2        FROM THE ROADSHOW ERA TO THE NEW HOLLYWOOD I

When Time magazine attempted to explain the Hollywood renaissance in 1967, it noted that, as the major studios’ main goal continued to be ‘to make money’, a crucial factor in their changing output had to be that ‘customers are now willing to pay for a different product’ (Kanfer 1971: 324). This applied by no means to everyone; indeed, divisions within Hollywood’s audience had become more pronounced than ever before: ‘there is not a single cinema audience today but several’. While some people continued to prefer ‘banality and bathos’ in their cinematic entertainment, others wanted ‘the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde’ (ibid.). Time described generational differences as the most important fault line that Hollywood had to contend with, youth being on the side of innovation and older audiences on the side of tradition. The latter increasingly turned away from the cinema towards television which ‘has all but taken over Hollywood’s former function of providing placebo entertainment’. As a consequence, ‘movie attendance among the middle-aged is down’, while ‘cinema has become the favorite art form of the young’ (ibid.). An important factor in the rise of challenging youth-oriented films was the ‘relaxation of censorship’ (1971: 333). Time cautioned that ‘the new thematic and technical freedom’ constituted a threat to the integrity of filmmakers as well as an opportunity for innovation, because it might be ‘used excessively for the sake of gimmickry or shock’: ‘Love scenes are not necessarily better because they are nuder’ (1971: 324, 333). With respect to both sex and violence, the escalation of ever more graphic filmic representations was a distinct possibility.

Time’s analysis concerned innovations across the Hollywood mainstream in the mid-1960s, but, of course, it could not yet address the changing patterns of success among Hollywood’s superhits discussed in chapter one. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that the factors outlined by Time in 1967 contributed to the shift from the Roadshow Era Top 14 to the New Hollywood Top 14. In this chapter and the next, I extend the historical analysis offered by Time to explain the emergence of the New Hollywood Top 14 and related trends across the annual top ten from 1967 to 1976. My overarching question is the following: Why do certain kinds of films become extremely successful during a particular period, when during an earlier period the most successful films were of different kinds? The answer to this question first of all has to consider the types of films being produced, and the preferences expressed by audiences. Obviously, these two factors are closely connected, and their interplay is the focus of this chapter. As we will see, the film industry’s output and audience preferences typically converge, but they can also be at odds with each other.

By and large the film industry aims to produce films that are liked by audiences, and it is therefore sensitive and responsive to changes in the audience. Such change may concern both the composition of the audience and the taste of particular groups. At the same time, audiences can only choose from what is on offer, and may well be dissatisfied with, even offended by, the industry’s output. As a consequence, certain audience groups may go to the movies less frequently or stop going altogether. On the other hand, if new kinds of films are being released, audiences may develop new preferences and habits, or previously absent groups may now be attracted. In addition to being influenced by each other, industry output and audience preferences are in turn shaped by other factors, notably the re-organisation of the entertainment industry and changes in public opinion (to be discussed in chapter three).

The first section of this chapter examines the declining fortunes of traditional family-oriented roadshows, which had previously been so dominant but disappeared in the early 1970s. This is followed by a discussion of the production and success of taboo-breaking films. The final section concentrates on the rise of new kinds of family-oriented blockbusters (notably disaster movies) and the gradual return of the family audience in the mid-1970s.

The decline of family roadshows

The dominance of traditional roadshow epics and musicals was never more pronounced than in the early to mid-1960s, not only in the Top 14 group of breakaway hits but across the annual charts. From 1960 to 1966, between one and four of the top five films every year were epics or musicals with roadshow releases, and they always took the top positions (see appendix 3). Their status as family entertainment was confirmed when those that were re-released after 1968 received ‘G’ ratings (with the exception of Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge on the River Kwai). From 1967, epics and musicals did not only disappear from the Top 14 group of breakaway hits, but they also were, with few exceptions, sliding down the annual charts, and, what is more, they were less family-oriented, as is indicated by their more restrictive ratings. While a more detailed account of the ratings system will be provided later to determine the shifting meanings of the various categories, for the time being ratings are used as a rough-and-ready indicator of the intended and actual audiences for films.

The highest-ranked musicals of 1967 were the animated The Jungle Book at no. 4 and Thoroughly Modern Millie at no. 10. In terms of chart rankings, 1968 and 1969 were still good years for musicals, with the Fanny Brice biopic Funny Girl (1st/1968), the Charles Dickens and Broadway adaptation Oliver! (6th/1968; also the winner of the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars), Barbra Streisand’s follow-up to Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly! feth/1969), and the musical western Paint Your Wagon (7th/1969). While 1970 was a lean year, musicals were back in the top ten in 1971: Fiddler on the Roof was the top-grossing film of the year, and Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks came in at no. 10. 1972 had Cabaret (no. 6) and the biopic of black blues singer Billie Holliday, Lady Sings the Blues (no. 10), yet these musicals were no longer traditional family entertainment. Whereas all of the hit musicals from 1967 to 1971 (with the exception of Paint Your Wagon) were rated ‘G’ during their original release or their first re-release, Cabaret was a ‘PG’ (due to its sexual content, it could easily have been an ‘R’) and Lady Sings the Blues an ‘R’. After two years’ absence from the top ten, the musical returned in 1975, mainly in a different musical idiom. In addition to the traditional showtunes of the Funny Girl sequel Funny Lady (8th/1975, ‘PG’), there were the rock opera Tommy (10th/1975, ‘PG’) and A Star is Born (2nd/1976, ‘R’), the second remake of a classic movie, this time as a fictional pop and rock biopic. Furthermore, unlike most of the earlier hit musicals, these films were no longer given a roadshow release. Thus, traditional musicals lost ground in the late 1960s and then largely disappeared from the top ten after 1971, while youth-oriented musicals, which were no longer presented as special events and had more ‘mature’ content perceived to be unsuitable for children, became ever more successful (a trend that continued after 1976, as we will see in the conclusion).

FIGURE 5 Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968)

Two of the hit musicals had distinctly epic qualities: Cabaret’s love story was set against the rise of fascism, while the story of Fiddler on the Roof culminated with the mass emigration of Jews from the pogrom-ridden Russian Empire. Apart from these two, few films in the top ten tackled important developments in Western history directly and in an epically spectacular fashion. The Biblical epic – which had still provided the no. 2 hit of 1966, The Bible: In the Beginning – disappeared altogether from the annual top ten, replaced, one might argue, by ‘R’-rated films about satanic possession which had epic resonances yet were presented as intimate relationship or family dramas (Rosemary’s Baby, 7th/1968; The Exorcist, 1st/1973; The Omen, 6th/1976). Non-religious epics occasionally appeared in the top ten, but never again as high as Gone With the Wind (2nd/1967; rated ‘G’ during another re-release in 1971). Most of them were Second World War movies – with the boundaries between epics and more narrowly focused combat films being fluid – in the tradition of The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone and The Longest Day. They tended to feature ensemble casts on more or less important war missions, and to place a particular emphasis both on the brutality of war and its procedural dimension. These films, most of which were very expensive and given roadshow releases, included The Dirty Dozen (6th/1967), M*A*S*H (3rd/1970), Patton (4th/1970; also the main Oscar winner of 1970, with an almost clean sweep of the major categories), Tora! Tora! Tora! (8th/1970), Catch-22 (9th/1970) and, after a long break, Midway (10th/1976). The Dirty Dozen, M*A*S*H and Catch-22 stand out from this group and from the Second World War epic tradition, due to their cynicism and strong sense of absurdity. The first one was never given a rating, the others initially received an ‘R’, while the more traditional Tora! Tora! Tora! was a ‘G’, Midway a ‘PG’ and Patton a ‘M’ (‘suggested for mature audiences’, a transitional category about which more will be said below).

