Bikers, Outlaws, and Mobsters: A Brief History of New Hollywood

By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood studios were verging on economic disaster after forty years of ruling U.S. and world cinema. Much of their core audience had grown up and moved to the suburbs, away from the grand city theaters but infinitely closer to their new living-room TVs. In desperation, the studios had cast their future on new technologies like “widescreen” Cinemascope projection and big-budget costume epics like Cleopatra to lure them back, but got only slim returns. Then came a generation of ambitious “film brats” eager to storm the Hollywood system.

While no one was predicting “The End” for Hollywood in 1960, box-office returns were trending down. Sure, there were still marquee hits like the action-packed biblical saga Ben-Hur and Alfred Hitchcock’s shocking, low-budget Psycho. But the first full decade of network coast-to-coast TV had taken its toll on the old “picture show,” as did other factors such as the massive demographic change that sent young (Caucasian) families moving en masse to the suburbs. Why go downtown and pay for a movie when audiences could stay home and watch Gunsmoke, Bonanza, or the Ed Sullivan Show for free? While Hollywood and its exhibitors did partially stop the bleeding with gains from the suburban, family-friendly drive-in theater, their total revenues were stuck in reverse.

By then, the surviving Hollywood major studios (M-G-M, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and the up-and-coming Columbia and Universal) had bet big on costly, cast-of-thousands color spectacles that were busts as often as they were blockbusters. No film distilled Hollywood’s supersized strategy as much as 1963’s Cleopatra did. Figuring in inflation, the four-hour Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton historical romance, with a budget of at least $44 million then (including an estimated $2 million to Liz), would today cost more than $300 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever. While it did top ticket sales that year, Fox’s ill-fated Egyptian extravaganza never came close to recouping its costs, leaving in its wake the mummified professional remains of several of its chief executives.

Still, in all the red ink, there were bright flashes of green. Not only Psycho (which foretold the 1970s “slasher” horror film), but U.S. director Stanley Kubrick’s outrageous satire of nuclear war, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While an under-the-radar outlier that starred Peter Sellers (in three roles), Strangelove was a hilarious harbinger of what would be known as New Hollywood, even if it was produced in England. Made just a year after the near-apocalyptic 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and first intended as a serious treatment of the U.S. military and “the Bomb,” Kubrick and writer Terry Southern’s subversive masterpiece exploded with counterculture hipness immeasurably foreign, if not radioactive, to old Hollywood.

But America would have to wait until 1966 and 1967 to feel the first home-grown shock waves of a rebellious new filmmaking sensibility. First up was the censor-busting success of the Warner Bros. film version of Edward Albee’s scandalous 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Again starring Taylor and Burton, but in wildly deglamorized roles, director Mike Nichols’ (and writer Ernest Lehman’s) adaptation blew the lid off of Hollywood’s strict censorship system. Albee’s play made free use of profanity and sexual references, fearlessly attacking the idealized U.S. marriage and family as depicted in sitcom 1950s TV shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best.

Coming of Age in 1967

With 1967 came the double-barreled direct hits of, first, Bonnie and Clyde, followed a few months later by The Graduate—both aimed at America’s burgeoning college-age audiences. In the latter, Dustin Hoffman went to the head of his Hollywood class with a breakout performance as Ben Braddock, the titular college graduate who matriculates into an extracurricular affair with the lusty, older Mrs. Robinson. Mike Nichols again directed, superbly, but it was Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and the trend-setting, integral pop-rock tunes of Simon and Garfunkel that made this landmark sex comedy resonate with audiences.

A world apart in tone and setting, director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde took the vintage Hollywood gangster film and upped the ante with still-shocking levels of gun violence that further shot down the old censorship codes. Shepherded to the screen by producer/star Warren Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde was both a glamorized and graphic re-telling of the notorious 1930s Texas bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. At first buried by its studio, Warner Bros., in the drive-in circuit, only after critical raves (one famously by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker) did Penn’s game-changer begin getting the attention—and praise—it deserved. Not only did it epitomize the decade’s youth vs. “establishment” schisms, but it also recoiled with the horrid violence erupting on America’s streets, especially the defining1963 JFK assassination.

