Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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242 Chapter 13
it was perceived by many observers as a pivotal movie in the development of
the American cinema in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. As the
superlative editor and sound designer Walter Murch has said: “When I look
back on my career, I kind of judge things whether [my films] were before
or after Apocalypse.” Surely that may be true for others who worked on this
Coppola film as well.
The arduousness—and sometimes madness—of the production has been
well documented, not least by Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s documentary entitled
Hearts of Darkness. The movie that proceeded so wildly went on to gross $180
million and to capture eight Oscar nominations. At the height of hyperbole
surrounding its release, Coppola is said to have claimed the film would be-
come the first to win a Nobel Prize; he had to settle for the “Palme d’Or” at
Cannes instead.
When the film was released, however, a great many critics panned it. But,
over time, the assessment of the critical establishment has seemed to change.
“When I read three years ago that Vittorio Storaro had been chosen as the
cinematographer for Apocalypse Now,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann in the New
Republic,
I was shocked. Storaro, the lush Vogue-style photographer of Last Tango in
Paris and The Conformist, for a picture that was billed as the definitive epic
about Vietnam! But, it turns out, the fine moments in Francis Coppola’s
film depend heavily on what Storaro can do for them.
The movie’s story line is relatively simple. An Army officer, Captain Wil-
lard (Sheen), is sent to find and “terminate with extreme prejudice” the ren-
egade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has “gone insane” and set himself
up in Cambodia as the warlord of an army of Montagnard headhunters. On his
long trip up the Mekong River, Willard learns that in this war, man is ever at
risk of becoming the thing he hates, the unknown he fears.
In spite of its point of departure—a novel by Joseph Conrad set in the
late nineteenth century, entitled The Heart of Darkness—critic Stanley Kauff-
mann did not see the movie’s strength in copying the theme of how colonial
conquest finally takes over and consumes its agent, but rather in delivering
the texture of “the first freaked-out, pill-popping, rock-accompanied war.”
Vincent Canby in the New York Times wrote:
Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various
faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom,
terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Fed-
erico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point. It evokes the look and
Mixed Styles, Mixed Messages 243
feelings of the Viet Nam War, dealing in sense impressions for which no
explanations are adequate or necessary. It’s a stunning work . . . operatic.
But, he concludes, “It’s an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur, a movie
that ends—in the all too familiar words of the poet Mr. Coppola drags in by
the bootstraps—not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Coppola’s company, Coppola Cinema Seven, first put the project into
development in conjunction with Samuel Goldwyn Studios. United Artists
eventually released to film, into which Coppola had reportedly invested $16
million personally, through its MGM/UA Distribution Company. It was five
years in the making.
If Vietnam was the “first living-room war,” Coppola and his screen-
writer, John Milius, knew that their film had to take the viewer well
beyond the familiarities of nightly TV-news coverage. “Politically, too,”
writes Kauffmann,
the film is empty, but then it doesn’t have much political ambition. . . .
Apocalypse Now ultimately reduces to the story of a special-services assassin
sent to kill a grander assassin; with décor of eye-filling adventures along the
way; but with nothing at the end, except that as predicted, the victim is
an inflated lunatic.
Given his $30 million budget, Coppola used it well to give the picture its
orchestrated crowds, the immense vistas, and the stunning juxtapositions of
images that make the movie into a compelling spectacle.
The unique sound montage for Apocalypse Now was designed by Murch—
a figure who has been highly influential in modern Hollywood movie sound
and editing—who was seeking to depart radically from the traditional use of
sound in American feature films, in which sound is “married” to picture. As
he put it, “Image and sound are linked together in a dance. And like some
kids of dance, they do not always have to be clasping each other around the
waist; they go off and dance on their own.”
Unlike many films, Apocalypse Now was reedited and re-released in 2001in
a version entitled Apocalypse Now Redux, fifty-three minutes longer than the
original film. At that time, critic A. O. Scott wrote in the New York Times:
Apocalypse Now, in spite of its limited perspective on Viet Nam, its churn-
ing, term-paperish exploration of Conrad, and the near incoherence of its
ending, is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing,
and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has
only added to its sublimity.
