The Rise and Fall of New Hollywood | What's a Movie Brat?
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- So much talent went into making New Hollywood films - but it wasn't all directors, and it wasn't all men!
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More info:
An interesting look from 1983 on how the "movie brats" are doing as the New Hollywood era winds down (only directors mentioned): www.csmonitor....
If you have a JSTOR account or a university library account, I highly recommend this look at how the Movie Brats didn't really change a lot in terms of Hollywood power dynamics (Derek Nystrom): www.jstor.org/...
A great resources from American Cinematographer discussing how they covered cinematography in the 1970s: ascmag.com/art...
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Title music: "Adventure"
www.bensound.com
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Hi Aaron. Thank you so much for your videos. It is great to listen to such a perceptive, well-informed and erudite film scholar. Above all, your enthusiasm inspires me to feed my life-long addiction to movies. I would describe myself as a "moderate auteurist" in that I agree with you completely that film is a collaborative art and that writers, cinematographers and others involved in the process. seldom get the credit they deserve, and this has to change.
However, I would argue that, ultimately, the director is the creative driving force in making a movie; he/she is ultimately responsible for what we see on the screen and therefore has to be considered the "artist".
Huge wealth of knowledge! Outstanding, and actually inspiring to a person who is on the search of information and knowledge about filmmaking!
Hello Aaron, I loved this video, very informative and well explained. As a film buff I´m ashamed to confess I wasn´t aware of this movement, although I seen movies of every director mentioned here. I found your analisis was deep enough to consider not only the directors, but the DPs, the writers and the editors.
Could directors such as Hawks, Lubitsch, Ford or Wilder be classified in an era or movement as well? Maybe Hollywood golden era? Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the kind words - glad to hear you found it informative! In terms of the directors you mentioned, they'd come from roughly the same era, although it probably wouldn't be called a movement. "Golden Age" is a term that's often used to describe it. You'll also heare it called "Classical Hollywood" or the "Studio Era" - it kind of depends if you're talking about the quality of the films (golden!) the style (classical!) or how they were produced (studio!), but all the terms roughly encompass the 30s- late 50s/early 60s . . . roughly from the rise of sound through the changes I discuss in the series (waning of studio power, rise of independent production companies and agents, etc.). Hope that helps!
Hey awesome video! Learned alot
Would Brian De Palma and William Friedkin be considered movie brats?
De Palma, definitely - he didn't have the same film school background as some of the others (I think he studied theater), but he was closely associated with that group and, obviously, his work is heavily steeped in old Hollywood. Friedkin, I guess you could say yes - he certainly crossed paths with them (esp. as a member of the Director's Company), but he also often tried to position himself as a bit of a loner iconoclast. But his debt to French New wave is pretty immense.
Aaron, is every film made during this period considered a new Hollywood film? Because I can think of films such as several John Wayne westerns made during the 70s like rooster cogburn and big jake for example, which may have fit in more with old Hollywood films.
Hi, good question - if you check out my vid from this series called The "Other" Films, I go into this a bit. But the short answer is "no" - not all films from the era are "New Hollywood" films, but making the distinction can be tricky (is it just about the directors? the themes? the rest of the cast and crew?). Hollywood had a lot going on in the '70s, and sometimes there was some creep from NH films into Non-NH films, but there are definitely distinctions to be made (like, Eastwood's westerns? Yes. Wayne's? For the most part, no.)
Howard Hawks is the godfather of New Hollywood IMHO. A guy who was our first and best auteur, a guy the French worshipped, a guy who made the most optimistic and humane and decent movies ever while never succunbing to cheap sentiment or Capra corn or heavy handed Hitchcockian camera tricks that were just annoying half the time.