The few hit epics not about the Second World War also moved away from ‘G’-ratings. Little Big Man (6th/1970), the only one of the westerns in the annual top ten which had true epic scope, while at the same time offering a revisionist, often absurd and in places extremely brutal perspective on American history, received a ‘GP’. Ryan’s Daughter (7th/1970), the only epic romance in the annual top ten apart from Gone With the Wind, was initially given an ‘R’, but received a ‘GP’ on appeal. The two science fiction epics 2001: A Space Odyssey (2nd/1968) and Planet of the Apes (7th/1968) were both rated ‘G’, but the former was far from child-friendly. Thus, from 1967 to 1970 traditional family-oriented roadshow epics, lost ground to war films, westerns and science fiction movies which were less suitable or altogether unsuitable for children, and after 1970 all variants of the epic disappeared from the top ten (except for Midway), a decline even more drastic than for traditional musicals.

These shifts were mainly caused by changes in film production, whereas, as we will see below, audience support for traditional epics and musicals remained remarkably strong. Let us first take a closer look at the period 1967–1971 when family-oriented roadshows still had a strong presence in the annual charts, best exemplified by their ability to take one of the two top spots in 1967, 1968 and 1971, with both Gone With the Wind and Fiddler on the Roof having earnings comparable to those of the New Hollywood Top 14. It is somewhat ironic that the main reason for the failure of other roadshow epics and musicals to match the breakaway success of Gone With the Wind and Fiddler on the Roof was overproduction; the roadshow format became a victim of its own success (see Hall 1999: vol. 1, 439–42).

Due to the extraordinary box office earnings of many roadshows, the number of films being presented in this fashion (many of them traditional musicals and epics, although more and more youth-oriented movies and art films were roadshown as well) had steadily increased over the years. Their number grew from one or two per year in the late 1940s and 1950s to about ten per year in the first half of the 1960s and between 15 and 20 in the second half (see Hall 1999: vol. 2, 36–92). Furthermore, several of the successful roadshows of the mid-1960s stayed in theatres for years, thus further increasing the number of roadshows on release in the second half of the decade. This substantial increase undermined the very specialness which was the distinguishing feature and main attraction of roadshows. At the same time, roadshowing youth-oriented and even art films undermined the long-standing assocation of the roadshow format with family entertainment (Hall 1999: vol. 1, 13, 304–10).

As noted above, traditionally, roadshows were presented as big family events, which, in addition to appealing to regular cinemagoers, were addressed to the large number of people who had lost the cinemagoing habit and would only go to the movies on special occasions. When the number of such special occasions grew across the 1960s, attendance of infrequent cinemagoers did not rise accordingly. Instead it seems that they tended to pick one or two films from the roadshows on offer, thus spreading themselves across several films and reducing the number of tickets sold for each one. Audience surveys support this speculation. A 1957 survey found that of all Americans over 14, 39 per cent attended cinemas less than three times a year (Jowett 1976: 478). By the early 1970s, this percentage had not decreased – with a decrease indicating that those groups who had attended infrequently now went to the movies more often to see more roadshows – but it had in fact increased considerably. In 1972 and 1973, over 50 per cent of all Americans over 11 went to the cinema less than three times a year, which included a large proportion of Americans who said they never went at all (40 per cent in 1972 and 37 per cent in 1973) (Jowett 1976: 486; Gertner 1978: 32A). As a group, infrequent cinemagoers could still turn a roadshow into a breakaway hit (as they did with Gone With the Wind and Fiddler on the Roof), but, having so many roadshows to choose from, this was becoming much less likely. (Furthermore, as we will see later, women, who constituted a key audience for traditional roadshows, were one of the groups being alienated from cinemagoing in the late 1960s.)

The declining number of breakaway roadshow hits was not the only consequence of overproduction. Production costs had risen so much during the 1960s that many roadshow releases required breakaway success to be profitable (Hall 1999: vol. 1, 236–41). Anything less caused losses, even if the film in question made it into the annual top ten (an early, and extreme, example of a top hit losing money is Cleopatra). For instance, Hello, Dolly! feth/1969) earned $15.2m in rentals but it cost 525.3m to make (excluding the substantial costs for prints and advertising); the figures for Tora! Tora! Tora! (8th/1970) were 514.5m and 525.5m respectively (1999: vol. 1, 238). Other roadshow releases from this period made even less money in the US. The musical Star! (1968) earned $4.2m in rentals against a budget of $14.3m, while the Second World War epic Battle of Britain (1969) had US rentals of $2m and a budget of $14m, and the musical Darling Lili (1970) earned $3.3m against a budget of $16.7m (ibid.). It would seem that the disastrous performance of such films in the US was, to some extent, mirrored by the declining success of roadshow epics and musicals abroad. In Germany, one of the largest foreign markets, for example, Hollywood epics had regularly ranked in the annual top ten, but – with the exception of Battle of Britain (no. 9 in the 1969/70 season) – they stopped doing so after Doctor Zhivago (the top hit of 1966/67) (Garncarz 1994: 124–31). Thus, losses in the domestic market could not be recouped abroad. Indeed, the losses incurred by superexpensive roadshow musicals and epics were probably the main reason for the enormous overall corporate losses several of the major studios suffered in 1969 and 1970 (Finler 1988: 286–7; Hall 1999: vol. 1, 236–40).

After the near-catastrophe of 1969/70, the major studios finally changed direction, drastically reducing the number of roadshow releases so that by 1973 they had virtually disappeared. It is important to note that this change in industry strategy did not in any direct way reflect a diminishing taste for traditional roadshows on the part of Americans. Indeed, in addition to the solid US box office performance of many traditional roadshow epics and musicals until 1971, there is plenty of evidence that across the decade 1967–76 Americans continued to favour these kinds of films. To begin with, five of the Roadshow Era Top 14, including four epics and musicals – Ben-Hur (broadcast in 1971), The Sound of Music (1976), The Ten Commandments (1973) and The Robe (1967) (the fifth film was Goldfinger, 1972) – achieved ratings over 30 when they were broadcast during this decade, and The Bridge on the River Kwai had a 38 rating in 1966 (Steinberg 1980: 32–3). As of 1976, four of these films were among the twenty top-rated theatrical movies ever shown on television (and only two made-for-TV movies did equally well); they sat right next to many of the New Hollywood Top 14 in this chart (1980: 32). It is also worth noting that when Ben-Hur was first broadcast in 1971, it became the second-highest-rated theatrical movie in American television history up to this point – after The Bridge on the River Kwai (ibid.).

