A Brief History of Film
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Part One: Muybridge and His Trotting Horse
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
To think the medium that produced such screen gems as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron began with a barroom bet seems so outlandishly vulgar as to be unbelievable. At yet that is how it happened – at least that’s what some people say.
It seemed simple enough – even for brains sufficiently dulled by a few drinks. The question was – when trotting, does a horse ever have all four hooves off the ground at the same time? Some said no. Others, including Eadweard Muybridge, said yes. He went about to prove his point using one of the most amazing technological advancements of the 19th Century – photography.
It was a summer day in 1878 when Muybridge set up his cameras, twelve of them, along the side of a racetrack. Each camera had electrical wires extending across. As the now-famous horse, Occident, trotted by, it tripped the wires which tripped the shutters. Muybridge now had twelve still pictures of Occident trotting -- and proof that a horse can have all four hooves off the ground at the same time.
But this was just the beginning. Muybridge soon discovered that the photographs, when passed by the eye in rapid succession, ceased to resemble separate images and became a “moving” image. It was an amazing illusion – and not really a new one. The French has developed the phenakistiscope back in the 1830s. It provided drawn images that, when projected correctly, gave the entertaining illusion of motion. Now with the advent of photography plus the capability of taking more than one photo in succession, the animation toys of yore suddenly became much more powerful, with fully realized actual photographic images of animals and people coming to life in a way that had never been possible.
Muybridge made the study of motion his life-long work, creating innumerable short “motion pictures” of animals, men, women, acrobats, athletes, and dancers. By the time of his death in 1904, Muybridge had secured his place in film history.
Part Two: The Original Tik Tok and Instagram – Lumiere, Edison, and Glimpses of Everyday Life
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
A young gymnast does a flip. Workers leave the factory. A train arrives at the station. A couple shares a passionate kiss.
Such brief “movies,” sometimes only seconds in length, are common in our own 21st Century. Perhaps such social media apps as Instagram, Tik Tok, or YouTube Shorts come to mind. But the idea of being entertained by brief clips is decidedly old school.
Very old school. Extremely old school.
For this approach to visual storytelling is actually a throwback to the very beginning of movies. Each example that I mentioned in the first paragraph is from the 19th Century – films made 130 years ago.
Things have really come full circle, haven’t they?
In the beginning, of course, brief “tests” like these were all that was possible. And necessary. People were amazed by these life-like photographs that moved. Others were aghast at this latest technology which showed ghostly moving images in silence and, even worse, in a strange colorless world of blacks, whites, and greys.
But it was the “amazed” crowd that won the day and people in general couldn’t get enough of these thrilling glimpses.
In France, the Lumière Brothers created an amazing process by which a film base was covered with photographic emulsion and then perforated, allowing the film to be advanced one frame at a time past the aperture. The brothers took their new device out into the streets – capturing everyday events that wowed audiences. Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) and Baby’s Breakfast (1895) were amazing enough.
But it was their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) which created film history when audiences, thinking that the hyper-realistic images of a photographed train would run them over, reportedly ran to the back of the theater, fearing for their lives. Some modern critics doubt the truth of this story. I do not. We need to remember that for people in those days, seeing a Lumiere film projected on screen in the 19th Century had the same impact as us watching a display on The Sphere in Las Vegas in the 21st Century. In each case, the technology was showing a clarity and realism that had never been seen before.
Over in the USA, inventor Thomas Edison and his assistants were busy creating their own movie magic. Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) is my favorite. With a sprightly running time of five seconds, the film shows Fred Ott (one of Edison’s assistants) sneezing for the camera.
Unreeling at a truly epic running time of eighteen seconds, The Kiss (1896) shows performers May Irwin and John Rice, well, kissing. Many critics denounced the film as obscene, most especially since the couple is presented in closeup (extremely rare for the time) and is shown kissing three times – not just once. One reviewer called the work “disgusting”. Audiences didn’t seem to mind too much, and many such similar films were produced over the next several years.
Nowadays, youngsters from Generation Z and Generation Alpha post and share short five-second or ten-second clips of plane turbulence, funny pet tricks, and physical feats of strength – convinced that they have revolutionized the way moving images are captured and edited. But all they have done is reverted to old school ways of filmmaking. Very old school.
