Conclusion
The End of the Road
This transition into the seventies is maybe the most interesting as well as the most confusing in American movie history, yet there’s a real possibility that, because the tastes of the young audience are changing so fast, the already tottering studios will decide to minimize risks and gear production straight to the square audience and the networks. That square audience is far more alienated than the young one—so alienated that it isn’t looking for anything at the movies.
—Pauline Kael, “The Bottom of the Pit,” New Yorker, 1969
And as quickly as it all began, it was over. The headline of the November 3, 1971, issue of Variety proclaimed, “Youth Shuns Youth-Lure Films.” Addison Verrill’s article begins, “another improvised ‘adage’ of the U.S. film trade is taking a beating. The vaunted ‘youth market’ is no longer dependable.”1 Verrill lists almost thirty youth-centric titles released during the year, none of which managed to make an impact on the box office. In addition to Two-Lane Blacktop, The Last Movie, The Hired Hand, and Drive, He Said, Verrill also mentions such contemporaneous but now-forgotten box-office failures as Dusty and Sweets McGee (dir. Floyd Mutrux, Warner Bros., 1971), Medicine Ball Caravan (dir. François Reichenbach, Warner Bros., 1971), and Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (dir. Jeffrey Young, Paramount Pictures, 1971). Verrill concludes that despite the youth market comprising 74 percent of US cinema patronage, this audience was shunning the very titles contrived to capture and capitalize upon its presumed viewing habits. For Verrill, studio executives made a grave miscalculation in pigeonholing the projected tastes of the young audience. There is no intimation at any point in Verrill’s article that the youth-cult cycle might represent something of a renaissance; his tone is strictly pragmatic, befitting Variety’s industrial trade paper status.
While Verrill was proclaiming the end of the youth-cult cycle in late 1971, Pauline Kael had expressed similar sentiments the previous year, writing of the new youth films:
Except for the big hits, the newer kinds of movies mostly don’t satisfy anybody. After the breakdown of the studio system, the good side of the chaotic situation got attention first, with the looser, more individual-in-style films of Sam Peckinpah, Mazursky and Tucker, Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, and others; but the bad side is becoming overpowering, and that regular weekly audience, decimated by television, is being shriveled by too many nights at movies like End of the Road [dir. Aram Avakian, Allied Artists Pictures, 1970], The Looking Glass War [dir. Frank R. Pierson, Columbia Pictures, 1969], Futz [dir. Tom O’Horgan, Commonwealth United Entertainment, Inc., 1969], Duffy [dir. Robert Parrish, Columbia Pictures, 1968], The Legend of Lylah Clare [dir. Robert Aldrich, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968], The Bed Sitting Room [dir. Richard Lester, Lopert Pictures, 1969], The Magus [dir. Guy Green, Twentieth Century Fox, 1968], Coming Apart [dir. Milton Moses Ginsberg, Kaleidoscope Films, 1969], The Happy Ending [dir. Richard Brooks, United Artists, 1969], The Adventurers [dir. Lewis Gilbert, Paramount Pictures, 1970], The Magic Christian [dir. Joseph McGrath, Commonwealth United Entertainment, Inc., 1970]. Why should people submit to more? The answer is they don’t and almost all the films released this summer have been box-office bummers.2
Also in 1970, Easy Rider cinematographer László Kovács expressed a sense of belatedness, telling Michael Goodwin in Take One, “I was a part of such an exciting era. I feel a little like a has-been, because somehow that era is already gone.”3 Even Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, one of the most prominent attempts at enshrining a decade-spanning New Hollywood historiography, contains a quote from Easy Rider and Last Movie production manager Paul Lewis: “[T]he freedom that we were allowed was over with The Last Movie, The Hired Hand, and Two-Lane Blacktop. The end of the ’70s began at the beginning of the ’70s.”4 Both of these quotations imply an acknowledgment that the New Hollywood—or a version of it—had culminated by the early 1970s, a moment more typically remembered as the lofty midpoint of the era. Certainly by 1973 the youth-cult boom was well and truly over.
