Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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By the late 1970s, two prominent movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and Star Wars marked the quick maturation of Hollywood high concept. Their
success brought together several elements of the new Hollywood. First, their
production budgets were considerably higher than films made even a couple
of years earlier. Second, these two movies were directed by two relatively
young men who, after these productions, would each become a major Hol-
lywood figure of enormous stature and influence. One, Steven Spielberg, was
considered a movie genius who had worked his way rapidly into a prominent
position as a director ready to take on all kinds of challenges, much in the way
film professionals had worked their way up in the movie industry during the
era of Classic Hollywood. The other, George Lucas, was one of the original
“movie brats,” who after his film-directing success in the late 1970s followed
a unique career path to becoming an industry entrepreneur and a Hollywood
insider whose role in movies went so far beyond directing as to become one
of the great visionary innovators of motion picture technology.
SCIENCE-FICTION BREAKTHROUGHS
In 1977, Spielberg delivered to the screen a sci-fi blockbuster produced by
Columbia Tri-Star. The film was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, supposedly
U.S. Air Force terminology for contact with creatures from outer space. Vilmos
Zsigmond, who was the director of photography, talked about the breaking of
new ground with the movie: “Before Close Encounters of the Third Kind there
were some space movies about spaceships, but nothing really that great tech-
nically we could follow. So we had to invent.” At the time, the only way to
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Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages
234 Chapter 13
do this was through optical effects, which for this movie were in the capable
creative hands of specialist Douglas Trumbull. Zsigmond later explained that
Spielberg “came up with many of the visual effects himself. We were testing
things out a year before we started to shoot.” Zsigmond won an Oscar for his
cinematography on Close Encounters, and the Academy also recognized Frank
R. Warner with a special achievement award for his sound effects editing on
the film. As Bob Lardine wrote in the New York Daily News: “Close Encounters of
the Third Kind may be the first movie since Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer to inspire
audiences to break into spontaneous applause for the sound effects.”
This movie established Spielberg as a Hollywood brand name, a recog-
nized force in the cinema equal in magnitude to Hitchcock or Disney. New
York Times film critic Vincent Canby enthused:
Steven Spielberg’s giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the
best—the most elaborate—1950s science fiction movie ever made, a work
that borrows its narrative shape and concern from those earlier films, but
enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and
space technology.
The Independent Film Journal agreed:
The year’s most awaited film event arrives. Spectacular, visually stunning
story of UFO sightings and their overpowering hold on people who see
them. The ferocious drive of this movie is likely to exert a strong hold on
the viewer. Spielberg’s big gamble should pay off handsomely.
Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, previously no fan of Spielberg’s di-
recting, wrote:
I was utterly unprepared for this third kind of close encounter with Spiel-
berg. I was particularly unprepared for the last 40 minutes of this 135
minute film, in which two things happen. First, and less important, the SF
[science fiction] film reaches its pinnacle to date. Second, the movement of
SF as vicarious religion and the movement of the Film Generation meet,
unify, and blaze.
Spielberg is quoted as saying that Walt Disney inspired him, and that as
a youth he found both Snow White and Fantasia frightening: “For me, Disney
was the dean of the horror classics.” Spielberg acknowledged compromises
from his original vision in the movie, many of those compromises brought on
by Columbia Pictures’ nervousness at the budget exceeding $20 million.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, had much more than special
effects, and a number of movie critics pointed to the strength of several per-
Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages 235
formances in the movie, including that of three-year-old Cary Guffey, who
plays a small boy in Muncie, Indiana, who awakens in the middle of the night
to discover that his electrical toys have magically sprung into action. French
New Wave director Francois Truffaut makes an unexpected—some critics
said it could hardly be understood or accounted for—appearance in the cast,
playing a mysterious scientist.
