Movies

In the United States, movies have long been an entertainment staple as well as an artistic medium that reflected the nation’s social and cultural trends. Powerful social movements, regulatory attitudes, and technological and commercial changes radically transformed the nature of American movies during the last 35 years of the 20th century.

The late 1960s witnessed what many called a Hollywood renaissance that extended well into the 1970s. Throughout this period American movies adapted themselves to various external forces that would shape the direction of the film industry. The national film audience had shrunk from 80 million to 20 million, while its members had become younger and more educated. The social movements of the 1960s had reconfigured social and sexual values. These developments, along with the need to accommodate itself to the competition of the world market, forced the film industry to alter its practices as well as the content of its products. Major Hollywood studios often became subsidiaries of huge conglomerates like Coca-Cola. In the 1980s some ownership moved overseas, when an Australian company bought Fox, and Japanese companies purchased Columbia and Universal. Studios began producing more fare for television audiences than for theatrical release, and increasingly, studios shot films on location outside Hollywood. For example, New York City recaptured its status as a movie-making center.

While many of the films of the period were produced strictly for entertainment value, the trend was toward films that commented on the state of society. Major directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese produced films that challenged the traditional norms and institutions of American life. Films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Medium Cool (1969), The Godfather (1972), and Taxi Driver (1976) searched for meaning in a society that had become entangled in the Vietnam War and that many perceived had lost its way, becoming enamored of the merely material and suffocated by its institutions.

This artistic challenging of traditional norms was also instrumental in restructuring the way films were regulated. In 1968, the Motion Picture Rating System (MPRS) replaced the Hollywood Production Code that was established in 1930. The old code, essentially an industry-controlled censorship program, was replaced by a series of ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, and X) that indicated the level of audience maturity each film demanded. Once in place, this system allowed moviemakers to push the artistic envelope even further. The MPRS remained in effect at the end of the 20th century with one alteration. The X rating had proven unworkable and was replaced in 1990 by the NC-17 rating (no children under 17 allowed).

The late 1970s witnessed a radical change in both the content and the distribution of American films. While during the previous decade, films sought to challenge the myths of American life, beginning in the late 1970s and extending into the mid-1990s movies reaffirmed those myths and sought to create new ones. As many scholars of film history argue, mainstream films, with some exceptions, had become relatively conservative and predictable, unwilling to take artistic and political risks.

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) almost single-handedly effected this change. It renewed the old Hollywood genre of “good vs. evil” by offering unambiguous heroes and villains and provided an escape from social reality into a science fiction wonderland of myth and magic created by new visual technologies. Its pioneering use of Dolby NR (noise reduction) and the Dolby SVA (stereo variable area) soundtrack led many to herald it as a “second coming of sound.” Lucas’s use of computers to control special-effect shots virtually computerized the industry; by the late 1980s, computers had become essential in every aspect of filmmaking. Further, Star Wars secured the viability of the sequel, and sequels, which made safe investments for both producers and audiences, began to dominate the industry with films such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980); The Return of the Jedi (1983); and The Phantom Menace (1999). Of course, sequels were not new, as evidenced in James Bond, Pink Panther, and Planet of the Apes films, but sequels came to dominate the industry.

Additionally, Star Wars earned so much money that it changed the way the industry did business. By the 1980s, studios concentrated on making blockbusters and reserved a few slots on the production schedule for low-budget and offbeat films. Other than that, they produced sequels and acquired independent films that they released under the studio logo. Because movies cost so much more to make and were capable of earning so much (Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, 1993, grossed almost $1 billion), studios considered it foolhardy to take chances on the public’s taste. Finally, Star Wars and other movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Lucas and Spielberg, 1981), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) combined the appeal to innocence with the appeal of special effects, and produced a cinematic world of spectacle and an unambiguous tribute to traditional values.

The unambiguous good-triumphs-over-evil myth and the childhood fascination with space and magic were not the only myths evoked by mainstream film, however. Films such as Halloween (1979), Alien (1979), and Poltergeist (1982) presented in a visually stunning way the darker myths of horror, terror, and the irrational and unknown menace.

Director Steven Spielberg working with a camera on the set of his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Hulton/Archive)

Many films investigated the dilemmas of real life in a comic way (Ordinary People, 1980; The Big Chill, 1983). Action heroes such as Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger offered film series that affirmed the deeply rooted American value of assertive individualism. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) reasserted American patriotism, and Saving Private Ryan (1998) depicted the realities of war while venerating the incumbent heroism of its American participants.

In contrast to these relatively formulaic films stood many exceptions by artists who sought to explore the tragic aspects of American social history in films such as Little Big Man (1970) and Heaven's Gate (1980). Several African Americans directed their depictions of the realities of family and urban life for wide audiences: Charles Hughes (Killer of Sheep, 1970; To Sleep with Anger, 1990), Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, 1989; MalcolmX, 1992), and John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood, 1991). John Sayles offered a realistic portrayal of baseball’s 1919 Black Sox scandal (Eight Men Out, 1988), in which players conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series, but the film attracted a relatively small audience. In 1989, however, Field of Dreams was enormously successful because of its redemptive approach to the same scandal. In the typical late 20th-century American style, it suggested that the culture could heal itself by forgiving and erasing the troubles of the past. Redemption was complete when the ballplayers were welcomed back to the field of dreams, an action that rescued the financially stricken farmer who had built the field.

Beginning in the 1980s, the film and television industries became more interdependent, a result in large part of the growth of cable and satellite television and of the use of VHS videotape. Hollywood studios began to make movies for immediate release on network and cable TV. Some pay channels (HBO, Showtime) and basic cable channels (USA, TNT) started producing feature films in the 1990s for exclusive release on their network. At the end of the 20th century, most theatrically released movies were televised, usually on cable pay channels or cable pay-per-view, within a year after their initial release. This practice invited home viewers to make a copy, thus diversifying the market for the film industry. Essentially, if a film did not fare well in theaters, a studio could recoup much of its losses in video sales and rentals. The video rental industry has also allowed film studios to market their entire library of films to the home-viewing public.

Although many American movies increasingly rely on special effects to attract audiences, and the blockbuster and the predictability of its sequel drive the industry’s success, theatrically released films still offer the big image, clear details, true colors, and state-of-the-art stereo sound all offered in a dedicated environment free of the distractions of home viewing. The uniqueness of the experience, as well as the content of the film, continues to make film a culturally important medium, while fostering the continued commercial success of Hollywood studios as integral parts of the American consumer economy.

See also media; popular culture; pornography.

Further reading: Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society since 1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

—William L. Glankler