Roadshow Era superhits also did extremely well in audience polls. When, in 1970, the Los Angeles Times asked readers for the best film of the 1960s, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Doctor Zhivago and My Fair Lady were among the top ten, which, as mentioned earlier, was led by The Graduate (Steinberg 1980: 145). Seven years later, the Los Angeles Times again asked its readers for their favourites, and both The Sound of Music and Ben-Hur made it into the top twenty, right next to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Graduate (1980: 189). One might suspect that older respondents in these polls voted for the Roadshow Era films while youth voted for those of the New Hollywood, but this was not necessarily the case. A 1978 poll of college students found that The Sound of Music was their third favourite film, just ahead of Rocky (1980: 183).

The film industry and critics also continued to embrace many of the Roadshow Era Top 14. In the 1970 Los Angeles Times poll, filmmakers considered The Sound of Music one of the ten best films of the 1960s, while once again The Graduate was considered the very best (1980: 146). The University of Southern California’s 1972 panel of filmmakers and critics included the following on its list of the fifty most significant American films of all time: West Side Story, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sound of Music, Ben-Hur and The Robe; from the New Hollywood Top 14 they included The Godfather as well as The Graduate (Steinberg 1980: 187). A 1975 poll of top film and television executives listed My Fair Lady among their thirty favourite films, but none of the New Hollywood Top 14 (1980: 186). Finally, the 1977 AFI membership poll found Ben-Hur, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sound of Music and West Side Story in the top fifty, together with seven of the New Hollywood Top 14 (1980: 144).

Thus, after 1966, American film industry personnel, critics and movie audiences continued to appreciate and even love the superhits of the Roadshow Era. Some of the films had successful re-releases in the cinema, most notably The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins in 1973 (Steinberg 1980: 27). Indeed, through extended runs into the late 1960s and rereleases in the early 1970s, both The Sound of Music and Doctor Zhivago (re-released in 1971/72) earned over $30m in rentals from 1967 to 1976, thus joining the ranks of the decade’s biggest hits (see appendix 1). However, the most spectacular re-release of an old-style epic superhit was that of Gone With the Wind in 1967/68. Somewhat perversely, the $36m which the film generated in rentals during its roadshow release at this time and during another re-release in 1971/72 might even qualify it to be included in the New Hollywood Top 14. What is more, in almost every conceivable way, Gone With the Wind was the most outstanding film in American culture during the period 1967–76. It was first shown on TV in two parts in 1976 with astronomical ratings over 47; even today it is by far the highest-rated theatrical movie on television ever (1980: 32). Indeed in 1976, it was the highest-rated programme of any kind in American television history up to this point (it is still in the top ten today) (People 2000: 162). Several polls conducted during this period found that Gone With the Wind was also by far the favourite movie of Americans (1980: 183, 189), even among college students and – despite the film’s close association with female audiences – among older educated males (Anon. 1970). Furthermore, Gone With the Wind came out on top in some polls of critics and film industry personnel as the best American movie ever (Steinberg 1980: 144, 182, 187).

Since Gone With the Wind and the Roadshow Era superhits remained absolutely central to American film culture from 1967 to 1976, Hollywood’s abandonment of traditional roadshows in the early 1970s was by no means a response to declining audience demand. Instead, we can understand this abandonment as the major studios’ belated and overly drastic reaction to the huge roadshow losses of 1969/70. It also was a reaction to their success with other, cheaper types of films. Most prominent amongst them were youth-oriented taboo-breakers and family-oriented disaster movies.

The rise of taboo-breakers

Mainstream hits breaking with the American film industry’s long-standing restraint on matters of sex and violence as well as other controversial subjects became possible once Hollywood’s Production Code was fatally weakened in 1966. The Production Code had originally been adopted in 1930 by the major studios’ trade organisation – the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, later renamed Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) – to ensure that films shown in mainstream movie theatres followed certain guidelines. These were intended to make sure, as much as that was possible, that all films were basically suitable for all audiences, including children, and that, furthermore, film screenings would not provoke public controversy and official intervention through municipal or state censorship or even new legislation. Censorship and new legislation were bound to complicate the industry’s operations, increasing costs along the way. While controversy might make the film in question more appealing, it could damage the reputation of the film industry as a whole and alienate certain segments of the population from the cinemagoing experience altogether. The Code was enforced by the MPAA’s Production Code Adminstration (PCA), which reviewed all scripts for American productions as well as prints of films (of both American and foreign origin) to be given a mainstream release, and, if necessary, negotiated changes to bring films into line with the Code’s guidelines. While a few films – mostly European imports and exploitation films – were shown without the PCA’s Seal of Approval, these were seen by comparatively few people and on the whole remained economically marginal (on the limited success of foreign language films, see Anon. 1991a).

The Code was framed by ‘general principles’ such as: ‘No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it’, and ‘law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation’ (Steinberg 1980: 391). Specific stipulations concerned the representation of violent acts – for example, ‘brutal killings are not to be presented in detail’ – and of sexuality: ‘adultery and illicit sex … must not be explicitly treated or justified, or treated attractively’; ‘excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown’, certainly ‘not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions’ (1980: 392). With further restrictions, for example, on nudity, profanity and criticisms of religion, it is easy to see that much of what was shown from 1966 onwards had simply not been possible in a mainstream release before that time. What is more, the Catholic Church had exerted enormous pressure on Hollywood through its Legion of Decency until the liberalisation of the Church in the early to mid-1960s (Walsh 1996; Black 1998). Finally, censorship boards had continued operating for a while after official censorship by federal states and municipalities had been declared unconstitutional when film (except for cases of extreme ‘obscenity’) was included under the Constitution’s protection of free speech in 1952, yet in the early 1960s these boards were finally being phased out (see Jowett 1996).

