On 25 May 1977 the film industry’s leading trade paper, Variety, published an enthusiastic review of George Lucas’ Star Wars (reprinted in Salewicz 1998: 123–5), declaring it to be ‘a magnificent film’, which ‘like a breath of fresh air … sweeps away the cynicism that has in recent years obscured the concepts of valour, dedication and honour’. According to Variety, the film drew on, and revived, older forms of Hollywood entertainment, including Flash Gordon serials, Errol Flynn adventures and ‘the genius of Walt Disney’ (who had died in December 1966, almost exactly a year before Time announced the Hollywood Renaissance). Like this older Hollywood, Star Wars had ‘all-age appeal’ and was an ‘affirmation of what only Hollywood can put on a screen’ – exciting action, spectacular technology and a ‘rousing score’ combined with sympathetic characters and ‘human drama’ set in an ‘intriguing intergalactic world’: ‘This is the kind of film in which an audience, first entertained, can later walk out feeling good all over.’ In effect, this review declared Star Wars to be a repudiation of many of the dominant trends of the New Hollywood (a claim which, as we have seen, had previously been made for disaster movies).
As it turned out,
Star Wars did not only become the second-biggest hit of all time up to this point (topped only by
Gone With the Wind, with its numerous re-releases, in the inflation-adjusted all-time chart; see Steinberg 1980: 3), but it also quickly established itself as the key reference point for debates among critics as well as filmmakers and cinemagoers about the pleasures and meanings, the potential and limitations of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Already in November 1977, for example, the
Variety review of Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (reprinted in Perry 1998: 108–9) noted: ‘[The film’s] dénouement is light years ahead of the climactic nonsense of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, in terms of real empathy with enduring human nature as it is (warts and all),
Close Encounters lacks the warmth and humanity of George Lucas’
Star Wars.’ Where
2001: A Space Odyssey, with its abstraction and ambiguity, had once been the benchmark for science fiction films, now it was the ‘warmth and humanity’ of
Star Wars.
FIGURE 10 Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
Film scholars soon responded to this shift, which applied not only to science fiction films, but seemed to affect Hollywood as a whole. By redefining the meaning of the term ‘New Hollywood’ (now referring to the period since the mid-1970s) or by introducing the notion of a ‘New New Hollywood’ or of a ‘post-modern’ American cinema, scholars identified the second half of the 1970s as another period of fundamental change in American film history (see Krämer 1998a: 301–5; for a recent contribution to this debate, see Shone 2004). Once again, broad critical agreements – now on the whole just as negative in their judgements as those about the Hollywood Renaissance had been positive – emerged swiftly. It was said that Hollywood was focusing ever more narrowly on blockbuster productions to be marketed in conjunction with countless tie-in products, and that filmic characterisation and storytelling were undermined by the prominence of merchandising and the films’ increasing emphasis on special effects and spectacle (although some dissenters argued that Hollywood had in fact entered a ‘neo-classical’ period of ever more efficient and effective storytelling). Furthermore, both aesthetically and politically Hollywood was deemed to have become much more conservative. At the heart of this re-orientation of American film culture were, it was widely agreed, science fiction and action-adventure films, most notably those directed and/or produced by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
While I would take issue with the negative critical evaluation of Hollywood’s big hits since the late 1970s in terms of both their aesthetics and their politics (see Krämer 1998a: 306–7 and 1998b, Thompson 1999, and Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996), there is no doubt that patterns of success have indeed changed significantly, with 1977 standing out as another major historical turning point. To demonstrate this, I want to compare the biggest hits of the decade from 1977 onwards with the New Hollywood Top 14 of the decade before 1977. Using the inflation-adjusted all-time chart which forms the basis for
appendices 2 and 4, I have selected all films from 1977–86 which outdo
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the lowest-ranked film from the New Hollywood Top 14 (the Roadshow Era Top 14 are also all ranked above
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). This once again creates a list of fourteen films (see
appendix 5; figures for rentals below are taken from Cohn 1993, and those for box office gross from
