Year
|
Event and Significance
|
1975
|
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was the first film to take all the major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress) since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934).
|
1975
|
Steven Spielberg's Jaws was the first modern 'blockbuster' film to top the $100 million record in box-office business in North America (cruising past previous pace-setters Gone With the Wind (1939), The Sound of Music (1965) and The Godfather (1972)). It earned its 27 year-old director (and Universal Studios) a place in Hollywood. Part of Jaws' financial success was due to the fact that Hollywood preceded its release by three nights of TV ads during prime time on all the networks - a massive TV marketing campaign costing $700,000. It was also booked into 460 theatres for its opening weekend - a record! - making it one of the first major films to open in wide-release throughout the country (another prominent film that also opened in wide-release was the independent film Billy Jack (1971)). The film's tremendous success spurred Hollywood studios to aggressively look for further modern blockbusting, 'big-event' films that could break weekend box-office records - fueled by increasingly more expensive ad campaigns.
|
1975
|
Robert Altman's low-budget, Oscar-nominated ensemble film Nashville followed the interlocking lives of a huge eclectic cast of twenty-four main characters - one of Altman's trademarks. The quirky film was shot in under 45 days, and was the first major release that had actors perform live in front of the camera during their song performances.
|
1975
|
Writer/director Peter Bogdanovich's throwback 30s musical, At Long Last Love, was the first film since the "Golden Age of Hollywood" in the early 30s to have its musical numbers recorded live (instead of lip-synching).
|
1975
|
The first full frontal female nudity (an open crotch shot) in a major-studio American film was in Roger Corman's exploitation film Capone, a biopic about Chicago gangster Al Capone (Ben Gazzara). The female actress was Susan Blakely (as Iris Crawford), who spread her legs while getting out of bed with Capone.
|
1975
|
The Sony Corporation introduced the 1/2 inch Betamax video format and videocassette recorder (VCR) for consumer home use, with the capability of recording up to one hour.
|
1975
|
Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film version of the original international stage hit, was a commercial failure when originally released, but has since achieved major cult film status, and has been considered the longest-running 'midnight movie' of all time.
|
1975
|
The unusual, nationally-distributed, low-budget B/W feature film Deafula marked a strange milestone - it was the first, and only, horror (vampire) film shot using American Sign Language (Amesol), a technique dubbed "Signscope." It was shot without sound originally and no spoken dialogue, although a monotone soundtrack was later dubbed in, loosely translating the signs.
|
1975
|
Director George Lucas, John Dykstra and producer Gary Kurtz created a facility called Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in Lucas' own studio (Lucasfilm) in Marin County (Bay Area of Northern California) to help in the creation of special effects and miniature models for his first film in a trilogy -- Star Wars (1977). One of its customized inventions was a motion-controlled camera (the "Dykstraflex") to film the spectacular space-ship dogfight in the finale. Since then, the award-winning ILM (under the umbrella of Lucas Digital, Ltd.) has become the industry standard. It has been a major player in the development of advanced and computer-generated visual effects for scores of films, and the top effects house for Hollywood.
|
1975
|
Kathleen Nolan was named the first female National President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), initially for a two-year term. She was re-elected in 1977 to serve a second term.
|
1975
|
HBO (Home Box Office) bet its future on satellite programming distribution, when it signed a 6-year, $7.5 million contract to allow access to RCA's recently-launched communications satellite Satcom I. HBO inaugurated its satellite-delivered cable service nationwide with the live transmission of the Ali vs. Frazier boxing match ("Thrilla in Manila") in October, 1975. The move made HBO the first successful, satellite-delivered pay cable service in the US.
|
1975
|
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel debuted their PBS-TV film review show, a monthly show originally titled OPENING SOON...at a Theatre Near You, on Chicago's PBS affiliate WTTW. After a few successful seasons, it was re-named Sneak Previews in 1977, and soon became a weekly show - and was one of the highest-rated shows of its kind in TV history. The milestone show helped to pioneer interest in film criticism (beyond print). After a contractual dispute, the critics left the series in 1982 to start At the Movies.
|
1975
|
The first feature film to be encoded with a Dolby Stereo optical soundtrack was Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975).
|
1976
|
The Steadicam, developed by Garrett Brown, was used for the first time in Rocky, and then fully exploited in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).
|
1976
|
Italian film director Lina Wertmuller became the first woman to be nominated for Best Director for Seven Beauties (1976, It.).
