That ‘70s era: a decade of excess and film success

Not long before filming began on “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” the movie’s screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, took Bob Dylan to Durango, Mexico, to meet Sam Peckinpah, full of trepidation that the hell-raising director would do something to spook Dylan, who’d not only agreed to co-star in the movie but record a soundtrack album too.

“It was late at night,” Wurlitzer recalls in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” one of two fascinating new documentaries devoted to the glory days of ‘70s movies. “As we walked up to the house, there was a scream and this maid ran out, terrified, and we heard a gunshot and I thought, ‘Oh, man, this is going to blow the whole thing with Bob.’ Sam was standing in front of this mirror, completely naked. The mirror was totally blown and he had a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. And I said, ‘Sam, this is Bob Dylan.’ ”

It seems completely apt that the rival documentary about this period, produced and directed by respected filmmakers Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme, is titled “A Decade Under the Influence” -- ‘70s Hollywood was an oasis of unparalleled excess. As producer Polly Platt puts it: “These guys were doing whatever they wanted. They were drinking, smoking dope and they lost their minds.”

But along the way, those guys -- Hollywood in the late ‘60s and the ‘70s being very much a man’s world -- made a staggering number of terrific movies, including “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Godfather,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “MASH,” “Shampoo,” “The French Connection,” “The Wild Bunch,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Mean Streets,” “Badlands” and “The Last Picture Show,” to name but a few. The outpouring of celluloid artistry has earned the period between the 1967 release of “Bonnie and Clyde” and the arrival of “Star Wars” 10 years later a reputation as Hollywood’s last golden era. Together the documentaries tell about that remarkable period of filmmaking and offer an ironic commentary on the dismal state of Hollywood today.

Of the two documentaries, “Easy Riders,” which played at the Cannes Film Festival and will air again on the Trio cable network in August before making its DVD debut later this year, offers more entertainment value. Writer-director Kenneth Bowser has great, rarely seen footage of the young Francis Ford Coppola at work, accompanied by a painfully shy “personal associate” -- the scrawny young George Lucas. He’s also got a knack for loosey-goosey interviews. Trying to explain why Dennis Hopper botched the Mardi Gras footage in “Easy Rider,” Karen Black, who plays one of the hippie chicks in the movie, gives a classic ‘60s answer: “Everyone was stoned out of their mind.”

Now playing at the Nuart Theater in West L.A. and airing in an extended version in August on the Independent Film Channel, “Decade” is more illuminating, with the respectful tone you’d expect from a graduate school seminar. It gives filmmakers a welcome opportunity to discuss their craft and technique. Billy Friedkin, for example, drew on his experience as a documentary filmmaker shooting “The French Connection,” especially when shooting its bravura under-the-elevated-train chase sequence. “Decade” gained access to more key figures, using filmmakers to interview their peers (Alexander Payne did a great interview with Coppola; likewise, Neil LaBute with Paul Mazursky and Michael De Luca with John Calley).

LaGravenese and Demme, who died shortly after the film went into production, also sent out a letter distancing the film from Peter Biskind’s acerbic “Easy Riders” bestseller, which provides source material and the title for Bowser’s film. Nevertheless, some of the most formidable figures, namely Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, wouldn’t talk. LaGravenese spent an afternoon at Beatty’s home, listening to him tell Hal Ashby stories, but he could never pin him down for an on-camera interview. Not everyone was a breeze.

“I was so nervous that I didn’t sleep the night before I interviewed Robert Altman,” LaGravenese recalls. “Before we were on camera, I asked him one question and he immediately said, ‘Well, I don’t agree with that.’ After that, I just threw away all my prepared questions.”

Of risk and adversity

As both documentaries point out, by the late 1960s the monolithic studio system was in dire straits, run by aged moguls who had no idea that the country was in the grip of a youth-culture revolution. It’s a chapter of film history that’s useful to remember. When business is booming, as in today’s Franchise Film-dominated Hollywood, studios are loath to take any chances -- why mess with success? It’s when things are going bad that people are open to taking risks, figuring as the moguls of the early ‘70s did, what have we got to lose?

When Paramount couldn’t get a top director interested in “The Godfather,” the studio took a flier on Coppola, a young unknown whose movies hadn’t made a dime. Seeing archival pre-”Godfather” footage of the director scratching his beard and wandering around in powder-blue shorts, it’s a wonder he ever got past the studio guard gates. But as Coppola says today, in a quote that should be emblazoned in marquee-sized neon lights over the desks of the executives responsible for this summer’s parade of brain-numbing sequels:

“There can’t be art without risk. It’s like saying there’s no sex, but then expecting there to be children.”

Coppola and his contemporaries were irrepressible and often self-destructive. But they possessed a fiery passion for filmmaking that is rarely on display today. Paul Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver” in a two-week creative binge, saying “it jumped out of my head like an animal.” As my colleague Manohla Dargis wrote in a recent review of the wan indie drama “XX/XY,” “The American indie scene is filled with tame, polite movies, agleam with professionalism and laden with characters that are content to remain willfully unaware of the world.” LaGravenese, who at 43 is old enough to remember seeing “The Godfather” and “Serpico” as a kid at Loew’s Oriental in Brooklyn, believes most of today’s filmmakers are wary of putting any naked feeling into their films. “They’re trying so hard to be hip that they don’t have room for a lot of emotion,” he says. “It’s odd to hear young people today equate passion with being uncool. No one wants to say what they’re feeling at the risk of sounding foolish.”

In fairness, today’s young filmmakers have less rope to hang themselves with. When Arthur Krim ran United Artists, home to many of the most daring ‘70s films, he’d invite a filmmaker to a Sunday brunch of lox and cream cheese. “He’d look into your eyes,” recalls screenwriter Marshall Brickman. “And if you didn’t look that crazy and [the film] didn’t seem that expensive, he’d say, ‘Go make your movie, invite me to the opening.’ ”

An age of irony

It’s hard to believe that so many ‘70s movies, despite their restless abandon, were box-office hits. Were audiences more open to experimentation and artistry? Did they have higher expectations? As befits an era shaped by the Watergate scandal, urban decay and the Vietnam War, ‘70s films were packed with irony, irreverence and a nagging sense of moral ambiguity. Today’s moviegoers have grown up with radically different cultural signposts. Arriving at the height of an unpopular war, “MASH” was a huge box-office success. But how much resonance would it have today, when according to a recent survey 75% of all college kids say they trust the military “to do the right thing” most or all of the time? As Julie Christie observes in “Decade,” ’70s audiences “didn’t want the same old stuff -- like nowadays.”

It was a rare moment in American pop culture when moviegoers preferred the rough trade of reality over escapist fantasy. From “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Chinatown,” the movies were full of ambiguity, populated with antiheroes who lost their souls or died before the credits rolled. Today we crave good guys with squishy-soft hearts of gold. Perhaps the most telling moment in either film occurs in “Easy Riders” when Roger Corman,

the B-movie impresario who made teen drive-in quickies about fast cars and mutant monsters, says he went to see “Jaws” and realized the jig was up.

The big studios, who’d long ceded him the youth market, had their own killer shark B-movie, except it had A-list stars and effects. Opening on hundreds of screens the same weekend, it marked the dawn of today’s visual-effects extravaganzas. Too often today’s movies are all about excess; every summer seems like a hollow exercise in “can you top that” filmmaking. Back in the ‘70s, Schrader saw Hollywood as “a decaying whorehouse that had to be assaulted.” I wonder how many young filmmakers today feel the same way -- or

have the courage to lead the charge.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.