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Once Upon a Time in America
Two new documentaries expose America's most important decade of cinema
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| "This was all about Teddy. Not just about
doing it for him, but about keeping him alive… at least
for me. It still feels like we’re partners and that we’ve
worked all year together.” —Richard LaGravenese |
Movie audiences, desensitized to violent imagery by the graphic coverage of the Vietnam War and disgusted by the blatant corruption of political leaders, grew intolerant of the movie pablum of the past. They sought a fresh, raw brand of truth from the silver screen, and young audiences, especially, flocked to small, offbeat pictures that promised something different, radical and real. From the earliest works of the period, like Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, to the last, including Jaws and Star Wars, it was clear that this “New Hollywood” movement was a major departure for the American motion picture industry. No longer would it only be the Hollywood producers who called the shots. This was the beginning of the reign of the “director as king.”
For moviemakers Kenneth Bowser, Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme, the ’70s represented more than just a decade of great movies—it was a time of enormous creativity and risk-taking. It was also a film school crash course and an era of free thinking that today’s directors would be wise to learn from. For Boswer, “these were the films that made me fall in love with movies.” For LaGravenese, they’re part of his childhood memories. “My family would get dressed up to go into the city and see Planet of the Apes… I remember standing with my dad, waiting to get into The Godfather and Serpico. My high school is in the background of The French Connection car chase.”
Now, two new documentaries—Bowser’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Demme and LaGravenese’s A Decade Under the Influence—pay tribute to this explosion in American politics and film.
As the centerpiece of the Trio channel’s “’70s Maverick Filmmaking” month, Bowser’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a loose adaptation of Peter Biskind’s best-selling book of the same name. A chronicle of the ’70s, Biskind’s book was despised by Hollywood and loved by readers for its behind-the-scenes look at this era of film, complete with all the scandals and rumors.
While the book’s legacy may have been helpful to Bowser in getting the attention of potential investors, its infamy proved a hindrance in enticing interviewees. “Last year at the Berlin Film Festival I talked to Robert Altman, who had been in my movie, Frank Capra’s American Dream,” recalls Bowser. “I told him that I was doing a film on the ’60s and ’70s filmmakers and that I would really like to interview him for it. ‘Oh yeah, that would be great. I’m there,’ he told me. Then I said ‘Well, I have to tell you, the film is called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.’ I won’t tell you what he said! He was polite enough to let me pitch... but he was not going there. Francis Coppola, the same thing. William Friedkin said no. Spielberg and Lucas wouldn’t even return the call.”
Though detaching the project from Biskind’s book and its implications would have been one way to go, Bowser opted instead to let his filmography precede him. “It’s always a double-edged sword,” he says. “What worked for me was that the book was so famous that it got me in doors and it made people willing to help make the film. Had I just walked in and said ‘I want to make a film about this period...’ I’m not Richard LaGravenese or Ted Demme. I don’t have that kind of clout or access.”
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| “It’s real hard to be free when
you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” —George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in Easy Rider (1969). |
Even hampered by the preconceived notions that the project’s title invited, Bowser was able to assemble a group of more than 40 subjects to appear before the camera—including directors Arthur Penn and Paul Schrader and actors Dennis Hopper and Ellen Burstyn. Like its literary predecessor, the film is packed with information. “The book is so encyclopedic. When I went back and I read it carefully to see if I could use it as a script, it’s so dense. There are four stories on every page! Someone said to me once, ‘It’s like driving around Paris and getting lost—you keep running into the same landmarks, but you have no idea how you got there.’ That was the experience of making the film.”
Like its namesake’s subtitle, “How the Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood,” the film is more an exploration of the social scene rather than a hardcore moviemaking chronicle. “One of the things I didn’t want to do was make a ‘making of’ movie,” states Bowser. “Even though I touched lightly upon the making of some of these films, there were so many ‘Making of Jaws,’ ‘Making of M*A*S*H,’ ‘Making of The Godfather’ films. I knew wasn’t going to do that because there was this great story of how it all happened, and that story involved chaos.”
