Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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for the world outside. The notion is clear—the real crazies are those of us
who have adjusted to and learned to live with a world full of poverty, injus-
tice, racism and hatred, hunger, war, and even genocide.
“They’re telling me I’m crazy,” McMurphy announces, “because I don’t sit
there like a goddam vegetable. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless,
out-of-it, gone down the road, wacko, but no more or less.”
Nearly all of the mainstream print critics praised the power of the material
and celebrated Forman’s approach to it. A modest objection was raised by Da-
vid Denby, then writing for the New York Times, whose review focused on the
work itself as reflecting a stereotypical adolescent male fantasy and thus being
emblematic of the limitations of the Beatnik literary tradition of the late 1950s
and early 1960s from which it had come. Denby also chided the director: “I
find something offensive in Forman’s turning freaks into ‘good theatre.’”
Forman’s approach accentuates the comic, giving full play to incidents
that McMurphy organizes or instigates: a crazy basketball game, prompting a
loud protest over a World Series game, and a seemingly innocent afternoon’s
outing on a fishing boat. Around McMurphy, however, is an ensemble that
Forman was given much credit for molding by a great number of critics. The
movie builds to a rousing escape party that ends unexpectedly in tragedy.
Many years later, in 1990, after seeing his film with a group of students
in his native Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism, Forman offered
the view that when the Native American, Chief Bromden, dramatically leaps
through a window to his freedom, with the applause of the other heartened
inmates of the mental institution behind him, that moment on-screen “will
live always as political allegory . . . a political allegory always for things that are
and will be happening in the world.”
NASHVILLE
Writing in the New Yorker in 1975, the critic Pauline Kael called Nashville,
which was produced, written, and directed by Robert Altman, “an orgy
for moviegoers” and “the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the
screen.” Joan Tewksbury, who collaborated on the script with Altman, did
her research by visiting Nashville and going to food joints, visiting churches,
and listening to fellow riders on the municipal buses. All this background
contributed to a kaleidoscopic portrait of a city where the music never stops.
Tewksbury developed eighteen characters, to which Altman himself added
seven more, plus a presidential candidate, Hal Philip Walker.
Origins of Hollywood Divided 223
Altman shopped his Nashville script to United Artists, which had been
involved in two of his previous pictures, The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like
Us, but the studio rejected his new project as being too much of a “downer”
film. All the other major Hollywood studios passed on the film as well. Finally,
however, Altman talked Jerry Weintraub into partnering with him—at a party
that Weintraub had hosted—and Weintraub was able to convince the ABC
television network to back Nashville for $2.7 million.
At the time, ABC was interested in the project primarily because it
owned a music company, and ABC expected the movie to be filled with
music. Subsequently, however, there was disappointment on that point when
Altman insisted that each actor write his or her own songs, especially since the
agreement on casting did not require that any of the cast necessarily have a
background in music. For example, Henry Gibson, who knew nothing about
country music, got the role of Haven Hamilton. (Robert Duvall, an aficio-
nado of country music, had desperately wanted a role in Nashville and was
considered for the role of Haven, but the salary was too low for him to take
it.) Gibson hired a local performer, David Peel, to help him with the role and
write his songs; Peel wound up being hired to play the role of Haven’s son in
the movie. Ronee Blakley, a songwriter with absolutely no prior experience
acting in film, was cast in the role of Barbara Jean, Nashville’s prima donna.
Altman also insisted that each of his cast develop their own dialogue and
be responsible for their own wardrobe. Shelley Duvall, who played a groupie,
had nothing written for her in the script except for the stage direction, “L. A.
Joan enters.”
Then through an unusual and convoluted process of showing it to
friends, Altman whittled his initial version of Nashville down to three hours.
Subsequently, the editing equipment was moved to Lion’s Gate and Altman’s
own offices in West Los Angeles, where nearly anyone Altman knew and
trusted in the movie industry was given a chance to do some editing on the
film. Altman finally put together a version for release that was two hours and
thirty-nine minutes long.