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A 1999 article in the Los Angeles Times had quoted Coppola as saying
that he thought that after two decades the tastes of audiences had caught up
to the sophistication of the movie, which had met mixed reviews two decades
earlier. Coppola, it turns out, may have been his own most insightful critic
of his 1979 movie, pointing out, of Apocalypse Now Redux: “In a funny way
the movie is more clear at this length, it’s fuller and better developed about its
theme of the kinds of hypocrisy involved in warfare.”
SUMMARY
Perhaps the single most distinctive characteristic of Hollywood production in
the 1970s was the growing importance of “name” directors. Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola each moved to a more advanced
plane of accomplishment. Michael Cimino weighed in with a directing ef-
fort on a controversial Academy Award Best Picture winner that appeared to
promise him a bright future. Woody Allen’s unique Hollywood niche as its
premier comic writer, actor, and performer solidified.
Auteurism was a preeminent theme for Hollywood in the late 1970s.
Nationwide, movie critics embraced the notion, which had originated with
French movie critics more than two decades earlier. As film studies emerged
in American universities, the notion prevailed that the best way to seriously
study a movie was to examine the personal artistic choices and motivations of
its director, as if he or she were the author of a novel. What the auteur concept
meant for Hollywood itself was more bottom-line oriented. Since the era of
World War I, Hollywood had recognized that stars helped sell tickets to mov-
ies. During the late 1970s, the Hollywood industry had to acknowledge that
the names of directors could do so, as well. To be waiting for the next Spiel-
berg film, for Coppola’s next movie, or for Allen’s upcoming release became
an element of moviegoing that was important to the business.
245
The first truly significant movie of the 1980s was another Martin Scorsese
project, which turned out to be an integration of the realist aesthetic with
the cinema of sensation. Raging Bull chronicles the true-life story of cham-
pion boxer of the 1940s and early 1950s, Jake La Motta, and the destructive
demonic quirk in La Motta’s nature. Ostensibly in order to triumph in the
ring, Jake obsesses about his wife’s virtue. Neither his wife (Cathy Moriarty)
nor his brother (a warm and likable Joe Pesci) can slow down his rise to the
championship and the dizzying self-destruction that follows.
Produced by the team of Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who were
also responsible for Rocky, the movie was edited by Thelma Schoonmaker.
Schoonmaker, who has worked with Scorsese on a regular basis, is quick to
point out that her job as editor is made so much easier by the fact that when
Scorsese is directing, according to Schoonmaker, “he thinks deeply as an edi-
tor.” Scorsese is renowned for the amount of coverage that he shoots, as well
as for his own editorial sense. A graduate of New York University’s M.F.A.
program in film, Scorsese had found an early career opportunity in editing
Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock in 1970.
Critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic:
Scorsese has filmed the life of the boxer Jake La Motta, his rises and falls
and eventual retirement, and this time Scorsese’s work is purged of heavy
symbolism, of film school display, of facile portent. His directing is imagi-
native but controlled; egregious mannerisms have coalesced and evolved
into a strong style. Some of Raging Bull is shocking, but all of it is irre-
sistible. . . . What holds this picture together more than its storyline is its
stylistic consistency, and style here means more than cinematic syntax, it
means fire and personality.
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Hollywood in the 1980s
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The screenplay for Raging Bull was by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin,
based on La Motta’s recently published autobiography, which Robert De
Niro had strongly recommended to Scorsese. Their screenplay is structured
on the major prizefights of La Motta’s career, but this is clearly not a movie
about boxing.
Raging Bull garnered eight Academy Award nominations, including Best
Supporting Actor (Pesci) and Best Supporting Actress (Moriarty), as well as for
cinematography, directing, editing, and sound. Schoonmaker won an Oscar
in the category of editing, and De Niro was named Best Actor for his per-
formance in Raging Bull. As the aging La Motta, De Niro gained over eighty
pounds to transform his body from the relatively trim middleweight boxer
into the retired prizefighter who owned a saloon and later became a nightclub
entertainer. Scorsese took a long production hiatus of nearly four months in
the late summer and fall of 1979 and resumed shooting with a much heavier
De Niro in Los Angeles at the very end of 1979.
The movie’s visual design is enhanced by a series of gritty, realistic details.