But the story doesn’t end there. What is neat is that some of these younger people have rediscovered the films of yore and have re-posted them – many times using colorization and a higher frame rate to enhance the picture. Because of this, Lumiere and Edison have found new audiences, so that even that passionate kiss from 1896 and Fred Ott’s wonderful sneeze are being shared on Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
Things have really come full circle.
Part Three: “Once Upon A Time” – The Movies Become Stories
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
I was watching a Tik Tok video recently of a weightlifter going over the proper way to do a bench press. The video was noteworthy because it was longer than just 10 or 15 seconds, but more like 45 seconds or a full minute. One viewer commented, “Wow, a TikTok video that actually has a beginning, a middle and an end. What a refreshing change of pace!”
I had to laugh. The sentiment could have been expressed with equal fervor back in 1903 – when the first film with a story was released.
But I digress.
Actually, there were a number of films released before 1903 that had something resembling a plot. Georges Méliès, the French magician filmmaker who wowed audiences with his beautiful visual effects, filmed the story of Joan of Arc in 1900 and sent men to the moon in 1902. Granted, these films were short and primitive. But they did tell a story and had the semblance of a plot.
It is The Great Train Robbery (1903) that gets all the attention and all the credit. Directed by Edwin S. Porter, the film told the story, using multiple shots from various angles, of a train robbery. With a gargantuan running time of 12 minutes, the movie had suspense, drama, action, and even an unforgettable final shot of a gun being fired directly at the camera.
The language of film was being created quickly. But lessons were often learned the hard way.
Take, for example, Life of an American Fireman (1903), also made by Porter, which depicts a fireman rescuing a woman and her baby from a burning building. Porter wanted to get inventive and show the event from multiple angles. In the final film, we first have a shot from the inside. The woman and the child are in the room as the fireman enters and rescue them. Then we have a shot from the outside. We see the fireman climb up the ladder to the window, disappear inside, then reappear outside with the woman and then the child. Motion pictures being as unique as they are as a visual art form, including not only the dimensions of space but also of time, it became obvious, only in hindsight, that it made no sense to have the same event presented twice, from beginning to end.
It was only years later that others re-edited the sequence in a way that made sense – first we have a shot from the outside and see the fireman enter the house. The we cut to the inside shot of the woman and child in the house and the fireman enters to rescue them. Then we cut back to the outside of the house to see the fireman carry both the woman and the child to safety. This was the first example of cross cutting – something we take for granted today but was completely new back in the early 1900s.
As the language of film developed, the desire to create grander stories, even epics, took hold of these first moviemakers. We learn about the silent movie masterpieces of the 1910s and 1920s in our next article.
Part Four: D.W. Griffith and the Birth of Epic Cinema
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
As cinema moved into the 1910s, a powerful film “industry” formed, most famously among the orange groves of Hollywood in California. Armed with great ambition and a lot of money, the young powerhouses of this fledgling industry sought to expand film to epic proportions. In doing so, one prominent director not only made a lot of money but, in the process, helped to create the language of cinema.
Famous for his extravagant cinematic vision and his extravagant spending, D.W. Griffith stunned America with The Birth of a Nation (1915). Unreeling at a truly epic running time of over three hours, the film was controversial (and remains so to this day) for its revisionist depiction of slavery and the presentation of Ku Klux Klansmen as the “heroes” of the climactic scene. It was an enormous financial success – inspiring the expenditure of even more money on bigger films.
Griffith followed up Birth of a Nation with a more extravagant production the very next year. Entitled Intolerance (1916), the monstrous thee-hours-plus epic intercut different stories from four different time periods – the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, a story of crime and struggle in modern-day (1910s) life, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the Persian defeat of the Babylonian Empire. That last segment was the most famous, featuring thousands of extras parading down the largest set ever built for a film. Well received by critics and audiences alike and weighed down by its $2 million budget, Intolerance just barely made its money back.
It was Griffith who, along with Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, decided to unite forces, providing the artists an opportunity to make their own films without having to follow the dictates of industry producers. These artists, united in their desire to create, called their joint venture company…what else? United Artists.
Chaplin himself got into the epic game – an extraordinary feat for one with such rough beginnings. A native of London, Chaplin’s father was a music hall performer who drank himself to death, while his mother, cracking under the pressure of raising Charlie and his half-brother Sydney, had to be sent to a mental asylum. By the age of 14, Charlie Chaplin was living like an orphan but was extremely talented – very popular for his comedic routines on stage. By the age of 19, he was working with Fred Karno – a connection that sent him on a boat to the States (with fellow passenger Stan Laurel who would also become a great comic). Eventually arriving in California, he created The Tramp character that made him famous. By the time he co-founded United Artists in 1919, Chaplin was said to be the world’s most recognizable figure (more so than the president or the pope).