Variety 2000: 62–7; in the case of the
Star Wars films and
Grease, box office figures were adjusted so as to exclude re-releases after 1986):
| 1977 |
Star Wars (with rentals of $194m and a box office gross of 5323m), Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($83m/$156m), Smokey and the Bandit ($59m/$127m) |
| 1978 |
Grease ($96m/$153m), National Lampoon’s Animal House ($71m/$142m), Superman ($83m/$134m) |
| 1980 |
The Empire Strikes Back ($142m/$223m) |
| 1981 |
Raiders of the Lost Ark ($116m/$242m) |
| 1982 |
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial ($229m/$400m), Tootsie ($95m/$177m) |
| 1983 |
Return of the Jedi ($169m/$263m) |
| 1984 |
Ghostbusters ($133m/$239m), Beverly Hills Cop ($108m/$235m) |
| 1985 |
Back to the Future ($105m/$208m) |
Let us first of all examine whether these films have the same exalted status in American film culture from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s as the New Hollywood Top 14 (and the Roadshow Era Top 14) had in their time. The commercial success of
Star Wars was certainly astonishing. The film’s box office total of $323m was equivalent to 14 per cent of all income generated from cinema ticket sales in the US in 1977 ($2,376m), the year when
Star Wars made most of its money (Finler 2003: 377). This is comparable to the 12 per cent market share of
Jaws, the record holder among the New Hollywood Top 14, and the 17 per cent share of
The Sound of Music, the record holder among the Roadshow Era Top 14. The average ticket price in 1977 was $2.23 (2003: 379), which means that 145m tickets were sold for
Star Wars. This is equivalent to about 65 per cent of the American population in 1977 (however, it is certainly not the case that two-thirds of all Americans actually saw the film in the cinema at the time because there were many repeat viewers; see Earnest 1985: 16). Once again, this percentage is comparable to that for
Jaws (60 per cent) and
The Sound of Music (55 per cent).
The impact of
Star Wars on subsequent film production and audience choices was enormous, most directly through its sequels. Sequels and film series were by no means a new phenomenon. Feature films which continued the story told in a previous film, or which used the same set of characters as an earlier film without establishing any clear chronological sequence or causal connection between events in both films, had been around for a long time (see Simonet 1987). While sequels and series had usually been associated with the low-budget sector, both the Roadshow Era and the New Hollywood saw several highly successful big-budget sequels and series.
Jolson Sings Again (the third-highest-grossing movie of 1949), for example, was a sequel to
The Jolson Story (1946), and
Cinerama Holiday CLst/1955) can be regarded as a sequel to
This is Cinerama CLst/1952). The biggest success story prior to the
Star Wars trilogy was the James Bond series, which included
Goldfinger (3rd/1964),
From Russia With Love (5th/1964),
Thunderball (3rd/1965),
You Only Live Twice (8th/1967),
Diamonds Are Forever (5th/1971) and
Live and Let Die feth/1973) (see
appendices 1 and 3). Hit movies with top-ten sequels during the New Hollywood era include:
Funny Girl CLst/1968) and
Funny Lady (8th/1975);
The Love Bug (2nd/1969) and
Herbie Rides Again (10th/1974);
Billy Jack (2nd/1971) and
The Trial of Billy Jack (5th/1974);
The Godfather (1st/1972) and
The Godfather, Part II (6th/1974);
Dirty Harry (6th/1971),
Magnum Force (6th/1973) and
The Enforcer (8th/1976); one might also include
Airport (2nd/1970) and
Airport 1975 (7th/1974) although hardly any characters are carried over from the first to the second film.
Jaws also had two sequels, the first of which was a top ten hit in 1978 (top ten hits of the late 1970s are listed in Cook 2000: 501–2).
Thus, the success of the Star Wars sequels was not without precedent. However, even the two breakaway hits that the Bond series generated in the mid-1960s pale in comparison with the box office dominance of the Star Wars trilogy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Furthermore, several other breakaway hits of 1977–86 also generated top-grossing sequels, including Smokey and the Bandit II (7th/1980), Superman II (3rd/1981) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (3rd/1984) (Anon. 1991b: 81–2). The next tier of hit movies below the Top 14 also generated numerous top ten sequels, ranging from Staying Alive (9th/1983), the follow-up to Saturday Night Fever ürd/1977), to several sequels of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (2nd/1979). Furthermore, several top ten hits from 1977–86 were themselves sequels of pre-1977 top ten hits, including more Bond films and several sequels to Rocky. Compared to the decade before 1977, then, sequelisation became a much more important phenomenon in the annual top ten from 1977 onwards, and it was also more blatant, due to the widespread use of numerals in film titles.