Scorsese’s director of photography, Michael Chapman, filmed much of the
narrative with evocative shadows, in contrast to the shots in the boxing ring,
which are all rendered in an unrelenting glare. Chapman’s black-and-white
cinematography is juxtaposed with a series of still black-and-white photo-
graphs. The style of the editing, especially of the fight scenes, contrasts with
the more direct and simple realism in the look and pacing of the scenes of
La Motta with his wife and his brother in their Bronx neighborhood. While
it is believed that Scorsese chose to film in black-and-white because he had
fears about the capacity of the color film stocks at the time to hold their look
over the years, most critics concluded that the use of black-and-white lent
a 1940s/1950s tabloid newsprint feeling to the film and that Chapman’s use
of the black-and-white cinematography contributed to the overall theme of
the movie. Wrote Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times: “The subtlety,
beauty, and the power of the black-and-white photography were overwhelm-
ing. Color would have destroyed the impact of Raging Bull.”
Critic Michael Sragow, in his review in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
talked about the raw, relentless power of the film and how the movie squared
off with brute manhood:
Scorsese arouses more identification with La Motta than the man could in
his own account—and more hope for his redemption. Scorsese’s Catholi-
cism has not only given him a feeling for the hellishness of the world, but
a faith in the potential salvation of every human being.
Wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times: “Though it’s a movie full of
anger and nonstop physical violence, the effect of Raging Bull is lyrical.”
Hollywood in the 1980s 247
Among major movie critics writing at the time, only a few voiced the
minority opinion that the movie was ineffective. David Denby, in his review
for New York magazine, was not convinced: “Even if we do feel for Jake
La Motta, De Niro’s alternating performance and Scorsese’s harshness shut
us out. . . . We never do discover why Jake is such a crumb-bum.” Fault-
ing the Schrader-Martin script for its lack of explanatory depth, Kenneth
Turan, writing in New West magazine, added: “Raging Bull is like the man
it portrays—powerful and distinctive but not especially pleasant, an inspirer
of awe but not affection.”
An initially good run in the early weeks of its release was followed by
the conclusion on the part of many exhibitors that the movie was just too ar-
tistic for mainstream audiences, a view that was given a good deal of industry
attention. Variety reported that the Arthur Rank Company decided not to
distribute Raging Bull in Great Britain because it considered the movie “non-
commercial.” Raging Bull’s Academy Award nominations opened some doors
for its international distribution, but its overseas box office and rental revenues
dragged behind expectations and never were considered acceptable by the
movie’s distributor, United Artists.
The waves of positive critical attention to Raging Bull, and even its Acad-
emy Award nomination for Best Picture, weren’t enough to turn into a com-
mercial success in 1980, but its subsequent history proved far more blessed.
Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it
a rich, harshly honest, and mesmerizing film . . . a disciplined and im-
portant achievement that is likely to go unchallenged for a long time as a
portrait not simply of La Motta, but of a particular segment of the American
experience. . . . It is one of a thin handful of superior films of recent years
and it seems to be Scorsese’s most perfectly shaped film.
In his New York Times review, Canby cited a moment in the film that stands
out for him:
Jake, now over the hill, gone to flab, and possibly deranged, is thrown
into a Miami jail on a morals charge. Full of self-pity and unfocused rage,
he beats his head against the wall of his cell. “Why, why, why,” he bel-
lows, and then whimpers, “I’m not an animal.” It’s a risky moment that
pays off. Though there’s not one sequence in the film when he hasn’t
behaved like an animal, Jake, like all the rest of us, is the kind of animal
who can ask a question.
The inspiration for the color home movies was an idea that came to De
Niro when he went to Florida during a break in filming to visit La Motta’s
wife, Vicki, who showed him some 8mm family home movies.
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As the review in Newsweek argued,
Raging Bull is only indirectly about boxing; the blood and brutality of the
ring are an extension of the characters in the tight, relentless screenplay by
Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin. . . . What Jake La Motta does in the ring
is the ritualization of the nameless fury that outside the ring overwhelms
and confounds him.
In an article in the Village Voice, movie critic J. Hoberman called it “the one
possibly great Hollywood movie of the early 1980s.” In fact, in 1990 a national
poll of movie critics did name it the greatest film of the 1980s. On that basis,
MGM/United Artists re-released Raging Bull to the movie theaters that year.