His “epic” was inspired by historic images of prospectors traveling West seeking gold. The resulting film, The Gold Rush (1925), accomplished what most thought was impossible – extending a film comedy to a feature-length running time. Chaplin managed to do this by mixing in pathos with the comedy – the alternating currents of emotion are what helped to move the story forward and entertain audiences. His film ended up making an enormous amount of money.
The film epic was not limited to America. In France, Abel Gance envisioned making six enormous epics based on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. He made only the first film. Stretching the limits at a truly astonishing running time of five and a half hours, Napoleon (1927) featured innovations such as hand-held camera, multiple exposures, gib shots, split screen, and film tinting. For the film’s finale, three projectors roared to life, presenting a kaleidoscope of individual images or a single panorama. Due to the difficulty of presenting this colossal epic, Napoleon remained relatively unknown until film archivist Kevin Brownlow restored it and brought it to new generations of audiences during the 1980s and beyond.
Meanwhile, over in Russia, young filmmakers were experimenting with editing, creating montages of unprecedented rapidity and depth of meaning. Soviet montage editing is covered in our next article.
Single frames from various shots from the famous Odessa Steps Sequence (Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin {1925})
Part Five: Splicing, Dicing, and the Birth of Montage Editing
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Not long ago I was having a conversation with a young filmmaker. My friend was anxiously trying to make a distinction between how Baby Boomers and Gen Z’ers edit. He was trying to make the point that editing in the 21st Century is at a much faster pace than it was in the past. So I showed him a clip from a 100-year-old film. As he watched the rapid-fire editing montage, his mouth dropped open and he said, “Wow”.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
As I have told my film students many times before, it is the content and not the year that determines the pace of editing. Some will start with the technique and work backwards to the content – for example, saying “I want to make a really cool fast-paced video” and then trying to figure out what content to force into their pre-conceived editing schema. The better way is to decide on the content first and then let the content determine the pace of the editing.
That said, some of the fastest editing from the 20th Century can be found in the silent era – a time when the visual image danced free from the constrictive grip of synchronous sound.
The filmmaker often credited with discovering the true power of montage editing is Sergei Eisenstein. Hardly a Gen-Z’er, Eisenstein was born back in 1898 and boasted a head of hair that looked as jarring as his editing. A product of his time, this Latvian filmmaker and theorist made movies filled to the brim with Soviet propaganda. His images, if you can stomach the Soviet-style preachiness, are as powerful today as they were over one hundred years ago.
Eisenstein discovered the power of editing when he realized that two shots, each with very different content, could create a whole new meaning when spliced together. This can be summarized by the formula:
Shot A + Shot B = Meaning C
…in which the juxtaposition of Shots A and B create a new meaning (C) that cannot be found in Shot A alone or Shot B alone.
Take, for example, the opening post-title shots of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). A shot of a flock of sheep going past the camera (Shot A) slowly dissolves into a shot of workers walking from a subway station on their way to work (Shot B). The meaning we find in this juxtaposition, which is not found in either Shot A alone or Shot B alone, is that workers in our modern world have been dehumanized; they are nothing more than mindless sheep at the service of modern machines. Of course, Charlie gets drawn into the gears of a machine later on in the film – he is, in a sense, “devoured” by modern technology.
Lev Kuleshov made a famous film in which the shot of an actor was juxtaposed with a bowl of hot soup, a dead child lying in state, and a scantily-clad female. The shot of the actor was identical each time but the actor’s performance appeared to depict hunger, sadness, or lust, depending on the shot with which it was combined.
Eisenstein took this concept of shot juxtaposition and pushed it to the limit, experimenting with ever more rapid editing and shots lasting a fraction of a second.
His best-known work, Battleship Potemkin (1925) features two memorable sequences. One – the plate-smashing sequence shows the growing frustration of a sailor who has had enough of hunger and smashes a plate in a flurry of brief shots (I counted ten shots in four seconds). Two – the Odessa Steps sequence shows the slaughter of innocent people by Cossacks marching down on them with guns and bayonets. Easily the best-known scene in silent cinema, the Odessa Steps sequence has been referenced countless numbers of times in other films – most famously in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), which even goes so far as to show a baby carriage tumbling down the stairs, just as in Eisenstein’s film.