Nashville was nominated for five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best
Director, Best Supporting Actress (for both Blakley and Lily Tomlin), and Best
Song (won by the actor Keith Carradine for “I’m Easy”). The entire film had
been recorded in an eight-track sound system that facilitated the overlapping
of conversations and room ambiance so that both could be heard clearly. In
the history of motion picture sound, this stood out as conveying a sense of
auditory reality that had not been possible previously.
Popular criticism, as well as the subsequent interpretations of academic
critics, hardly missed a beat in relating Nashville to the nation’s well-publicized
turmoil of the early and mid-1970s—the Watergate investigations, President
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Nixon’s resignation, the U.S. military retreat from Vietnam, and so forth.
Frank Rich’s review in the New York Times described Nashville as “one of
the best cinematic descriptions of American democracy ever made.” With
its twenty-four characters woven tightly into the few hectic days leading up
to a major political convention, many problems could be anticipated for the
production. But as Kevin Thomas wrote in his review of Nashville for the Los
Angeles Times: “It is amazing how Altman manages to blend often hilarious sat-
ire with depth, poignancy, and intimacy—and a flawless sense of nuance and
gesture.” In the Washington Post, critic Gary Arnold offered: “This stunning
new movie is a politically haunted work of art, full of echoes and reverbera-
tions from the major public tragedies, failures, and scandals of the past dozen
years, from the assassination of President Kennedy, through Vietnam, through
Watergate.” Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, exuded even more
ambitiously: “Robert Altman’s Nashville is the movie sensation that all other
American movies will be measured against.” Two months later, however, a
different voice spoke from the pages of the New York Times, when critic John
Malme wrote that Nashville was “Altman’s colorful, self-indulgent, overblown
and vastly overpraised opus.”
A THROWBACK SLEEPER
The Academy Award–winning Best Picture of 1976, Rocky, directed by John
Avildsen and written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, was widely perceived
as a “throwback” to an earlier, more traditional type of Hollywood movie.
Avildsen himself described the film as “classic Capra-type.” Frank Capra him-
self, then seventy-nine years old, added his personal imprimatur to the project:
“Boy, that’s a picture I wish I had made.” As critic Richard Corliss wrote in
his review of Rocky, “The ending is like coming out of the Bijou in 1937, so
naïve.” Other critics struck similar notes, but inevitably found themselves for-
giving: William Way, writing in the magazine Cue said: “The plot is too glib
and predictable, but ruggedness and boundless energy make Rocky a picture to
take seriously.” Judith Crist, in the Saturday Review called it “a delightfully hu-
man comedy that will undoubtedly wind up as the sleeper movie of the year.”
John Simon added, “Rocky was considered old-fashioned because of its story-
line and theme.” At a time when “serious” American cinema was expected by
many critics to reveal more about the darker side of society, human instinct,
and the values of society, the movie seemed contrary to that mainstream kind
of critical thinking.
The preproduction process on Rocky was every bit as idealistic and chal-
lenging of credulity as the film’s screenplay itself. Stallone had not yet made
Origins of Hollywood Divided 225
his way into a motion picture career when he started writing a screenplay
based on the actual prizefight he had seen between the legendary heavyweight
champion Muhammad Ali and a seriously overmatched, but game, challenger
named Chuck Wepner. Wepner was known by the nickname “The Bayonne
Bleeder,” but he fought a gallant, complete fifteen rounds against Ali. Stal-
lone later wrote, about seeing the Ali-Wepner prizefight: “That night I went
home and I had the beginning of my character.” It was also the beginning of
Stallone’s own unlikely story and his arrival in Hollywood.
When Stallone, an out-of-work and hungry actor whose only screen
appearances had been brief ones in Lords of Flatbush and Death Race 2000 and
a fleeting few moments as a mugger in Woody Allen’s Bananas, jobbed his
screenplay around Hollywood, he was offered $150,000 for it clear. The of-
fer amounted to guaranteed dollars that most struggling actors and fledgling
filmmakers on the edges of the movie industry would have promptly accepted
with joy. Stallone was broke and his wife was pregnant, but he nonetheless
refused to sell the script, digging in his heels and saying that he would let go
of the screenplay only to a production company in exchange for being cast to
play the lead. Holding out eventually succeeded.