ORDINARY SUBURBAN
The Academy’s Best Picture award for 1980 recognized a movie entitled Or-
dinary People. The film was based on the first book by novelist Judith Guest,
which had been optioned by Robert Redford for his own production com-
pany in 1976. The movie itself marked Redford’s debut as a director.
In the suburbs of Chicago, Beth, the mother, is the envy of her friends—
always in control. Calvin, the father, tries diligently to be a good husband,
parent, and provider. The tranquility of this comfortable couple and their
children is shattered, however, when the family’s elder son, Buck, dies in a
sailing accident. Buck, a gifted student and a high school athlete, is survived
by his unremarkable younger brother, Conrad. Conrad, who blames himself
for his brother’s drowning, becomes suicidal.
The dramatic conflict here focuses on the psychology of authentic feel-
ings and the perceived inability of human beings to remain in touch with
them. As with a similar movie from the previous year, Kramer vs. Kramer, the
success of Ordinary People apparently stemmed from viewers’ understanding
of the psychology that permitted close identification with the feeling being
experienced by the screen characters in presumably commonplace situations.
As the critic Stuart Byron wrote:
Ordinary People succeeded with the “class” public [read “upper-middle-
class” moviegoers] precisely because it pandered to the shared assumption
of the East Side [New York City] and the Westwood [Los Angeles] crowd.
Judd Hirsch plays the psychiatrist who frees teenage younger brother Con-
rad from suburban oppression. The medical identification figure reinforces
“liberal” beliefs that “we” (the educated elite) can save “them” (the people
out there) . . . Redford knows how to treat the “good life” rituals fairly
kindly, knowing how tenuous it all is.
Hollywood in the 1980s 249
The casting of Donald Sutherland as the father, Calvin, Timothy Hutton as
Conrad, and the enormously popular TV-sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore as
Beth provided an able team of lead performers to deliver this tale of domestic
disquietude in suburbia and adolescent insecurity and inner struggles.
Contemporary criticism emphasized assessments of the script and just
how much realism there was in its portrayal of the trials and tribulations of
suburban family life. Sometime movie reviewer Ben Stein enthused in the Los
Angeles Herald-Examiner: “Alvin Sargent’s script is as good as it gets; there’s
not a false note in it.” By contrast, Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New
Republic, expressed misgivings and disappointment, calling the screenplay “a
little trite wriggle.” Elaborating, he wrote:
Redford shows . . . that an intelligent actor, in the course of time, can learn
enough about filmmaking to direct adequately with the help of skilled col-
leagues. What I don’t understand is why that same experience didn’t tell
him that his material here is tired.
Yet a third critic’s opinion faulted the script, but praised one of the roles.
Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice: “Much of Ordinary People is glib
and simplistic, but the implausibility of the alienation of Mary Tyler Moore’s
mother character from Timothy Hutton’s suicidal son character is as com-
mendably ‘anti-cliché’ as anything I have seen on the screen in years.”
With a production budget of $6 million, Ordinary People was highly
successful financially, grossing earnings of $41 million on domestic rentals
initially, adding another $8.5 million to that amount after it gained six Oscar
nominations, and then adding a similar amount, another $8 million, after it
won the Oscar for Best Picture. Produced by Ronald L. Schwary for Red-
ford’s Wildwood Enterprises, Ordinary People was distributed by Paramount,
whose president, Frank Mancuso, engineered a highly effective release of the
picture, opening it around the country in four distinct stages.
Some observers suggested Ordinary People was a movie that merged with
the content and the aesthetic of television. In some ways, its content was more
suitable to the small screen than the large, and that an actress acclaimed as tele-
vision sitcom star was regarded by many as its strongest performer appeared to
reinforce this assessment.
THE EMERGING WORLD OF ANCILLARIES
Historically, Hollywood’s business had been about making movies that were
to be shown in movie theaters. By the early 1980s, new technologies were
available that would change the business entirely. Until the end of the 1970s,
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the only places for the general public to see movies were movie theaters or,
occasionally, network television—the latter with commercial interruptions
and cuts in content to meet the standards of the Federal Communications
Commission, which regulated broadcasting. That changed entirely with the
advent of videotape and the appearance of cable and satellite television. The
steady development of opportunities for videotape (and later, DVD) rentals
and sales of movies for the future would dramatically change where movies
were seen. Likewise, the proliferation of cable and satellite television networks
and the booming increase in the number of subscribers to them globally would
substantially alter the size and composition of the audience for movies.