By 1966, then, the necessity and usefulness of the Production Code, which had always been subject to some debate, was becoming ever more doubtful. When a major row between Warner Bros., the Legion of Decency and the PCA erupted during the production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), an adaptation of a recent play featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as a married couple involved in vicious verbal fights with plenty of profanity and obscenity, Warner Bros. decided to release the film with the warning ‘No One Under 18 Admitted Without Parent’ (see Leff & Simmons 1990: 241–66; Black 1998: 229–32; Walsh 1996: 312–3). Rather than insisting on changes which would bring the film in line with the Production Code, the PCA accepted Warner Bros.’ label and approved the film, which went on to become the third-highest-grossing film of 1966. Soon after the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? decision, in September 1966, the new president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, revealed a brand-new Production Code. This, in effect, removed most prohibitions because it allowed for the possibility that particularly challenging films could be released with the label ‘suggested for mature audiences’. It soon turned out that the majority of films approved by the PCA carried this label, making nonsense of the Code (Leff & Simmons 1990: 270). When two Supreme Court decisions in the spring of 1968 opened up the possibility that states and cities would replace censorship with ratings, which stipulated the age range of audiences allowed to attend particular films in that state or city, the MPAA quickly moved to institute its own ratings system, partly to avoid an unmanageable patchwork of regional age restrictions (Steinberg 1980: 399–401). On 1 November 1968, the PCA was replaced with the Code and Rating Administration (CARA), which reviewed all scripts and finished films and negotiated with studios about the changes they might have to make to get a desired rating.

The ‘G’ rating was initially set up as a continuation of the pre-1966 Production Code, being given to films which were deemed suitable for all audiences. Indeed, the vast majority of pre-1966 movies that were rereleased from 1968 onwards were given ‘G’ ratings. However, as we have seen, four of the Roadshow Era Top 14 were re-released with ‘GP’/’PG’ ratings, and several other hits also received non-‘G’ ratings, most notably Psycho (2nd/1960) which was rated ‘M’ in 1968 and ‘R’ in 1984. The meaning of all ratings was in flux in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within a few years ‘G’ was rarely used and rather than signifying a film’s acceptability for both young and old, it was soon widely understood to refer to films which were in effect only suitable for children (Krämer 2002b: 191; Steinberg 1980: 399–404). The ‘M’ rating was equivalent to the ‘suggested for mature audiences’ label so popular from 1966 to 1968; indeed ‘M’ immediately became the most frequently used rating. However, there was considerable confusion about whether ‘M’ was meant to signal that films were unsuitable for children due to their mature content, or whether these films might be appropriate for children after all. Changing ‘M’ into ‘GP’ (‘parental guidance suggested’) in 1970, and then into ‘PG’ in 1972, made it clear that films so rated were child-friendly, despite some mature elements. The ‘R’ rating, which quickly became almost as popular as ‘M’, required that children under 16 be accompanied by an adult, and the very rarely used ‘X’ excluded those children altogether and became increasingly associated with pornography. In 1970, the age limit for ‘R’ and ‘X’ was raised to 17.

The upshot of all these developments was that, from 1966 onwards, mainstream hits breaking long-established taboos became possible, which in turn exerted a strong influence on future production patterns and audience decisions. The influence of such hits derived both from their box office performance and the intense, often controversial public debate they generated. Let us take a look at the breakthrough hits of 1967. While sex was highlighted in the poster for The Graduate and in many reviews (see, for example, Elley 2000: 337), the film did not generate much controversy. John Simon of The New Leader disliked it, but mentioned only in passing that ‘a few taboos are, indeed, broken’ (1968: 30). There was great excitement and disagreement among critics and among audience members, as evidenced by the many letters debating the film’s merits in the New York Times months after it had first been shown, yet this appeared to concern the film’s ‘arty’ style and the effectiveness of its satire more than its representation of sexuality. Nevertheless, the breakaway success of The Graduate exerted a strong influence when it came to sexually-themed films. Explicit depictions of highly unusual romantic entanglements and sexual practices in contemporary American settings could now become mainstream entertainment. Before 1967 such representations had been less frequent, less explicit and often confined to historical settings, as, for example, in Cleopatra CLst/1963) and Tom Jones (3rd/1963), the most notable exception among major hits being the Bond films, which were, however, far removed from the realities of contemporary American life.

In the wake of The Graduate, extensive displays of nudity, men cavorting with prostitutes or prostituting themselves, married middle-class couples contemplating partner swaps, prostitutes featured as comic heroines, men sleeping around in search not of love but of sexual gratification, and extra-marital affairs between older women and young men could be found in many films set in contemporary America, including the following top ten hits: Midnight Cowboy (3rd/1969, rated ‘X’), Easy Rider (4th/1969, ‘R’), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (6th/1969, ‘R’), Woodstock (5th/1970, ‘R’), The Owl and the Pussycat (10th/1970, ‘R’), The French Connection (3rd/1971, ‘R’), Carnal Knowledge (8th/1971, ‘R’) and The Last Picture Show foth/1971, ‘R’, set in the recent past). Just outside the top ten, there were sexually explicit films such as the Swedish import I am Curious: Yellow (with $8.5m rentals in 1969, belatedly rated ‘X’ in 1973) and Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ($7m, 1970, ‘X’) (see Cohn 1993).

This trend culminated with the surprising success of ‘X’-rated films in 1972 and 1973, when both the Euro-American art film Last Tango in Paris (7th/1973), with its graphically portrayed, extensive and in places violent sexual acts (including, famously, anal penetration), and the hardcore porn movies Deep Throat (7th/1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (10th/1973) achieved top ten success (see Lewis 2000: ch. 5). The extremes of 1972/73 were not replicated in later years, at least not in hit movies. Indeed, sexual themes and the graphic depiction of sexual acts became generally much less important in the annual top ten – with some notable exceptions such as the sexually hyperactive hairdresser in Shampoo ferd/1975, ‘R’), the bisexual bank robber who wants to finance his boyfriend’s sex change operation in Dog Day Afternoon (4th/1975, ‘R’) and the extensive sex scenes in A Star is Born (2nd/1976, ‘R’).

Going back to 1967, I have already noted that this was the breakthrough year for extremely violent films with Bonnie and Clyde (5th/1967, rated ‘M’ in 1969) and The Dirty Dozen (6th/1967). Both films also featured extensive scenes dealing with sex (in the former mainly revolving around the woman’s arousal and the man’s inability to perform, in the latter involving prostitutes), which in some instances explored the connection between sex and violence (as when Bonnie Parker is aroused by Clyde Barrow’s robbery of a store). It is not altogether surprising that, after 1967, violent sex and sexualised violence became a feature of top-ten movies (also, of course, of many movies outside the top ten such as Straw Dogs, 1971). However, these were often set outside contemporary America. The most notable examples come in the early 1970s. In what is arguably the most shocking scene of A Clockwork Orange (7th/1971, ‘X’, changed to ‘R’ in 1972), a film set in a futuristic Britain, a group of young men beat up a writer and force him to watch his wife being gang-raped, while their leader cheerfully intones ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. The story of Deliverance (4th/1972, ‘R’) revolves around one of the four river-rafting adventurers being raped by two local men. Then, 1973 saw the release not only of Last Tango in Paris, which blurred the lines between rape and consensual sex, but also of The Exorcist (‘R’). In this film a twelve-year-old girl, possessed by a male-identified demon, spouts incredibly graphic obscenities (such as ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell’) and mimicks sexual behaviour, most shockingly when she violently stabs her genitals with a bloody crucifix, doing so in front of her mother, whose face she then pushes into her crotch with the words ‘Lick me!’ An important precursor for such excess was a scene in Rosemary’s Baby (7th/1968, ‘R’), in which the drugged and only semi-conscious young wife is penetrated and inseminated by the Devil himself. Yet while there is this precursor for The Exorcist, there was no commercially successful attempt to replicate the extremes of its sexualised violence after 1973.