Two producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, got behind the
Rocky project and endorsed the idea of Stallone playing the lead. At the time,
Winkler and Chartoff had an agreement with United Artists, where Michael
Medavoy was the head of production, that permitted them to make any fea-
ture they wanted, so long as it had a production budget under $1.5 million.
On this basis, they went forward with the project, but United Artists insisted
that it was a $2 million picture and wanted to cast either Ryan O’Neal or Burt
Reynolds in the lead. In response, Winkler and Chartoff told the studio that
they could do the film for $1 million, and that the two producers were willing
to back up their proposition by covering any overages themselves. To do so,
Winkler and Chartoff had to risk everything they had financially, taking out
second mortgages on their homes; Winkler later recalled that for years they
never even told their wives that they had put both their family’s homes at risk
in order to do the movie by meeting Stallone’s terms. The package was simple:
The twenty-nine-year-old Stallone was paid $25,000 to play the lead, Rocky
Balboa. Carl Weathers, a former professional football player, was cast as the
heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed. And it was stipulated that the film had
to be shot in twenty-eight days.
The original 1976 Rocky grossed $171 million worldwide, and its inter-
national appeal proved especially surprising. Combined with four subsequent
sequels to it in 1979, 1982, 1985, and 1990, the franchise grossed more than
$1 billion in rental revenues. In sum, that fifteen-year string of Rocky movies
earned as much as the megahit of the late 1990s, Titanic. And a fifth sequel,
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Rocky Balboa, was released in 2006. Such are the elements out of which a
modern Hollywood legend is made.
There were critics, of course, who thought that the movie was such a
throwback to earlier sensibilities and values that, by the mid-1970s, it would
widely be considered to be socially and culturally irrelevant. But from the
writings of the contemporary critics in 1976, any reader still gets the sense of a
certain respect and awe, if for no other reason than because such an ostensibly
dated and retrograde movie still found so much appeal. Janet Maslin, writing
in Newsweek, finally concluded that she couldn’t talk about Rocky as being
about sports, because “it works on the visceral level of a good sports event,
generating blissfully uncomplicated excitement.” Other commentary, such as
that of Charles Champlin writing in the Los Angeles Times called Rocky part
Marty (the 1955 film with Ernest Borgnine as a shy working-class butcher)
and part Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: “a once-in-a-lifetime coming
together of man and material. [Stallone] makes Rocky colorful, not too bright
. . . and altogether heroic and engrossing.” As the Hollywood Reporter com-
mented: “It’s a fantasy, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility.”
Rocky earned the Best Picture Oscar against competitors that struck
many observers as deeper projects that were decidedly more “reflective of
the times”: Network, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver, and Bound for Glory.
Stallone’s own comment, “I want to be remembered as a man of raging op-
timism, who believes in the American Dream,” was surely not to be well re-
ceived by pessimists and anti-Americans, but most moviegoers probably don’t
arrive at the box office with much formal ideological baggage influencing their
moviegoing choices.
URBAN, CORPORATE, AND
GOVERNMENTAL UNDERBELLIES
Rocky was the Best Picture selection for 1976, but three other nominees from
that year—Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President’s Men—also are recog-
nized as distinguished and significant. According to critic Joe Baltake, Martin
Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver was among a number of American movies made in
the 1970s that were remarkable for their tentative moods and feelings of dread.
In it, a Vietnam veteran, loner, and cab driver named Travis Bickle becomes
obsessed first with Betsy (Cybill Shepard as a cool sophisticate working on a
political campaign) and then with a teenage prostitute (as played by twelve-
year-old Jodie Foster). Bickle’s response, like John Wayne’s obsession in The
Searchers, is to pursue these women to save them. He does so by going after
the father figure in each woman’s life: the presidential candidate for whom
Origins of Hollywood Divided 227
Betsy is campaigning, and the young prostitute’s pimp. The movie begins
with Travis’s cab seeming to rise out of the damp, smoky city, accompanied
by Bernard Hermann’s music and Robert De Niro’s voiceover narration of
Travis’s thoughts: “Someday a big rain will come and clean all the filth from
the streets.”