|
1976
|
JVC (in Japan) introduced the VHS (originally for vertical helical scan, and later Video Home System) 1/2 inch video format. The first VHS cassettes and players, which cost about $885 each, were released by JVC in October. The system was designed to compete with Sony's Betamax magnetic tape system, with a longer recording time. In 1977, RCA began marketing the first VCRs in the United States based on JVC's system, capable of recording up to four hours. By now, Japanese manufacturers had taken over the VCR market. The videocassette recorder became a mass market consumer item in the late ‘70s, primarily in two formats: VHS and Sony's Betamax. The VHS system soon became the home video recording standard for almost two decades (until the rise of DVD technology), although it was in many ways technically inferior to the high-quality Betamax. By 1987, VHS had acquired about 95% of the consumer market. The new technology was considered a threat to the film industry but in subsequent years was re-evaluated as a boon when studios discovered videos to be a major source of income. By 1986, the home video industry's annual gross rentals exceeded rentals paid for films by the theatres.
|
1976
|
Gone with the Wind (1939) first aired on network TV and drew a huge audience over two nights - about 34 million people - the largest ever film audience to watch a feature film on television.
|
1976
|
Director Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A., another Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, documented a Kentucky coal miners' strike in the early 1970s against the Eastover Mining Company.
|
1976
|
Nagisa Oshima's shocking and controversial film, In the Realm of the Senses (aka Ai No Corrida, Jp.), told of extreme, all-consuming sexual obsession, madness and immersion (bordering on pornography in its uncut version). It was seized and banned by US Customs and postponed in its censored release, for its scenes of unsimulated fellatio and penetration, and for genital dismemberment and auto-erotic asphyxiation. This erotic Japanese masterpiece about painful passion told the story of a torrid, increasingly intense and dangerous, true-to-life, almost non-stop sexual affair between gangster businessman/inn owner Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji) and one of his maid-servants, former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) in mid-1930s Japan.
|
1976
|
Director Bernardo Bertolucci's epic political tale, 1900 (aka Novecento), was released - at 255 minutes (although some versions were cut). The monumental film was produced by three American movie studios and represented three countries (Italy, France, and W. Germany). It was basically a history of Italy in the first half of the 20th century, seen through the eyes of its two characters (Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu).
|
1976, 1977
|
British actor Peter Finch was awarded the Best Actor Oscar for his role as crazed, suicidal, UBS network anchor-man and fired 'mad prophet of the airwaves' Howard Beale in Network (1976) - memorable for his immortal line: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore." Finch's award was presented post-humously (he died on January 14, 1977, just shortly before the awards ceremony). He was the fourth actor to be honored with a posthumous nomination and the first and posthumous winner for Best Actor - later supplemented with Heath Ledger's posthumous nominaton and win for Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight (2008).
|
1976
|
Beatrice Straight won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, the shortest role to win an acting Oscar, for her less than eight minutes of screen time in Network, with only 8 speaking parts (of approx. 260 words). (Runner up: Judi Dench for about ten minutes of screen time as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), with 14 speaking parts (of approx. 446 words).)
|
1977
|
George Lucas' space opera Star Wars, made for $11 million, was released in theaters in mid-summer and grossed nearly $200 million on its first release, topping Jaws (1975) as the highest earning film to date and generating an astoundingly lucrative merchandising campaign. It truly revolutionized movie merchandising. After adjusting for inflation, its US gross profit was second only to Gone with the Wind (1939). It ultimately helped to resurrect the financial viability of the science-fiction genre, a category of films that was considered frivolous and unprofitable, and its exhilarating, action-paced computer-generated effects thrilled audiences. Until Jaws (1975) and then Star Wars, the summer was typically Hollywood's slow season -- not true afterwards.
|
1977
|
Star Wars was nominated for ten Academy Awards (including Best Picture), and won in six (mostly technical) categories. One of its negative influences was that it accelerated a trend towards special-effects-laden blockbuster films targeted at young people. It generated a remarkable two sequels (for the original trilogy) and three prequels, and led to the equally-successful collaboration between Spielberg and Lucas for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
|
1977
|
Director John Badham's Saturday Night Fever created a disco-dancing craze, popularized disco music, made a star of John Travolta, and the extremely popular songs by the BeeGees encouraged the future popularity of movie soundtracks.
|
1977
|
Director/writer Steven Spielberg's successful science-fiction classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, presented a unique view of aliens as benign and kind --- and saved Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy by being the studio's biggest grossing film up to that time.