Sexual representations (both violent and non-violent) were clearly peaking in the box office charts of 1972/73. For non-sexual violence, it is much less obvious whether such a peak exists. The two breakthrough hyperviolent films of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen, generated enormous controversy, which linked them so closely to social unrest, assassinations and rising crime rates in American society that Hollywood’s potential role in increasing levels of violence in the US became the focus of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1968 (see Prince 1998: 18–30 and 2000a: 47–75; Hoberman 1998; on the diverse and changing meanings of the term ‘violence’, see Prince 2003: 253–63, and Barker 2004). Building on the impact these two films had at the box office and in public debates, the annual charts after 1967 included numerous films featuring the large-scale destruction of property, often during protracted chase sequences, and high levels of interpersonal violence, frequently showing extremes of human suffering and graphically depicting the physical impact of such violence on the human body, so groundbreakingly shown in the climactic slow motion slaughter of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (see Prince 1998: ch. 2).

FIGURE 6 The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

In addition to the war and disaster films discussed above and, of course, to Bond films which continued to populate the annual top ten, violent action of various types and levels of intensity (usually indicated by the rating) featured prominently in contemporary crime films including Bullitt (4th/1968, ‘M’), The French Connection (3rd/1971, ‘R’), Dirty Harry (6th/1971, ‘R’), The Getaway (8th/1972, ‘PG’), Magnum Force (6th/1973, ‘R’), Dog Day Afternoon (4th/1975, ‘R’) and The Enforcer (8th/1976, ‘R’); in contemporary dramas pitting countercultural protagonists against establishment figures like Easy Rider (4th/1969, ‘R’), Billy Jack (2nd/1971, ‘GP’), The Trial of Billy Jack (5th/1974, ‘PG’) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (2nd/1975, ‘R’); in adventure films like Deliverance (which, in addition to the rape, had prolonged scenes of men fighting the rapids as well as each other) and Jaws (1st/1975, ‘PG’), and sports movies like The Longest Yard (8th/1974, ‘R’) and Rocky (1st/1976, ‘PG’); in horror films such as The Exorcist (which, in addition to sexualised violence, also featured extreme violence both against adults and against the little girl) and The Omen (6th/1976, ‘R’, a film prominently featuring a father’s attempt to kill his son); in science fiction films like Planet of the Apes (7th/1968, ‘G’) and A Clockwork Orange (which featured several brutal beatings in addition to rape); and in historical dramas like the westerns Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1st/1969, ‘M’), True Grit (8th/1969, ‘M’), Little Big Man (6th/1970, ‘GP’) and Jeremiah Johnson (5th/1972, ‘GP’), the gangster films The Godfather CLst/1972, ‘R’) and The Godfather, Part II (6th/1974, ‘R’), and the prison movie Papillon (4th/1973, ‘R’ changed to ‘PG’ after an appeal).

A lot of this violence could be characterised as criminal. Indeed a quantitative content analysis of a representative sample of hit movies showed that the share of major characters committing crimes rose from 27 per cent in the period 1946–65 to 46 per cent in the decade 1966–75; the share of major characters resorting to violence (both criminal and legal) doubled from 19 per cent to 38 per cent (Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996: 105). The frequency of ‘R’ and ‘M’ ratings for the above films is the most clear-cut indication that from 1967 the annual top ten were focused to a much greater extent on violent representations than in preceding decades, and on more violent representations, including countless instances of damage to the human body that would not have been shown before at all (see Prince 2003). But unlike sexual representations, including sexual violence, there is no sense that non-sexual violence in hit movies was reaching its peak and then abating at any point during the early to mid-1970s.

One way to understand these developments is to assume a pent-up unsatisfied demand for sexual and violent cinematic representations, as well as other challenging depictions of contemporary reality, among a relatively small segment of the American population, mostly youth and especially males, with the majority of Americans clearly being opposed to such representations. Two 1968 surveys, for example, found that the majority of young people ‘approve of the high degree of realism in film content that has taken place in recent years’; in particular, of those under 30 ‘only a small fraction have strong objections to increased emphasis on sex’ or to more violence on the screen (Anon. 1968b; Warga 1968). Remarkably, a 1974 survey found that 10 per cent of males declared that ‘X’-rated films were among their most preferred types of film (while both males, with 25 per cent, and females, with 43 per cent, also declared that ‘X’-rated films were by far their least preferred type of film); action-oriented and increasingly violent genres such as westerns (22 per cent), suspense films (16 per cent) and war movies (9 per cent) also scored highly with males but much less so with females (Newspaper Advertising Bureau 1974).

Three films released in 1967 managed to meet this pent-up demand and become major hits (The Graduate was, as we have seen, a true breakaway hit; its rentals were matched by the combined income of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen). This encouraged the film industry to invest more heavily in such movies, by making more of them, but also by making them more expensively, with The Exorcist, for example, costing $10m (Finler 2003: 298). Furthermore, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave taboo-breaking films an even higher profile by awarding them plenty of Oscars; Midnight Cowboy and The French Connection, for example, won Best Picture and Best Director for 1969 and 1971 respectively. In the light of Hollywood’s increasing investments in, and publicity for, such challenging films, people who had liked the three breakthrough hits of 1967 were encouraged to come back for, among other things, more sexual and violent attractions, which also probably aroused the curiosity of a wider range of people who had not seen the initial films. To some extent, their surprising, even shocking impact could be replicated only by intensifying the sexual and violent representations, which set in motion a process of escalation. In the case of sex and sexual violence, this process reached such extremes from 1971 to 1973 that people both in the film industry and in the audience who had supported this escalation eventually turned against it. Consequently, among top-ten hits both the number of films featuring explicit sex or sexual violence and the intensity of sexual representations declined. In the case of non-sexual violence, however, the escalation proceeded more slowly (at least in hit movies; in the low-budget horror sector it arguably matched the sexual extremes of the hits of 1971–73), so that this violence could gradually become a new standard rather than an exceptional attraction.

Race relations were another sensitive aspect of contemporary American reality which hits from 1967 onwards began to address in new ways, with the result that African-Americans could become a standard part of cinematic entertainment by 1976. Once again a major controversial hit of 1967 prepared the way for more extensive and diverse representations in hit movies (see Bogle 1997: chs. 7–8). Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 3rd/1967) starred Spencer Tracy (who died shortly after filming stopped), Sidney Poitier and Katherine Hepburn in a drama about the difficulties of white liberal parents to accept their daughter’s impending marriage to a black man. Arthur Knight (1967) wrote in the Saturday Review that the film broke new ground insofar as it was the first major studio release ‘to give serious attention to the question of interracial marriage – or even to permit a Negro male enthusiastically to kiss a white female’. Although some reviewers felt that the film was too stagey, all too tasteful and atypical in its social setting, the majority welcomed the fact that it treated an important social issue in an entertaining and apparently inoffensive fashion (see, for example, Elley 2000: 348). However, a look at the extensive racist hate mail which producer-director Stanley Kramer received from the moment his film project was announced, suggests that, outside mainstream media, the film was surrounded by great controversy (the letters are contained in the Stanley Kramer Papers, Special Collections, Theater Arts Library, University of California at Los Angeles).