Screenwriter Paul Schrader, inspired by French writer Jean-Paul Sartre’s
existentialism and the diaries of Gov. George Wallace’s would-be assassin,
Arthur Bremer, gives us the story of an isolated man, living out of his own car,
whose craving for love pushes him into a half-saintly, half-satanic crusade to
make some sort of difference in the sordid world he sees around him. Bickle is
an alienated war veteran who is unable to establish normal relationships, so he
transforms himself into a loner and a wanderer and assigns himself the mission
of rescuing an innocent young girl from a life that offends his prejudices. The
screenplay was cowritten by Mardik Martin, and the film was a Bill-Phillips
production for Columbia release.
With Taxi Driver, Scorsese delivered to the screen a movie about a
psychopathic loner that is a touchstone for what has been called the cinema
of loneliness. With the haunting pictures of Bickle drawing a revolver and
speaking into a mirror, repeating, “You talking to me? Hey, I’m the only one
here,” it creates an incomparable image of paranoid disassociation.
Scorsese, perhaps the most cinema-literate of the film school graduates of
the 1960s and 1970s who actually became a feature film director, reportedly
was greatly influenced by the French writer-director Robert Bresson’s films
that were made right after World War II. Bresson’s characters are less brutal
than Scorsese’s antiheroes, but both directors’ characters are flawed human
beings who sin their way to grace. As New York Times critic Janet Maslin
wrote: “For all its invective against urban decay, Taxi Driver is also brilliantly
acted and rhapsodically beautiful, which accounts for Mr. Scorsese’s vision of
a shimmering, neon-lighted purgatory, thanks also to the power of Bernard
Hermann’s score.” The composer, whose credits included Citizen Kane and
Psycho, died the day after he finished conducting the work for Taxi Driver, and
Scorsese dedicated the film to him.
The movie was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, and
won the Golden Palm at Cannes. With cinematography by Michael Chap-
man, who made the New York of Taxi Driver look, in Maslin’s words, “both
seductive and terrible,” Scorsese collaborated to deliver the city atmosphere
as simultaneously hyper-realistic and surreal. Shot in black-and-white, the
climactic sequence of Taxi Driver was printed in the laboratory following a
processing method normally used to desaturate color film stock, in order to
make the scene’s depictions of violence more abstractly artistic and avoid an
“X” rating from the MPPA.
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“Scorsese and crew have an excellent film here which has a real gut
appeal to both discriminating audiences as well as the popcorn trade,” said
Variety. Critic Pauline Kael wrote: “No other film even dramatized urban
indifference so powerfully. . . . The violence in the movie is so threatening,
precisely because it’s so cathartic for Travis.” On the other hand, writing in
the New York Times, Vincent Canby claimed: “Though it is much more flam-
boyant and much more elaborate technically than Mean Streets, it is a smaller
film.” Mean Streets was Scorsese’s 1973 independent, low-budget ($100,000)
feature, set in New York City’s Little Italy. It is about two friends, played by
De Niro and Harvey Keitel, living on the fringes of mob life, but essentially
portraying a very authentic feeling portrayal of life in Little Italy.
The range of contemporary criticism written about Taxi Driver spoke to
a phenomenon about responses to American feature films that had become
clear by the mid-1970s. Classic Hollywood, and even the era of Hollywood
transition, had managed to avoid extremes of taste. From the early 1970s, Hol-
lywood movies became increasingly symptomatic of a divided American cul-
ture, so that a great many movies either were loved or hated—with evidence
of an eroding middle ground among critics. Taxi Driver’s violence, of course,
sparked debate. But critic John Simon went much further; writing for New
York magazine, Simon labeled Chapman’s urban cinematography “hammy”
and faulted the script’s flaws:
Motivation is extremely fuzzy here. . . . Schrader is the product of a repres-
sive Calvinist upbringing, aggravated by its Midwestern locale; Scorsese
grew up hemmed in by Little Italy and orthodox Catholicism. . . . Match-
ing the cheesily posturing photography is an ungainly and bombastic score
by Bernard Hermann.