In aligning his film with the spirit of the book, Bowser hoped his treatment of the subject would be different from the approach Demme and LaGravenese were taking on A Decade Under the Influence, a project he learned about “not long after we optioned the book. There was a little piece in Entertainment Weekly that said they were doing this film and that it was going to be a ‘love letter to the ’70s.’ I can’t say that I was pleased, but it tipped me to the way that they were going to approach it… It didn’t sound like their project was going [to focus on] the chaos.”
Perhaps as a nod to Biskind, Bowser’s film takes a somewhat academic approach to the time, describing the various financial, social, political and cultural contributors to the New Hollywood movement, and tying it all together with news clips, photos and narration by William H. Macy. Where the film particularly succeeds is in the interviews with those moviemakers whose behind-the-scenes positions afforded them a front row seat to the New Hollywood’s antics. Though their names may not be as well known as Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese or Coppola, none of those moviemakers could have achieved such success without the collaboration of cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond (The Deer Hunter) and Gordon Willis (The Godfather); editor Dede Allen (Bonnie & Clyde); writers Carl Gottlieb (Jaws) and Joan Tewkesbury (Nashville) or producers Jerome Hellman (Midnight Cowboy) and Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather).
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| Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1967), starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, is considered to be the first “New Hollywood” film. |
Hand any two—or three—directors the same camera and central theme, and the stories they’ll tell are certain to be different. While both films cover the same people and films—even using some of the same clips—those similarities are about the only ones. As a viewer, it doesn’t take long to catch onto the differences, as each film starts out with a quote that is indicative of the film’s temperament. For Bowser, that introduction serves to bring the New Hollywood’s relevance to today’s film market: “As the new millennium begins, the Hollywood movie has become, at $32 billion a year, America’s most successful export to the world.” A Decade Under the Influence’s approach is decidedly more existential, with a quote from François Truffaut (a progenitor of the movement). “Cinematic success is not necessarily the result of good brain work, but of a harmony of existing elements in ourselves that we may not have even been conscious of—an accidental coincidence of our own preoccupation at a certain moment of life and of the public’s.”
For Demme and LaGravenese, A Decade Under the Influence began with two distinct emotions: excitement and fear. Friends since 1994’s The Ref (which Demme directed and LaGravenese wrote and produced), the two had spent many hours discussing “the kind of movies we wanted to make and the kind of filmmakers we wanted to be,” said LaGravenese.
“We’d even show each other clips... When we were facing that writer’s strike that sent the business into a panic—rushing movies into production or postponing them indefinitely—Teddy said why not do this documentary. We thought it would be a blast, number one. And at the same time it would be like going to film school (which neither of us had done).” The strike never happened. But by that point there was no stopping them: “Decade became something we felt strongly about accomplishing—getting this collection of artists on film.”
Based on Demme’s previous relationship with the Independent Film Channel (he hosted Escape from Hollywood), they took their idea to IFC’s Alison Bourke who, along with Caroline Kaplan and Jonathan Sehring, served as executive producer. “Alison, Caroline and Jonathan have been incredibly supportive,” states LaGravenese. “IFC is great place to make movies.”
With a distributor in place, next came the research. Unlike Easy Riders, there was no existing reference source for Decade. “We started the research phase about four months before we began the interviews. Our research team, John Miller-Monzon and Tania McKeown, did extensive research not only on the filmmakers and films of the ’70s, but also on what was going on in the world at that time. This gave us a sense of the context the filmmakers were working in.”
In addition to content, Demme and LaGravenese also needed to make decisions about how they were going to shoot the film, considering the need for two DPs (Clyde Smith in LA and Anthony Janelli in NYC) and a limited budget. “Knowing that we were going to eventually go to film, we decided to shoot in 24p HD. We tested a series of different options, and Teddy really loved the way the HD looked.”