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was not the only hit of 1967 dealing with race. Indeed, race was an important issue in half of the top ten hits that year, which is perhaps not so surprising in the context of ongoing heated debates about Civil Rights, the emergence of the Black Power movement and the formation of the Black Panther party in 1966 as well as a series of major race riots from 1965 to 1967. Hits with racial themes included the re-released Civil War epic Gone With the Wind (2nd/1967) and the latest Disney animation, The Jungle Book (4th/1967). This film tells the story of the human orphan Mowgli who has to return from the jungle to his own (human) kind, because ultimately he is racially incompatible with the animals who have raised him and is hated by Shere Khan, the tiger, simply for being human. Quite problematically, the film also depicts monkeys as dwellers in a jungle ghetto associated with black musical forms. Furthermore, The Dirty Dozen (6th/1967) prominently featured African-American football star Jim Brown. Most impressive, however, was the box office dominance of Sidney Poitier. In addition to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he starred in To Sir, With Love (at no. 9), a drama about a black school teacher in London, as well as In the Heat of the Night, a film about a black police detective who, during a visit in the deep South, is suspected of murder and then goes on to solve the crime, in the process giving an offensive Southern aristocrat a memorable slap in the face and earning the respect of the racist local sheriff. While In the Heat of the Night (with rentals of $11m; Cohn 1993) was placed just outside the top ten, it won five Oscars, including Best Picture. As a result of these three hits, Poitier became the first black performer ever to be ranked among Quigley’s top ten box office attractions. He was at no. 7 in 1967 and, since his three 1967 films had long runs into 1968, was designated the biggest movie star in the US in 1968, before slipping down to no. 6 in 1969 and disappearing from the top ten thereafter (Steinberg 1980: 60).

In the following years, racial themes and African-American performers were central to a wide range of films, including, in the first half of the 1970s (especially in 1972–4), dozens of mostly low-budget action films with predominantly black casts (so-called ‘blaxploitation’ films), which were addressed primarily to African-Americans and rarely crossed over to white audiences (see Cook 2000: 259–66). With the exception of the hardboiled private eye thriller Shaft (1971, $7m rentals) and the drug dealer drama Super Fly (1972, $6.4m) (Cohn 1993), such films did not even come close to the annual top ten. However, top ten hits also continued to address racial issues. Across all hit movies, the share of (major and minor) characters belonging to a racial minority (Black, Asian, Native American or Hispanic) doubled from 5.5 per cent for 1946–65 to 11 per cent for 1966–75 (Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996: 175). Planet of the Apes (7th/1968) presented an allegory of contemporary American race relations (see Greene 1998), while racial prejudice and racially motivated violence were also explored with reference to Native Americans in Little Big Man (6th/1970), Billy Jack (2nd/1971) and The Trial of Billy Jack feth/1974). Woodstock (5th/1970) prominently featured black musicians, most notably Jimi Hendrix (whose Are You Experienced? had been the top-selling album of 1968), and Lady Sings the Blues (10th/1972) told the story of a blues legend, played by pop star Diana Ross (who had had a string of hit singles and albums, both on her own and as a member of the Supremes, since the mid-1960s) (People 2000: 219–20, 224). In Magnum Force (6th/1973) ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan gets a black partner, and in Live and Let Die (9th/1973) James Bond fights black gangsters. The Towering Inferno (1st/1974) featured former football star O. J. Simpson in its all-star cast, and Earthquake (4th/1974) Richard Roundtree – who had risen to stardom with Shaft (1971), in which he constantly crossed the barriers between racial communities, among other things having sex with a white woman. While none of these black performers were included in Quigley’s annual list of the top ten box office attractions, their potential drawing power was recognised by their inclusion in Quigley’s annual ‘Stars of Tomorrow’ list: Jim Brown was listed in 1968, Richard Roundtree in 1971, Ron O’Neal (from Super Fly) in 1972 and Diana Ross in 1973 (Steinberg 1980: 64–5).

These trends culminated in the breakaway success of Blazing Saddles (2nd/1974, ‘R’), a western parody about a black sheriff and his fight against corrupt white businessmen and politicians, featuring plenty of comically-rendered racial slurs and racially-motivated violence, but also a utopian vision of interracial alliances, including a sexual relationship between the black hero and a white woman. While building on earlier, racially-themed hits, Blazing Saddles also consolidated the most successful formula for future treatments of black/white relations: the bi-racial comedy-action team (here played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder). The first inkling of the ongoing success of this formula was provided by Silver Streak (4th/1976) which started out as a Gene Wilder comedy and then turned into an extended comedy routine between Wilder and black comedian Richard Pryor (who had co-written Blazing Saddles). Thus, by the mid-1970s, racial themes and African-American performers had become a standard – rather than a controversial – element of a range of hit movies. Indeed, from 1976 onwards, their share of (major and minor) characters was close to their share of the American population; African-Americans were no longer underrepresented (Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996: 175).

FIGURE 7 Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)

The initially shocking breakthrough presentation of taboo subject matter in 1967, the escalation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the normalisation of such subject matter (either through its de-escalation or through its widespread acceptance) in the mid-1970s, exerted a strong influence on the composition of the American cinema audience across this decade.

The break-up and reconstitution of the family audience

The most pertinent fact about cinemagoing in this period was that a substantial number of Americans simply did not do it any longer. In 1972, when the escalation of violent, sexual and racial representations was nearing its peak, 40 per cent of Americans over 11, and 43 per cent of those over 17, said in a survey conducted for the MPAA that they never went to the cinema (Jowett 1976: 486; the survey did not cover young children). Nonattendance rates were highest among the people with the least income (60 per cent, as compared to 21 per cent for high earners) and those with little education (66 per cent, as compared to 20 per cent for the best educated); except for teenagers, they were higher for women than for men (1976: 4856). If we also consider those who went only once or twice a year, the combined percentages for non-attenders and infrequent cinemagoers among various groups were as follows: 61 per cent of women over 17 versus 45 per cent of men over 17; 70 per cent of those earning less $7,000 versus 37 per cent of those earning $15,000 and more; 79 per cent of Americans without a high school diploma versus 36 per cent of those who had some higher education. Similarly extreme imbalances existed with respect to different age groups. Although people aged 30 and over made up 61 per cent of the American population over 11, they accounted for only 27 per cent of ticket purchases; attendance levels declined with age, dropping dramatically at age 50. People under 30 accounted for 73 per cent of ticket purchases, while they made up only 39 per cent of the American population over 11.