The greater prominence of sequels did not, however, affect the market share of the Top 14. Indeed, the market share of the breakaway hits from 1977 to 1986 is comparable to that of the breakaway hits of the New Hollywood and the Roadshow Era. If we add up the grosses for the ten most successful films of the decade 1977–86 (one per year), the total amounts to $2,466m, which is 8 per cent of the total box office earnings in the US during these years (Finler 2003: 377). As we saw in
chapter one, the ten highest-grossing films for 1967–76 had a market share of 10 per cent, and the fourteen highest-grossing films for the fourteen years from 1952 to 1965 had a market share of 6 per cent. This means that, contrary to received opinion, the concentration of box office revenues on breakaway hits is slightly
less pronounced in the decade from 1977 onwards than during the decade before 1977 (but more pronounced than during the Roadshow Era).
Another change concerns the status of film showings on television. As we have seen, until the late 1970s traditional roadshow epics and musicals together with New Hollywood superhits dominated the all-time ratings charts for movies (with only very few made-for-TV movies being able to compete). Indeed, these film broadcasts were among the highest rated programmes of any kind in American television history up to that point. The superhits since 1977 have been unable to match the ratings of earlier hits, and they have also been left far behind by made-for-TV movies and mini-series, season finales of popular series and sports broadcasts since 1977 (
People 2000: 162). What is more, from the late 1970s onwards, fewer movie nights than before were included in the annual listings of the twenty top-rated TV programmes (
People 2000: 156–8).
At the same time, however, the superhits of 1977–86 played an important role in the growth, in the late 1970s, of two new delivery systems for audiovisual entertainment, namely cable television and home video. Movies in general, and breakaway hits in particular, were the main attraction of successful pay-cable services such as HBO (see Hilmes 1990) and by the early 1980s they also dominated the sales and rentals of pre-recorded videotapes (see Wasser 2001). The top ten of Billboard magazine’s first video sales chart, in 1980, include Superman and Grease (as well as Saturday Night Fever); Superman is also in the top ten for 1981 (People 2000: 110). Billboard’s first video rentals chart, in 1982, has Star Wars at no. 4; the film also is at no. 8 in the sales chart for the following year, and its first sequel is ranked 8th in the rentals chart for 1985. In 1984, Raiders of the Lost Ark is at no. 2 in the sales chart (dropping to no. 7 in 1985) and at the top of the rentals chart. In 1986, Beverly Hills Cop is at no. 4 in the sales chart and at no. 2 in the rentals chart (with Ghostbusters at no. 5). E.T. became one of the all-time best-selling videos after it was finally released in 1989 (see Jamgocyan 1998). Thus, while the Top 14 of 1977–86 no longer dominated the TV ratings charts, they did extremely well on video. Between video sales and rentals, showings on pay-cable and network broadcasts, they continued to reach large segments of the American population at home (as did the superhits of earlier eras; the popularity of films like The Godfather, The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind on video throughout the 1980s is particularly striking).
The resonance of the Top 14 of 1977–86 across other media is comparable to the resonance breakaway hits had in earlier periods, although the focus shifted to different product categories. The traditional association of superhits with best-selling books and soundtracks as well as Broadway shows is still in evidence in some cases, but it is, in fact, much reduced by comparison with the superhits of preceding eras. The soundtrack for
Grease, which was based on one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, was the second best-selling album of 1978, outsold only by the
Saturday Night Fever soundtrack; both records were among the top-selling albums of all time (
People 2000: 221–8, 327). The
Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack was the seventh-biggest-selling album of 1985 and ‘Ghostbusters’ the ninth-biggest-selling single of 1984. The
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook was the top-selling fiction hardcover of 1983, and the
Return of the Jedi Storybook took the no. 1 spot in 1982 (2000: 304–5). While many of the other films in the Top 14 – and indeed across the annual top ten – were tied in with novels, soundtracks or singles, by and large these were
less prominent in the respective charts than the books and records associated with the hits of earlier periods had been (see
People 2000: 218–25, 298–306).
