new hollywood

The Paramount decree of 1948 had already stripped the major studios of the theater chains that guaranteed a picture's run, and by the mid-1960s a string of expensive flops left the survivors chasing an audience that had gotten younger and gone to college. The trade press coined New Hollywood for what came next, before the studios had agreed to give these directors anything like control: real locations, handheld cameras and available light standing in for the backlot. Scorsese put an insomniac cabbie on the night shift, drifting out of reality, in Taxi Driver. Coppola's The Conversation follows a surveillance expert convinced the tape he just recorded will get two people killed, and who cannot decide whether to hand it over. Lumet ran the same nerve twice in two years: a bank robbery curdles into a hostage standoff and then a media event in Dog Day Afternoon, and a fired anchorman announces his own suicide on air in Network and watches the ratings climb. None of it resolves, because nobody funding these pictures was asking it to. You watch people come apart at their own speed, with nothing arriving to stop it.

Distinguish from French New Wave was the intellectual parent, but New Hollywood operated within a commercial studio system and told genre stories — crime, war, horror — where the New Wave was essayistic and personal. The earlier Film Noir shares the cynicism and urban darkness but belongs to the classical studio era New Hollywood was reacting against.