At the beginning of the 1980s, movie-viewing began a steady and unre-
lenting course away from going to a theater to see a movie to the convenience
of more individual and private consumption of movies. At the same time,
the cultural idea of the movies continued to be thought of as going out to a
movie theater to see them. For Hollywood production, all of this would mean
expanded audiences and vastly expanded earnings in the future. Those earn-
ings, when they did not come from distribution to movie theaters, are called
ancillary income by the movie industry.
THE SPIELBERG ASCENDANCY
In a Hollywood where individuals, not major studios, now appeared to domi-
nate the motion picture industry, one of the major figures in the motion picture
industry in the United States for the last two decades of the twentieth century
was Steven Spielberg. During those two decades, Spielberg would continue as
a director, but would also become a producer, a partner in a major production
and distribution company, DreamWorks, and one of several figures regarded
internationally as a guru for all moviemaking. Starting as a young director at
Universal in the early 1970s, Spielberg had his mark in that decade with Jaws
and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. With 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark,
ranked at number 60 on the American Film Institute’s first list of the hundred
greatest American films, Spielberg’s true ascendancy in Hollywood began.
Directed by Spielberg, with George Lucas (American Graffiti and Star
Wars) as its executive producer (officially a Paramount production, with
Frank Marshall serving as its producer at the studio), Raiders is set in 1936.
Archaeology professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) barely escapes from a
temple full of booby traps somewhere in South America and soon thereafter is
commissioned by U.S. agents to keep the Germans from discovering the lost
Ark of the Covenant. The ark is said to contain the tablets of the original Ten
Commandments and is buried in the deserts of Egypt, where a German team
Hollywood in the 1980s 251
is digging under the supervision of an especially corrupt and scurrilous French
archaeologist. The assignment that Jones has undertaken is clear: to keep the
ark out of Hitler’s hands.
With a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and a music score by John Wil-
liams, Raiders of the Lost Ark was immediately recognized as archetypal movie
entertainment. The idea for the film is said to have had its genesis in 1977,
when Star Wars was about to premiere and a nervous Lucas found himself kill-
ing time with his friend Spielberg. The pair turned to thinking of the outline
for an old-fashioned Saturday-afternoon movie adventure tale with a macho
hero named Indiana Jones. Out of those conversational ramblings came a
delightful, inspired, and unpretentious romp that encapsulated a great many
movies and succeeded brilliantly as entertainment. Based on a story by Lucas
and Philip Kaufman, the Spielberg-Lucas-Kasdan trio mastered the central idea
for a movie in which hardly a moment goes by when there isn’t a cliffhanger.
Dangers are ever-present, and all kinds of menacing devices populate the
screen: stone darts, snakes, pits, mummies, corpses, and even a monkey who
salutes “Heil Hitler” style.
As this race for the lost ark unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that
Raiders of the Lost Ark is largely a producer’s movie, in this case filled with
historical references and inspiration drawn from the serials churned out for the
tastes of kid audiences by Classic Hollywood. Spielberg and Lucas, of course,
recognized the scintillating art of viewer engagement that these movies—dis-
missed by many who take film seriously—provided. Raiders of the Lost Ark en-
tertains with biblical lore, exotic locales, a gutsy and beautiful heroine (Karen
Allen), and the hero in a race against a darkly evil force, Hitler and the Nazis.
For some, it seemed almost like a B-movie on a technically dazzling scale, shot
in La Rochelle, France; Elstree Studios, England; Tunisia; and Hawaii.
Two sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade, were made in short order, and both were also produced in the
spirit of the serial movies made during the 1930s. Both were nearly as successful
as the original 1981 production at the box office. Taken together, the release of
all three movies on DVD has resulted in a set that has consistently been in the
top ten of all requests by DVD purchasers into the twenty-first century. Their
success spawned yet another sequel, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull, in 2008, with plans for more in the works.
TWO BRITISH SLEEPERS
If the relative popularity of the 1980 Best Picture, Ordinary People, had been
understandable because the movie’s premise was based on a portrayal the