However, whereas almost all Roadshow Era superhits and most New Hollywood superhits had been based on pre-existing stories in other media, this no longer applied to the superhits of 1977–86. The only films in the Top 14 adapted from a specific non-filmic source were Grease and Superman, and the two best-selling tie-in novels were based on films rather than the films being based on them. What is more, there were countless other products derived from the films, ranging from t-shirts to toys. While this was by no means unprecedented (Disney films and Jaws being important precursors), the amount of merchandise sold on the back of superhits – and also, of course, of lesser hits – increased dramatically (see for example, Prince 2000b: 137–40; for the impact of Star Wars and other movie merchandise on the toy industry, see Cross 1997: 202–5). Once again this merchandise in turn helped to promote the films.
What about the status of breakaway hits among audiences, critics and filmmakers? In the light of later critical attacks on the film, it is somewhat surprising to see that, in the late 1970s,
Star Wars received widespread recognition comparable to the recognition received by
The Graduate and the rest of the New Hollywood Top 14.
Star Wars made it onto the annual ‘Ten Best’ lists compiled by
Time and the
New York Times (as did
Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and was voted the best film of 1977 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (Steinberg 1980: 175, 179, 308). The National Board of Review selected
Star Wars (as well as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as one of the five best English-language films of the year (1980: 284). Furthermore,
Star Wars won seven Academy Awards from ten nominations; however, while nominated for Best Picture and Screenplay, it only received Oscars in the technical and crafts categories (the results for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind were similar) (Elley 2000: 162, 809). Nevertheless,
Star Wars was immediately recognised as one of the all-time greats. Already in 1977, it was voted one of the ten best American films of all time by members of the American Film Institute, and as one of the ten all-time favourites by readers of the
Los Angeles Times (2000: 144, 189). The following year, a survey among leading critics conducted by the film magazine
Take One identified
Star Wars (and also
Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as one of the forty best films of the decade 1968–77, and a survey of college students found that
Star Wars was their second favourite film of all time (after
Gone With the Wind) (2000: 155–7, 182–3). At the end of the decade
Time selected
Star Wars as one of the ten best American films of the 1970s (2000: 179).
Despite all these accolades for
Star Wars, already in 1977 there were clear signs that the critical status of breakaway hits was changing. As we have seen,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was well-received, but much less so than
Star Wars, and the third breakaway hit of the year, the Burt Reynolds action-comedy
Smokey and the Bandit, was nowhere to be found on ‘Ten Best’ lists or at award ceremonies. The film receiving the highest accolades both from critics and the film industry itself was Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall, which was only a minor hit in 1977. In the following decade, Hollywood’s breakaway hits were rarely the favourites of critics and industry personnel, although several of them joined the all-time ranks of audience favourites (the Internet Movie Database users chart – as accessed on 14 September 2004 – has
Star Wars at no. 10,
The Empire Strikes Back at no. 13 and
Raiders of the Lost Ark at no. 17;
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top). None of the Top 14 of 1977–86 won any of the major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay), which instead went to the next tier of big hits such as
Kramer vs.
Kramer (1st/1979),
On Golden Pond (2nd/1981),
Terms of Endearment (2nd/1983),
Out of Africa (5th/1985) and
Platoon (3rd/1986), or to films which never even made the annual top ten such as
Coming Home (1978),
Gandhi (1982) and
Amadeus (1984) (see Cook 2000: 501–2; Anon. 1991b: 81–4).
In what ways did the kinds of films which became breakaway hits differ from the New Hollywood Top 14? The first thing to note is that science fiction (the
Star Wars trilogy,
E.T., Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
Superman) and what one might call fantastic comedy-adventures (
Raiders of the Lost Ark and
Ghostbusters) clearly dominate the Top 14 of 1977–86, making up nine out of fourteen films, including the top five (see
appendix 5). This constitutes a major shift in hit patterns, and this shift is indeed very closely associated with two filmmakers; as directors, writers and/or producers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were involved with seven of these nine science fiction/fantasy-adventure films, once again including the top five. The New Hollywood Top 14 (as well as the Roadshow Era Top 14) did not include a single science fiction film or fantastic comedy-adventure, nor can many films of these types be found in the annual top ten for 1967–76; the exceptions are
2001: A Space Odyssey and
Planet of the Apes in 1968 and
A Clockwork Orange in 1971, although it also has to be noted that Bond films often featured futuristic technology (see
appendix 1).