If life didn’t precisely imitate art, art and life at least became entangled in
1982 with the assassination attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan by
John W. Hinckley Jr., who wanted to impress Jodie Foster (by then a student
at Yale University) with whom he had become infatuated when seeing her in
the role of the child prostitute in Taxi Driver. This provided a diversion for
the appreciation of the movie as a film, and a kind of distraction in the early
1980s, only to have criticism of Taxi Driver shift dramatically toward a positive
assessment by the time of the film’s twentieth anniversary in the mid-1990s.
By comparison, Network, an MGM production, occupied safer ground,
taking on simpler topics more easily despised by audience members—namely,
television networks and large corporations. Paddy Chayefsky, who made a
mature career based on his capacity for writing crude, vulgar, and commer-
cially viable screenplays satirizing America’s crude, vulgar, and commercially
Origins of Hollywood Divided 229
viable culture, was thought to have hit the jackpot with his 1976 Network, and
directed by Sidney Lumet.
Peter Finch plays a veteran broadcast newscaster, about to be fired, who
one night admits on the air that all of the news is “bullshit” and informs his
viewers that next Tuesday, he will commit suicide on the six o’clock news.
The show’s ratings soar. The suicide never takes place, but Finch is shot dead
on camera because his ratings have been slipping. In the first half of the movie,
the relationship is between the failed newscaster and his boss, played by Wil-
liam Holden, while it is the boss’s affair with Faye Dunaway’s character that
dominates the second half of the movie.
Network was convincingly well acted: Finch won the Best Acting Oscar
award posthumously, and Dunaway earned the Best Actress Oscar by playing
the utterly amoral programming executive Diana Christensen. Holden was also
nominated as Best Actor in his role as Oscar Schumacher. Chayefsky painted a
withering portrait of television as a business gone mad with ratings, greed, and
the injection of entertainment into what it presumably had considered its own
sacrosanct world of reporting the news. The manic rant of anchorman How-
ard Beale, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” became a
popular catch phrase, especially for young American adults, for years.
As critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review: “Heaven
has blessed Paddy Chayefsky. . . . Network is his best original screenplay so
far. . . . He began in TV over 25 years ago and knows what he’s talking
about. . . . The characters may be composites but are not invented.” Chayef-
sky was a coproducer, along with Howard Gottfried, with the two putting
together the project that MGM largely financed for a United Artists release.
The movie’s director of photography was Owen Roizman, A.S.C., and the
editor was Alan Heim. As the Variety reviewer noted: “Sidney Lumet’s direc-
tion is outstanding. The picture . . . is a professional blend of art and com-
merce. Philip Rosenberg’s production design, Owen Roizman’s camera, and
all other key technical achievements are magnificent.”
Network justifiably is labeled a writer’s and actor’s movie. The script
was its essence, and Chayefsky delivered the satiric goods, although not
necessarily in a predictable way. Indeed, critic Richard Gertner, writing in
Motion Picture Production Digest was more decisive: “Chayefsky has made it a
‘writer’s’ movie, as distinguished from a director’s film or an actor’s show-
case. . . . Chayefsky projects his ideas about television and life through his
four leading characters.”
A number of mainstream critics applauded the fact that Network, in their
words, “short-circuited” TV, and there was no lack of commentary in the
print media that a film was bashing its sibling medium! “Hollywood Takes on
TV,” trumpeted a story in Newsweek about the movie. In May 1977, CBS paid
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$5 million for broadcast rights to Network, in spite of some CBS executives’
concerns about the rough language in the movie’s dialogue.
