Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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Actors Studio, recommended Lee Strasberg, one of its founders, to Coppola
for the role of Hyman Roth.
Given the success of The Godfather, Coppola was in the driver’s seat for
this sequel. Ambitious and visionary, Coppola got his own company to be
listed with Paramount as a coproducer of the film. As a director, he came
with an original idea to build the sequel around a story line and characters so
that the two movies eventually could be shown together. The changing Hol-
lywood was reflected by the movie taking eight months for production and
its budget soaring from an initial $6 million to more than $11 million. By the
time of its release, however, Paramount already had recorded advance book-
ings worth more than $26 million in earnings from just the first 340 theaters
where the movie opened at Christmastime in 1974.
With a plot constantly shifting from Sicily to Ellis Island to Las Vegas to
Lake Tahoe to Havana, and across periods, The Godfather, Part II is not re-
ally a gangster film, but rather a family saga played out against a backdrop of
a considerable swath of American history from early in the twentieth century
into the 1960s.
A review in the magazine Time Out from London described much of the
shared wisdom about The Godfather, Part II:
Where the film really constitutes an advance is in its analysis of crime,
violence, and control. . . . As a result, the film is not only more psychologi-
cally complex than the original, but is far more critical of Mafia methods,
and is considered far more politically astute as a reflection on the economic
and moral development of twentieth-century America. It’s also, of course,
about loyalty and betrayal, hope and disenchantment, time and memory.
Wrote fellow “movie brat” director Martin Scorsese in deep admiration of
The Godfather, Part II:
I admire the ambition of the project, its Shakespearean breadth, its tragic
melancholy in its portrayal of the dissolution of the American dream. I ad-
mire its use of parallel editing to accentuate the paradoxes of the historical
analysis, Gordon Willis’s dark-hued photography, the actors’ performances,
the accuracy of its period reconstructions. . . . Michael Corleone rules his
empire from his fortress-like Lake Tahoe estate. . . . Unlike the gangsters of
the Hollywood movies of the thirties, he doesn’t die but lives on—which
seems to be an even greater punishment.
The movie was long in length, coming in at three hours and twenty
minutes. The screen time, however, never seems to drag. This is a function of
the screenwriting and the editing, but also of the acting performances. Robert
De Niro, who almost played Don Corleone’s turncoat chauffeur in The Godfa-
ther, was chosen to play the don as a young man struggling for survival on the
Conglomerate Control, Movie Brats, and Creativity 213
Lower East Side of New York City early in the twentieth century. De Niro
took a Best Actor Oscar for his haunting portrayal of the young Vito Cor-
leone. The supporting roles all seemed as strong: Diane Keaton as Michael’s
wife, John Cazale as his brother Fredo, and Talia Shire (director Coppola’s
sister) as his sister Connie, and even the role of Frank Pentangeli (“Frankie
Five-Angels”), which was taken by Michael V. Gazzo, a playwright; Senator
Geary was played by G. D. Spradlin, a former lawyer and oilman who had
once run for mayor of Oklahoma City.
Although The Godfather, Part II was far less successful commercially than
The Godfather two years earlier, earning about $31 million (roughly half the
earnings of the 1972 movie), against a $13 million investment in production
costs, it marked the pinnacle of Coppola’s success and influence in Hollywood.
The 1974 movie was widely applauded by critics for its ambition, complex-
ity, and vast accomplishment and was readily acknowledged by professionals
within the industry. After The Godfather, Part II, Coppola’s career and presence
in Hollywood would be more tempestuous and problematic.
Of the other two original movie brats, George Lucas was now poised to
conquer Hollywood with Star Wars, which he turned into its own franchise,
before going on to launch Industrial Light and Magic. Scorsese, who would
maintain a certain distance from the Hollywood establishment, was still, by
the twentieth century’s end, considered to have survived to become the most
wide-ranging and accomplished director of the trio.
SUMMARY
The conglomerate takeovers of major Hollywood studios in the late 1960s
provided the basis for the motion picture industry’s future financial stability.
