The Cinematic Spirit of ’76

Last year’s 50th anniversary summer of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” was accompanied by a feeding frenzy of hoopla. We were besieged with a slew of “making-of” documentaries, countless online articles and appreciations, Discovery Channel specials, features on the nightly news, museum exhibits and a nationwide theatrical rerelease. I suspect the breathless delirium surrounding the “Star Wars” 50th anniversary next year will make this look like child’s play. Both celebrations are of course justified, as both films redefined what Hollywood would be for the next half-century, for better and (mostly) for worse. Lost in the cinematic no man’s land between 1975’s “Jaws” and 1977’s “Star Wars,” however, is 1976, a year of enormous significance for the industry. 

To understand the stakes at play in 1976, you need to rewind to 1969, the year the Hollywood establishment was blindsided by the smash success of “Easy Rider.” What the hell, right? That year the studios had given the public exactly what it wanted, what it had always wanted: bright, splashy, big budget all-star crowd pleasers like “Hello Dolly” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So why were people flocking to that tedious shaggy dog thing about a couple of dope-smoking hippies?

The film, which was directed by Dennis Hopper and starred Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, was originally slated for American International Pictures, the low-budget indie studio that catered directly, and profitably, to the youth market. A.I.P. and producer/director Roger Corman had already given us “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and hundreds of other monster movies, juvenile delinquent films, sci-fi movies, rock ’n’ roll rebellion pictures, beach party films, drug movies, sexploitation comedies and biker films that reflected and defined American teenagedom in the ’50s and ’60s. 

The roster of directors, actors and writers who made those cheap genre quickies included an astonishing crop of talents. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Nicholson, Brian De Palma and a dozen other notables all gave A.I.P. and Corman full credit for giving them their start.

That A.I.P. would produce “Easy Rider” seemed a given. Since the 1966 release of “The Wild Angels,” A.I.P. had all but cornered the biker film market. Fonda and Nicholson were established A.I.P. fixtures who’d already been in a couple of biker movies. “Easy Rider” was poised to take it to the next level by using the genre to comment on the generational turbulence of the late ’60s.

But when A.I.P. execs were hesitant to let Hopper direct his debut feature, he and Fonda began shopping the script around. Even though Columbia Pictures execs weren’t exactly hep to the scene and couldn’t make heads or tails of this rambling hippie nonsense, they decided to take a chance. The suits were as dismayed as anyone when a film with a paltry $400,000 budget raked in $60 million at the box office.

With that foot in the door, other A.I.P. alumni — maverick young hotshots who’d graduated from the Roger Corman school of low-budget genre filmmaking, began quietly infiltrating the major studios, ushering in what came to be dubbed The New Hollywood. Coppola, Scorsese and other Corman refugees left the bug-eyed monsters and hopped-up teenagers behind to make “The Godfather,” “Mean Streets” and other serious, downbeat prestige pictures aimed at adults.

Other Young Turk filmmakers like Terrence Malick, William Friedkin and Robert Altman, even without those A.I.P. credentials, followed suit, crafting intelligent, artistic films that mirrored the cynicism and paranoia of the era. Scan through the nominees for best picture Oscars in the first half of the ’70s and it’s a catalog of some of the greatest and most iconic American films ever made: both “Godfathers,” of course, together with “Nashville,” “The French Connection,” “Badlands,” “Chinatown,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” the list rolls on and on. For mature moviegoers, it was an amazing time to be sitting in theaters.

Then came “Jaws” in the summer of 1975, and those two repeated notes on the soundtrack rang the death knell for the New Hollywood. Everyone knew it, too, especially major studio chiefs. “See?” they said in essence. “If given the choice between hugely entertaining escapist summer blockbusters and dreary, cynical low-key human dramas with bummer endings, where do you think moviegoers are going to drop their hard-earned cash? C’mon people — Watergate and Vietnam are ancient history, so let’s turn that frown upside down!” 

’76 would witness the last gasps of the New Hollywood, the last time for several decades that prestige films would outpace fun old-fashioned popcorn fodder at the box office. It was a brief but good run, and it ended with a bang.

Following the mind-numbing success of “Jaws,” the old guard set themselves the task of clawing back the Old Hollywood they knew and trusted, with bona fide movie stars and satisfying happy endings. 1976 offered some hints of what was coming, but it hadn’t quite taken full hold yet. Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson starred in the romantic musical tear-jerker “A Star Is Born,” the big-budget war epic “Midway” featured Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, everybody loved those spunky ragamuffins “The Bad News Bears,” and “Carrie” was the first of what would soon enough become an almost comical avalanche of Stephen King adaptations. Although we saw the first wave of “Jaws” knockoffs like “Grizzly” and “Day of the Animals,” the most obvious stab at a “Jaws”-level blockbuster in 1976 was the over-hyped, Dino De Laurentiis-produced remake of “King Kong.” Released just before Christmas, the reboot (which really wasn’t that bad) made oodles of money and was accompanied by a shopping mall’s worth of merchandise. But it was only the fourth-top grossing film of the year, which wasn’t nearly enough. It wasn’t “Jaws”-level mammoth as expected, and earned an unfair reputation as an archetypal big-budget Hollywood flop before being quickly forgotten.

There’s nothing wrong with popcorn fodder like the above (I’m a big fan of all those movies), but a quick glance at the now-iconic films in the running for the best picture Oscar is sobering. The Watergate drama “All the President’s Men” was pitted against Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” the Woody Guthrie biopic “Bound for Glory,” Sidney Lumet’s prescient, dark and savage media satire “Network,” and the highest-grossing film of the year, “Rocky,” a quiet, gritty and melancholy picture that bears only the vaguest of familial resemblances to its cartoon sequels. 

Then came 1977. That year, Hollywood insiders George Lucas and Steven Spielberg finished the job Spielberg began with “Jaws,” stomping the life out of serious American filmmaking with “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters.” ’77 also ushered in the era of the unnecessary but obligatory sequel, beginning with “Jaws 2,” “Exorcist II: The Heretic” and “Airport ’77.”

Beginning in the second half of the ’70s and rolling on through the next few decades, Corman refugees continued making films like “Apocalypse Now” and “Raging Bull,” while the Hollywood establishment refocused on the bottom line. It did so while taking one important lesson away from the previous few years: Instead of lavish musicals and sprawling epics, the studios realized they could rake in much more money by targeting teenage audiences with plenty of liquid capital. In short order, theaters were glutted with horror movies, space operas, teen sex comedies, Stephen King adaptations and sequel after sequel after sequel. Over the course of the decade, the trajectory of the movie business became a kind of Möbius strip, as studio execs reclaimed the Old Hollywood by making A.I.P.-style movies, but with all-star casts and much bigger budgets.