Posted on 01/01/2011 9:59:08 PM PST by Walter Scott Hudson
In 1998/2003, the book/movie Easy Riders, Raging Bulls laid down a new stratum of received wisdom:
That the 1970s witnessed a "Silver Age" of American film making, after brave young rebel outsiders employed their low budget indie hits as celluloid Trojan Horses, infiltrated bankrupt, boring old Hollywood and rescued it from itself(...)
Reinforced by the coincidental companion piece The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994/2002), the "We practically invented cinema, dude!" meme was embraced by the rest of the Baby Boomers (self-congratulatory as ever), hipster Gen-Xers, and precocious Whatever You Young People Today Call Yourselves.
Now, some folks have "a problem with names." I have a problem with memes.
Don't get me wrong: there are some great 1970s movies: (The Conversation, Nashville, Jaws, A Clockwork Orange); some that weren't great but ahead of their time and hugely influential (The Jerk, Smile, Pretty Poison, Harold & Maude, Massacre at Central High), and others I'll admit are just charms on my personal mythology bracelet and may in fact be crap (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Willy Wonka..., Carrie, Phantom of the Paradise)(...)
But holy Mackinaw, Boombers and hipsters everywhere: just glance at this blush-inducing list of 1970s movies! American Graffiti?! The Sting?! Apocalypse Now?! (the movie about the movie is vastly superior.) The massively overrated The Exorcist, which takes about 40 minutes to even start? Ugh.(...)
Alas, one of the 1970s most overrated (and, more importantly, negatively influential) films was just honored with a place on the Library of Congress' prestigious National Film Registry. That movie is All the President's Men (1976).
(Excerpt) Read more at newsrealblog.com ...
It made pretty good fiction. I thought Jane Alexander looked sexy in her bathrobe.
Those were both good books. They may have given that generation of directors a bit more credit than they may have honestly earned but they also showed them going ego/drug-crazy and barely surviving success.
What do those movies have to do with Boomers, other than as part of the audience.
In context, the 1970s were great for movies.
What happened was pretty much the collapse of the old studio system in the 1960s, in which actors and directors were pretty much indentured servants of their studio. This made the studios less about production and more about distribution of movies.
That is, if you could get it made, the studios would get it into theaters. And while they wanted to reassert control over production, in 1975 and ‘76 was the roll out of Betamax then VHS, another big boost for indy productions. This kept the studios putting out lower budget stuff until the 1980s.
In the 1980s, low budget movies were almost monopolized by the Cannon Group (Golan-Globus). So that was pretty much the end of low budget avant guard.
Virtually everything made or produced during the sixties and seventies was made by a pre-Boomer. For some strange reason Boomers get blamed for everything negative that happened while they were in their teens or early twenties. The fact is there were much larger numbers of pre-Boomers who were responsible for what went on liberal-wise in those days.
Virtually everything made or produced during the sixties and seventies was made by a pre-Boomer. For some strange reason Boomers get blamed for everything negative that happened while they were in their teens or early twenties. The fact is there were much larger numbers of pre-Boomers who were responsible for what went on liberal-wise in those days.
Yes. This generational blame game becomes absurd.
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