During the early 1970s, Hollywood moviemaking elaborated on the new
directions of the late 1960s. The cinema of sensation matured. New talents
found opportunity in Hollywood. The first of the “movie brats,” graduates of
M.F.A. programs in film, made their mark in Hollywood. The most promi-
nent person in this first wave of movie brats was Francis Ford Coppola, who
became a dominant Hollywood figure in the period. As the screenwriter for
Patton, the cowriter and director of The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II,
and producer of American Graffiti, Coppola excelled in influencing an entire
industry. His Godfather II holds a special spot in cinema history as an admirable
and critically acclaimed sequel. Producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert
Towne, and director Roman Polanski joined forces on Chinatown in 1974.
The film’s accomplishments pointed toward many of the challenges to genre
conventions that would characterize Hollywood during the final quarter of
the twentieth century.
Part III
NEW HOLLYWOOD, 1975–2009
217
By the mid-1970s, the production side of Hollywood’s business was domi-
nated by agents and the agencies where they worked, independent producers
with connections to the traditional studio system, and a range of entrepreneurs
from various backgrounds. Movies were being financed and made on a one-
by-one basis, as if starting a new business over again each time. Distribution
was still in the hands of the major studios and, interestingly, was the safest
and most profitable sector of the movie industry. The major studio names still
carried a great deal of weight in the motion picture industry, and frequently a
major studio had some financial investment in a movie production, but rarely
all the investment. The exhibition sector was seeing the rise of new ownership
chains, based on building and owning multiplex cinemas, frequently in shop-
ping centers and nearly always in suburban locations. Audiences saw movies
in these movie theaters or, occasionally, on network television, which was
limited to ABC, CBS, and NBC. The technologies of videotape, DVD, and
even cable and satellite television did not yet exist.
JAWS AND HOLLYWOOD HIGH CONCEPT
For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Hollywood continued to make
a great many movies that were like its traditional ones. Alongside these mov-
ies, however, two distinct film types emerged that marked the founding of a
“New” Hollywood. The production and release of Jaws in 1975 marks one
of these. It began a form of Hollywood production that has lasted into the
twenty-first century: the “high-concept film,” which is more familiar to the
general public as the “big-budget blockbuster.”
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Origins of Hollywood Divided
218 Chapter 12
In 1973, two independent producers, Richard Zanuck (the son of Darryl
F. Zanuck, who was one of the most prominent producers of Hollywood’s
studio era) and David Brown, purchased the rights to adapt Peter Benchley’s
novel Jaws to film for $150,000 before it had even been put into print. Steven
Spielberg directed Jaws, which took the world of cinema by storm in the sum-
mer of 1975, grossed half a billion dollars worldwide, and was the number-one
Hollywood box office champ of all time until two years later when George
Lucas’s Star Wars surpassed it.
As critic Molly Haskell admitted in her review for the Village Voice,
Jaws
will no doubt get people off the beaches and into movie theaters. . . . Ste-
ven Spielberg, the obviously talented director of Sugarland Express, has put
together a scare machine that works with computer-like precision. . . . But,
perhaps I am making too much of too little. Jaws is only meant to raise the
hair on your forearm, not disturb your summer with thoughts.
Judith Crist wrote in her New York review: “Everyone involved in Jaws de-
serves the highest praise for an exhilarating adventure entertainment of the
highest order. . . . Spielberg has chosen complexity of character.” And Vin-
cent Canby, writing in the New York Times, said:
It’s a noisy, busy movie that has less on its mind than any child on the
beach might have. It has been cleverly directed by Steven Spielberg for
maximum shock impact. Jaws is, at heart, the old standby, a science-fiction
film. It opens according to time-honored tradition with a happy-go-lucky
innocent being suddenly ravaged by the mad monster, which in Jaws comes
from the depths of innerspace—the sea as well as man’s nightmares. There-
after, Jaws follows the formula with fidelity.
