The Ten Years the Directors Won

By the late 1960s the old Hollywood was dying in plain sight. The studio moguls were gone or going, the mass audience had migrated to television, and a run of bloated roadshow musicals had emptied the vaults. Out of something close to panic, the studios did the one thing they had never done: they gambled on the young. Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn with the French New Wave in its bloodstream — the sudden lurches from farce to slaughter, the romance of beautiful doomed outlaws — was a hit nobody had forecast. The Graduate followed, then Easy Rider, made for almost nothing and returning a fortune. The lesson the executives drew, briefly, was that they no longer knew what the audience wanted — and that the people who might were half their age.

What that uncertainty bought was the auteur on American soil: the European idea of the director-as-author, underwritten for one strange decade by Hollywood money. Francis Ford Coppola got The Godfather and, in the same breath, the paranoid miniature The Conversation. Martin Scorsese turned his own streets into Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Robert Altman dismantled the Western and the musical from inside, under a haze of overlapping sound — McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville. Roman Polanski's Chinatown ended in evil triumphant; Five Easy Pieces ended on a man fleeing his own life; Dog Day Afternoon ended on a kind of bewildered grief. Ambiguity was, for once, bankable. The downbeat ending was a selling point.

And then the window shut — not because philistines stormed the gate, but because the same industry found its salvation, and the salvation was the precise opposite of everything the decade had stood for.

Jaws and Star Wars — made, with a terrible neatness, by two of the movement's own children, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas — invented the modern blockbuster: the wide simultaneous release, the merchandised event, the film engineered to reassure rather than unsettle, to be seen twice rather than puzzled over once. The director's decade was killed by its most gifted sons, who had discovered that an audience will pay far more to be thrilled than to be troubled. The auteurs did not lose an argument; they were simply outbid by a new economic fact they themselves had proven.

It is tempting to mourn this as a fall from grace, and the mourning gets the shape wrong. New Hollywood was never as free as its legend insists — it ran entirely on studio capital, most of its films lost money, and its license was the license of an industry that genuinely did not yet know what it wanted. What ended in 1977 was not a golden age so much as an interregnum: the gap between one stable system, the studio, and the next, the franchise, during which, for one improbable stretch, nobody was sure who was in charge. The directors won the decade because, for ten years, the question of authority was open. The blockbuster did not corrupt that freedom. It answered the question — and a freedom that depended on the question staying open could not survive the answer.

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The line: Bonnie and Clyde → Easy Rider → Five Easy Pieces → McCabe & Mrs. Miller → The Godfather → Taxi Driver → Nashville → Jaws / Star Wars

This line crosses:

• The Revolution That Disappeared — Bonnie and Clyde is the hinge between the two: New Hollywood is the French New Wave's American heir, importing the auteur idea wholesale.
• The Cut That Stopped Meaning Anything — what the blockbuster became: the post-continuity action film is the far end of the road that opened when Jaws closed this one.

Read through: Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls · Thomas Schatz, "The New Hollywood."

A note on the argument: the history of New Hollywood and of the Jaws/Star Wars turn is well documented. The reading of the blockbuster as the movement's self-inflicted ending — and of the decade as an "interregnum, not a golden age," a freedom that depended on an open question — is this essay's framing.