While both The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were products—however bold—of the studio system, in 1969, a true “independent” smash rode to fame and fortune, blazing a new trail into the Hollywood fast lane. The film was Easy Rider, the first “indie” U.S. feature to climb the box-office heights, and the first gangbuster success of the growing sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll counterculture. Shot for only a half-million dollars by its two leads, Peter Fonda and director Dennis Hopper, their high-riding landmark made over $60 million in its initial release. However dated in its hippie lingo (“groovy, man”), it was a historic first, not the least due to its hard-rock soundtrack, kick-started by Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild.” It also made a star of Jack Nicholson after ten years laboring in Roger Corman “B” horror movies.

Coming at the end of the decade, Easy Rider was not alone in revving up freewheeling, unorthodox ways of making movies—and portraying new or long-taboo lifestyles. The Oscar for Best Picture that year went to Midnight Cowboy, the first—and only—time that award went to an “X-rated” (adults only) film. By 1969 the creaky Hollywood censorship code had been scrubbed, replaced by a letter rating system that, though modified, is still in use today. Even if Midnight Cowboy’s X rating seems extreme today, the film’s sexual situations, especially its treatment of LGBTQ themes, were groundbreaking, especially for a major motion picture.

In fits and starts, Hollywood was getting its groove back, pushed kicking and screaming into a decade increasingly riddled with domestic strife, protest, and emerging culture wars, as well as sexual and other liberations. The decade took another dive into the brave new filmmaking world with two other box-office hits that were omens of the future, even if one was set in the past. The latter was 1970’s M*A*S*H, a veiled 1960s military satire directed by Robert Altman, a budding New Hollywood titan, though older than his brothers-at-arms. While technically set during the 1950s Korean War, M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) took no prisoners in mocking any number of Vietnam-era military targets, including the gory absurdities of war itself, and did it with both scalpel and martini (or reefer) in hand.

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick followed up his blackly comic Strangelove with his mind-blowing sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, a speculative spectacular that would prove astronomically influential in the upcoming sci-fi/fantasy era, notably George Lucas’ Star Wars. While preview viewers found it a crashing bore, 2001 blasted off into the pop stratosphere once spacey, college-age audiences started experiencing it as the “ultimate trip.”

After M*A*S*H, Easy Rider, et al. opened the floodgates, the Hollywood powers could no longer deny that, paraphrasing Bob Dylan, “the times they were a-changin’.” Those powers still held tight at the purse strings, but now they were willing to open them to the young Turks out to make their name by making features. First in line was a nearsighted, confident, and gregarious U.C.L.A. film school graduate with the Italian-American name of Francis Ford Coppola. Since coming to Los Angeles from New York in 1960, Coppola had learned his trade, both in and out of the hide-bound studios. Frustrated by his inability to crack the system, he struck out on his own, financing, writing, and directing several micro-budget features during the decade. They became his calling cards for studio jobs, among them his fake-it-until-you-make-it 1968 directorial assignment on the musical Finian’s Rainbow

Finding a few rays of Hollywood success, Coppola took seed money offered by Warner Bros. and ran up to San Francisco in 1969 to plant his small, maverick American Zoetrope studios. But Coppola’s indie dream wilted quickly, partially due to Warners’ dismal reaction to a bleak, offbeat science-fiction feature he had produced that had been written and directed by a young University of Southern California film school graduate Coppola had partnered with and mentored. His name was George Lucas and the film was THX-1138, expanded from his own award-winning USC short film.

Leave the Gun, Take the Oscars 

Throughout his roller-coaster 60-year film career, Coppola has nearly always pulled a rabbit out of his hat to save himself from a mountain range of cliffhanger cataclysms. But perhaps his greatest trick was the quick dissolution he made from the bad scene of his American Zoetrope failure to landing a Hollywood job nobody wanted: directing an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling mafia potboiler The Godfather for Paramount Pictures.

Of course, today’s cinephiles know that The Godfather was a box-office behemoth that made Coppola—and many others in the cast and crew—famous, feted, and in lucrative demand. But what’s less known is that it was a troubled project from beginning to end, including the times Paramount almost terminated the young (age 31) Coppola. But when the dust and bullets cleared, he had swept the three-hour-plus crime saga into the “greatest hits” of Hollywood mythology, while making stars out of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Diane Keaton, and resurrecting the career of a 47-year-old, allegedly “over-the-hill” Marlon Brando.

While the subject of this article merits a sequel of its own, a preview of New Hollywood II would co-star such key films as Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and Lucas’ comeback smash American Graffiti (1973). But even those sleeper successes take a back seat to the coming mega-attractions of Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), which together would not only win over audiences everywhere but also gobble down the competition, hook, line, and sinker.