Still, 1977 belonged even more decisively to George Lucas and to Star
Wars. It was to become the first film in a trilogy—and much later a second
trilogy and other spin-offs. These initial adventures of Luke Skywalker were
a Lucasfilm production with Twentieth Century-Fox, produced for the stu-
dio by Gary Kurtz. Lucas’s previous film had been American Graffiti, but he
conceived of a space fantasy—a Flash Gordon type of project—as early as 1971
and began writing Star Wars in 1973, eight hours a day, five days a week. He
had met Kurtz when they were fellow students in the M.F.A. program in film
at the University of Southern California. The film was shot in locations as
distant as Tunisia.
Star Wars earned ten Academy Award nominations and received Oscars
for Art Direction-Set Decoration (John Barry, Norman Reynolds, Leslie
Dilley, and Roger Christian); Costume Design (John Mollo); Editing (Paul
Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew); Original Score (John Williams); Sound
(Don MacDougall, Ray West, Bob Minkler, Derek Ball); and Visual Effects
(John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune, Robert Blalack).
In the typical vein of high-concept Hollywood production, the movie’s lead-
ing character, Luke Skywalker, was played by a less-than-luminous male lead,
Mark Hamill. Harrison Ford, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, and Carrie Fisher
played the other major roles.
Variety predicted: “Star Wars will undoubtedly emerge as one of the true
classics in the genre of science fiction/fantasy films. In any event, it will be
thrilling audiences of all ages for a long time to come.” The Los Angeles Times’s
movie critic, Charles Champlin, wrote:
George Lucas has been conducting a lifelong double love affair, embracing
the comic strips on the one hand and the movies on the other. Now he has
united his loves in Star Wars, the year’s most razzle-dazzling family movie,
an exuberant and technically astonishing space adventure in which galactic
tomorrows of Flash Gordon are the setting for conflicts and events that
carry the suspiciously but splendidly familiar ring of yesterday’s westerns, as
well as yesterday’s Flash Gordon serials.
Time celebrated it as “The Year’s Best Movie” in a special feature article.
Critic Stephen Farber, writing in a magazine called New West called it daz-
zling, too, but no classic.
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Unlike the saturation-booking strategy that defined high concept, Star
Wars actually opened in only forty-three theaters, but still earned nearly $3
million in the first week’s box office returns, with admission prices hiked up
for the movie at most theaters. Not long after its premiere, a substantial num-
ber of commentators anticipated that Star Wars would quickly pass Jaws in
profits and easily might become the most popular movie of all time. Variety’s
review summed up what many observers within the industry believed:
Star Wars is a magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest
possible adventure-fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action
epics, and he succeeded brilliantly. Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz as-
sembled an enormous technical crew, drawn from the entire Hollywood
production pool of talent [to achieve] “movie magic.” The Twentieth
Century-Fox release is also loaded with box office magic, with potent ap-
peal across the entire audience spectrum.
The Chicago Sun-Times exclaimed that it was “about two hours of the
best time you’ve had in the last four or five years.” Said the Los Angeles Times:
“A slam-bang, rip-roaring gallop.” Exclaimed Variety, “Wow . . . boffo . . .
meteoric . . . super-socko.” Most critics appeared to be as enthusiastic as the
manager at the Avco Center Theater Complex in Los Angeles’s Westwood
district: “I have never seen anything like this. They are filling the theater for
every single performance. This isn’t a snowball; it’s an avalanche.”
Roger Simon wrote an article for the Chicago Sun-Times not long after
Star Wars premiered, assessing the sociology of the popular response to the
movie. He began by quoting critic Pauline Kael, writing on the difference
between it and other popular movies of the last few years:
Today, movies say that the system is corrupt, that the whole thing
stinks. . . . When movie after movie tells audiences that they should be
against themselves, it’s hardly surprising that people go out of the theaters
drained, numbly convinced that with so much savagery and cruelty every-
where, nothing can be done.
As Simon added interpretively:
Well, not in Star Wars. There the bad guys get zapped with death rays
and the good guys get a kiss on the cheek and a medal. There is a tre-
mendous amount of action but no blood. No sex. Not even a little flash
of thigh. It’s hard to believe people want to go see it. But they do. And
you’re going to hear a strange thing as the movie unfolds—the sound of
people cheering.
Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages 237
While most critics, like Richard Gertner writing in the Motion Picture
Digest, found it to be “smashing, escapist entertainment,” Joy Gould Boyum,
in a review for the Wall Street Journal, found it only childish: “We enjoyed
such stuff as children, but one would think there would come a time to put
away childish things.” John Simon echoed this view in his review in New York
magazine: “Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children
or unlucky enough never to have grown up.” Debate ensued over the movie’s
lack of “relevance,” as did ample backlash in the form of critical condemnation
of the movie as an unwelcome reactionary force in the culture wars.
The success of Star Wars created a great career turn upward for Alan Ladd
Jr., the president of the feature film division at Fox, who was made president
of Twentieth Century-Fox and elected to the studio’s board of directors as
the staggering financial returns on Star Wars began to add up. Star Wars was
not just a motion picture with tie-ins and spin-offs and enormous potential
for ancillary earnings, with all its derivative books, toys, miniature caricatures,
and gimmicks; instead, it was its own franchise! Its product potential was enor-
mous. By June 1978, the Los Angeles Times reported the rental earnings for Star
Wars at $219 million just for North America.
THE RARE BEST PICTURE OSCAR FOR A COMEDY
The Oscar winner for 1977 as Best Picture, however, was neither Close En-
counters of the Third Kind nor Star Wars, but rather a comedy entitled Annie
Hall. Most commentators regarded it as a “highly autobiographical” portrait
of the real-life relationship of the movie’s director, Woody Allen (as “Alvy
Singer”), with the female lead, Diane Keaton—born Diane Hall—who plays
the title role. Cowritten by Allen with Marshall Brickman, the Annie Hall
character seems even more neurotic and insecure than Alvy. The film was
vintage Woody Allen, an auteurist adventure, with “a Geiger-counter ear for
urban clichés and a hatred of Los Angeles that is appealing to all who share
it,” according to Penelope Gilliat writing in the New Yorker. John Simon in
New York magazine labeled Annie Hall “so shapeless, sprawling, repetitious,
and aimless as to beg for oblivion . . . a mess of typical West Side jokes, East
Side jokes, art-movie house jokes, meeting his-or-her-family jokes, or failed
lovemaking jokes.”
But the movie appeared to catapult Allen from his more narrow audi-
ences in the big cities on each coast into a wider audience demographic than
his previous, and sometimes similar, screen efforts. The reviewers for the ma-
jor national newsweeklies praised the movie. Time’s Richard Schickel called it
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“Woody Allen’s breakthrough movie with all the bubbling pessimism inherent
to psychoanalysis.” In Newsweek, Janet Maslin exuded: “For the first time, he
[Allen] seems capable of inviting genuine identification from his viewers, of
channeling his comic gifts into material of real substance, of exerting a pal-
pable emotional tug.” Allen, she observed, “had progressed from simple self-
representation to [an] artfully shaped self-portrait.” Indeed, Annie Hall contains
what by then had become a stylistic commonplace in Allen’s films: the lead
character’s direct address to the camera.
Allen was a veteran of television comedy writing (including a lengthy
stint working for the comedian Sid Caesar on television’s Your Show of Shows)
who broke into feature filmmaking by purchasing rights to a cheap Japanese
thriller to which he added a new soundtrack that consisted of a completely
new story and witty dialogue in English, which he called What’s Up, Tiger
Lily? He emerged as an auteur filmmaker in 1969 directing, cowriting, and
starring in Take the Money and Run. His persona in that movie served Allen
extraordinarily well, as he honed a number of standard elements into his pres-
ence as a screen character and worked on the particular blend of comedy and
self-absorption that typified his screenplays. In this sense, Annie Hall is a typical
Woody Allen film, and also the best example of his mastery of that style.
For a decade, Allen had worked to develop the obvious self-conscious
and self-reflexive nature of Annie Hall that is wrapped around the lead char-
acter’s self-awareness; for example, when they are about to make love, one
image of Annie’s body lies beside Alvy while, a second later, her form gets up
and walks across the room, to which Allen/Alvy remarks, “Now that’s what
I call removed.” Allen called the film’s structure “subjective and random”—
concepts well accepted by most critics at the time, with the notable exception
of Andrew Saris who complained in the Village Voice that “from time to time
Allen is all nuance and very little substance.”