In addition to constituting a major generic shift in hit patterns, the prominence of science fiction and fantastic comedy-adventures among the breakaway hits from 1977 to 1986 also is reminiscent of (but not quite as complete as) the dominance of three types of films (historical epics, international adventures and musicals) among the Roadshow Era Top 14. What is more, like those earlier breakaway hits, they are family-friendly and addressed to an all-inclusive audience, which is indicated by their ‘PG’ ratings, by the absence of sex, bad language and graphic violence (unless it is rendered comically), and the playing down of other potentially controversial elements. Indeed, these films actively court children and their parents – in addition to the core audience of teenagers and young adults – insofar as most of them feature young children, teenagers or somewhat child-like adults in stories about familial or quasi-familial relationships; the films also appeal to adults’ nostalgic fondness for entertainment forms (such as comic strips, movie serials, fairytales and ghost stories) which they remember from their own childhood (see Krämer 1998b). As is indicated by reviews in Variety and a wide range of other newspapers and magazines, these films were certainly perceived at the time as a return to old-fashioned family entertainment (see Krämer 2002b: 186–7, and 2004: 365–6; across the Top 14, we find only two ‘R’ rated films: Animal House and Beverly Hills Cop).
It is also possible to detect in these films a return to the epic form (that is the spectacular engagement with key moments in human history) and to spiritual matters, albeit now in the guise of science fiction and fantasy. Following on in many ways from
2001: A Space Odyssey, the
Star Wars trilogy is clearly epic and also explicitly spiritual (with its emphasis on ‘the Force’). Both
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
E.T. depict a transformative moment in history, namely the encounter with extraterrestrials, and they do so with distinctly religious overtones.
Raiders of the Lost Ark tells its adventure story, which culminates with a display of divine power, against the backdrop of the rise of fascism. Superman is a kind of saviour figure, and
Ghostbusters stages a near-apocalypse brought about by an evil supernatural force. No doubt influenced by the success of the above films, especially
Star Wars and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, many more science fiction and fantasy films (as well as some horror movies) with epic and/or spiritual resonances can be found among the annual top ten from 1977 to 1986. They range from
Star Trek – The Motion Picture (2nd/1979) to
Wargames (5th/1983),
Cocoon (6th/1985) and
Aliens (7th/1986); from
Time Bandits (9th/1981) and
Heaven Can Wait (6th/1978) to
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (3rd/1984) and
The Golden Child (8th/1986); from
The Amityville Horror (8th/1979) to
Poltergeist (7th/1982). Outside science fiction, fantasy and horror, the annual top ten included several ‘straight’ epics such as the war films
A Bridge Too Far (10th/1977),
The Deer Hunter (9th/1978),
Apocalypse Now (6th/1979) and
Platoon (3rd/1983), and the female-centered sentimental historical dramas
Out of Africa (5th/1985) and
The Color Purple (4th/1985), as well as more films with explicitly religious or spiritual themes such as
Oh, God! (6th/1977) and
The Karate Kid (5th/1984). Indeed, the share of hit movies featuring some form of supernatural event increased from 6 per cent in the decade 1966–75 to 26 per cent for 1976–90 (Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996: 131).
