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Variety
"This knockout documentary has it all … overflowing with insight and amazing detail"
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The documentary gives the viewer the bare outline one who has read the book is familiar with:-
A) The death of the old studio system sometime in the Sixties whose demise was hastened by such ill-considered mega-flops as Cleopatra, Paint Your Wagon and Hello Dolly.
(B) The rise of a burgeoning and untapped youth market eager to see things they could identify with on screen.
(C) The Trojan Horse of the 'Roger Corman Film School' i.e 'King of the B-Movies' Producer/Director Roger Corman who firstly tapped into the hitherto untapped youth market, with B-Movies like The Trip and The Wild Angels, and secondly opened the doors to the untried and untested Film school graduates and harbingers of the 'New Hollywood' Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese and Peter Bogdanovich amongst many others.
D) The rise of the 'movie brats' influenced as they were by the French and Italian 'new wave' brought a much more more realistic approach to story-telling that was evident in European cinema at that time (complete with it's attendant moral and sexual ambiguities) to American film for the very first time.
E) The shift in style and in cultural outlook helped to foster a climate of freedom and creativity which allowed the 'New Hollywood' to flourish and produce such great films as The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Mash, Harold and Maude, Network, Deliverance, All the Presidents Men, Dog Day Afternoon and a host of other films which a mere ten years previously would never have been made.
F) The Fall. Starting with Jaws and continued by Star Wars in the mid to late Seventies the era of the Blockbuster is shown as destroying this last era of innocence in Hollywood as commerce and the studio exec's reassert creative control.
All very well and good you might say but why only the three stars? churlish though it might appear it feels as though something is missing, the story is condensed and in the process something is lost.
My recomendation is firstly read the book but secondly watch Ted Demme's excellent documentary 'A Decade under the Influence' which covers this era by primarily focusing on the films rather than (as is the case in this documenary) by focusing too heavily on the personalities involved and their associated drug problems.
I found it fascinating, interspersed with clips from films from the late 60s and 70s and choice interviews with, among others, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, and Peter Fonda, it tells the story of Hollywood in the decade when directors dicatated the agenda, before studios settled on a formula for routine blockbusters in the style of Jaws, Star Wars and their sequels.
A parallel story is how a group of artistically minded directors, led by Francis Ford Copolla, together with his protege, George Lucas and other widely recognised names like Martin Scorsese, Warren Beatty, and Steven Spielberg combined ideas and pooled resources to come up with some of the most original films in cinema history. Given free licence by the studios, out of this group emerged films like The Conversation, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, American Graffitti and Taxi Driver, and with them came some of the great movie actors like Robert De Niro and Harvey Keital. As the 80s neared, the status of these directors, and so implies the film, their complacency and drug-fulled excesses, reached fever pitch, and it was this excess which ultimately led to their downfall. Meanwhile, from their own midsts emerged a new, clean, studio friendly and box-office driven director named Steven Spielberg with a film called Jaws that generated unprecedented publicity and opened to more screens than any film before and gained not only critical acclaim, but enormous box office returns. It, like Star Wars, and to a lesser extent, Alien and Superman heralded a new age. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull was the last hoorah for the artistically minded film maker, bucking the trend of the new super-blockbuster. Appreciating the marketability of their products to a previously under-appreciated yourh market, studios were on the road to tie-ins and 'Empire Strikes Back' lunchboxes. As one of the contributors on the film comments, studios were about to start making some serious money.
Add this central story to the fascinating anecdotes, the excellent archive footage and contemporary interviews, this film offers a fascinating insight into the personalities of the film industry and the history of a golden cinematic age that you'll want to share and discuss with friends. Recommended to anyone with at least a passing interest in cinema.
This film is okay for about half an hour but by then you realise that they're not going to talk to the people that matter (Scorcese etc.), instead you get a bunch of other people talking about them, the third assistant cameraman, the consulting script associate and the tea boy. Who cares?
All this is set to awful muzak, there's a song that sound a bit like The Byrds but it's not, there's one that sounds a bit like The Kinks but it's not, ditto Iron Butterflly and Bob Dylan.
The cherry on the cake of this sleeping tablet was no mention of 'Apocalypse Now' and, if any film personifies the hippies dream crumbling in their hands like an old chocolate chip cookie, surely it's that and not the likes of Dennis Hopper's 'The Last Movie'.
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