Convinced of the power of montage editing but taking a more documentary approach, filmmaker Dziga Vertov turned his camera to real people and events to create his Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In this amazing film, Vertov uses dutch angles, split screen, slow motion, fast motion, and a dizzying array of other techniques to capture real people in real life circumstances. Firefighters racing to a fire are real firefighters. Athletes running in a race are real athletes. Telephone operators busily flipping switches and connecting cables are real telephone operators. Vertov takes these bits of reality and cuts between them with amazing dexterity – sometimes the pace of editing is so fast as to be almost hypnotic.
What made all this possible one hundred years ago was that these films were silent. Perhaps we should be more specific, because silent films were never truly silent – there was always music (and even some sound effects) that accompanied each film. What was technically impossible at the time was synchronous sound – for example, dialogue that matched the lip movements of the performers on screen.
In his early years, Eisenstein saw a lack of synchronous sound not as a negative, but as a strong positive. No synchronous sound meant that the visual image was released from bondage. It did not have to slavishly link itself to sound as in a theater production. Instead the visual image, accompanied only by music, could be cut, cross cut, dissolved, sliced and diced, even down to a fraction of a second, with a freedom that was impossible in most other art forms.
With the passage of time, the coming of sound films was inevitable. Cameras became heavy – monstrosities that were blimped so the loud motors would not interfere with on-set sound recording. The radical editing of Soviet montage gave way to a more bland and realistic pace which allowed lengthy exchanges of dialogue to take place. The inventiveness of silent cinema gave way, at least for a time, to a more programmatic approach. Not until Alfred Hitchcock lensed his famous shower sequence in Psycho (1960) did cinema regain the radical inventiveness it had lost with the end of the silent era.
Part Six: The Early Sound Era and the Advent of Technicolor
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
My mother was only six years old when The Jazz Singer (1927) was released. She recalled how her older sister burst into the house one evening, so excited from her trip to the movie theater. “Oh mother!” she exclaimed, “On the screen was Al Jolson! Then he opened his mouth – and out came a voice!”
The movie was mostly silent and only a couple of songs were given the synchronous sound treatment. But history had been made and there was no going back. Similar to the digital quandary of several decades later, the new technology initially created confusion and competition among competing formats.
Now getting precariously close to middle age, Charles Chaplin was the solitary hold out, convinced that “talkies” would ruin the magic of his Tramp character. Not that the sound enthusiasts didn’t try. They most certainly did, with one company sending Al Jolson himself to the Chaplin Studios in a highly publicized effort to sway the famous comedian. But when City Lights was released in 1931, it was not only silent but actually went on to mock synchronous sound in its opening scene. It became one of Chaplin’s great masterpieces and guest of honor Albert Einstein was said to cry when viewing the film’s emotional conclusion at the gala premiere. After Modern Times (1936), Chaplin finally gave in and left the silent era forever, making only sound films from then on.
Another technological breakthrough was the advent of color. This great achievement came at a price. Not only did sound force cameras into blimps, cutting down on the ability to move the camera freely, but the new color technology added further limitations to camera movement. Technicolor required three rolls of film running simultaneously with each strip of film registering a different primary color. The Technicolor cameras therefore had to be much larger than their black-and-white counterparts. When fully blimped (to cut down on all the camera noise to help with sound recording), these monstrous cameras could weigh up to two hundred pounds.
The studio system was in full swing and stars were signed to specific studios. The new technology of both sound and color allowed for more spectacular offerings and for greater star power for their actors.
Often called the greatest year in the history of cinema, 1939 saw the release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Stagecoach, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Wuthering Heights, and Gunga Din, along with two of the most famous films of all time, Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz.
None of this came easily. Wizard of Oz is famous for its behind-the-scenes nightmares, including the aluminum dust allergy that sent original Tin Man actor Buddy Ebsen to the hospital, and the fire accident that burned Wicked Witch actress Margaret Hamilton so badly she was hospitalized for six weeks. Gone with the Wind is famous for both its high budget scenes and its dizzying array of multiple directors. Both films made enormous sums of money, spurring the studios to continue churning out their lavish productions.