James William Guercio’s belated entry in the post–Easy Rider cycle, Electra Glide in Blue, opened in New York in August 1973, having earlier played that year’s Cannes Film Festival, like Easy Rider before it.5 Electra Glide in Blue flips Easy Rider’s antiauthoritarian paradigm, with Robert Blake starring as a motorcycle cop. Yet the film upholds Easy Rider’s generic structure, concluding with its protagonist being fatally blasted from his motorcycle by the occupants of a passing vehicle; this time the gunman is a hippie rather than a redneck. The film was Guercio’s directorial debut. He was previously best known for his work as a record producer for the band Chicago, which was making the transition from jazz-fusion art rock combo to the soft rock formula that would bring it enormous commercial success from the mid-1970s onward. Guercio drew upon his extensive connections in the music industry to compose and record an elaborate score for Electra, and members of Chicago appeared onscreen in minor roles, much as Hopper inserted Phil Spector into a cameo role in Easy Rider. Yet United Artists’s marketing for the film centered not on the music, but on a photograph of the twenty-seven-year-old director himself, “clad in work shirt and director’s saddle boots.”6 Guercio had to deny accusations that he himself paid for these ads, along with charges in the trade papers that cinematographer Conrad Hall had unofficially directed the film.7 None of these promotional moves helped the film’s commercial fortunes; it took in less than $1 million dollars at the box office.8 By this point the cycle had truly run out of steam, finding the last gasp of its expression in generic hybrids like Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Race with the Devil (dir. Jack Starrett, 20th Century Fox, 1975).
If, as it appears, the importance of the youth audience had faded by 1973, then in order to reappraise the validity of the New Hollywood historical prism, it is necessary to consider the prevailing conditions of production, distribution, and reception throughout the period. Easy Rider remains an important starting point for rethinking conventional accounts of the period. Despite incorporating many formal devices that were unfamiliar in a Hollywood context at the time, its cinematic style was typically overlooked or met with derision from critics. This did not prevent the film from becoming an enormous commercial triumph, visibly galvanizing and consolidating the importance of the mass youth audience. A key factor that enabled such unprecedented box-office success was Easy Rider’s availability for multiple interpretations, while its exploitation origins and prominently branded soundtrack provided a variety of entry points for various audience members. Easy Rider’s commercial success instigated a cycle of similar films, which recombined elements of Hopper’s formula in the hope of appealing to an equally broad youth audience.
While many of these films incorporated narrative and thematic elements from Easy Rider, most crucially failed to employ Hopper’s ideological ambiguity and exploitation cinema sensibility. The most formally daring of these imitators were frequently abandoned by distributors before ever finding an audience. Some, such as Two-Lane Blacktop, eventually had their reputations repaired by new generations of critics, while others, such as Little Fauss and Big Halsy, were not afforded sufficient promotional prominence to flag their visibility for retrospective reappraisal, and they lapsed into indefinite obscurity. Taken as a cycle, few of these films were seriously regarded by critics within their historical moment, and their subsequent revision into the New Hollywood canon has been a retrospective, and selective, critical process.
The related fortunes of the contemporaneous The French Connection and Dirty Harry indicate the way in which the critical reception of films was heavily informed by assumptions about stardom and genre. Just as Easy Rider inaugurated a cycle of imitators, so too did these cop films, inspiring such titles as The New Centurions (dir. Richard Fleischer, Columbia Pictures, August 1, 1972), Serpico (dir. Sidney Lumet, Paramount Pictures, December 5, 1973), The Seven-Ups (dir. Philip D’Antoni, Twentieth Century-Fox, December 21, 1973), and McQ(February 1, 1974), not to mention Magnum Force (dir. Ted Post, Warner Bros., December 25, 1973) and French Connection II (dir. John Frankenheimer, Twentieth Century Fox, May 19, 1975). The fate that awaited Hopper’s avant-garde The Last Movie effectively foreclosed the kind of studio-sanctioned creative freedom that has become a central tenet of the retrospectively enshrined New Hollywood mythology. In the heart of what is now regarded as the New Hollywood moment, the critical establishment had already tired of the youth-cult production trend and effectively assassinated Hopper’s ambition to work with more daring formal elements inspired by European art cinema and American underground experimental film. This in turn limited the aesthetic parameters of the critically constructed New Hollywood, helping to reinforce risk-averse, formally conservative production practices, an outcome that is at odds with conventional conceptions of the New Hollywood. But then again, The Last Movie bears little resemblance to the most commonly identified New Hollywood productions, and the fact that Hopper’s film was essentially buried by its distributor prevented it from achieving even the kind of cult success that may have awaited it had it been permitted to play for long enough to find its audience. Furthermore, its continued unavailability means that in the foreseeable future it is unlikely to receive the kind of reappraisal that has been extended to Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point. Nevertheless, The Last Movie’s existence points to the potential elasticity of the New Hollywood banner, even as most conventional conceptualizations of the canon continue to exclude Hopper’s film.
