New Hollywood

New Hollywood (c. 1967–1980)

The decade American studios briefly let directors behave like novelists — and got the best films in the country’s history in return.

What They Were Doing

By the late 1960s the old studio system was broken. TV had eaten the mass audience; the Production Code was dead; a generation of film-school kids raised on European art cinema and Japanese masters arrived in Los Angeles assuming cinema was an art form, not a product. For roughly thirteen years, studios agreed. Budgets flowed to twenty-something directors with strange scripts, downbeat endings, protagonists who were losers or psychopaths, and a visual vocabulary borrowed straight from Tarkovsky, Bergman, Godard, and Antonioni.

The films got darker, slower, and weirder. Then Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) re-taught the industry that the real money was in blockbusters, and the window closed.

Key Figures and Films

• Martin Scorsese — Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull.
• Francis Ford Coppola — The Godfather I–II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now.
• Stanley Kubrick — elder statesman, parallel orbit: 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon.
• Robert Altman — McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville.
• William Friedkin — The French Connection, The Exorcist.
• Michael Cimino — The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate (which effectively ended the era).
• Brian De Palma — Carrie, Blow Out.
• Peter Bogdanovich — The Last Picture Show.
• Terrence Malick — Badlands, Days of Heaven.

Why It Matters

Every American film that takes itself seriously as cinema — rather than as content — still reaches back to New Hollywood for its license. It’s the moment American movies absorbed the European art film and the 19th-century novel simultaneously and became adult.

Connections

• Scorsese and Kubrick — the movement’s two poles, hot and cold.
• Dostoevsky — Taxi Driver imports the Underground Man into Manhattan.
• Kafka — the paranoid thriller strand (The Conversation, The Parallax View) is Kafka in American clothes.
• Huxley / Orwell — A Clockwork Orange sits between them.
• Thackeray — Barry Lyndon’s great literary source.
• European art cinema — Swedish art cinema, the French New Wave, and Russian poetic cinema were all direct influences.
• Hitchcock — the home-grown master every New Hollywood director studied.

Lineage

Predecessors: French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut), Italian neorealism, Hitchcock, Bergman, Kurosawa, the American film schools (UCLA, USC, NYU) in the 1960s.

Successors: The independent wave of the 1990s (Soderbergh, Tarantino, PTA, Fincher), the modern A24 ecosystem, and every “director’s cut” that gets released because New Hollywood made auteurism a marketing category.