World War II enveloped the globe. It was at this time that a young Orson Welles was preparing to turn the world of cinema upside down. Welles and other brash young filmmakers of the 1940s and 50s will be discussed in the next article.
Filmmakers, going clockwise starting from upper left: Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Francois Truffaut.
Part Seven: From Kane to Cannes and Beyond – New Filmmakers Leave Their Mark
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Orson Welles was hailed as a child prodigy almost from birth. Despite being left parentless at the age of 15, the young genius had already been given private music tutoring and the chance to make friends with the family of Aga Khan.
Often lying his way through one adventure after another, Welles eventually settled in the Big Apple, where he shocked the world with a voodoo version of Macbeth, featuring a cast from the Negro Theater Unit of New York. His masterful radio work culminated in the Mercury Player’s famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast – so realistic that many went into a panic, convinced that Martians had invaded. This brought Welles only more fame and attention.
Hollywood’s RKO, excited by this new boy genius with the golden touch, offered him an astonishing contract. Now Welles, who had never worked in Hollywood, was going to write, produce, direct, and star in a motion picture masterpiece – Citizen Kane (1941), the famous, scathing profile of William Randolph Hearst.
Welles, only 25 at the time, felt fortunate to have legendary Gregg Toland as his cinematographer. When Welles asked the cameraman why he was willing to work with a kid, Toland famously responded, “Because you don’t know what can’t be done.”
The result was a masterpiece featuring a jarring flashback timeline, bizarre and innovative camera angles, deep focus (unheard of in those days), dramatic lighting, and a masterful use of sound. The film covered the life of Charles Foster Kane, his obsession with the much-younger Susan Alexander, and their obscenely large mansion called Xanadu. But even the simplest of minds could make the connections with William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and San Simeon.
Hearst was furious and sought to have the original negative and all prints destroyed. He failed – and the film went on to make motion picture history.
Over in Italy, after the war, a new realism in cinema was born. Films such as Rome, Open City (1945) by Roberto Rossellini and The Bicycle Thieves (1948) by Vittorio De Sica featured low budgets, non-professional actors, and location shooting. Formalism was frowned upon. Italian neo-realism was born and would persevere into the 1960s.
In Japan, a young Akira Kurosawa was shocked to learn that his Rashomon (1950) had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, despite the fact he had never submitted the film for consideration. Turns out that a person in Italy was impressed by the daring cinematography and varying plot lines and made sure it was screened. Despite being denounced by some in Japan as being too exotic and too “Western,” Rashomon was eventually hailed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films.
In France, young moviemakers famously “invaded” the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. For years, these young men had written against a “safe” and formalistic approach to cinema, opting for risk-taking and experimentation. Hand-held cameras, grainy film stock, long takes, choppy editing, and stories that embraced radical social change were the order of the day. Francois Truffaut, a self-confessed “Paris brat,” started the ball rolling with The 400 Blows (1959). Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol also made their contributions.
While the initial excitement of this French Nouvelle Vague had died off by the late 1960s, Rohmer succeeded in outlasting his contemporaries, making films into his old age. A devout Catholic, the director often explored the inability of characters to understand their own inner desires as they struggled with deep philosophical questions. His masterpiece, My Night at Maud’s (1969) was nominated for two Academy Awards. Rohmer made his last film in 2007 when he was 86 years old.
Going back to the 1950s – the old Hollywood studios that had ruled cinema for years now had to contend with this new approach to cinema. They also had to combat a new enemy – the box that delivered moving pictures into millions of family homes. Hollywood spectacles during the Golden Age of Television will be covered in our next article.
Part Eight: The Bigger, the Better – Hollywood Goes Wide
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
The appearance of television had a huge impact on the Hollywood movie industry. Suddenly, Americans had access to visual entertainment in their own homes. Cartoons? They could be viewed on TV. Movie news reels? They were easily supplanted by well-written and highly-crafted TV news programs. Movies? They could be viewed on the small screen as well (as long as the networks got the rights to show them). Suddenly movie theaters were becoming obsolete. Why go out to a movie theater and pay money when one could stay home and watch TV for free?
Hollywood was at war with television – and had to bolster its armaments if it wanted to survive.
The big movie studios had two powerful weapons in their pockets. One was color – something that TVs in the 1950s could not offer and something that movies could offer in a lush and vibrant manner. Another was size. While having visual moving images in the family living room was quite the revolution, the screen still looked pretty small and could not compete with the magic of the much-larger silver screen.
