Rather than trying to sell films to everyone, many independent filmmakers aimed at smaller, specialized sections of the audience – teenagers, intellectuals, the socially concerned. Independent filmmakers learned that their films might alienate some customers, but would draw in others eager to see something more complex than the usual Hollywood fare. The Supreme Court had reversed itself in 1952 and declared that film was indeed an art form guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, and thus independent filmmakers began to deal with topics considered taboo by the Production Code, such as miscegenation or homosexuality. Yet most independent films during this period (and the Hollywood studio films that sought to imitate them) raised these topics only to uphold traditional beliefs.
More forthright explorations of mid‐century social issues were to be found in other art forms and movements. Poets and artists who comprised the Beat movement criticized American class consciousness and sexual hypocrisy. The civil rights movement, fighting for equal rights for African Americans, burgeoned throughout the 1950s and eventually became more vocal, militant, and successful. By the 1960s, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and homosexuals were also protesting for their civil rights. Many of these movements were closely linked to protests against American military involvement in Vietnam, and all of these movements were connected by a larger youth movement that openly challenged the conformity of the 1950s. The term counterculture is often used to describe this broad patchwork coalition of leftists, liberals, and libertarians who wanted to increase freedom for all members of society and bring an end to what they felt was an unjust war. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” became a mantra of this new social force. Since the personal was equated with the more broadly political, it was felt that social freedoms could be increased by expanding personal freedoms and vice versa.
Hollywood had a difficult time dealing with the social changes of the 1960s. Many younger Americans, people of color, and women began to reject the stereotypes and simplistic formulas of Hollywood films, and turned instead to independent, foreign, and avant‐garde films (both as audiences and as filmmakers). As a result, by the end of the decade, several of the Hollywood majors were again on the verge of bankruptcy. As part of these financial shake‐ups, most of the major studios were being bought out by larger non‐filmic corporations such as Gulf and Western (absorbing Paramount) and Kinney (absorbing Warner Brothers). These new corporate managers were desperate to make Hollywood profitable once again, and they began to experiment with different sorts of movies and film styles in an attempt to address the counterculture’s concerns. Slowly, a few women and African American men began gaining a small degree of power in Hollywood. The studios began targeting specific sections of the population, most notably in what came to be known as blaxploitation films – cheaply made genre pictures that featured African American protagonists. However, still being Hollywood films, most of them failed to address in any significant way the deeper political issues of 1960s America.
“New” Hollywood and the Blockbuster Mentality
During this same period (the late 1960s and early 1970s), in yet another effort to tap into the interests of younger audiences, studios began to hire a new generation of filmmakers who had learned their craft in the growing number of film departments in American universities. Mostly white, male, and heterosexual, these so‐called Film School Brats (including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola) reinvigorated the Hollywood industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Having studied film as an art, this new generation made films that reflected their knowledge of Hollywood (and global) film history. The Film School Brats revamped traditional genre formulas that had worked during Hollywood’s classical period, spicing them up with liberal doses of sex and violence, now that the Production Code had been replaced by the Ratings System in the late 1960s. (The ratings system restricted audiences rather than filmmakers.) Genre films that criticized or deconstructed American myths, which had been briefly popular with the counterculture, were now supplanted by genre films that reinscribed traditional form and ideology in a nostalgic fashion. In most of these films, women were once again cast as princesses, people of color appeared as villains or helpers, and physically strong white men remained the central heroes. This type of film, sometimes called the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster still drives the Hollywood industry today. (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, discussed earlier in this chapter, is an excellent example, as are the comic book superhero films of the twenty‐first century, discussed below.)
Rocky (1976) is a good example of the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, a type of film that uses classical Hollywood formulas to reinscribe traditional concepts of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Rocky, copyright © 1976, United Artists.
Most of these Hollywood blockbusters were (and are) shrewdly calculated remakes and recyclings of what had worked (that is, made money) in the past. They are designed according to marketplace research, and work not to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain the ideological status quo. They are usually pre‐sold (they have name recognition from a previous incarnation as TV show, novel, comic book, etc.), and are considered high concept (they have a story that can be reduced to simple phrases and tag‐lines). Ever since the 1970s, Hollywood blockbusters are sold via saturation advertising and saturation booking, which means that the country is blanketed with ads for a film for weeks before it opens in thousands of theaters at once. The concept of synergy also drives current Hollywood production, wherein the film acts as an advertisement for other related products (and vice versa) – soundtrack music, movie novelizations, behind‐the‐scenes mini‐features, magazine specials, comic books, fast food franchises, posters, toys, video games, action figures, theme park rides, clothes, and other assorted collectibles. All of this media saturation convinces filmgoers of these films’ alleged importance. Independent films, which tend to offer the viewpoints of various marginalized groups, are frequently lost in the media flurry surrounding the more formulaic Hollywood output, films that still tend to center on white patriarchal capitalist ideals.
This situation is the result of the increased mergers of media companies into larger and larger corporate conglomerates (discussed in greater detail in the following sections). These large multinational businesses control multiple aspects of the entertainment industry, producing and distributing motion pictures, books, recorded music, video games, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows, as well as owning theme parks, sports teams, TV channels, cable TV distributors, home video releases, and chains of movie theaters. This is a new type of corporate oligopoly, since these global conglomerates control almost all of the world’s mass media. It is thus increasingly difficult for independent filmmakers to have their work screened within mainstream cinematic outlets, which are for the most part controlled by these multimedia corporate conglomerates.
Box: A Brief History of Television in the United States
Although the title of this book is America on Film, there has historically been much cross‐influence between theatrical film and television, and the boundaries between the two have narrowed and blurred over recent decades. Within a number of chapters, we have included sections like this one discussing briefly the history of television’s interaction with a specific minoritized community. This particular boxed section provides a brief overview of the technological, economic, and legal development of television, to act as a reference for the other chapters.
Although television programming unsurprisingly looked to the Hollywood style of filmmaking for inspiration, the basic technology of television actually emerged from radio. Just as engineers in the 1910s developed the ability to transmit audio signals through airwaves, during the 1930s inventors