|
1977
|
Woody Allen's semi-autobiographical romantic comedy Annie Hall, a marked departure from Allen's earlier slapstick-filled pictures, won the Best Picture honors over the special-effects blockbuster Star Wars, and gave the director/star/writer two Oscars (Best Screenplay and Best Director). The costuming of the title character (Best Actress winner Diane Keaton) -- dubbed the 'Annie Hall' look -- created a fashion craze. Woody Allen became the first director to win an Academy Award for a film he starred in.
|
1977
|
Canadian writer/director David Cronenberg's low-budget horror film Rabid starred ex-porn film star Marilyn Chambers (the ex "Ivory Snow girl") in the lead role as Rose, a mutant predator with vampirish blood cravings following plastic surgery. It was a notable cross-over role for the former hard-core adult film actress - she was one of the first adult stars to cross over into a mainstream film.
|
1977
|
Andre Blay, who had founded an audio/video production and duplication company in 1968 called Magnetic Video, established the first video distribution company (in Detroit, Michigan) in 1977 to license, market and distribute half-inch videotape cassettes (both Betamax and VHS) to consumers. It was the first company to sell pre-recorded videos. He offered the first group of fifty best-selling movies (from Twentieth Century Fox) to the public through a direct-mail sales operation called the Video Club of America, advertised in TV Guide. His revolutionary company ushered in the lucrative era of home-video.
|
1977
|
George Atkinson of Los Angeles began to advertise the rental of 50 Magnetic Video titles of his own collection in the Los Angeles Times, and launched the first video rental store, Video Station. It was a 600-square-foot storefront on Wilshire Boulevard. In order to raise capital, Atkinson charged $50 for an "annual membership" and $100 for a "lifetime membership," which provided the opportunity to rent the videos for $10 a day. Atkinson was threatened with a lawsuit for renting the videos, but quickly discovered that U.S. copyright law gave him the right to rent and resell videos he owned. Within five years, he franchised more than 400 Video Station stores across the country.
|
1977
|
Respected 43 year-old Polish director Roman Polanski had sex with a 13-year-old girl (Samantha Gailey (now Geimer)) following champagne (and allegedly, quaaludes) in actor Jack Nicholson's hot tub. Known for directing Rosemary's Baby (1968) (his debut Hollywood film) and the highly-acclaimed Chinatown (1974) which revitalized the film noir genre, and for being the widower of the brutally-murdered Manson victim and 26 year-old pregnant wife Sharon Tate in August, 1969, Polanski pleaded guilty to a single count of unlawful sexual intercourse with the minor but fled to France in 1978 before his sentencing. In exile, he went on to direct Tess (1980), Frantic (1988) (featuring the first starring role of Emmanuelle Seigner - his future wife), the erotic thriller Bitter Moon (1992), and The Pianist (2002), which was nominated for Best Picture and won three Oscars, including Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director (unclaimed, since he remained a fugitive from US justice). [Footnote: After 31 years as a fugitive, 76 year-old Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 while enroute to the Zurich Film Festival, with possible extradition to the US to face sentencing for his conviction.]
|
1977
|
David Begelman, the executive head of Columbia studios, was suspended for confessed embezzlement and forgery. In late 1977, he was reinstated, but then by early 1978, Hollywood gossip columnists Rona Barrett and Liz Smith exposed the story to a mass audience, dubbed "Hollywoodgate". Shortly afterwards, Begelman was reinstated and then running United Artists for MGM, while actor/whistleblower Cliff Robertson was blacklisted for four years.
|
1978
|
Philips introduced the video laser disc (aka laserdisc and LD) -- the first optical disc storage media for the consumer market. Pioneer began selling home LaserDisc players in 1980. Eventually, the laserdisc systems would be replaced by the DVD ("digital versatile disc") format in the late 1990s.
|
1978
|
Disney licensed its cartoon compilations to MCA's DiscoVision - these were the first Disney videos available to the public.
|
1978
|
Grease continued the explosion of rock-music hit films (after Saturday Night Fever (1977)) - again featuring super-star John Travolta paired with singer Olivia Newton-John - they were the "oldest" teenagers in America at the time. Its success led to a disastrous run of inferior imitators, including: Thank God It's Friday (1978), Can't Stop the Music (1980), Xanadu (1980), The Apple (1980), Grease 2 (1982), Staying Alive (1983), etc.