The cast consists of more than two dozen interviewees, including Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Julie Christie, Sidney Lumet, Pam Grier, Robert Towne and Milos Forman. But equally impressive is the assemblage of interviewers that Demme and LaGravenese put together, including writer/directors Alexander Payne and Neil LaBute. “People were excited about the idea of interviewing and would come up with their five top preferences.”
Like the dialogue between LaGravenese and Demme that sparked the idea for the film, the interviews that take place in front of the camera on Decade are more like intimate conversations. “Neither Teddy nor I had done this kind of thing before,” admits LaGravenese. “What made sense to us was to have these conversations the same way we’d talk to each other. The way we’d get excited talking about movies carried us through the interviews.” It was this same kind of personal moviemaking that marked the New Hollywood movement itself.
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| The only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), starring Dustin Hoffman and John Voight, epitomized the radical nature of the “New Hollywood” movement. |
The interviewing process commenced in December of 2001. But an unexpected tragedy would change the course of the film just one month later. “During the first week of December in 2001, we had our first wave of interviews,” recalls LaGravenese. “I did Robert Altman and Marshall Brickman in NYC; Teddy did William Friedkin, Roger Corman and Bruce Dern in LA; and Scott Frank did Robert Towne and Sydney Pollack in LA. A month later, Teddy passed away.” Though an enormous loss, personally and professionally, abandoning the project was never a consideration for LaGravenese. “For me, continuing was never a question.
It was all about Teddy. Not just about doing it for him, but about keeping him alive… at least for me. It still feels like we’re partners and that we’ve worked all year together.”
After a year spent completing the interviews, for LaGravenese, the road to completion would still be a long one. “The pacing in the ’70s was very different. [Moviemakers] really took their time to develop atmosphere and character. It was as if they worked in longhand instead of sound bytes. When I got to the editing phase, I wanted the documentary to take its time, as well.” More than two years later—and after its Sundance premiere—it’s a process that LaGravenese is just now completing. “Our editor, Meg Reticker, started assembling in May, 2002 and we just locked last week.”
Originally conceived by Demme to be a 10-hour documentary (“He was a man with big ideas”), the theatrical version of the film will weigh in at just under two hours. Not making the final cut are the many moviemaker tributes that Demme and LaGravenese planned to include. “We wanted there to be a John Cazale tribute, an Ashby tribute, a Pakula tribute and a veteran director tribute for films like John Huston’s Fat City. We wanted to cover the foreign films, which were amazing (Fassbinder, Wertmüller, Herzog). We also wanted to cover Fosse, Peckinpah, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three and the up-and-coming filmmakers (John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Jonathan Demme). But time and money wouldn’t allow it.”
When the film makes its small screen debut in August, that version will hold some added features, including interviews with Clint Eastwood, Monte Hellman and Sissy Spacek that didn’t make it into the film—as well as the Ashby tribute.
While Bowser and LaGravenese see their films as rather selfish pursuits—a chance to remind the world of this great time in cinema history—what will inevitably emerge is a newfound appreciation for the work of these ’70s movie mavericks.
“I screened an early cut of the film for a Columbia film class and one student remarked, ‘I only know Nicholson old; it’s great to see some of his earlier work.’ I realized how little audiences today know about this period. For many of us, [the film] will be a love letter to a period; an homage. For today’s audiences, I wanted it to be a primer to get them interested in discovering some of these films and filmmakers.”
Bowser’s pursuit is similar: “We screened the film
at NYU and the students loved it. The films that they didn’t know,
they wanted to know more about.” Bowser also hopes that remembering
the ’70s will help to establish the need for more originality
in today’s movie marketplace. “It’s an interesting time because,
once again, the most interesting films are coming out of Europe…
There’s something going on. I just hope that it’s 1958 in America
and we’re getting ready to break out.” MM
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This story was published in the Spring 2003 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Something Radical, Something Real / Two new documentaries expose America's most important decade of cinema
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