The youth-cult road movie cycle, produced in the wake of Easy Rider’s commercial success, represented Hollywood’s concerted attempt to retain a youth audience. This cycle is defined by its use of contemporary settings, its self-conscious cinematic style, its subversion of generic convention, and its downbeat endings. In addition, the films of the cycle shared similar conditions of production, predicated on the success of Easy Rider, and imitated, to varying degrees, Hopper’s production methods. Few of the entries in this cycle achieved immediate critical success. None came close to equaling the commercial success of Hopper’s directorial debut. Despite premeditated production imperatives to duplicate Hopper’s structural formula, the fates of Easy Rider’s imitators were ultimately determined throughout the stages of distribution, exhibition, and reception. Some films failed to appeal to a sufficiently wide youth audience, having neglected to re-create Easy Rider’s exploitation formula, while others were mismarketed, neglected, or abandoned at the point of distribution.
One important reason for Easy Rider’s success is the years that Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson had spent working in Roger Corman’s exploitation stock. The commercially minded sensibility forged under Corman emerges in the form of Easy Rider’s rock soundtrack, drug content, and spectacularized motorcycle sequences, as well as in its open-ended narrative structure that appealed to a broad audience spanning the political spectrum. None of Easy Rider’s imitators successfully managed to recombine these elements in a similarly commercially successful manner. The eventual reappraisal of Two-Lane Blacktop and the belated (if limited) cult success of Vanishing Point can be attributed to the atypicality of these films and their unwillingness to adhere to generic conventions or typical Hollywood modes of representation. The very atypical aspects of the small body of films that constitute the New Hollywood as it is now popularly recognized have been retrospectively and selectively championed by new generations of critics, following Elsaesser’s early lead. The more typical, and now-forgotten, youth-cult artifacts Little Fauss and Big Halsy and Adam at 6 A.M. demonstrate the continuing relevance of stardom and distribution muscle during the early 1970s. Stardom had ramifications not just for initial box-office success, but also for the possibility of these films finding an audience decades later; thus far fate has continued to consign these two films to obscurity.
Despite their similarities in theme and narrative structure, the disparate stylistic approaches employed by each of these films—the austerity of Two-Lane Blacktop, the kaleidoscopic fragmentation and occasional detours into avant-garde modes of representation in Easy Rider, the self-consciously performance-oriented Five Easy Pieces, and the kinetic action mode of Vanishing Point—problematize the project of identifying a unifying cinematic style even within this self-contained cycle. Overall, at the point of production the youth-cult cycle represents a brief bubble of deviation from conventional narrative and generic formulae, driven nonetheless by (misjudged) commercial imperatives that were promptly abandoned in the process of distribution and exhibition. The films of the cycle often fell victim to personnel changes at the distribution companies. New executives frequently found themselves unwillingly inheriting such uncertain commercial properties. More often than not the decision was made to let these low-budget productions die a quick death with a limited release and a minimum of promotional expense, rather than to hedge bets by sinking further expenditure into costly promotional campaigns. However, the eventual rediscovery of Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point demonstrates that the prospect of cult immortality might still unpredictably await other titles.
Dirty Harry and The French Connection are two concurrent films that blur the lines between the Old and New Hollywoods. The critical reception that greeted those two films was steered by the same forces that determined the fortunes of the youth-cult cycle: namely, the connotations of stardom, directorial affiliation, and self-consciousness of cinematic style. These combined factors indicate the continuing power held by distributors in the early 1970s in determining the critical and commercial fortunes of these films and the career longevity of their directors. In both Dirty Harry and The French Connection, the tension between the fidelity to generic convention and an auteurist interest in its subversion problematizes retrospectively held notions of what the New Hollywood film might be, by pushing the structural parameters of a genre not typically considered a part of the New Hollywood canon. Friedkin and Hackman’s vindication by the Academy, paired with Siegel and Eastwood’s dismissal in the press, suggests the continuing power that personality and cinematic style exerted over interpretation and critical reception. In the critical discourse, the two films were accorded widely divergent political interpretations, despite their shared thematic content. This suggests that at the point of critical reception and interpretation, presumptions of authorial intention and star ideology were projected onto the works. This in turn raises questions about the role that critical reception has played in determining the historical visibility and standing of these films decades after the fact.
