University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

Fourth Précis: Robert Sklar keeps the Seventies real

‘Cultural Revolution #9’

Or, how the more things change in Hollywood…

“We need to be wary of postulating a direct correspondence between society and cinema or condemning its absence. Film subjects and forms are as likely – more likely – to be determined by the institutional and cultural dynamics of motion picture production than by the most frenetic of social upheavals.”

Formal Precis:

In Chapter 19, ‘Nadir and Revival’, of the revised edition of his comprehensive chronicle Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1994), Robert Sklar reframes the supposed ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ of the early to mid 1970’s as a halcyon interregnum of intelligent – if surprisingly irrelevant – mainstream Cinema preceding a newly constituted “age of order” in the blockbuster model for the Dream Factory.

Sklar first relates the paradox of the ‘death’ of Old Hollywood in the 1960’s: Television had stolen its commercial stranglehold on the American populace but couldn’t yet touch its “aura” of past achievement. Allied with the pervasive fashion for socio- political dissent that immortalized the era, this created a brief but beautiful opening for a new “Film Generation” of cinephile ‘auteurs’ and audiences to momentarily replace the fading assurances of the studio-era with a critique-driven ‘Personal Cinema’ seeking to literally re-envision American movies.1 Though ‘New Hollywood’ enjoyed unprecedented successes it “did not provide a stable audience foundation” to ensure its longevity, and with the triumph of mass-appeal genre-‘revival’ cinema in the late 70’s2, the popular artistry of most serious American filmmakers had all but disappeared from public consciousness by the release of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Sklar finally lists and describes the alternative representational cinemas forced to discover

1. Jumping ahead, Sklar briefly shows how this utopian movement was doomed by the eventual adoption of the simultaneous mass-release model of film distribution in 1975, replacing the ‘gradual spread’ model that allowed non- lowest-common-denominator movies to acquire sizable audiences.

2. Created by the proto-typical film-brats themselves, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

niche audiences thanks to the political exclusivity of Hollywood even in such ‘tumultuous’ times: Blaxploitation movies, occasional independent female directors and theorists, and a belated documentary movement centered on the Vietnam War showing up the absence of a counterpart in fiction cinema.
Sklar’s primary intention, self-evidently, is to create a history of the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ within the greater context of the saga of American Cinema. However, what he emphasizes here, in contrast to popular myth, is the almost banal importance of film distribution shifts in the rebirth of commercial cinema and the immanent failure of New Hollywood to break its ‘pre-existing boundaries’ of socio-political representation, thus implicitly highlighting an era of cinematic revisionism as itself needing to be revised in our collective memory.
Therefore, by including this partial counter-history as an update in his popular tome3, Sklar provides for his general audience of movie-lovers and amateur culture historians a straight-laced interpretation/clarification of the rise and fall of this mythologized intermission in the eternal status quo of Cinematic Capitalism in America. At his urging, we can reservedly say that Art and Commerce once came astoundingly close to reconciliation on the backlots of American Dreaming.

Application to Chinatown:
Chinatown (1974) is in many ways the exemplary film of New Hollywood as well as its most prophetic. It is self-consciously intelligent in blatantly critiquing – revising notre-making – a problematic strain of Old Hollywood (Los Angeles Noir) by subtly inverting the moralistic assurances in the depictions of its detective-hero, femme fatale and arch-villain. It is also a strictly personal endeavour, being predominantly the nihilistic love-child of screenwriter Robert Towne’s flair for instant characterization and attritional dialogue and director Roman Polanski’s European signature4 of artful mise-en-scene and pessimistic entropy. It’s mid-wife was the legendary maverick

3. First published ironically in 1975, the totemic ‘sea-change’ year for New Hollywood ofOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nashville and Jaws…
4. Polanski is probably the best example of the causal effect the European New Waves had on the popularization of a Directors’ Cinema in America; in him we literally have an experimental (Polish) auteur who easily ‘crossed over’ to become a stalwart of New Hollywood, at least until his necessary excommunication…

producer at Paramount, Robert Evans, who bowed to their creative freedom. Most importantly, it was an enormous critical5, and substantial commercial, success for its genre – both internationally and domestically6 – just before the ‘Jaws distribution- model shift’ Sklar cites as the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood moment. In “fus[ing] the detective genre with an expose’ of capitalism” (in the form of Noah Cross’s aged and incestuous monopolistic terror) the film further typifies its production-era, devotedly following “a critical and analytical approach to national institutions rarely seen in mainstream American filmmaking.” Being set in the 1930’s, the film also quite subconsciously pays homage to the other of Sklar’s “ages of turmoil”, when the wide-scale failure of the Great Depression couldn’t help but be reflected in the sentiments of Hollywood movies: from the lionization of Gangster protagonists, to the increasing anarchy of Screwball comedies, even to the first inklings of Film Noir. But as in the 1930’s, it did not take long at all for the most influential institution – the studio-system – to right itself through profit and for New Hollywood to become a lost, nostalgic era of its own.

5. Winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar and being nominated for every other major award, only losing out to The Godfather Part II.
6. On a $6 million budget it made $17 million abroad and $16 million at home. (according to Wikipedia and iMDB)