WATERGATE ON THE BIG SCREEN
Just two years after Richard M. Nixon became the first U.S. president in his-
tory to resign from the office, a feature film, All the President’s Men, which was
based on the events leading up to that resignation, was released. The producer
was Walter Coblenz, associated with Robert Redford’s company, Wildwood
Enterprises, and it was shopped as a $6 million project to Warner Bros. (which
took it, but did not exert the strictest of controls over either the production
or its budget). It was Redford who championed the idea of adapting the story
into a movie and who personally oversaw pursuing the rights to the book.
With those rights in hand, a production team was assembled that included
Jon Boorstin as an associate producer, Alan J. Pakula as director, and George
Jenkins as the production designer. The cinematographer was Gordon Willis,
who lit the city of Washington as darkly as possible, in contrast to the excep-
tionally brightly lit newsroom of the Washington Post, which was recreated and
constructed on a soundstage in Burbank, California.
After reports of a break-in at Democratic Party offices in a complex
called the Watergate, the movie quickly turns into a tense real-life detective
saga with the admonition to the reporters from the character known as “Deep
Throat”: “Follow the money. Just follow the money.” The screenplay be-
comes a story of dark secrets revealed during clandestine meetings in a parking
garage. It turns two reporters, Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein
(Dustin Hoffman) into folk heroes in diligent pursuit of the truth: “We’re
about to accuse Haldeman, who only happens to be the second most impor-
tant man in the country, of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the
White House. It would be nice if we were right.” The review in Variety cited
the acting as exemplary and pointed out the role of Deep Throat in particular:
“[Hal] Holbrook is outstanding; this actor, herein in total shadow, is as com-
pelling as he is in virtually every role he’s played.”
Doggedly, Woodward and Bernstein follow an elusive trail. On the other
end of their odyssey are Jason Robards, playing Ben Bradlee, the executive
editor of the Washington Post, and Jack Warden and Martin Balsam as his as-
sistants. However, in 1976, the movie was met by a set of critical reviews that
could most accurately be described as lackluster. Stanley Kauffmann’s review
in the New Republic and the review by Jon Margolis in the Chicago Tribune,
for example, both raised serious questions about historical accuracy and the
glamorizing of Bernstein and Woodward.
Origins of Hollywood Divided 231
SUMMARY
The genesis of “New” Hollywood dated to 1975. Two movies from that year
established the poles between which most American feature films would be
produced through the remainder of the twentieth century.
On the one hand, Jaws inaugurated Hollywood high-concept filmmaking
with its enormous profitability and a veritable franchise for marketing tie-ins
to the movie. High-concept movies of this sort continued to provide for
the possibility of staggering earnings into the twenty-first century. Directed
by Steven Spielberg, Jaws is the model for a prominent strain in Hollywood
moviemaking for the last quarter of the twentieth century.
By contrast, the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar for 1975 was awarded
to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like Jaws, Cuckoo’s Nest was an adapta-
tion from a novel, but there the similarity ends. Jaws was based on a popular,
contemporary page-turner; Cuckoo’s Nest came from a Beatnik novel that was
celebrated by the counterculture in the late sixties. The director of Jaws, Ste-
ven Spielberg, had worked his way up at Universal and took on this movie
at the age of twenty-five. Cuckoo’s Nest was directed by Milos Forman, a
celebrated European art film director who had recently arrived in the United
States. Cuckoo’s Nest was perceived as an edgy, alternative protest movie.
Nonetheless, the same man, Bill Butler, was the director of photography on
both these films, which indicated the prevailing continuation of a Hollywood
emphasis on craft.
The following year, 1976, saw the production of five movies that made
it onto the American Film Institute’s hundred greatest American films lists.
Rocky was the Academy’s choice for Best Picture, a throwback movie that, as
one critic put it, followed a story line and themes that would have fit neatly
into a typical Hollywood film of the late 1930s. By contrast, Taxi Driver was
a modern movie about an obsessive man from the margins of American urban
life who murderously pursues his vengeance upon a society he considers putrid
and unworthy.
In these years, Hollywood feature films straddled opposite sides of a
growing cultural divide. On one side was high-concept, big-budget mov-
iemaking; on the other side were alternative visions brought to the screen
through edgy, often independently produced, movies.