So Hollywood went big – big time. This meant larger cameras and larger formats with a larger aspect ratio.
“Aspect ratio” is the overall shape of the film frame. The shape is expressed as a proportion. TVs (as well as movies) typically had an aspect ratio of 4:3. That is, four units of measurement wide by three units high. Though technically a rectangle, this particular aspect ratio took on the appearance of a square, or something very close to a square. Thus, old movies and old TV shows had what looked like a “square” frame. 4:3.
Hollywood decided to create entirely new and very wide formats. This would be costly. This meant that the extra wide film had to be manufactured from scratch, along with the brand-new film cameras that could handle that format, and brand-new movie projectors and screens in every theater that also featured the new “shape.”
The most famous wide screen format was 70mm. Film formats are named by their width in millimeters, so the standard (sort of square) 35mm movie film was thirty-five millimeters wide. The new 70 mm was twice the width of the old format. This not only allowed for a wider screen but also for an extra-sharp picture (the larger the format, the smaller the film grains appeared to the naked eye, and the more detail could be captured. This is why a professional film looked sharp and a Super 8 home movie looked “grainy.”).
Sometimes special anamorphic lenses were used to “squeeze” an image onto a smaller film format, with a similar lens used to “unsqueeze” the image when projected. This process was used for Ben-Hur (1959), which was filmed using MGM’s 65 mm. format and a 2.76:1 aspect ratio.
Ben-Hur made lots of money and gobbled up a record number of Oscars at the Academy Awards. This only validated Hollywood’s decision and wide-screen epics became the mainstay of the movie industry. Many 70mm epics followed, including Exodus (1960), West Side Story (1961), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965). It is a tribute to the skilled directors and cinematographers of the era, as well as to the lush and sharp wide screen formats, that these films look as stunning today as when they were first released.
Even the Soviets got in on the game. Their bloated but still impressive seven-hour-long movie version of War and Peace (1966-1967) was shot on Sovscope 70 mm and boasted huge battle scenes with over 13,000 extras. Not surprisingly, stressed-out director Sergei Bondarchuk, who also starred in the movie, suffered two major heart attacks during shooting.
Arguably one of the most beautiful films ever made was Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Shot on the massive Super Panavision 70 format by cinematographer Freddie Young and directed by David Lean, the film involved hauling out large cameras and other massive equipment into the Jordanian desert. The breathtaking result stunned audiences of the time and still looks impressive even today. New 4K and 8K digital transfers bring out details that were already present in the original film negative.
As profitable as this era was for Hollywood, newer and younger voices would quickly take over in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Sunny musicals and Biblical epics would be supplanted by gritty realism and brutal violence. The New Hollywood movement will be the subject of our next article.
Francis Ford Coppola directs Marlon Brando.
The Godfather (1972)
Part Nine: “It’s strictly business…” – The Rise of New Hollywood
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Every generation can point to a shared socio-cultural moment when innocence was lost. For Baby Boomers, born in the affluent post-war era of Howdy Doody and Elvis, that moment came in November of 1963. For an entire agonizing weekend, the country and the world were glued to their television sets, watching the almost unbelievable images coming in from Dallas, Texas. A Howdy Doody view of the world was coming to an end – and right quick.
The Kennedy assassination and the subsequent on-air murder of his accused killer had serious cultural repercussions in the following years. Add to this a Vietnam War that was spinning out of control, social unrest, student uprisings, and the meteoric increase in drug use, and you have a seismic cultural shift that reached everywhere – including Hollywood.
The movie industry got rid of its Hays Code in 1968, replacing it with a voluntary rating system overseen by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). A radical cinematic permissiveness was now possible and the time was ripe for a new generation of filmmakers to make their mark – oftentimes with realism, violence, and sexually explicit material.
These young men adored the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and Welles – falling in love with their movies in film school. Now they were ready to graduate and move out on their own – and they were not about to make another “South Pacific.” Their names would soon become famous: Dennis Hopper, Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, among others.
Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) touched a chord with the drugged-soaked hippie generation. When the independent flick ended up earning 150 times its tiny budget, Hollywood took notice. This author (Fr. John Wykes) once talked to a man who was in the room when it happened. “It” was a meeting of all the high-powered musical producing giants at a major studio. They were gathered together, thanked for their great work in past years, and then fired.