Bill Butler was the director of photography for the film. Butler sought
to create a brightly lit and summery look for Jaws, which was a far cry from
his cinematography on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Jaws
was edited by Verna Fields. Many years later, Richard Dreyfuss, who played
one of the movie’s leads, said he thought the film was stupid and idiotic and
wouldn’t see the light of day. Dreyfuss later admitted that at the time he made
those comments he didn’t understand filmmaking. The film finally cost more
than $9 million to make, and Spielberg presumably lived in constant fear of
being fired before the movie was completed.
Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic:
The ads show a gaping shark’s mouth. If sharks can yawn, that’s presum-
ably what this one is doing. It’s certainly what I was doing all through this
Origins of Hollywood Divided 219
picture, even in those moments when I was frightened. There’s no great
trick to frightening a person. . . . The direction is by Steven Spielberg who
did the unbearable Sugarland Express. At least here he has shucked most of
his arty mannerisms and has progressed almost to the level of a stock direc-
tor of the 1930s.
In sum, the mechanical shark didn’t work as expected, and Spielberg was
thrown back to simpler film conventions to tell his story. Fate forced him to
discover earlier than he otherwise might have what the essence of making
movies is about.
With Jaws, Hollywood discovered something deeper and more impor-
tant, however, and that was the high-concept film, of which Jaws was defini-
tive. Film scholar Justin Wyatt provides a summary of the essential elements
of high concept:
1. An easily marketed story, idea, or image. This was best understood
by reference to the promotional poster for Jaws, a striking image of
a shark with gaping open mouth and sharp teeth rising through the
blue water toward the surface on which a young female figure is
swimming.
2. The New Hollywood practice of saturation booking, meaning that a
movie opened on a set date, like an event, on hundreds or thousands
of screens across the United States and Canada. Jaws pioneered this
practice, which was in direct contrast to distribution by Classic Hol-
lywood, whereby movies opened in New York City, Chicago, and a
few other large markets, only sometime later to be disseminated across
the United States.
3. A massive marketing campaign to promote the movie to potential
viewers, focusing on television advertising and television talk shows.
Such marketing quickly became commonplace, but until the mid-
1970s, Hollywood had relied extensively on print advertising in local
newspapers, lobby displays in movie theaters, and the coming attrac-
tions to promote movies.
4. The creation, solely from the movie, of its own merchandising in-
dustry, with control over franchising. Hence, Jaws beach towels (with
over 100,000 sold), thermos bottles, plastic tumblers for cool summer
drinks (over two million sold), and picnic baskets for the beach, along
with Jaws lunch boxes and three-ring binders for kids returning to
school after the summer, were all marketed from the movie. The Jaws
T-shirt sold 500,000 units in eight weeks. The Jaws Log by Carl Got-
tlieb, the cowriter on the screenplay, sold a million copies and joined
Benchley’s original novel (nine million copies sold) on the best-seller
220 Chapter 12
list. Recordings of the Jaws soundtrack, composed by John Williams,
flew off the shelves at record stores nationwide. Previously, Holly-
wood had dabbled in tie-ins, and it was understood that a style worn
by a star in a movie might become popular in department stores and
women’s apparel shops. It was also common since the early 1960s to
produce recordings of songs from movies and their soundtracks, but
Jaws transformed these marginal enterprises of the past into central
business tenets of big-budget movies and their marketing for Holly-
wood’s high-concept future.
AN EDGY ADAPTATION
The other side of the New Hollywood equation that became apparent in 1975
was an edgy, alternative feature. The movie was based on a novel published in
1962 by Ken Kesey that had become an exceptionally popular book with the
American counterculture during the late 1960s—One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. Milos Forman, a European art film director who had fled Communist
Czechoslovakia, directed this screen adaptation. It won the Hollywood estab-
lishment’s endorsement by receiving the 1975 Oscar for Best Picture.
