New Hollywood
A generation raised on film arrived on the wreckage of the factory. The collapse took twenty years to unfold. Barred from block booking and theater ownership by the 1948 Paramount decision, the studios were worn down gradually — one study estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the decline in theaters in the areas studied traces back to that ruling. Then came a string of expensive failures. Cleopatra (1963) was budgeted at $2 million and ended up costing $44 million; 20th Century Fox nearly went bankrupt and survived by selling roughly 300 acres of land that later became Century City. Handing the reins to young directors was less a bold decision than the only option left. Another door opened. In 1968, the Production Code — in place for more than thirty years — was abolished and replaced with a voluntary ratings system. MPAA president Jack Valenti is said to have called the old code something that "reeked of censorship." Young filmmakers, suddenly free to shoot what they couldn't before, poured through that door. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both 1967, are usually named as the starting point — Bonnie and Clyde's script went first to Truffaut, who turned it down and recommended Warren Beatty instead, a story told on the neighboring band of this map. Easy Rider (1969) was made for under $400,000 and earned $60 million, and it settled the studios' new willingness to bet on youth. Many of these directors came out of Roger Corman's productions. Coppola shot his first feature for $40,000 in nine days; Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Demme all passed through Corman's shop too. James Cameron called it "the Roger Corman film school." But one often-repeated story deserves untangling. The person who told Scorsese not to get stuck in the exploitation market and to do something different wasn't Corman — it was John Cassavetes, after watching a rough cut of Boxcar Bertha. Mean Streets followed from that conversation. The person who gave him the craft and the set experience, and the person who gave him the nerve to be an author, were two different people. In December 1969, Coppola and Lucas founded American Zoetrope in San Francisco — the choice to build a place of their own. That company would later become entangled with a film by Akira Kurosawa. In 1980, when Kagemusha ran short of money, Lucas and Coppola persuaded 20th Century Fox to cover the gap, in exchange for distribution rights outside Japan. It's said to be the first time a Japanese film's overseas distribution rights were sold to a Hollywood major before the film was even finished. Both men are credited as executive producers, and are said to have appeared together in a Suntory whisky commercial to help raise the money. Twenty-two years had passed since The Hidden Fortress. The influenced had come back to repay the debt. This band also holds the sign of the end. Heaven's Gate (1980) was budgeted at $7.5 million and ballooned to roughly $44 million; its North American box office came in under $3 million. On July 28 the following year, United Artists was sold to MGM for $380 million. But this one film didn't end an era on its own — other failures piled up that same year. The events remembered as symbols are, as a rule, symbols.