The limitations of film authorship in the New Hollywood are further challenged by the careers of Easy Rider’s creators in the wake of that film, as the critical and commercial failures of their subsequent directorial efforts illuminate how mainstream film critics set the parameters of the New Hollywood even in the earliest stages of its canonical constitution. The possibility of those films achieving a positive critical consensus or finding a popular audience was already foreclosed by a narrowly defined set of critical presumptions about auteurism in Hollywood, as illustrated by the contemporaneous critical championing of the more stylistically and narratively conventional nostalgia film.
What, then, would the critical establishment deem to be the limits of an American art cinema, and what degree of commitment would a major motion picture distributor extend to such challenging material? As a critical construction, the New Hollywood is predicated upon such an open-ended ambition, yet in practice, it proved uncontainable at the point of critical reception. Clearly, Hopper’s The Last Movie was and remains too resolutely unclassifiable to sit comfortably in the company of the New Hollywood body of films, despite the widely professed proclivity of the films of that period to subvert generic convention, foreground directorial style, and telegraph countercultural affiliations. All of these features are present in Hopper’s film. The acclaim accorded to The Last Picture Show offers one answer to the question of an American art cinema, as it delivered contemporary content in a conservative, nostalgic style, a combination that managed to appeal to mainstream audiences and critics in equal measure. Fonda’s The Hired Hand failed to generate critical or commercial enthusiasm for precisely the opposite reasons. The Hired Hand adhered too closely to generic convention, was too subtle and modest in ambition and scope. Lacking the frank sexual material that earmarked both The Last Picture Show and Carnal Knowledge as praiseworthy objects du jour, the considerably more reserved and nuanced representation of sexual interactions in Fonda’s film was almost entirely neglected by critics. The fact that it was insufficiently youth-oriented and not overtly revisionist in its depiction of western violence further contributed to critics’ inability to pigeonhole the film.
In the midst of a historical moment so frequently lionized for its distinctive cinematic visions, which spawned and then promptly shunned both The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Hopper expressed his own disappointment with the state of the art film. Asked by Lawrence Lindeman whether he would view his own films as working within the same spirit as Faces (dir. John Cassavetes, Continental Distributing, 1968), a similarly iconoclastic American film (in terms of production practices, if not aesthetic outcomes), Hopper replied:
You’re assuming that Faces is an art film. Cassavetes may feel that way, but I don’t. I might as well include others in here as well—Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, Cassavetes, I don’t think there’s anything in any of their films that’s revolutionary, that hasn’t been done before. Of all their films, the only one that was courageous—and which was a box office disaster—was Rafelson’s Head, which did some really far out technical kinds of things. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like Faces, The Last Picture Show, and Five Easy Pieces. I did, yet none of them contain things that haven’t been done a million times before by directors like Howard Hawks, Joseph Mankiewicz, George Stevens, John Ford, and Henry Hathaway. As a matter of fact, those movies were going back to a 1940s concept of film as a human drama that says we go from here to there, that this will happen here and then we’ll go on to the end.9
Later in the same interview, Hopper says of his fellow American directors, “you’re no longer inventing anything, you’re no longer contributing to the evolution of your art.”10 Hopper’s was the rare voice that openly criticized his peers’ inability to push the art form beyond commercially enshrined aesthetic norms. His invocation of Bogdanovich is a useful one, casting Hopper into the unlikely company of Variety scribe Verrill, who concludes his prognosis of the waning audience for youth-cult films with the assertion that “this far in 1971, nostalgia seems to be of more proven power than anything else. Summer of ’42 (dir. Robert Mulligan, Warner Bros., 1971), The Last Picture Show and Carnal Knowledge all share that common denominator.”11 The nostalgic tone of these commercially successful films seems at odds with the timbre of the youth-cult road movie and the countercultural underpinnings assumed of the earliest films of the New Hollywood, whereas the nostalgic content of The Hired Hand was too closely linked to the conventions of the unfashionable western genre for critical comfort. Hopper himself acknowledged that he misjudged audience sentiments, telling Interview magazine that he attributed The Last Movie’s commercial failure to “the fact that we’re probably going back to the 1940’s kind of sentimental, romantic, let’s lose ourselves in the movies kind of film.”12 In sum, the critical bayoneting of The Last Movie and the simultaneous acclaim for The Last Picture Show call into question whether a truly “New” Hollywood was ever possible.
