End of the Road?

Abstract

Summer 1969 may well turn out to be one of the crucial moments in American film history. For the last several years Hollywood has been steadily recovering from the box-office slump of the fifties; every year profits have been getting bigger, soundstages busier. But this past summer the trend has been sharply reversed. Almost all of the big, expensive, traditional-style commercial films (The Chairman, The Great Bank Robbery, MacKenna's Gold, Castle Keep, Justine) have failed miserably. Most of the movies released during the summer were dreadful, but that is hardly a new phenomenon; what is new is that the big bad movies are all losing money. Last year's Sidney Poitier vehicle, For Love of Ivy, was a smash; but this year The Lost Man, which is, if anything, a slightly better movie, has bombed. Almost all of the major studios have risked their futures on giant-budget films that once might have seemed good commercial bets -Star, The Shoes of the Fisherman, Sweet Charity, MacKenna's Gold, Paint Your Wagon -and that now will be lucky to recoup a quarter of their initial costs. Of course it's possible that a couple of the twenty million dollar blockbusters still unreleased-Hello Dolly or Darling Lili or Tora Tora Tora or Catch 22-will strike a gold mine and change the situation, but even the studios don't expect that any more. They know that they're on the verge of an unprecedented financial disaster. Many have stopped shooting altogether for a period of months. The Paramount lot is to be sold, and MGM and 20th Century-Fox (soon, with unwarranted optimism, to be renamed 21st Century-Fox) are talking of doing the same. Agencies are desperate-even many of their major stars cannot find work. The boom town is close to becoming a ghost town again. The changing movie audience, talked about for a long time, has finally registered its preferences with unmistakable clarity. The two favorites of the youth audience last summer, Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, will probably be two of the highest-grossing films of all time. While The April Fools and Sweet Charity languish, there is an audience for offbeat movies that no studio would have dreamed of making even last year-for Alice's Restaurant, a crazy quilt of autobiography, farce blackout sketches, melancholy romantic ballad, melodrama; or for Medium Cool, an angry, passionate indictment of the forces of repression in contemporary America. Four major movies released this summer-Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant, Medium Cool, The Rain People-were all made on low budgets, with virtually complete independence, away from the studios; all were written and directed by the same person, and all were conceived for the screen. (Alice's Restaurant moves off in such a different direction from Arlo Guthrie's record that it has to be considered a largely original piece of work.) None of these are Underground films-they are made for large audiences, with name actors, with very sophisticated Hollywood-level craftmanship. But all are truly personal films in the sense that works by Bergman or Antonioni are personal films. Midnight Cowboy is not quite comparable-it was adapted from a novel and has a separate writer, producer, director-but its success also represents a boost to personal film-making, for it was made outside the Hollywood cocoon, and in defiance of conventional assumptions about acceptable material for the screen. The success of these movies and small movies like them-Frank Perry's Last Summer, Robert Downey's Putney Swope (the first major hit from the Underground)-has reached the front offices. This is not to say that the new studio executives are likely to be any more discriminating than moguls of the past. They are still