In addition to this renewed emphasis on spirituality and the epic, the Top 14 of 1977–86 also indicate a more prominent role for musicals with pop, rock and country music replacing traditional showtunes (a trend which started in the mid-1970s, as we saw in
chapter two). The breakaway success of
Grease is complemented by other musicals in the annual top ten, including
Saturday Night Fever ürd/1977),
Popeye (10th/1980),
The Blues Brothers (8th/1980),
Coal Miner’s Daughter (5th/1980),
Annie (10th/1982),
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (9th/1982),
Staying Alive (9th/1983),
Flashdance ferd/1983) and
Footloose (7th/1984). Another echo of the Roadshow Era Top 14 is the preponderance of calculated blockbusters, that is, films which due to their stars, budget or source material could be expected to do well, the most clear-cut cases being sequels to breakaway hits. As far as budgets are concerned, nine of the Top 14 of 1977–86 were clearly above average, four were just above (
Grease and
Beverly Hills Cop) or just below (
Smokey and the Bandit and
E.T.), and only
Animal House was a low-budget film, costing $2.7m at a time when the average budget was $5m (Finler 2003: 42, 95, 123, 190, 269, 298). Since
Animal House and
E.T. also lacked established movie stars and were not based on popular source material, they can be seen as the only true surprise hits among the Top 14 – whereas the New Hollywood Top 14 included four big surprises. In many respects, then, the Top 14 and, more generally, the annual top ten of 197786, turned away from the most important trends of the New Hollywood and towards older traditions of the Roadshow Era.
At the same time, there are clear continuities with the New Hollywood Top 14. Indeed some trends become more pronounced. Except for the alternative universe of the Star Wars films and the 1930s international settings of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the films’ stories all take place in postwar America, and with the exception of Grease, Animal House and parts of Back to the Future and Superman, they are basically set at the time when they were released. The central protagonists of all the films are male (only in Grease is the male protagonist complemented by a woman receiving equal attention), and the only woman who gets top billing is Dee Wallace, who plays the mother in E.T. As in the preceding decade, the breakaway hits of 1977–86 continue to address social divisions of various kinds, including class differences (most notably in Animal House, Grease and Beverly Hills Cop) and generational tensions (notably through father/son relationships as in the Star Wars trilogy and Back to the Future).
Arguably, the emphasis on conflictual gender relations and romance is more pronounced than in the New Hollywood Top 14, especially in
Grease and
Tootsie, but also in
Smokey and the Bandit, Superman and
Back to the Future; even the
Star Wars trilogy,
Raiders of the Lost Ark and
Ghostbusters have important screwball-type romantic storylines. More generally, one might characterise the Top 14 of 1977–86, despite the prominence of science fiction, action-adventure and male protagonists, as more female-friendly than the New Hollywood Top 14, due to their avoidance of extreme violence and graphic sex (
Animal House being an exception), and their frequent emphasis on romantic love and familial relations. Broadening the perspective to include the annual top ten hits and the main Oscar winners certainly confirms this sense that from 1977 onwards Hollywood’s commercially and critically most successful films belonged far more often than during the preceding decade to those genres typically preferred by women, that is, musicals, romantic comedies, costume films, contemporary dramas and weepies (Krämer 1999: 99). Furthermore, after a decade in which Quigley’s annual lists of top box office attractions had usually included only one woman (mostly Barbra Streisand), from 1977 to 1982, there were on average three (from 1983 the figure went down again) (Moser 1997: 19A).
Another shift concerns the focus on ethnicity in the New Hollywood Top 14 which was largely replaced in the superhits of 1977–86 by an emphasis on racial difference, mostly expressed in a fantastic fashion (through extraterrestrial/non-human characters in the Star Wars trilogy, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T. and Ghostbusters) and only once in terms of contemporary social reality (the African-American cop in an all-white setting in Beverly Hills Cop). However, several hits (co-)starring African-American stars can be found in the annual top ten, including Stir Crazy (3rd/1980), 48 Hours (8th/1982), Trading Places (4th/1983), The Color Purple (4th/1985) and The Golden Child (8th/1986). After a twelve-year absence from Quigley’s top ten box office attractions, African-American stars finally returned from 1982 onwards; Richard Pryor in 1982 was followed by Eddie Murphy from 1983 to 1986, Prince in 1984 and Whoopi Goldberg in 1986 (Moser 1997: 19A). Furthermore, black musicians are featured attractions in The Blues Brothers (8th/1980), and there are prominent supporting roles for African-American performers in, for example, the Rocky sequels and An Officer and a Gentleman (3rd/1982). Indeed, African-Americans made up almost 10 per cent of all (major and minor) characters in hit movies, which is close to their share of the American population (12 per cent) (Powers, Rothman & Rothman 1996: 175–6).
