1960s Hollywood
The Hollywood studios
continued their decline during the 1960s contributing only modestly to the
world cinema renaissance. Declining cinema attendance and the break-up of a
single mass audience (which had begun in the 1950s) accelerated in the 1960s
with young people, ‘intellectuals’, black audiences, ‘adults’ and ‘families’
now catered for as separate, specialised audiences. This tendency was
accelerated towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when the studios
surrendered considerable control over production to a new generation of
filmmakers.
Before this period, however, Hollywood ’s response to the decline was to divert more resources to the rapidly expanding TV market (by providing serials and made for TV movies) and to cut production costs wherever possible. One popular method of cutting costs and maximising profits was the so-called ‘runaway production’ strategy. This involved moving big-budget productions abroad, which had the advantage of lowering costs (particularly labour costs) whilst taking advantage of the various subsidies offered by many foreign governments to encourage ‘national’ production. ‘Runaway productions’ included ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962) and ‘Dr Zhivago’ (1965) which maximised the wide screen format in their choice of exotic, if not authentic, locales (‘Dr Zhivago’, for example, made convincing use of Spanish locations for snowy landscapes !). The tendency to draw upon a more international range of actors, storylines and settings was also an economic acknowledgement of the importance of overseas markets that now made up over fifty percent of Hollywood ’s shrinking box-office takings.
Nevertheless, in itself, filming abroad was no longer sufficient to alter Hollywood ’s shrinking fortunes as the financial fiasco of ‘Cleopatra’ (1963) proved. ‘Cleopatra’, filmed chaotically in Italy , England , Spain and Egypt , cost a staggering $44 million (making it the most expensive film ever in real terms, including ‘Titanic’) and all but bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox. The inability of studios under various management regimes to control or support wanton waste on this scale in the 1960s only hastened their decline. The sale of Fox’s 260-acre Los Angeles lot to the Aluminum Company of America (at the giveaway price of $43 million) in 1962 was a desperate transaction designed to staunch the hemorrhaging of the company’s resources. It was echoed by similar sell-offs by other studios, most of which were swallowed by giant conglomerates.
As a result of Hollywood ’s financial crisis a generation of important directors that included Ford, Hawks and Walsh ended their careers in the 1960s with modest budget pictures. New directors, some from television, such as John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, and Sydney Pollack achieved success with sharp, low-budget features that were occasionally critical of the contemporary political or social scene. ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), ‘The Hill’ (1965) and ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They’ (1969) were examples of films with more abrasive or cynical world views that might have been possible under Macarthy’s shadow in the 1950s. Censorship, in general, was reduced substantially in the 1960s with the United States Supreme Court reducing the powers of local and state censoring bodies. The gradual liberalisation of American cinema (and society) was signalled by a shift in policy by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 1968 towards classification rather than regulation of screen content.
The growing power of television and the popularity of ‘European’ films also played its part in eroding screen censorship as Jack Ellis (1995) suggests:
‘Organised pressure groups - religious, ethnic, political - turned their attention away from what was showing in the theatres to what was appearing ever more widely on the tube. Producers eagerly, some desperately, took advantage of the new freedom in order to try to attract new audiences away from television and to compete with the forthrightness of European films.’
Frank representations of nudity, sex and violence increased dramatically towards the end of the decade. Four films by Mike Nichols which were controversial in their day show how far attitudes shifted in the space of five years. ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ (1966) was considered groundbreaking in its uncompromising portrayal of a marriage in crisis and use of ‘shocking’ language. ‘The Graduate’ (1967) was a landmark exploration of sexual discovery in which a college graduate is seduced by a middle aged woman and then falls in love with her daughter. The anti-war ‘Catch 22’ (1970), like ‘M*A*S*H’ of the same year, was a thinly- veiled satire of America ’s involvement in Vietnam and gleefully ridiculed military authority figures. Nichol’s ‘Carnal Knowledge’(1971), like ‘The Graduate’ was a film about sexual rites of passage but was more explicit and far blacker in its conclusion. In fact ‘Carnal Knowledge’ provoked a short-lived backlash by a number of American States which banned the film, before a wave of explicit material ranging from the (sometimes brutal) psycho-sexual explorations of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ to the pornography of ‘Deep Throat’ (both 1972) radically shifted the frontiers of what was acceptable for public viewing.