1980s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1980
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Ronald Reagan was elected the first movie-star president of the United States, noted for films such as Kings Row (1942) and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951).
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1980
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36 year-old Sherry Lansing became the first female to head a major studio when she became president of 20th Century Fox studios.
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1980
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UA premiered Heaven's Gate (1980) in late 1980, and then withdrew it for re-editing, and re-released it in 1981. The disastrous film marked the start of the death-knell of the American Auteur period that had blossomed in the 1970s, with original works by directors and producers, including Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976)), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show (1971)), Woody Allen (Annie Hall (1976)), and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter (1978)).
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1980
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Exemplifying dedication to the art of realistic acting, Robert De Niro set the world record for most weight gained for a film by gaining 50-60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.
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1980
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The Tinto Brass/Bob Guccione (publisher of Penthouse Magazine) trashy, adult-rated film Caligula (1979) engendered controversy over its graphic sexual content (self-rated for MA - Mature Audiences only), when released in the US in 1980. The high-profile film was a remarkable production, considering that it featured eminent film actors (John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell, and Helen Mirren) and an adapted screenplay by Gore Vidal.
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1980
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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic drama Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally 15 and a half hours in length, was serialized into 14 parts (of varying lengths) for television viewing. Three years later in 1983, it was also released for theatrical viewing to US theaters.
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1980
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The acclaimed British director and "Master of Suspense" Alfred Hitchcock died at the age of 80. He was often noted as the originator of the "thriller" genre, the director of England's first feature-length sound film Blackmail (1929), the director of one of Hollywood's 3-D pictures Dial M for Murder (1954) and the originator of all slasher films Psycho (1960). His films were known for their themes and characters: an innocent man wrongly-accused (i.e., North by Northwest (1959)), sexual obsession (i.e., Vertigo (1958)), McGuffins, and cool blondes.
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1981
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Katharine Hepburn won her record fourth acting Oscar - Best Actress for her performance in On Golden Pond. She became the first performer to win that many Best Actress awards - the most successful actress in the award's history.
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1981
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The Best Picture winner this year was a surprise and major upset win for British producer David Puttnam's low-budget Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson, with seven nominations and four wins. The win signaled the start of another mini-British renaissance of film awards for this year and the next - with Gandhi (1982) soon breaking all British film Oscar records.
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1981
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MGM made a comeback when it was split into a hotel empire and a movie company in 1980, and then acquired United Artists. UA was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the disastrous Heaven's Gate (1981). The regular release of James Bond films provided most of the studio's hits for the remainder of the decade.
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1981
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MTV, a music video channel on cable, was launched 24/7. Its style of fast-moving montage was influential on films such as Flashdance (1983).
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1981
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Only one actor in film history, James Coco, was nominated for two opposing awards in the same year, an Oscar and Razzie, for his supporting role in Only When I Laugh (1981).
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1981
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Steven Spielberg's summer box-office hit Raiders of the Lost Ark was a breathlessly-paced throwback to cliff-hanging, non-stop action/adventure films of the past. This was the first collaboration between two legendary American film-makers, producer George Lucas and director Spielberg. Spielberg's phenomenally successful film, that cost only $23 million and made more than $200 million, contributed to the demand for bigger blockbusters. It was the first of three Indiana Jones films (from 1981-1989), and went on to make Harrison Ford a major, bankable A-list star (in addition to his original Star Wars appearances).
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1981
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43 year-old Actress Natalie Wood accidentally drowned off Catalina Island, during the filming of Peter Hyam's Brainstorm (1983), thereby necessitating the alteration and rewriting of the final film around her disappearance. Ironically, the film dealt with the question of the afterlife.
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1981
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The disco film musical Can't Stop the Music (1980) won the First Golden Raspberry Awards - a recognition given to the most banal and awful 'turkey' film of the year.
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1981
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Director/actor/producer/writer Jamie Uys's film The Gods Must Be Crazy - a comedy about a Kalahari desert Bushman named Xi who decided to take a journey to the edge of the world to return a peculiar foreign object (a Coca-Cola bottle) to the gods - became the biggest foreign box office hit in history, although it wasn't released in the US until 1984 (after it broke records internationally).
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1981
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Cult director John Waters paid homage to 60s' era Smell-O-Vision (inspired by William Castle's mystery film Scent of Mystery (1960)) with scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" cards for his classic film Polyester.
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1981
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John W. Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Notoriously, Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver (1976) was linked to and may have triggered the political assassination (copy-cat) attempt by the inconspicuous John Hinckley, illuminating his dangerous fixation on young actress Jodie Foster who had hoped that his "historical deed" would impress her and gain her "respect and love". Ultimately, it resulted in the assassin's infamous media-hero status - he was tried and found not guilty for reasons of insanity in 1982 and thereafter was confined to a Washington DC mental hospital.
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1981
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President Ronald Reagan supported government spending on abstinence education to prevent teen pregnancy (by promoting chastity and self-discipline), with the passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA). The prevalence of permissive attitudes, and of sex in films (the 80s was the age of the teenage sex comedy), TV, and in music helped to spur this movement ("Just say no").