As in previous decades, then, American cinema of the years 1977–86 was dominated by a small group of films, which generated a significant portion of overall film industry income (somewhat smaller, though, than during the New Hollywood), were seen by up to half of the American population in movie theatres (and also on television and video), had a mutually beneficial link to popular tie-in products (with toys now figuring more prominently than books and soundtracks) and exerted a strong influence on future film production and hit patterns (especially through sequels), while also often becoming all-time audience favourites. Unlike in previous decades, however, these breakaway hits were (with one exception) no longer received with widespread acclaim by critics and industry personnel. While their critical standing was thus much reduced, their status as popular-cultural trendsetters had increased, because, rather than adapting stories from other media, they now typically became the sources for such adaptations.
As a group, the fourteen biggest hits of 1977–86 compared in complex ways to the Top 14s of the New Hollywood and the Roadshow Era. Due to the prominence of science fiction and fantastic comedy-adventures (mostly made by Lucas and Spielberg), they were generically less diverse than the New Hollywood Top 14 but more so than the Roadshow Era Top 14. Quite unlike the superhits of the Roadshow Era, they favoured contemporary American settings as much as the New Hollywood Top 14 and, like them, often explored social divisions and foregrounded the actions and experiences of male protagonists. Yet, the Top 14 of 1977–86 were more likely to deal with racial than with ethnic differences and foregrounded gender relations more than the New Hollywood Top 14 had done. They also included fewer surprise hits. Furthermore, they signalled a major revival of the two dominant film types of the Roadshow Era: the musical and the epic. The former, however, now featured rock and pop music, and the latter dealt primarily with fantasy versions of history. At the same time, the Top 14 of 1977–86 moved spirituality and religion back to the centre of American film culture, albeit in the guise of fantasy and science fiction. Perhaps most importantly, building on the success of the disaster cycle, the majority of the Top 14 of 1977–86 revived the Roadshow Era ideal of all-inclusive family entertainment, bringing together youth and children as well as their parents, both male and female, and often doing so by putting familial relationships at the centre of their stories.
There is evidence that the all-inclusiveness of most superhits was connected to a new inclusiveness of the cinemagoing public. As we saw in
chapter two, in 1972 the share of people who attended cinemas only infrequently (one or twice a year) or never was 61 per cent among women over 17 and 79 per cent among those who had not completed high school (Jowett 1976: 485–6). By 1983, these figures had come down to 53 per cent for women over 17 and 68 per cent for those without a high school diploma (the respective figures for males over 17 and people with some higher education were, of course, lower still with 42 per cent and 31 per cent; Gertner 1985: 32A). The drop-off at the age of 30 was also much less dramatic. In 1972, 25-29-year-olds made up 9 per cent of the population over 11, and bought 14 per cent of all tickets purchased by those over 11; the figures for 30-39-year-olds were 15 per cent of the population and 11 per cent of tickets (Jowett 1976: 485). In 1983, the respective figures for 25-29-year-olds were 11 per cent of the population and 14 per cent of tickets, that is, this group bought proportionally fewer tickets than in 1972; for 30-39-year-olds the figure was 18 per cent for both the population share and the share of tickets, which means that this group bought proportionally more tickets than in 1972 (Gertner 1985: 30A). While this trend towards a more inclusive audience was, as we have seen, already under way in the mid-1970s, it is reasonable to assume that the huge impact of family-adventure movies such as
Star Wars and female-oriented superhits such as
Grease helped to make cinema audiences ever more inclusive from 1977 onwards. This ties in with the supposition that the family-adventures and women’s pictures among the superhits owed their breakaway success precisely to attracting those people who rarely, if ever, went to the cinema, whereas many of the New Hollywood superhits depended largely on (repeat) attendance by young people who tended to be frequent cinemagoers. Where several of the New Hollywood superhits further alienated those who only rarely attended cinemas (especially older people and women), most of the superhits of 1977–86 signalled to the American population that it was safe to go to the movies again (see also Krämer 1998b, 2002b, 2004, 2006).
