Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  DALE POLLOCK

  There was a whole group of young filmmakers who had gone to film school in the late 1960s; they’d gone to NYU and USC and UCLA, and they were ready. The Francis Ford Coppolas and other people were really just waiting for this opportunity to move in. And so you had this period of incredible flux in the early seventies where the studios are desperate to land a hit, and all of a sudden Easy Rider does hit. They’re like, “We’re going to make a lot of films like Easy Rider,” but they didn’t know how to make films like Easy Rider.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  It was sixty years after the studios started, so all the people that began when they were in their twenties were now retiring and the studios were getting bought up by corporations. And the corporations didn’t have any idea how to run a studio, so they were hiring film students. It’s really being in the right place at the right time. All of us, this whole group that was a part of it, got ushered into the film business, because the studios didn’t know what they were doing and you didn’t have to be related to somebody to actually get into the industry.

  MICKY DOLENZ

  (musician, The Monkees)

  What these guys did, with Easy Rider being the breakthrough movie, is they essentially deconstructed the Hollywood major film industry. From then on, it was never the same. To some degree, I also think that’s what Head is about: deconstructing the motion picture industry via The Monkees experience. There’s a scene where Mike Nesmith and I are cavalry officers in the Wild West. There are Indians attacking us. Teri Garr is lying there with an arrow through her; the whole movie was pastiches on different Hollywood scenarios. I’m standing there and suddenly get hit with a bunch of special effects arrows. I look down and break them off and I say, “Bob [Rafelson], I’ve had it. I can’t do this anymore.” I throw the arrows onto the ground and I turn around and storm off, going right through the backdrop of this awesome Western set. That, to me, is sort of the central conceit of the movie. It was breaking through the old-school barriers of the Hollywood studio system. Then the producers, of course, went off and made Easy Rider after that.

  DALE POLLOCK

  An MGM had no conception of how to try and make a movie like Easy Rider, so there was an opportunity for a new generation to come in that understood where cinema was going, understood the impact of Bergman, Fellini, and these other filmmakers, and the French New Wave in the sixties began to percolate into American filmmakers. We had the first graduating classes from real film schools that were plugged in to what was happening in the moment. Not film history, which had been the previous approach at USC. They were not interested in teaching filmmakers, they were training film historians, but all of a sudden they changed and you had this real wave of people just itching to get in there and make their kinds of movies. The collapse of the studio system afforded them that opportunity.

  JONATHAN KIRSHNER

  The New Hollywood was, I think, special. And why it was special is because the studios were so uncertain, that they were willing to give space to filmmakers that they were unwilling to give them in the same way before or after. But Hollywood studios are the closest thing, I think, we have to pure capitalism. Everybody decries that Hollywood is like this or that, but Hollywood wants to make movies and make money. I don’t think that has ever changed. So they’re always looking for the way to do that, and that’s the yardstick that the industry judges itself by. And this has always been the challenge for filmmakers who view themselves as working in a mass art form. You can’t get around that, it is an art form but it’s also the most expensive art form, so you have to make compromises.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  The concern of Hollywood in the Golden Era was always the audience. They cared about the audience. That’s why they worried about censorship, they worried about happy or sad endings and clarity of narrative. Their concerns were always linked to audience reaction. They did previews and tried to understand what people wanted. They followed the genres: they knew people liked Westerns, so they made Westerns. They knew people liked musicals, so they made musicals. Their decisions were all audience-connected. But in this new world, they were money-connected, and the artistic filmmakers’ movies were self-connected in a way. They were making personal expressions, so you’re moving farther away from a direct connection to selling a product that pleased an audience and weren’t really concerned with that. And, of course, when you bring in a great many people from a corporate structure, from Gulf & Western and things like that, these are not people who have been interested in storytelling, concerned with storytelling, and know how to make movies.

  JONATHAN KIRSHNER

  You also have this demographic change in the audience itself. It goes from being the mass medium of the forties to more youthful, more urban, more hip type[s] of audiences, generally speaking. So there’s this subculture of this New Hollywood that emerges around 1967 and it’s caught up in the tunnel of generational change that’s taking place in social change and social contestations and it rides out. It has about ten years. And then society changes, and also the industry catches up with what’s going on and the blockbuster model emerges as the successor to the New Hollywood experimentation.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  Everything shifted and it became a different system, a different product. And the audience began to be more selective. The audience was being molded to go for the event movie of the year: the movie that you had to see. If you haven’t seen this movie, you’re a jerk. If you can’t talk about this movie at a cocktail party, you’re not going to go home with anybody that night. You have to find the big event movie and have some wiseass opinion about it. So, again, it all shifted, and movies stopped being the important, mysterious, personal escape, a wonderful kind of private and delicious experience for you as an individual. It became more of a talking point for social reasons that everyone just shifted towards.

