax shelters and

an opportunity to brush up against celebrities and a glamorous industry. The

conversion into movie-producing often was led by agents, a profession that

knew the talent, the craftspeople, executives at the studios, or the founders of

new distribution companies.

Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 209

In 1973, Universal backed a movie produced by Tony Bill; Michael

Phillips, a former actor; and his wife, Julia Phillips, who had been an editor at

Ladies’ Home Journal. They teamed to package a film entitled The Sting, with

a cast that mirrored the 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring

Paul Newman and Robert Redford and directed by George Roy Hill, it was

similar to Butch Cassidy in that it was about a couple of likable con men and

their capers. There is little doubt that bringing Newman, Redford, and Hill

together produced a combination that establishment Hollywood, still floun-

dering to recover its equilibrium in the changing culture, liked. Bankrolled

by Universal, the movie enlisted one of the great veterans of Hollywood

cinematography, Robert Surtees, as its director of photography and hired

the legendary Henry Bumstead as its art director. Among its successful ele-

ments, the movie, set in Chicago during the 1930s, reintroduced to the broad

American public the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, with the adapted score

from his music earning one of the movie’s seven Academy Awards, including

Best Picture for 1973.

In The Sting, an elderly con man named Luther Coleman (Robert Earl

Jones) and his younger buddy Johnny Hooker (Redford) pull off a successful

con, giving the pair enough money to convince Coleman it’s enough to retire

on, while stimulating the insatiable Hooker to hurry on to his next con job,

which will be even bigger. But before either Coleman or Hooker can move

on, reality intervenes. It turns out that their mark for the last con was a num-

bers runner for an underworld organization run by gangster Doyle Lonnegan

(played, perhaps a bit improbably, by the distinguished British actor Robert

Shaw), who orders Coleman’s murder.

Hooker, wanting to find Coleman’s killer, seeks out an older friend of

Coleman’s, Henry Gondorff (Newman), whom he discovers in a dissipated

state hiding out in a bordello run by a tough madam named Billie (Eileen

Brennan). So their partnership begins, and a complicated array of ins and outs

follows, as they set up a “store” for off-track betting and Hooker repeatedly

eludes the killers who have killed off Coleman and are now after him. Before

they can find him, however, Hooker gets to Lonnegan and convinces him to

place a huge bet of half a million dollars with Gondorff at their store. But even

though they are pals, Gondorff worries that his friend Hooker won’t keep his

wits about him and won’t be able to pull off the “sting” successfully.

The movie fared much better with the Hollywood establishment and

with audiences than it did with the critics. The trade journal Hollywood Reporter

concluded its mixed review of The Sting by saying that the movie looked a

lot better than it felt. In spite of the stylized cinematographic affectations—

dissolves, fades, wipes, the use of glass shots, and even titles—that were so im-

pressive, something essential seemed missing in it. The script, which won a Best

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Screenplay Oscar for its author David S. Ward, nonetheless was perceived by

many critics as being too complicated structurally and too heavy with dialogue.

Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby said the movie reminded him

of a musical comedy with the songs removed! Jay Cocks, reviewing The Sting

in Time, offered that it was essentially an elaborate gimmick film that “ends

with a lot of expensive sets and a screen full of blue eyes.”

FORGET IT, JAKE

An entirely different critical response awaited Paramount’s 1974 production

of Chinatown. The producer, Robert Evans, teamed with screenwriter Rob-

ert Towne (who won an Oscar for the screenplay) on this notably edgy and

stylized addition to the genre of modern film noir. Chinatown starred Jack

Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, with John Huston, John Hillerman, Darrell

Zwerling, Diane Ladd, and Perry Lopez and was directed by Roman Polanski.

Art direction was the creation of Richard Sylbert and W. Stewart Campbell

with sets by Ruby Levitt and costumes by Anthea Sylbert. The director of

photography was John A. Alonzo.

As Evelyn Mulwray, who asks private detective J. J. Gittes (Nicholson)

to find her husband’s murderer, Dunaway delivers a vintage noir performance,

complemented by Alonzo’s dark, muted cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith’s

lush romantic score. Towne originally wanted to direct the movie himself, but

he was broke at the time and cut a deal with Evans on a thirty-day option on

his screenplay at Paramount; Evans promptly hired Polanski to direct.

Polanski, Alonzo, and the art director collaborated to create a Los An-

geles of the 1930s that consists of a dry, parched landscape covering a sordid

pool of corruption, vice, and incest. One neighborhood of the city, China-

town, where the movie’s plot finally ends and a villain triumphs, becomes a

metaphor for a moral climate of such Byzantine corruption that no man can

fathom it. What seems a simple case of a husband having a romantic affair

abruptly explodes into murder and scandal, and, by the minute, the story be-

comes more mysterious, complex, and downright kinky. Gittes is a private eye

whose sleepy gaze unravels, in Chinese-box fashion, layers of private depravity

behind a public-works scam involving gentleman farmer Noah Cross (John

Huston) and his skittish daughter Evelyn Mulwray.

Critic Jerry Hiller wrote in 1974:

A film about Los Angeles in the thirties by a Polish director looking

through a CinemaScope lens in 1974 seems an anachronistic mixture. But

on its visual terms alone, Chinatown displays one of the most stylistically

Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 211

cohesive uses of the ’Scope format to date. It might be seen as the artistic

vindication of CinemaScope. The superb camerawork, and, more surpris-

ingly, the editing [by Sam O’Steen]—a feature which is considered incom-

patible with the large screen—combine so powerfully that one wonders if

CinemaScope didn’t die too soon.

Time’s critic Jay Cocks gave it a mixed review, concluding:

Chinatown as a whole shares something of Dunaway’s problem. Get too

close to it and the careful illusion breaks down. Polanski and Towne

turned out a smart and elegant creation. But the script also raises moral

questions and political implications that are never plumbed at greater than

paper-cup depth.

Seen by many as being as searing and as resonant a story as the movies have

ever told about the making of modern America, New York Times critic Jim

Shepard called it “jolting noir with a shot of nihilism” in a 1999 article on the

movie and its interpretation.

A SEQUEL TO DIE FOR

The Godfather, Part II holds the distinction of being the only sequel honored

on both of the American Film Institute’s lists of the 100 greatest films. The

original Godfather in 1972 won the Best Picture Oscar and two other Academy

Awards—Best Director for Francis Ford Coppola and Best Actor for Marlon

Brando—and was the all-time box office hit for Hollywood until 1978. The

1974 sequel won twice as many Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best

Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Dramatic

Music Score, and Best Art Direction and Set Direction. Critics, as well as the

Hollywood establishment, were impressed by the accomplishments of this se-

quel, the success of which remains unrivaled in American cinema history.

Coppola’s undertaking for this follow-up to the enormously popular first

Godfather film expands the saga of the Corleone family in a screenplay that

interweaves almost three generations of births, deaths, marriages, baptisms,

communions, deep friendships, and betrayals. In research for the screen-

play, Coppola enlisted Debbie Fine, a photographic and story researcher at

Paramount Studios, to annotate, verify, investigate, and structure the cred-

ible lineage of the family and its story. With this ambitious work, Coppola

anchored his Hollywood reputation as a stickler for details and Al Pacino

established himself as an A-list movie actor. Pacino, who had studied at the