I know theres a tendency to link Hawks with Ford but thats not fair. They couldnt be further apart. Hawks made Wayne ACT and didnt deify him. And Hawks relentlessly attacked middle American values through his whole career. Marriage, home, monogamy, children, religion, masculinity and femininity and sexuality were all challenged by Hawks. Take sex. To Hawks WW2 was the biggest cockblock in history. Nothing enraged him more than asexuality or situations that prevented folks from fucking. Notice i didnt say men and women because theres a pansexuality to his movies, or at least a deep respect between men that was downriight homoerotic. Look at the Thing or Rio Bravo. And Hawks loved nothing more than stretching gender notions to the breakkng point. Of course he'd just call it fun. Fun.like his was as subversive as anything HUAC went after. And he was never cowed by censors. If called on his constant references to anal sex he'd become outraged and accuse the censors of having dirty minds.
Look at how Ford and Capra behaved like chastened school boys when threatened by HUAC or censors. How many films like Grapes of Wrath or Mr Smith did they make after WW2? None. Meanwhile Hawks was making Monkey Business and The Thing and I was a male war bride, all the smuttiest movies ever, up to ...New Hollywood.
You can ID a Hawks . movie in two minutes at most. And not just by the overlapping dialogue which wasnt a stylistic choice but a way for him to burn through screenplays in record time and give him time to add new scenes he and script doctor William Faulkner thought were more fun. When he made His Girl Friday the actual stage play didnt start for over twenty minutes! And the movie only lasted 90 mins!
All of New Hollywood owed a big debt to Hawks and they know it. Even the two directors who ruined American cinema, Lucas and Spielberg. Everyone wanted to be Hawks, i think. Roger Corman said as much. "His films look so natural until you try to duplicate them. Then you realize how much technical mastery was needed to make to make things looks easy. And a touch of genius didnt hurt, either"
Thanks for this great comment. I love Hawks, too - had a great time teaching To Have and Have Not in a first-year Hollywood class this past year.
@@AaronHunter Only when reading technical books on movie making does one realize the sheer level of craft Hawks needed to make his "simple and natural" films. And not just getting sound coverage when everyone is talking at once. Look at a minor scene in The Thing. Hendry and crew go to the radio room looking for the monster. As they leave, Ken Tobey says "And it you get attacked, use your fireax. A gun's no good."
Understandably Tex is freaked and says "What do you mean a gun's no good?" Half of that sentence is spoken in the radio room and then the audience hears the second half of that panicked squawk in the hallway as the group moves to the next room. Hawks needed coverage on both the radio room and the corridor. Once Hendry left the radio room, the cameras had to be blocked already, along with lighting and sound. So Hawks filmed the scene both ways, all in the radio room as well as all in the corridor.
Thing is, he didn't have to make things so hard. That line could have been read completely in one location. It's a nice comedic touch to hear Tex's panic from the corridor after watching Pat warn him in the radio room. But Hawks could have lazily gotten around the dual coverage because, really, all it is is a nice touch. But then his movies are full of one nice (and seamless) touch after the other. And only other directors at the time are going to spot the degree of difficulty needed to pull such relaxed scenes off. Hawks sure didn't call attention to them. Nor did he make excuses to studios about going overtime and over budget due to his love of improvisation and double entendres. Years later he said Bringing Up Baby took twice as long to film as they figured because "Cary and Kate kept putting dirty connotations on innocent lines. It took us hours to finally get the scene right where they discover the dinosaur bone missing." The 'innocent' line to which he referred was
Cary: "where's my bone? It's rare! It's precious!"
Hepburn: "now David why on earth would I take your bone out of this box?"
De@@AaronHuntermaybe you can answer something that bugs me. Did¹ contemperaneous reviewers not catch all the double entendres referring to anal sex? Was it just nót done?.And I'm aware that Faulkner was responsible for half. So what gi e
@@cwdkidman2266 If you're talking about To Have and Have Not, in that particular case, there was a significant battle with the Breen office over the film's use of some curse words (mild by today's standards) - Hawks was insistent that as a "war" film, it replicate the speech of soldiers, and in the end got away with some modest use of (if I recall) 'damn' and 'bastard.' Some reckon that Hawkes took advantage of the office's attention to cursing to slip in all the sexual double entendres (and directed his actors to emphasise them).