  * * *

  The New Hollywood had consisted of innovative directors like William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich, the force behind, respectively, The French Connection and The Exorcist, and The Last Picture Show. But the advent of the movie blockbuster, which really began with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 production of Jaws and would take root two years later with George Lucas and the first Star Wars, spelled the death knell to the studios’ new direction.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Jaws wasn’t necessarily seen as the game-changer, but the feeling was more, “This is what we’ve been waiting for.” They’d been waiting to figure out how they could deliver a mass appeal movie that cuts across every audience segment. You look at a film like Spielberg’s Sugarland Express—no mass audience was going to that. All of a sudden Jaws becomes a personal project for him and becomes an enormous financial hit. Then Star Wars makes sense: another personal project that becomes an enormous financial hit.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  To the credit of directors like Marty and Coppola and everybody, they really loved and still do love movies and wanted to tell movie stories, but they were wanting to move the art form forward, play with cinema and bring new energy, new ideas, new concepts forward into the filmmaking process, while creating personal cinema. So they did care, but their ideas were also influenced by the whole international historical aspect of filmmaking. They became less connected to a straight-forward, clear, maybe even generic product. So for the average person in the audience, they’re probably going to stay home, turn on their TV, watch an old-fashioned narrative with people sitting on the couch talking, and then they’re going to go out to the blockbuster event movie.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  People forget that Star Wars is an independent film for the most part and had that movie not hit, people would have been like, “That was a nice experimental independent film.” Because even a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark is kind of an independent film. Lucas and Spielberg were saying, “We’re going to pay for this, we’re going to raise the money for it, we’re going to make it
, and then you, Paramount, are going to distribute it,” which is very much in the same vein as Easy Rider.

  JONATHAN KIRSHNER

  Jaws as a big summer hit is a harbinger of the blockbuster, but you need Star Wars to really nail it.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Now, were these projects really developed by the studios in the way movies were in the forties, fifties, and sixties? No. They were in essence developed outside of the studio. At the same time, Spielberg had to go to Universal for financing on Jaws, but he had total control while developing the script with Carl Gottlieb. So, I think the corporations were trying to reassert themselves in the seventies, though the blockbuster was the greatest thing that ever came along for them.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  From the first days of film, the industry was financially driven, right from the time when people went to penny arcades and dropped pennies in to look at flickering pictures. It was always about the money, and when something comes along that changes the business financially, artistic interests fall by the wayside.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  I think there’s irony in the fact that Coppola’s the one that wants to do independent small films and Lucas is the one that essentially destroys it, because he comes up with the blockbuster template. Actually, it’s probably Spielberg with Jaws, and then you have George Lucas coming right behind it. From there for a while, every summer there’s a Lucas or Spielberg film, because they kind of wrecked that side of it. But, again, to me, New Hollywood means that you’re like, “Oh, good, there’s a new Steven Spielberg film coming out.” For the most part, unless it was on TV, you didn’t really get, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents…” until they finally said that on television. You kind of knew it was Hitchcock or John Ford, but nowadays more than anything else, it’s creator-driven content, the look, the feel, the style of films that’s still very reflective of the New Hollywood mentality.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  In the wake of the blockbuster, it became harder for a director who wanted to work consistently, or anybody who wanted to work consistently, in the New Hollywood, for the simple reason that they’re making fewer films. They suddenly had to be gigantic successes and the audience diminished. A director like John Ford could make a hundred movies and even if half of them failed, they could keep going. They were under contract and there was security in it. It was always a challenge if you were considered unreliable financially, like an Orson Welles, but the truth is, it became harder and harder to have a successful ongoing directorial career. Even somebody like Marty faced a great challenge when his Last Temptation of Christ was a failure at the box office. For a lot of reasons, it was very hard for him to get financing. So the whole system became more difficult, more challenging, and it came down to the fact that you needed a big hit.

  JONATHAN KIRSHNER

  All of the things that brought about the New Hollywood are changing by 1977. Even the cultural things that are going on in society, what the audience is kind of shopping for, is changing. Star Wars is a story of a ragtag group of underdog good guys taking on evil and winning, right? That’s not Chinatown, that’s not Rocky. At the 1976 Academy Awards, Rocky wins Best Picture. What does it beat? Taxi Driver, Network, All the President’s Men, and even Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie bio, Bound for Glory. There’s a cultural shift in what American society is, and in 1980 Reagan is president, right? And Star Wars is a turning page on all of that. Certainly, it’s not coincidental that once you get into 1977, you’re into the Carter presidency and you don’t have Dick Nixon to kick around.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  So fewer films are being made, which means it’s harder to get them financed and approved. You’re put into a corporate system where your ideas are being reviewed by businessmen who don’t have experience in filmmaking. It just gets harder to do anything and everything, and harder to predict what the audience is going to respond to. That’s William Goldman’s era where he famously says about film, “Nobody knows anything,” and nobody does. What they knew in the old days was, “get a product, put a star in a product, make the product generic, and you have a chance.” Plus, everybody is going to the movies two or three times a week, so get a product out there, don’t spend too much on it. Don’t spend heavy amounts of money promoting it, keep it flowing and you’ll be enormously successful. Now you have a system where you can’t count on people going; they aren’t going to the movies anywhere near as often. So everybody gets skittish about what they’re going to finance, what they’re going to make.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  (author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)