The success of the nostalgic film with audiences and critics alike appears to undermine commonly held conceptions of the New Hollywood as a whole. Contrasted with the failings of The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, critical admiration for the nostalgia film suggests that the thematic and stylistic range that might be encompassed by the New Hollywood umbrella was highly limited and determined at the point of reception rather than production. This returns to a major flaw in most writings on the period to date, which tend to stress that the idiosyncrasies of the New Hollywood were established at the point of production. While the fragmentation of studio production and distribution during this period has been well-documented, it does not wholly account for the historical constitution of the New Hollywood canon. The same conditions of production and distribution spawned The Last Movie and The Last Picture Show. It was the tastes of prominent critics like Kael that effectively lauded Bogdanovich and buried Hopper, just as more recent figures such as Hoberman and Rosenbaum excavated and rehabilitated the reputation of Hellman, returning him to a new position of visibility. The distinctive directorial voices of Hopper and Fonda, having ridden out the initial commercial success of Easy Rider, were effectively doomed to obscurity as the critically constructed New Hollywood took shape around them.
Hellman’s retrospective revision offers hope for the futures of Hopper and Fonda’s works, however. In recent years the influence of The Last Movie has reared its head not in mainstream or academic criticism, but in the avant-garde from which Hopper drew his early inspiration. James Benning retraced Billy and Wyatt’s journey in his ghostly Easy Rider (2012). More recently, Filipino director Raya Martin and Canadian film critic Mark Peranson collaborated on La última película (M’Aidez Films, 2014), which simultaneously functions as a skewed, post-structuralist retelling of Hopper’s The Last Movie, a self-reflexive critique of the legacy of colonialism and its relationship with international film production, and a (post)apocalyptic reverie for the death of cinema and celluloid film. It would be a supreme irony if Hopper’s ultimate legacy extends not over commercial Hollywood cinema, but over the experimental realm, given that in his day Hopper’s invocation of the avant-garde was regarded as an exploitative act of commercial appropriation or else dismissed and overlooked by such publications as Film Culture.13
As my book excludes films from the second half of the conventionally enshrined New Hollywood decade, it is worth acknowledging the popularly held end point of the New Hollywood narrative: the rise of the blockbuster “event film,” another critical construct that is problematized when subjected to closer scrutiny. While the saturation booking strategy employed in the release of Jaws helped to enshrine the “event film” phenomenon, Steve Neale has identified that the industrial significance of the blockbuster was already well established: “Annual production of a handful of big-budget blockbusters, most of them road-shown, had been established in the 1950s as a means of catering to family and adult audiences who occasionally went to the cinema.”14 And while the lavish scale of The Godfather’s production marked it as such a self-consciously “blue ribbon” prestige production, Paramount executive Frank Yablans notably employed a “showcase” distribution strategy rather than road showing. The decision to open the film simultaneously in a handful of select cinemas in key cities, before opening it to several hundred more screens the following week and ultimately spreading it to eight hundred screenings in the weeks that followed, meant that the film was able to capitalize on the presold audience and early word of mouth, while quickly recouping its extensive production costs.15 Furthermore, Yablans’s approach eschewed intermissions to maximize the number of sessions that could be shown per day. In fact, Steve Neale notes that “although [The Godfather] ran 175 minutes, Paramount strictly prohibited intermissions interrupting the film and allowed only five minutes between shows for the auditoria to be cleared,” which helped to boost the film’s box-office takings16. Shortly thereafter, the public furor surrounding The Exorcist offered a different example of a New Hollywood film transcending the physical limitations of the picture theater to become an extracinematic “event” and a brandable commodity.