Paired with Keaton, with whom he had a long off-screen romantic re-
lationship, this story of a failed romance marked Allen’s greatest critical and
commercial success. In addition to the Best Picture Oscar for the movie, Al-
len was recognized by the Academy with awards for Best Director and Best
Screenwriter (shared with Marshall Brickman). Much credit for Annie Hall
justifiably went to Gordon Willis, the director of photography, whose other
triumphs in the 1970s included both The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II,
as well as All the President’s Men. Most critics saw in his work the ability to light
the film more expressively, as if it were a drama, rather than in the monotonal
brightness considered typical of production for Hollywood comedies. The
pacing of Annie Hall no doubt owed much to the editor, Ralph Rosenblum,
regarded as one of the industry’s best feature-film cutters and long rumored to
have saved Allen’s first effort as a director in Take the Money and Run (1969).
Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages 239
The overall success of Allen as a distinctive auteur presence in main-
stream American film was the result of a long working relationship that he
had with his producers, Jack Rollins and Charles H. Jaffe. Annie Hall scored
good earnings, and its box office figures indicated that this romantic comedy
about a contemporary urban neurotic played well in all major metropolitan
areas, not only in North America but also in Western Europe. The film had
been financed through a deal with United Artists, but at the time of its release,
two small British exhibitors took on a role in its distribution when United
Artists became leery of its commercial prospects, and they were handsomely
rewarded for their efforts.
FROM COMEDY TO CONTROVERSY
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected a controversial
film as Best Picture for 1978. The Deer Hunter was released by Universal in
conjunction with the small British company EMI, with a screenplay by Deric
Washburn, based on a story on which he collaborated with several others, in-
cluding the director, Michael Cimino. Cimino also was a coproducer on the
project, along with Barry Spikings, Michael Deeley, and John Peverall.
Four years earlier, Cimino had made his directing debut with Thunderbolt
and Lightfoot, which he also scripted; it was a vehicle for Clint Eastwood that
also starred Jeff Bridges and was produced by Eastwood’s company Malpaso.
The most compelling connection that could be made between that film and
The Deer Hunter, however, is that both might be said to contain elements of
a popular scripting device in Hollywood in the 1970s: the “buddy movie.”
Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Cazale portray three steel-
workers from a small town in Pennsylvania who share their lives in friendship
at work, at the recreation of deer hunting, and in the war in Vietnam.
Cimino generally won high praise at the time for his directorial efforts—
although not from all critics—especially since this ambitious and grandly
designed movie was only his second feature. To a number of critics, the film
divided quite neatly into what some considered an almost classic three-act
structure: a pre-Vietnam segment, a war segment, and a postwar segment.
The Deer Hunter also won accolades for its look, with art direction by Ron
Hobbs and Kim Swados. To create the small town of the movie, locations in
eight cities in four states were utilized. The Vietnam footage was shot in Thai-
land, and since the Pentagon had not supported filming projects pertaining
to the Vietnam War since John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), equipment
and personnel had to be secured from Thai authorities and the Thai military
240 Chapter 13
for filming. The visual style of the movie plays well to its locations, and the
cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond earned high marks all around.
Contemporary critics were more divided on Cimino, with strong nega-
tives coming from Pauline Kael and David Denby. Kael’s review in the New
Yorker called Cimino to task for not really understanding how to “reveal char-
acter.” Writing in Newsweek, Denby offered praise bracketed by misgiving:
His casting of the aristocratic-looking theater actress Meryl Streep as a
sweet, not very bright, small-town beauty seems perverse and risky, but
Cimino needed her radiance to basically illuminate this essentially inarticu-
late character. . . . He has the outline for a great film but not only doesn’t
he achieve Tolstoyan height, he doesn’t even obtain to [Martin] Scorsesian
or [Francis Ford] Coppolian levels.