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1982
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Jim Clark founded Silicon Graphics, a cutting-edge company that contributed to the growth of computer imaging and animation in films.
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1982
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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan just beat Tron (1982) into release, to attain the honor of being the first film to use computer-generated images (CGI) to any extent. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the "Genesis Effect" sequence was cinema's first entirely computer-generated (CG) sequence. This visual effect, a brief fully computer-generated sequence lasting about one minute, marked the first use of a fractal-generated landscape in a film (created by the Lucasfilm division of Pixar at ILM), and a particle-rendering system (for the fire effect).
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1982
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Walt Disney Studios' Tron was released as both a feature film (with more state-of-the-art computer-generated animation than any other film) and an arcade video game. This film was heralded as the first live action film with over 20 minutes of full 3D graphics and computer animation (extensive use of 3-D CGI in the famed 'light cycle' sequence). However, the film's failure at the box-office held up greater development of computer animation.
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1982
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Director Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial was released -- another all-time champion blockbuster. Special effects were produced by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) Company.
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1982
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During the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), two child actors (my-ca Dinh Le and Renee Chen) and Vic Morrow (the father of Jennifer Jason Leigh) were killed in a freak helicopter crash. As a result, greater precautions would be taken on Hollywood sets through the passage of reformed US child labor laws and safety regulations. Almost a decade later, director John Landis and four others were found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
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1982
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Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly actress Grace Kelly, died at age 52 of injuries from a car crash when she suffered a heart attack. During her brief six-year film career, she rose to prominence in High Noon (1952) opposite Gary Cooper, appeared with James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), and won a Best Actress Oscar for The Country Girl (1954) before retiring in 1956.
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1982
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The first feature-length free-form 'music video' film was Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall, based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall.
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1982
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The biggest home-video seller from 1983-1985 was Jane Fonda's exercise video titled Workout (aka Jane Fonda's Workout), first released in 1982. The trend continued in 1986 (the top seller was Jane Fonda's New Workout) and in 1987 (Jane Fonda's Low-Impact Aerobic Workout). The videotape revolutionized the video industry, with numerous celebrities imitating Fonda with their own fitness and diet videotapes.
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1982
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The soft-drink giant Coca Cola Company bought Columbia Pictures in a $750 million transaction. In 1982, a Columbia movie, Gandhi, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the Company secured its first Oscar. The newly-organized studio Tri-Star Pictures was formed by CBS Television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures.
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1982
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After a contractual dispute, film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel left the PBS-TV show Sneak Previews in 1982 to start At the Movies, owned by the Tribune Company's multimedia subsidiary Tribune Entertainment, which also owned Siskel's review newspaper. The name of the show was taken from their show's sign-off phrase: "We'll see you at the movies." They developed the "thumbs up-thumbs down" rating system as a permanent trademarked feature of the show.
Siskel and Ebert remained on the nationally-syndicated show until 1986, when they had another dispute (with Tribune Entertainment), and left to create a new Disney-produced show (Buena Vista Television), titled Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. [When they left in 1982, Sneak Previews continued until 1996, first with New York film critic Jeffrey Lyons and Detroit Free Press critic Neal Gabler, until Gabler left in 1985 and was replaced with Michael Medved.]
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1983
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George Lucas' THX sound system technology was developed with the main goal of recreating film sound in film theaters exactly as the filmmakers had intended. The first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983).
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1983
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The science-fiction film Brainstorm (1983) was not entirely completed when 43 year-old Natalie Wood died of drowning in late November 1981. The film was finished by changing its ending and using a stand-in, and then released posthumously - dedicated to her memory.
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1983
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The ground-breaking hit arcade game Dragon's Lair, introduced by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth and Rick Dyer, was the world's first coin-operated laserdisc arcade video game. The fully-animated, interactive cartoon challenged players to time their movements through the cartoon or otherwise face death.
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1983
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Never Say Never Again (a remake of the earlier Bond film Thunderball (1965)), starred Sean Connery as James Bond - the star's first appearance as agent 007 for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971). The film's title was a clever joke referring to Connery's reneged promise twelve years before that he would "never" star as Bond again. That summer, there was a so-called 'dueling' of Bonds - Connery's film competed with Octopussy, an "official" James Bond film starring Roger Moore, with both films in theaters at the same time. [A similar occurrence happened when the "unofficial" Bond film Casino Royale, starring David Niven, was released the same year as You Only Live Twice (1967), but these two films were not in theaters at the same time.]
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1983
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HBO (Home Box Office) became a leader in developing and creating programming content, with revolutionary shows such as: Not Necessarily the News (1983-1990) - its first original series, and the sports biopic The Terry Fox Story (1983) - the first made-for-pay-TV movie.
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1983
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Only one actress in film history, Amy Irving, was nominated for two opposing awards in the same year, an Oscar and Razzie, for her supporting role in Yentl (1983). This feat was duplicated by Sandra Bullock in 2009, who won both awards!
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1980s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1984
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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that home videotaping or recording (for home use) did not violate copyright laws.
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1984
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Splash, a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, was Disney's first film released under its new film label "Touchstone Pictures (or Films) " - its first entry into more mature themes (and content) in films.