What followed was a series of classic New Hollywood films – a few excellent, some fair, others horrible, but most very much imbued with steaming sexuality, violence, and progressive counter-culture philosophy.
Few of the New Hollywood filmmakers ruled the early 1970s as did Francis Ford Coppola, whose The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather II (1974) broke box office records and ended up winning Academy Awards for Best Picture in their respective years. Coppola quickly produced The Conversation (1974) in between the two Godfathers. It was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and is still considered a New Hollywood classic.
Martin Scorsese took the street violence he witnessed in Queens as a boy and brought it to his violent Mean Streets (1973) and the shockingly blood-soaked Taxi Driver (1976). Later on, his films became more refined – though still violent.
Take Hollywood’s love for star-studded spectacles and combine it with the early-70s penchant for dreary, violent content, and what do you get? The strangest and most unique of all film genres – the disaster film.
Really only one name dominated the disaster film genre, and that name was Irwin Allen. A skilled writer, director, and producer, Allen managed to attract some of the biggest names in Hollywood to sets where their characters got drenched, soaked, burned, and otherwise victimized by whatever disaster dominated the scenario. Diverse stars such as Gene Hackman, Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters, and Roddy McDowall were thrown into an upside-down cruise ship in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) while William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, and Richard Chamberlain were trapped inside a burning skyscraper in The Towering Inferno (1974).
Science fiction of the era was also decidedly dark. Planet of the Apes (1968) featured an astronaut’s visit to an “upside down” world – and his confrontation with humanity’s self-destruction. Soylent Green (1973) was a socio-economic nightmare about a bizarre nutritional supplement of the future – and its scary origins. And Logan’s Run (1976) presented a society in which people underwent mandatory annihilation at the age of thirty.
Joining in on the dystopian fun was a young man named George Lucas. He made THX-1138 4EB (1967) while still at USC. The post-apocalyptic student film received a lot of positive attention. Later on, Lucas had the rare opportunity to re-make it professionally as THX-1138 (1971) with Robert Duvall playing the title role. “THX Sound,” by the way, a common feature of later films, had no technical significance to the name but was a homage to Lucas’ first opus.
Films of the early 70s were soaked in darkness. But Lucas and friend Steven Spielberg had other plans. Though of the same generation as many other New Hollywood directors, they had a different creative bent. They leaned not towards violent anti-establishment cinema, but towards the light-hearted and fun sci-fi movies and adventure serials they watched as boys back in the 1950s. They were itching to make films that would entertain, not preach. The Lucas-Spielberg revolution that quickly tore down New Hollywood cinema will be the subject of our next article.
Star Wars fans in line — May, 1977
Part Ten: Lucas Destroys the Death Star – and New Hollywood as Well
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Perhaps no event marked the early 1970’s victory of liberal New Hollywood’s revolution more than the special Oscar for Charles Chaplin. Back in the 1950s, Chaplin, a British native who had never sought U.S. citizenship, journeyed to England for the premiere of his new film, Limelight (1952). J. Edgar Hoover, who had been after him for years (the FBI file on Chaplin’s alleged Communist-sympathizing activities numbered nearly 2,000 pages), saw a golden opportunity and (through the attorney general) rescinded the director’s re-entry permit the moment he left U.S. waters. Chaplin, who had helped lay the foundations of Hollywood, had been thrown out of the country. He and his wife Oona set up permanent residence at a chateau in Switzerland.
By the early 1970s, the climate had changed dramatically, and now Hollywood invited Chaplin back to receive a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. Now in his early 80s, Chaplin expressed great reservations, fearing he would be arrested as soon as he set foot on U.S. soil. The Academy as well as the Nixon administration assured the aging director that this would not happen. Chaplin showed up to receive his award and the progressive Hollywood elite greeted him with the longest standing ovation in Oscar history – twelve minutes long.
The ovation was well-deserved, as Chaplin was one of the greatest comic geniuses Hollywood ever knew. It was also a sign that New Hollywood’s revolution was complete.
Or was it?
Chaplin’s tears of joy were barely dry when American Graffiti (1973) began principal photography. A far cry from the violent and dark films of the era, George Lucas’ opus was a love letter to the teen culture of the 1950s. It proved to be very popular, as was Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Jaws two years later. This should have been a warning sign to Hollywood that something was about to change – dramatically so.