While these imbalances had a long history, they had been intensifying over the years. For example, a 1957 survey (this time including children up to the age of 11) found that men went to the cinema slightly more often than women, that the lowest income group went less often than the highest income group (although, unlike in 1972, medium income groups were the most avid cinemagoers), and attendance increased with education (although the effect of higher education was less pronounced than in 1972) (Jowett 1976: 476–7). Those under 30 bought 72 per cent of all tickets, while they made up only 50 per cent of the population. This is not directly comparable to the 1972 figures because the latter excluded children under 12, but, by and large, there is once again a strong bias towards youth, although it is less pronounced than in 1972. The drop-off in the frequency of cinema attendance at the age of 30 was certainly much less dramatic in 1957 than it was in 1972.

In trying to understand the increasing dominance of the youth audience, we can first of all note demographic changes. The most avid cinemagoers in 1957 were 15-19-year-olds (making up only 7 per cent of the population but accounting for 21 per cent of all ticket purchases), followed by 20-29-year-olds (9 per cent/15 per cent) and 10-14-year-olds (12 per cent/20 per cent); furthermore, 20-24-year-olds tended to go to the cinema more frequently than 25-29-year-olds (Jowett 1976: 477, 485). Due to the postwar baby boom (that is the increased birthrates between 1946 and 1964), the number of 15-24-year-olds, who were precisely the most avid cinemagoers, expanded considerably across the 1960s. In 1957, there were 22.3m people in this age group, making up 13 per cent of the US population; in 1970, there were 36.5m, accounting for 18 per cent of the population (Wattenberg 1976: 10). This goes a long way towards explaining why the concentration of ticket sales on the youth audience was much more pronounced in the early 1970s.

However, demographics cannot explain why the differences in the frequency of cinema attendances between those under 30 and those 30 and older, between men and women, between the well-educated and the uneducated, between the well-off and the poor increased so much from 1957 to 1972. In other words, what led to the relative reduction in attendance levels among women, older people, the poor and the uneducated, and what caused the relative increase in attendance levels among educated, middle-class male youth? I am not going to deal with income and educational differences (their extraordinary impact deserves a separate investigation), but I want to make some suggestions about the increasing differences along the lines of gender and age.

First of all, across the postwar period, industry observers and survey respondents had increasingly expressed the opinion that the film industry was not catering sufficiently to ‘general’ or family audiences – despite the fact that the PCA was meant to ensure that the vast majority of films released in the US were suitable for all segments of the population, including children. It seems that people were no longer convinced that PCA approval of a film guaranteed its suitability for children, and instead of expecting that all of Hollywood’s output was in effect family entertainment, ‘family films’ emerged as a separate category. Thus, the Christian Science Monitor wrote: ‘In recent years the clamour has increased for Hollywood to make more family films’ (Anon. 1962). While there was some debate about how one might define this category, ‘most people who speak about a family film mean one that does not deal with sex at all, or deals with it only in a negative definition’ (ibid.).

The mutual exclusiveness of sex and family films was the main result of a 1967 survey by McCall’s magazine among its female readers. While their favorite recent movies (The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago and My Fair Lady) were described as ‘family films’, the list of ‘least-liked’ films was headed by Who’s Afraid of Vrginia Woolf?, and ‘more than two-thirds said they were “almost always” or sometimes offended by “sex scenes or overly frank dialogue”’, because these were ‘out of step with their personal and parental attitudes’ (Anon. 1967a). Concerns about Hollywood’s departure from family entertainment, then, were closely connected to the age and gender of respondents, with mothers being particularly affected. The MPAA acknowledged such concerns in February 1968 when its president, Jack Valenti, declared that the film industry’s ‘single most outstanding weakness … lies in its failures to meet the demands of young married couples with children’ (Anon. 1968a). Yet with the total removal of the Production Code that year, worries about the provision of child-friendly family entertainment only increased. A 1970 poll revealed ‘widespread dissatisfaction with available children’s fare’ among 68 per cent of all respondents (Wolf 1970). Two years later, Jerry Lewis (1972) headed an article in Variety: ‘Children, Too Have Film Rights’. A 1974 survey found that 76 per cent of respondents said that there were not enough ‘family pictures’ (Anon. 1974a).

People were not just worried about children, though. Many, especially those over 30 (see Warga 1968) and women, were concerned about their own cinema experiences. Surveys in the early to mid-1960s had clearly identified what kind of experience most Americans were looking for in the cinema. In general, they preferred ‘(i) escapism to harsh reality, (ii) action to “talkiness”, (iii) a happy ending, not without some sense of logic, (iv) relaxing rather than provocative themes, (v) glossy comedies to harsh tragedies, and (vi) a touch of “naughtiness”, but never dirt for dirt’s sake or violence for violence’s sake’ (Anon. 1963). Similarly, a 1964 survey identified ‘a definite preference for entertainment which the entire family can enjoy … Audiences want to escape – not be exposed to unappetising realities’ (Anon. 1964). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, older Americans and women had many reasons to object to the amount of sex and violence and other problematic realities appearing on screen, also to the focus of many films on young and on male protagonists, and to the poor state of repair of many movie theatres (Krämer 1999: 85–7). In the 1974 survey quoted above, 52 per cent of respondents – probably mostly women and older people – agreed that ‘sex, violence, or a combination of these ingredients keep people away’ from the cinema (Anon. 1974a). Another 1974 survey listed the ‘pet peeves of the 18–30 female audience’: ‘seats are too small, prices too high, theatres are dirty … too hot or too cold, audiences are too noisy’ (Anon. 1974b). Such complaints contributed to the declining attendance levels among women and older people across the 1960s and the early 1970s.

At the same time, these groups, like everyone else, had become increasingly accustomed to watching films on television, turning, as we have seen, traditional roadshow epics and musicals into ratings champions. The popularity of films (both older and recent) on television is also suggested by the fact that in 1966/67, for the first time, NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies and the CBS Friday Night Movies were ranked among the twenty top-rated shows on television; for the next decade these and other ‘movie nights’ were regularly ranked in the top twenty (People 2000: 154–6). Apparently, women and older people felt much more comfortable watching films at home than venturing out to a movie theatre.

Here we find another reason for the rapid disappearance of family roadshows in the early 1970s. The alienation of women was particularly damaging for the chances of success of traditional musicals and of romantic historical epics. When asked about their preferred types of movies, both male and female respondents named comedy most often; yet, for women, this was followed by love stories (named by 26 per cent) and musicals (17 per cent), whereas only 2 per cent and 10 per cent of men, respectively, listed these types as their favourites; even worse, 13 per cent of men listed both musicals and love stories among their least preferred types of films (Newpaper Advertising Bureau 1974: 7, 61; see results of surveys of teenage girls reported in Anon. 1965b and Seventeen 1967). Finally, there was evidence that women selected the film when older couples went to the cinema (Anon. 1974c); hence alienating them also meant that their boyfriends and husbands no longer attended epic romances and musicals either. This undermined the audience base for traditional roadshows, which, as noted earlier, needed to attract an all-inclusive audience to be profitable.