  Jaws and Star Wars proved to Hollywood that people were hungry, not for social commentary or provocative but often downbeat speculation about the future, but for entertaining, well-made, old-fashioned films. Given the context, it’s not difficult to see why people were hungering for simple, well-told tales that reinforced traditional values. The audience sought escapism. In particular, they wanted well-made, technological escapism. Jaws fit the bill, as it was a scary horror film, dependent on Spielberg’s technical acumen to achieve its terror. And Star Wars was cutting edge in terms of special effects, showcasing a whole new world while simultaneously reinforcing old myths/fairy tales.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  To me, New Hollywood means more about the creative side than the financial side. I know the financial side is hugely important, but to me, it has more to do with the way you start to get projects that are more director-driven. Until the New Hollywood came along, you weren’t necessarily like, “Oh, there’s a Stanley Donen feature coming out now. Let’s all go down and see the new Stanley feature.” But once the New Hollywood comes along and you’re like, “Oh, okay, we know who Martin Scorsese is. Brian De Palma? We know who that is.” You start getting these filmmakers with distinct personalities and you can tell from the style of film, which you still see today.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Those filmmakers created their own problems by making Jaws, making Star Wars and transforming the industry into a blockbuster-oriented business where everything began to depend on what your opening weekend was. It’s ironic that that generation changed the rules. And that that, in effect, prevented a lot of future films from being made, because they couldn’t deliver that big opening weekend of Star Wars, Close Encounters, Jaws, and all the other films of the mid-to-late seventies. So in a way, the filmmakers themselves destroyed this little period of innovation, because they introduced the blockbuster. For a time, Spielberg and Lucas were going along the lines of Scorsese and De Palma, and then they splintered off because no one could match the success that they were having. And yet Lucas always felt he was an independent filmmaker. He never saw himself as anything else, because he couldn’t stand working for a movie studio with anyone telling him what to do.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  That little myth got started by a critic who didn’t know much about the movie business. It’s amazing how the media has sort of picked it up as a fact. There’s an ecosystem in the film business. What happens is when Steven and I make our movies and they make billions of dollars, well, half that money goes to theater owners. For every billion we make, a half billion goes to them. What do they do with that money? They make more multiplexes. More multiplexes mean more screens, which means more room for more movies. Thus, room for more non-mainstream films, for art films. We have ruined nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, we have helped smaller films flourish. And another thing: the films of the seventies weren’t that great. I grew up in that era and it’s a complete myth. There were four or five movies that were really interesting and were about something, and most of the others weren’t about anything.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  I think Jaws and Star Wars were seen as both aberrations and opportunities, but mostly opportunity. If you are in any kind of business, if you’re in an ice cream store and the ice cream rival across the street puts in a new flavor, you’re going to get that flavor. You can make one movie
and make a gazillion instead of having to make fifty movies and make millions? That’s what they saw in the old Hollywood. If a movie made $200,000, that was profitable and that was great, but here, you’re suddenly making two million and then twenty million and then two hundred million. So it was opportunity. This is a business that looks at patterns that it could never know if you’re trying to sell something to the hearts and minds of people. You can’t get a grip on the hearts and minds of as many people as live in the world or in the United States or even in Cleveland. So it was an inspiration for business success. And of course, with Jaws, it was a fantastic movie. That’s the thing that everybody forgets. How many Jaws are you going to have in your lifetime?

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Before he was caught up in the blockbuster machine, Lucas gave the world one of the starkest and most powerful visions of the future in THX 1138, and then created another, wholly personal film (though one more relatable) in American Graffiti. In short, he was making the films he wanted to make, according to his unique vision, and Star Wars fits the bill, too. Spielberg, lest we forget, made The Sugarland Express before Jaws and, again, was the type of New Hollywood movie brat who in his art, joined his technical understanding of film grammar at the same time that he pursued his own story ideas and vision. Both men are a part of the New Hollywood, not separate from it. But their visions “pivoted” the culture; their interests dovetailed with the public’s in a major way, thus spawning the age of the blockbuster. But we should understand that the shift was also about marketing and the way Jaws and Star Wars were distributed.