After American Graffiti, Lucas had the pull for his dream project – a space adventure that would harken back to the fun sci-fi serials of the 1950s. Called The Star Wars (later shortened to Star Wars) the idea owed a lot to Frank Herbert (who had authored the popular Dune novels) and Akira Kurosawa (whose plot for The Hidden Fortress {1958} was largely duplicated by Lucas, as Lucas readily admits).
This was a daring move by the young director. The tenor of the times seemed to call for violent, dark films immersed in existential angst. Fun sci-fi serials of the 1950s seemed dated and shallow by comparison.
But few executives in Hollywood realized the true tenor of the times. The American public, weighed down by the civil unrest and multiple, high-profile assassinations of the 1960s, were now even more despondent over what the early 1970s had to offer, including the Manson murders, the Watergate scandal, the terrorist nightmare at the Munich Olympics, the never-ending Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the urban decay of America’s cities. People surrounded by misery were now sick of seeing even more misery at the movies. They had had their fill of gangster flicks and disaster films. They were looking for something different. Even though they didn’t know it at the time, they were looking for Star Wars.
Disney, Universal, and United Artists all said no to the project, deeming it too strange and too risky. 20th Century Fox, happy with Lucas’ American Graffiti, decided to take a chance.
Boasting new, highly-advanced motion control visual effects of the new Industrial Light and Magic, and a loud, expansive John Williams score performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, Star Wars was released upon an unsuspecting public in 1977. Even before the age of social media, word of mouth was immediate and frantic. This was a film with amazing effects, beautiful music, and memorable characters. Best of all (and most astonishing of all), the movie was a clear battle of good vs evil and even had a happy ending.
Some critics were aghast. Wasn’t the New Hollywood about urban plight and exploring the gritty, violent undercurrents of a broken humanity? And now we have a silly movie like Star Wars? How could anyone take such a film seriously? Two young critics from Chicago, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, broke ranks and praised the film as something refreshing and different – escapist entertainment that the American public sorely needed.
Much to the astonishment of everyone (most especially the cast), Star Wars took off like no film had before, amassing such a huge amount of money that its first run in theaters lasted for over a year. When it officially became the most profitable film in the history of cinema, Hollywood switched gears as quickly as possible.
It takes two calendar years to make a feature film. Considering this, it is not surprising that 1979 (two years after Star Wars) became a bonanza year for science fiction and spectacular visual effects. Disney, whose animations had experienced a downturn, quickly turned out The Black Hole. 20th Century Fox released Alien. United Artists, whose treasure remained the highly-popular Bond films, sent 007 into earth orbit with Moonraker. And Universal released Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. All were released in 1979.
Paramount had acquired the old Star Trek television series when it bought Desilu. Always unpopular during its initial run on NBC, Star Trek had acquired a unique and loyal following in syndication, proving to be so popular that Paramount (in the mid-1970s) planned a new television show to be called Star Trek – Phase II. Scripts were written, sets were built, and the cast was assembled.
And then came Star Wars.
Seeing dollar signs, Paramount decided quickly on a bizarre gamble – to turn this cult TV series into a multi-million-dollar movie. This was totally unprecedented. The newly-constructed Phase II sets were destroyed. Costumes were re-designed. Leonard Nimoy, who had declined to appear in Phase II, was now coaxed back to re-join the original cast as Mr. Spock. Highly-successful Robert Wise became the director. John Dykstra, the man behind the effects for Star Wars, and Douglas Trumbull, the man behind the effects for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ended up working together on the new Trek film, producing an historic number of visual effects shots that hold up well to this day. Star Trek – The Motion Picture was rushed into release in 1979, underperforming domestically but doing well internationally and (later) on home video.
Spielberg had already made his mark with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters (1977). Now he would team up with friend George Lucas to make the highly successful Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels. Lucas continued his Star Wars franchise with The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), both highly successful. Spielberg returned to alien adventures with his E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) which raked in an astonishing $619 million dollars worldwide with its initial release. Making a grand total of $797 million dollars when including subsequent re-releases, E.T. was the highest grossing film of all time – keeping that title for eleven years.
Hollywood had changed. Both Lucas and Spielberg seemed to be unstoppable. By 1990, the pair was responsible for eight of the ten top-grossing films of all time. And yet, other filmmakers were on the rise – both new and old. The rise of a new foreign cinema, the rediscovery of old cinema, and the VHS videotape explosion will be covered in our next article.