The great controversy over The Deer Hunter in 1978 and 1979, however,
had little to do with the artistic and aesthetic choices in the film’s making,
casting, and performances or the overall achievements of the film’s dramatic
ambitions. The controversy was about politics, Vietnam, and the war that had
ended with the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years earlier.
With a production budget of $3 million, The Deer Hunter was perceived
by Universal as being “a serious film about a subject that hasn’t been successful
at the box office before.” A movie set during a war that was so divisive for
the nation, and that had ended unsuccessfully for the United States, still was
considered a treacherous choice in a business sense. The release of the film,
in fact, was moved up to just before the end of the year in 1978 in order to
qualify for the Oscars, the New York Film Critics Awards, and the Society of
Film Critics Awards, because the backers felt that this exposure was absolutely
necessary to give The Deer Hunter any chance at financial success. While such
caution may not have been entirely necessary—the movie did $7 million at
the box office on the first weekend of its release—it surely helped in placing
it strategically for a possible Oscar win.
While The Deer Hunter was strong at the box office, adding an additional
$27 million to its rental earnings in the United States after its Best Picture Os-
car win was announced in the spring of 1979, and although its earnings were
healthy overseas, pressure by the Soviet Union caused it to be blocked from
release throughout Eastern Europe. The official Communist rhetoric was that
the movie was “racist” in the way the Vietnamese were depicted, an argument
picked up and echoed by leftists everywhere, including in the United States.
On Oscar night in 1979, some demonstrators held up signs reading “No Oscar
for Racism” outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles
where the Academy Award ceremonies were being held. One of the protesters,
interviewed by the press, claimed that The Deer Hunter “was a con job, trying to
convince everyone that American imperialism is the best thing in the world.”
Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages 241
Controversy, indeed, had already been raging for four months, since the
film’s initial release. New York Times movie critic Roger Copeland summed
up the essence of criticism of The Deer Hunter’s central flaw in one short sen-
tence: “A Viet Nam movie that does not knock America.” For many, this was
the movie’s unforgivable offense, along with the apparent inability of a great
many people to distinguish and delineate fiction from nonfiction or expecting
a fictional movie to present a historically accurate summation of the war in
Southeast Asia. For example, Pulitzer Prize–winning Vietnam War journalist
Peter Arnett called the “Russian Roulette” scenes in the movie a “bloody lie.”
Documentary filmmaker John Pilger found time to comment on The Deer
Hunter more broadly: “This is how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild
West, and how the Second World War and the Korean War were absorbed
into box office folklore.”
Such readings of The Deer Hunter were taking place before the term politi-
cal correctness came into vogue to identify the biases of academics, cultural crit-
ics, and journalists. Interestingly, it was Stanley Kauffmann, well-established as
a senior voice of film criticism, who, writing in the center-left New Republic,
pointedly mentioned that he sympathized with the politics of critics of the
U.S.’s military engagement in Vietnam, but that he accepted the “Russian
Roulette” scene as a metaphoric and thematic fit for the film:
It’s not about Viet Nam, but about three steelworkers who work, drink, and
hunt together, and who are captured and tortured together, who escape
together and move on to their differing resolutions of that experience with
their futures. The Russian Roulette was a symbolic extension of the “one-
shot credo” by which these hunters had lived.
Continuing, Kauffmann explained: “Should Slaughterhouse-Five [1972, directed
by George Roy Hill], because it showed the allied fire bombing of Dresden,
also be expected to show the German bombing of Coventry. [The Deer Hunter]
is really about a perennial preoccupation of American film—male friendship.”
Indeed, Cimino himself called the movie a celebration of the extraordinary
qualities of so-called ordinary people who are facing a crisis. “The war is really
incidental to the development of the characters and the story. It’s part of their
lives and just that, nothing more.”
APOCALYPSE NOW
In the following year, 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now
created an even more riveting screen image taken from the military conflict
of the Vietnam War. Although it did not win the year’s Best Picture Oscar,