By 1970, the sense that movie theatres were no longer a hospitable place for many segments of the potential audience had become so pronounced that it was a major factor in the reception and success of the two biggest hits of the year. While Love Story did by no means receive only positive reviews upon its release in December 1970, the film was widely understood as a successful return to the kind of traditional Hollywood storytelling that, according to critics, had become overshadowed in the late 1960s by thematically and formally challenging films. The Los Angeles Times opined:

Having learned to be brutally candid in word and deed, cynical, pessimistic, unsparing – discoveries which are by no means unimportant – the movies tended to forget that all of us would in fact rather be romantic, idealistic, optimistic, and that if we have a capacity for violence we have a larger capacity for caring … If you have forgotten you could leave a movie feeling good rather than depressed, you might just want to join the queue outside Love Story. (Champlin 1970a)

For Time it was the beginning of a ‘counter-revolution’ against ‘sexual license and ‘X’-rated sprees’ (Kanfer 1970). For the Saturday Review the film was a reminder of ‘what movies once were all about: … a catharsis that was all the more joyous because it reaffirmed our essential humanity’ (Knight 1971). The magazine concluded that, together with Airport, ‘Love Story is going to bring back to the theaters large sections of that “lost audience” that hasn’t gone to a movie in years.’ (Three years later, similar comments were made about The Sting; see for example, Anon. 1973 and Meade 1973.)

When the ‘G’-rated Airport had received its initial roadshow release in February 1970, Variety had described it as ‘a handsome, often dramatically involving $10-million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking’ (Elley 2000: 11). According to Entertainment World, ‘it’s heartening that Hollywood still occasionally surfaces from the contemporary, psychedelic subculture and produces what should be a whoppingly successful, old-fashioned film’ (Gilbert 1970). The Los Angeles Times found the film ‘breathtaking in its celebration of anything which used to work when Hollywood was younger and we were all more innocent’, and found it to be ‘a deliberate appeal to the sedentary majority’ who had come to prefer watching television to going to the movies (Champlin 1970b). The Hollywood-Citizen News pointed out that ‘you can take your children along’, and also that the film’s producer had an excellent track record with Doris Day ‘women’s pictures’, thus suggesting that Airport was less male-oriented than most high-profile releases of those years (Scott 1970).

These themes recurred in the reception of subsequent disaster movies. In its review of The Poseidon Adventure, for example, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner wrote that the film was ‘an old-fashioned adventure suspense thriller … something of an aquatic Airport which departed from Hollywood’s recent preoccupations insofar as it made ‘no social comment. There’s no nudity. No drugs. No homosexuality … only the man in the street may like The Poseidon Adventure – but he and she will like it very much indeed’ (Scott 1972). Similarly, the Evening Outlook noted under the headline ‘At Last – Good Family Film’: ‘If you have been wondering what happened to old-fashioned movies … all-star casts, suspense, adventure and something you take the kids to without blushing, the answer is, they are back … There is no sex, no nudity, no drugs’ (Gropenwaldt 1972). While reviewers of disaster movies wrote increasingly – and ever more critically – about costs, special effects and technological spectacle, they explicitly related the films back to the tradition of big-budget epic filmmaking. Boxoffice highlighted Earthquake’s ‘monumental mesh of stunts, effects and editing that harkens back to former Hollywood eras’ (Anon. 1974d). The Hollywood Reporter described the film as ‘one of the biggest entertainments of epic-style filmaking (sic) history’ (Anon. 1974e), and also compared The Towering Inferno to the epics of Cecil B. DeMille (Dorr 1974).

FIGURE 8 Airport (George Seaton, 1970)

It would seem, then, that at the same time that the major studios, in the wake of the huge losses of 1969/70, withdrew from the production of traditional roadshow epics and musicals, they invested heavily, and often very successfully, into a new form of big-budget family entertainment, which was modeled on Airport. It is important to note that while the budgets for disaster movies (Airport, $10m; The Poseidon Adventure, $5m; Earthquake, $7m; The Towering Inferno, $15m; Airport 1975, $4m) were clearly above the average cost for a studio release (less than $2m in 1971 and $2.5m in 1974), they were far below the budgets of the most expensive roadshow epics and musicals, which cost in excess of $20m (Finler 2003: 123, 269; Steinberg 1980: 50). Thus, when abandoning the traditional roadshow, the majors shifted most of their biggest investments into what, for a while, was an eminently profitable new form of family entertainment (occasional flops notwithstanding). The high-profile releases and enormous success of these films, especially from 1972 to 1974, in turn appear to have achieved what the reviewers of Airport and Love Story had been hoping for, namely to bring back to the cinema many of the people who had stopped attending. By 1975, the share of the population aged 18 and over who never went to the cinema had dropped to 40 per cent, as compared to 43 per cent in 1972 (Jowett 1976: 486; Gertner 1979: 32A).

Conclusion

In the late 1960s the major studios invested heavily in two divergent production trends. On the one hand, on the back of the astonishing success of traditional roadshow epics and musicals in movie theatres in the early to mid-1960s and their ongoing popularity as evidenced by extended runs, television ratings and audience polls after 1966, the studios dramatically increased their output of these kinds of films. On the other hand, they released a growing number of films – including both relatively cheap productions such as the surprise hit The Graduate and big-budget star vehicles such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – which broke long-established taboos of filmic representation, especially with respect to sex, violence and race relations. While the taboo-breaking films were particularly attractive to some audience segments, notably male youth, they alienated large numbers of Americans (in particular older people and women and also, possibly, those with little education), many more of whom stopped going to the movies. By 1970, it was clear that, due to overproduction and the alienation of key audience segments, the large output of traditional roadshows could not be maintained. In the wake of massive losses generated by these films in 1969/70, the major studios used Airport, a huge hit in 1970, as the model for a new kind of big-budget family entertainment. (Interestingly, the other breakaway hit of 1970, Love Story, appears to have been a less successful model for future productions, perhaps because its attractions were less diverse; in particular, the film did not have much to offer to children.) With a string of high-profile and very successful disaster movies, especially The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, as well as other old-fashioned entertainments (most notably The Sting) the studios did indeed win back some of the previously lost audience after 1972. At the same time, the output and success of films featuring sex, violence, sacrilege and/or racial conflict continued, particularly with the superhits The Godfather, The Exorcist, Blazing Saddles, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Rocky.

As we have seen, an important precondition for the emergence of such films had been the weakening and abandonment of the Production Code from 1966 to 1968. The question remains why the MPAA’s attitude towards the Code had changed in 1966 and why there was such a strong interest in the breaking of filmic taboos among both filmmakers and some audiences.