Actor Kirk Douglas, who had played McMurphy in the 1963 Broadway
stage version of Cuckoo’s Nest, had purchased the rights for a screen adaptation
with the intention of producing the movie and starring in it himself. By the
early 1970s, however, he decided that he was too old for the lead role, so he
turned this property over to his son, actor Michael Douglas, who then teamed
with producer Saul Zaentz to package and produce One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest, coming up with the movie’s $4.4 million budget. Credited as a Fantasy
Films Production in United Artists release, it was Michael Douglas’s first at-
tempt at producing and Zaentz’s second (after Payday). One Flew over the Cuck-
oo’s Nest became United Artists’ most profitable release ever up until that time.
The worldwide grosses for the movie were reported at $320 million. (In 1987,
the Internal Revenue Service implicated Zaentz in a scheme that diverted $38
million in Cuckoo profits offshore in order to avoid taxes in the United States.)
Its box office returns in North America were well beyond expectation, and it
was an international hit as well. For example, the movie played for a record
573 consecutive weeks at one movie theater in Stockholm.
Forman, who had made Love of a Blond and Fireman’s Ball in Czecho-
slovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1969, had a reputation for
allowing his actors to improvise in scenes, which brought him into conflict
with his director of cinematography, Haskell Wexler, who, although he
had considerable experience as a documentary filmmaker, approached this
Origins of Hollywood Divided 221
dramatic project in a more traditional manner. The disagreements between
Forman and Wexler led to the cinematographer being fired and replaced by
Bill Butler. Thus, as it turns out, Butler was the director of photography on
the year’s most edgy counterculture movie and on the first high-concept film,
Jaws. Cuckoo’s Nest was shot in an empty wing of the Oregon State Hospital in
Salem, which had been built in 1883. Nearly all of the film’s action occurs in
a single room, and much of the filming was done with a handheld camera.
Cuckoo’s Nest won all five Oscars for 1975 in the top categories: Best Di-
rector for Forman, Best Actor for Jack Nicholson (as Randle Patrick McMur-
phy), Best Actress for Louise Fletcher (as Nurse Ratched), Best Screenplay for
Larry Hauben, and Best Cinematography for Bo Goldman. Forman had made
his fame in Czechoslovakia directing his own original scripts, but in Cuckoo’s
Nest, he was working from an adaptation of a popular novel about a rebellious
individual who is in a mental institution because he resists authority and not
because he is crazy. The editing team of Richard Chew, Lynee Klingman, and
Sheldon Kahn achieved a pacing that was vital to the kind of frenetic look and
feel that Forman wanted in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, and even Burt Reynolds were consid-
ered for the role of McMurphy before it went to Nicholson. As for Nurse
Ratched, the part was turned down by five better-known actresses (Anne
Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Angela
Lansbury) before Fletcher took it. The cast included Danny DeVito, playing
Martini, and this screen veteran was joined by newcomers Christopher Lloyd
(“Taber”), Will Sampson (“Chief”), and Brad Dourif (“Billy Bibbit”), each of
whom was making his screen debut in a feature film.
Since the 1950s, the theme of nonconformity had been popular enough
in Hollywood film, from Rebel without a Cause (1955) to A Thousand Clowns
(1965) to Easy Rider (1969). Nonetheless, a number of critics attributed the
popular response to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to its timely release soon
after the military defeat of the United States in Vietnam and the Watergate
scandal, whose cover-up led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. On
the other hand, the review in the industry trade journal Variety questioned
whether audiences would perceive the movie version of the 1962 novel as
topical and current:
Kesey, a major intellectual catalyst of the Beatnik era, is virtually an elder
statesman of the avant-garde. . . . Sadly, the ideas herein are today as earth-
shattering as the [birth control] pill, as revolutionary as pot, and as relevant
as the Cold War. Gladly, however, their transfer to the screen is potent,
contemporary, compelling. And so, the young in head like the young in age
can be drawn equally to this film. . . . Then, too, there is the idea, at least
prominent in modern fiction, that mental institutions are ideal as metaphors