This unlikely pairing of The Godfather and The Exorcist undoubtedly contributed to the reconfiguring of distribution strategies in the second half of the decade, not least by demonstrating the commercial viability of movie sequels. Just as these original New Hollywood event films begat The Godfather Part II and Exorcist II: The Heretic (dir. John Boorman, Warner Bros., 1977), the New Hollywood also demonstrated that the sequel, once the hallmark of the B picture domain, could succeed both commercially and critically, leading to the release, with varying degrees of success, of such titles as More American Graffiti (1979); Jaws 2 (1978) and Jaws 3-D (1983); Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983), and Supergirl (1984); and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).
Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show is a key transitional film that helped usher in the nostalgic tone that would become prevalent in Hollywood production in 1971. An equally important transitional work in this regard is American Graffiti (1973), which is a missing link of sorts between Bogdanovich’s nostalgic, film and the endless process of sequelization that would follow Star Wars. Where Bogdanovich’s local cinema represents a refuge of stability for youth unsettled by a changing world, Lucas locates his safe space within the car, accompanied by the omnipresent radio broadcasts of Wolfman Jack. American Graffiti marks an important shift from the youth-cult road movie, in which the flight away from cities in the search of an identity (be it personal, generational, or national) in the interstitial spaces of America’s highway system is rendered futile by encroaching social pressures or seemingly fated self-destruction. In American Graffiti the desire to wander aimlessly is turned inward, localized in a suburban setting over a single night. The protagonists of Lucas’s film, poised on the precipice of adulthood, as signified by their impending departure from Modesto for college, instead attempt to arrest the passage of time by spending it driving precisely nowhere while acting out the rituals of youth. A parallel geographical immobilization plays out in Mean Streets (dir. Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1973), in which the characters endlessly traverse the same New York blocks. Their frenetic movement, with its lack of meaningful progress, mirrors their arrested state and inability to change as characters. While Hopper’s use of contemporary popular music in Easy Rider branded the film as decidedly of the here and now, Lucas’s and Scorsese’s ever-present golden oldies cast the viewer back into the cultural sphere of the early 1960s, each song carefully evoking the atmosphere of nostalgia that pervades both films.
American Graffiti went on to be a major financial success and was indeed sequelized as More American Graffiti (1979), while Mean Streets was a sequel of sorts to Scorsese’s earlier Who’s That Knocking at My Door/I Call First (Joseph Brenner Associates, 1967). Lucas continued to mine his nostalgic fixation with Star Wars, which moved beyond American Graffiti’s evocation of a single historical period and instead reworked the broader fabric of the entirety of popular culture into a tapestry of generic recombination (science fiction, the western, samurai film, war film), mythology (western Christianity and Eastern spiritualism), and cinematic allusions (to Kurosawa, Ford, Leone, Errol Flynn, and many others). The sense of nostalgia in Star Wars comes from the shared recognition of the web of allusions, references, and homages that is recontextualized and recombined throughout.17 In the film’s relentless recycling of pop cultural tropes, it is worth considering how little separates Star Wars from Easy Rider. Like Easy Rider, Star Wars uses the full resources of studio backing to elevate the production values of what is essentially exploitation film content, but also borrows the disaster movie cycle’s strategy of using ensemble casting to ensure multiple points of identification, thus ensuring its broad appeal to diverse audiences. Yet Star Wars’ most significant contribution has been its ability to maintain its presence across the decades through a vast web of merchandised permutations, ultimately ushering in the likes of the Transformers franchise.18 This brings us back to the despairing territory of the Biskind-ites and seemingly leaves us a long way from Hopper and Fonda. By 1971 the Easy Riders had already long since reached the end of the road.