@@AaronHunter Hawks in general, really. To Have And Have Not was, in my opinion and correct me if I'm wrong, a looser and more relaxed Casablanca, one that didn't scream MOVIE!!! with every frame. This relaxed (but not unserious) approach can mislead viewers who need to be told they're watching something important to pay attention.
The whole "put your lips together and blow" scene belongs in a Hawks movie because no other director would even attempt it in a "serious" drama. Was it Alfred Kazin who said Americans are never more serious than when being playful? It certainly seems to fit. I know Hawks and Faulkner wrote that scene together, and Faulkner was a writer whose novels get taken at face value when they have a,definite comedic edge, like "I want to laugh but I'm scared I'm not supposed to." And one should laugh AND take it seriously. Southern Gothic Humor is like Southern Gothic Horror: over the top and definitely part of the fabric of the story. It appears to me that Hawks learned a lot from Faulkner yet America learned nothing from either man; Hawks latest biographer simply said "Hawks could be a little naughty that way." A little naughty? Look at the opening lines of Bringing Up Baby, Hawks' A Midsummer Night's Dream. Is anyone going to suggest Midsummer Night has less to say about the human condition than King Lear? Or that I Was A Male War Bride was as less savage an attack on the American military as Wilder's A Foreign Affair, which blew it at the end by not trusting its own satiric edge.
America has a bad habit of not trusting its best artists (Twain, Faulkner, Joseph Heller, Hawks, Michael Ritchie, etc.) and taking it's cues from the paint by numbers crowd of Hemingway and Ford and Edward Albee.
what was the impact of New Hollywood?
I tried to answer that in the series (I hope!) - short answer: on the business end of things, it ended up leading to the re-institution of a top-down, hierarchical structure of management, run by executives over artists; artistically and stylistically, it showed that there was a lot more potential for Hollywood films - in terms of subject, theme, and style - than had been realized before: gritty and dark realism, but also introspective, and more adult humour. In that sense, it was very influential on the indie filmmakers of the '90s, and continues to influence indie and arthouse American filmmakers today.
the new hollywood era is the blue print of the now generation of films, Go to a movie theatre and look how many blockbusters are there. Spielberg and Lucas pioneered that. Filmmakers like tarantino, the Safdie brothers, The coen brothers etc were heavily inspired by the movie brats, The film editors that these film directors also were the pioneer of the modern day flow of movies.
i miss new hollywood. The era of movies today lack the so called RISK that is very prevalent in that era, today's era is just riding the coat tails of the past nostalgia bating and safe choices, Granted there are movie studios out there willing to take a shot i.e A24,Searchlight so on and so forth, its just not as prevelant anymore... I go to the movie theatre and its always blockbuster after another without really having any of the movies that the indie studios have.
The New Hollywood Movement can only be replicated if it follows sixty years plus of tight censorship, it coexists with an unpopular ground war in Asia, and a Civil Rights Movement.
I think Blow-up kicked it off and maybe Animal House or Annie Hall were the last. And the years 66-78 contain a lot of garbage: Doctor Doolittle, Oliver!, The Sting (okay, it's entertaining) and all the trashy horror movies that followed Rosemary's Baby. After DELIVERANCE made him an a-list actor Burt followed his incredible performance in that incredible movie with....Gator. But he rightly promoted the hell out of Deliverance on every talk show and radio show that would book him.
And he correctly called it one of the most powerful movies ever made in cinematic history. He even rightly saw it as "the entire experience of Western Europeans in the New World." And he rightly lamented the people who watched it and only came away with "rural white people are evil" when Deliverance actually said that the viewer could decide who the good guys and bad guys REALLY were.
So yes movies by film students and film critics we're getting their movies greenlit. No one knew what the next Easy Rider would be. But Hollywood disliked uncertainty and the evil duo of Spielberg and Lucas made movies ABOUT movies. Rocky isn't a boxing movie; it's a movie about older boxing movies. Star Wars and Indiana Jones were about old Republic serials. None had anything to do with the human condition.