From this analysis, the years 1967–76 do indeed emerge as a very distinctive period in American film history. Despite all its commercial and critical successes, American cinema from 1967 to 1976 was, as far as its stories were concerned, highly derivative (with most superhits adapting stories from other media), and it was quite exclusive, insofar as it failed to attract large segments of the American population, instead primarily serving male youth. What
Star Wars and similar breakaway hits from 1977 onwards achieved was to bring back many people who had previously given up on the cinema, and also to generate new stories (based on long-established traditions, of course, but never told before) which were so appealing that they have been extended and re-told countless times both in films and in other media ever since. Rather than primarily adapting existing stories for a niche cinema audience of male youth, since the late 1970s movies have once again become a genuine mass medium, and an important driving force in the entertainment industry.
In conclusion, then, this book has offered a new perspective on the period 1967–76 in American cinema, a decade which saw the theatrical release of over 2000 American-financed films in the US (plus roughly the same amount of foreign-financed films; Finler 2003: 367). From this vast corpus, using an inflation-adjusted box office chart, I selected a small group of breakaway hits, demonstrating the centrality of these films for the film industry and its audiences, and establishing their distinctive thematic concerns by comparing them with the superhits of the decades preceding and following the New Hollywood. This comparison revealed significant thematic shifts between the three sets of superhits, which also could be found across the annual top ten lists. Notwithstanding the incredible diversity of the overall output of the American film industry, from the Roadshow Era to the New Hollywood the thematic emphasis of hit movies shifted from key developments in Western history to the social divisions of contemporary America and the operations of its main institutions, from foreign nations and nationalities to American ethnicities and race relations, from family-friendly representations to graphic displays of sex and violence.
I offered an explanation for these thematic shifts by examining the dynamic interplay between the output of the American film industry and the composition and preferences of cinema audiences in the US, which can be approximated with the help of audience surveys conducted at the time. This examination revealed that in the late 1960s and early 1970s overall industry output was in line with some audience preferences (especially those of male youth), but not others. In particular, ongoing preferences for traditional family-oriented musicals and historical epics, which continued to be immensely popular on television and in audience surveys in the 1970s, were no longer serviced in cinemas during the first half of the decade, and the objections of many people to, among other things, high levels of sex and violence were disregarded. As a result, large segments of the American population (notably women and older people) were alienated from the cinemagoing experience, some only temporarily, others permanently. Hence, it is not the case that Hollywood always gives the people what they want. However, ignoring the concerns and preferences of large population segments is clearly detrimental to the industry’s long-term financial health, and it could therefore be expected that efforts would soon be made to overcome the alienation of those segments, as indeed they were with increasing success after 1972.
In order to explain Hollywood’s bias and the polarised responses of various audience segments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I examined a number of developments in the American entertainment industry and in American society at large. Assuming, as most film historians do, that there is some relationship between changes in films and changes in society at large, I used opinion polls as a measure of key aspects of social, cultural and political change. I argued that, across the 1960s and 1970s, public opinion in the US became ever more polarised, with youth being at the forefront of liberalisation, and older people often being left behind (although on the whole their attitudes were slowly becoming more liberal as well). The relationship between the thematic concerns of hit movies and the outlook of the increasingly liberal youth audience was by no means straightforward. Hit movies were in line with some liberal attitudes (notably about sex, race, ethnicity, foreign policy and the shortcomings of the social, political and economic order), but ignored, even reversed others (notably about gender equality). Furthermore, it has to be emphasised that for more liberal movies to be made in the first place, the film industry had to change so as to make it more responsive to, and potentially even an engine of, social change. I argued that the integration, or transformation, of film companies into corporations operating across a range of media, and indeed across a range of industries, disrupted their long-established hierarchies and traditional ways of doing business (most notably the implementation of the Production Code). This disruption created opportunities for new generations of film executives and filmmakers, often with a politically and culturally liberal outlook, and for the quick adoption of (thematic) innovations in television, publishing and popular music. The hits of the New Hollywood arose from the interplay between such changes in the film industry and the liberalisation of American society.
Finally, I want to suggest that the integrated analysis of hit patterns, film industrial developments and social change offered in this study with respect to the New Hollywood can be applied to other periods of change in American film history. As this conclusion has demonstrated, another obvious candidate for such an analysis is the transformation of American cinema in the late 1970s. But this requires, I think, another book.