The more one interrogates the composition of a decade-spanning New Hollywood, the more problematic its conception becomes and the more crucial the midpoint of 1971 becomes. The recognition of the fragmentation of the moviegoing audience, and the ensuing shifts in studio distribution, can be observed not only in the overcapitalization of the production of the youth-cult road movie cycle, but in other such distinct, contemporaneous film cycles as blaxploitation and the kung fu movie. Any attempt to situate these cycles within the canonical New Hollywood narrative must also account for the continued presence of a larger, undifferentiated mass audience that simultaneously permitted the box-office triumph of Love Story, Summer of ’42, Airport, and Diamonds Are Forever. While women are typically excluded from the canonically enshrined New Hollywood body of films, the most commercially successful films released during the same period appealed to women and men in equal measure. Major auteurs of the period made films with strong female protagonists during this time, yet for the most part such titles remain peripheral to the canon. The youth road movie cycle was preceded by The Rain People and is capped by The Sugarland Express and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. This latter film is typically eclipsed within Scorsese’s body of work by the titles released before and after it—Mean Streets and Taxi Driver—while the predecessor of that earlier film, Boxcar Bertha (American International Pictures, 1972), is also similarly excluded from auteurist approaches to Scorsese, rendered atypical not only by its female protagonist, but also by its “disreputable” exploitation origins and its adherence to a generic formula. Scorsese accepted the Boxcar assignment as a stopgap measure while he continued developing his Mean Streets project with cowriter Mardik Martin. Their screenplay had been kicking around since the mid -960s, but producers were unconvinced by the commercial prospects of its depiction of Italian American life in a pre-Godfather Hollywood. In fact, Roger Corman did offer to finance Mean Streets and shoot it in New York, with the proviso that Scorsese recast it as an African American milieu. Scorsese demurred, but it is intriguing to consider how his career might have developed had he made this concession to Mean Streets’ autobiographical origins, which remain so celebrated and central to Scorsese’s claim to auteurism.19 Alice was Scorsese’s first studio film, although Warner Bros. did ultimately distribute the independently produced Mean Streets. Contrary to auteurist expectations, the property was brought to him by its star, Ellen Burstyn, who selected first-time screenwriter Robert Getchell’s script as her follow-up to her starring turn in The Exorcist, complicating the question of authorship within the film.20 The film was a hit, taking in $15 million at the box office.21 The star power of both Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson, fresh from a certified gold single, “Why Me,” undoubtedly helped establish the film’s crossover appeal. The charged eroticism of the moment of their romantic pairing, as Burstyn runs her fingers through Kristofferson’s beard, along with the scene in which Alice and her friend speculate on Robert Redford’s sensitivity as a lover, is far more obviously addressed to a heterosexual female audience than the hypermasculine angst of the more canonically approved Mean Streets or Taxi Driver. Through its evocation of 1940s and 1950s “women’s pictures,” Alice plies the same brand of wistful nostalgia that had proved commercially successful in The Last Picture Show and Summer of ’42. Burstyn’s role as the project’s creative facilitator suggests that she was briefly a kind of star-auteur, wielding the kind of influence that defined Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand throughout the decade, in a challenge to Scorsese’s oft-vaunted directorial presence.
Typically, the New Hollywood period is conventionally narrowly written about, with the continual championing of the same small sample of movies that were neither commercially successful nor aesthetically representative of the broader period. My book has offered a historical investigation of the process by which this canon was consolidated. If the critical conception of the New Hollywood is to hold, then further inquiries along these lines must necessarily accommodate Hopper and Fonda alongside Lucas and Coppola, not to mention more marginal figures such as Friedkin, Jewison, and Sarafian. This final group of directors was poised to graduate to historically enshrined stations of auteurship but for various reasons never quite did.
It is indisputable that for a brief period of time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unique production circumstances were at play in Hollywood. However, the extent to which these industrial conditions permitted an American art cinema renaissance to bloom was far from certain at the time. Nor was it the aesthetic or industrial norm for the period. Nevertheless, a select body of films would be retrospectively lionized in the critically constructed New Hollywood. In order to reexamine this process of canonization, I have attempted to consider not just the way in which the conditions of production shaped the formal aspects of these films, but also how these aesthetic outcomes and production practices were read by critics. This process of reception and criticism was critical to continued distribution and exhibition practices, playing an important role in determining whether or not a film found its audience. The same privileged critical community that determined the fortunes of these films also ultimately galvanized the historical narrative of their purported radicalism, despite the film’s ultimate inability to respond to the more tumultuous upheavals of the surrounding culture. Critical and commercial reception in turn influenced subsequent production trends, foreclosing the aesthetic and thematic adventurousness of the period while retrospectively lionizing atypical works. This process has gradually shaped our historical understanding of the period, as some films passed into the canon and others passed from view. A multifaceted evaluation of this complex process is required to continue to interrogate, disentangle, and refine our understanding of why, precisely, this period of Hollywood history remains so compelling and contradictory.