|
1978
|
Orion Pictures Corporation was formed as a joint organization between Warner Bros. Pictures and three disgruntled, top-level executives at United Artists, who left over disagreements with UA's parent company Transamerica about lack of control and conflict over the future film Heaven's Gate (1980).
|
1978
|
Vietnam Era films began to appear at the end of the 70s, including Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Sidney Furie's The Boys in Company C, Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans, Best Director-winning Michael Cimino's controversial Best Picture-winning The Deer Hunter, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
|
1978
|
At first, John Carpenter's low-budget teen slasher film Halloween began the teen slasher film cycle. It was dismissed as schlock by most critics, until championed by the Village Voice and the 'Ebert & Siskel' Sneak Previews PBS-TV review show as a work of art. For many years, it was the highest grossing independent film of all time, and ushered in a glut of other similarly gory films (such as Friday the 13th (1980) and Prom Night (1980)). Unfortunately, it spawned numerous, often routine and mediocre sequels (seven sequels and a remake by 2007).
|
1978
|
Marlon Brando broke the $3 million mark for an actor's earnings, when he was reportedly paid a salary of $3.7 million and over 11 percent of the gross (his total earnings were $14 million) for his 10-minute cameo appearance (shot over 12 days) as Jor-El, the title character's father in the blockbuster Superman: The Movie. He also received top-billing (with Gene Hackman) over Christopher Reeve.
|
1978
|
National Lampoon's Animal House, a wildly-successful gross-out teen comedy with unrefined humor - about an anarchic party-animal frat house at fictitious Faber College, was the first $100 million hit comedy. It was one of the earliest films to be targeted directly at the teenaged audience - and set the stage for further Hollywood films made just for that demographic. It ushered in a growing era of gross-out teen comedy.
|
1979
|
Miramax Films was originally created as a small production company to distribute low-budget, quirky independent and arthouse films. It started when brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein purchased and renovated a run-down movie theater in Buffalo, N.Y., and turned it into a profitable college art house. They started as distributors by acquiring the rights to the concert film The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, which cost them $180,000 and grossed $6 million. [In the following two and a half decades, until Disney split with its partner in 2005, the Weinsteins-run Miramax would garner $4.5 billion in grosses from its films, almost 250 Oscar nominations, and a reputation for creating controversy.]
|
1979
|
Disney-trained animator Don Bluth, who was an animator for Disney's Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers (1977), Pete's Dragon (1977) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) broke away and formed Don Bluth Productions with a group of disgruntled animators. His first notable non-Disney work was the animation sequence of Xanadu (1980). His first independent feature-length animation was The Secret of N.I.M.H. (1982), and his first big hit was the Spielberg-co-produced animation An American Tail (1986).
|
1979
|
The Black Hole was Disney's first PG-rated feature film.
|
1979
|
The China Syndrome, a film about a fictional nuclear plant that faced near melt-down, starred Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. It opened 11 days before an actual partial nuclear reactor core melt-down accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania.
|
1979
|
The first film utilizing Dolby's 70mm "Split Surround" format was Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
|
1979
|
Woody Allen's Manhattan was released -- his first film using a widescreen (2.35:1) Panavision process. At Allen's insistence, the studio's contract required that the film had to be shown in letterbox format in any home video release or broadcast/cable showing -- therefore, it was the first film released in letterbox format for home video. At the time, the FCC regulations that didn't permit blank areas of the screen (bars above and below caused a bit of a problem.
|
1979
|
Ridley Scott's Alien, 20th Century Fox's extremely suspenseful, superior space science-fiction horror film, was the first R-rated film to have merchandising aimed at children.
|
Mid-to-late 1970s and into the 1980s
|
The Australian film-making industry experienced a revival or renaissance (new wave) of production after many years of sporadic growth, with increased government financing. Examples of films portraying Australian culture and history at this time of Australia's film-making resurgence included Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977) and Gallipoli (1981), Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979), Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant (1980), and the unexpected success of Mel Gibson in the first Mad Max (1979) film.
|
Late 1970's to Early 1980's
|
The popularity, profitability and success of HBO (Home Box Office) in the mid-1970s helped spur the growth of cable TV, and soon after, new satellite-delivered basic and premium cable TV networks were successfully competing against the major TV networks in the late 70s and early 80s, including premium movie channels such as: Viacom's Showtime (1976, with satellite broadcast in 1978), Warner Amex's The Movie Channel (1979), Time/HBO's own Cinemax (1980), the Disney Channel (1983), American Movie Classics (1984), and other Pay Per View (PPV) channels, to name a few.
|