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1984
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The PG-13 film rating was introduced, in response to parental protest about the sexualized torture scene (a beating heart was ripped from a victim's chest) in influential producer/director Steven Spielberg's PG-rated Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (his follow-up film to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)), and also for violence in Gremlins. The PG category was split into two by the Motion Picture Association of America: PG and PG-13 (for a film having a higher level of intensity). Children under the age of 17 could be admitted, but with parental guidance strongly suggested.
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1984
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The first movie to be released in the US with a PG-13 rating was John Milius' Red Dawn.
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1984
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Tri-Star Pictures, formed in 1982 as a joint venture by CBS Television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures, released its first film in May, The Natural.
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1984
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The Voyager Company debuted its Criterion Collection line of special-edition video laserdiscs, with additional revolutionary features such as language options, original aspect ratio widescreen and letterboxed formats (rather than pan-and-scan), supplementary materials, commentaries by directors on audio tracks, interviews, making-of documentaries, photo galleries (stills, posters, artwork, storyboards, shooting scripts), state-of-the-art mastering, and other extras. Their contributions solidified the laserdisc as the choice of cinephiles for over 15 years. These features later became commonplace on releases of DVDs.
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1984
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The soundtrack of cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth's and director Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984), featuring the rock band Talking Heads, was recorded on a 24-track Sony digital recorder. It was notable for being the first all-digital film sound in history. Its documentation of the singing group during three nights in December, 1983 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater has often been considered to be the best rock concert film of all-time.
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1984
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Director John Hughes, the future master of comedic, "teen"-oriented coming-of-age or 'rites of passage' films directed toward a youth audience, released his debut film Sixteen Candles, starring his oft-used star Molly Ringwald, one of the Brat Packers of the time.
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1984
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Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap set the standard for a mockumentary in its depiction of a fictional heavy-metal rock band named Spinal Tap on tour in the US during the fall of 1982. Its most memorable scene was the one in which a band member described how the amplifier had an "11" on its dial: "These go to eleven"..
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1985
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Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (established in 1980) took over the Utah/US Film Festival by 1986. It was named after Redford's character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Later in 1991, it was renamed the Sundance Film Festival (held annually since 1981 in January in Park City, Utah and expanded in length) - "dedicated to the support and development of emerging screenwriters and directors of vision, and to the national and international exhibition of new, independent dramatic and documentary films." The first Grand Jury Prize went to the Coen Brothers noirish debut film Blood Simple (1984).
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1985
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The first Blockbuster Video store opened in Dallas, Texas.
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1985
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John Hughes' coming-of-age teen film The Breakfast Club was extremely influential in its depiction of five stereotypical teen characters (populars, jocks, druggies, brains, and loner groups), all portrayed by Brat Packers. They were attendees at a Saturday school detention while experiencing teen angst - struggling with issues of conformity and parental values. In the end, they all wrote one letter to Mr. Vernon, signed "The Breakfast Club," to describe their group as a whole: "...we think you are crazy for making us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the most simplest term, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out, is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?"
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1985
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The low-quality Blood Cult about devil worship, shot entirely on videotape, was the first horror film designed explicitly for the video market. It signaled the start of features made specifically for the home-video market (also the destination for sub-standard feature films unworthy of release), now that VCRs were abundant.
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1985
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75 year-old Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's historical samurai epic Ran, a re-interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear, was released. It was the last of his great masterpieces.
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1985
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Hunk film star Rock Hudson, a closet homosexual, died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at age 59 after a battle with AIDS. He was the first celebrity to announce publically that he had AIDS. As a result of the disclosure, the Reagan Administration finally responded to and acknowledged the burgeoning AIDS epidemic.
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1985
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The comedy Topper (1937) was the very first B/W feature film to be released to the home video market in 1985 in a 'colorized' version, using computer technology - a controversial modernizing technique at the timee.
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1985
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When the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947), converted by Color Systems Technology (CST) for 20th Century Fox to a colorized version, aired in 1985, it became the highest rated non-network movie in syndication.
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1985
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Disney's PG-rated film The Black Cauldron (their 25th full-length animated film) was the first animated feature film to contain 3-D CGI elements (digital fire and a boat), and the first Disney animated feature to use 3-D computer graphics technology. In fact, it was the studio's first PG-rated animated theatrical feature film.
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1985
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The fourth film in the popular Rocky series, Rocky IV (1985) became the most financially successful sports film of all-time. It had a production budget of $31 million, and box-office gross receipts of $128 million (domestic) and $300 million (worldwide).
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1985
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Clue, the first film based on a board game, came from the popular Parker Brothers mystery board game. Three separate endings were shot and screened in different theatres. Each ending had a different solution for the various murders. Some newspaper print ads specified the ending (Ending A, B, or C), although in most cases, viewers were frustrated by the arbitrary nature of the solution and the ambiguous clues that led up to the ending. The first two endings were "What If?" endings, and the third ending was the actual ending.
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1985
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British character actress Marianne Stone was noted as having the most screen credits for a living actress - a record-breaking 159 films, from 1943-1985. Her most notable roles were in the UK's series Carry On, and in Kubrick's Lolita (1962) as Vivian Darkbloom. She died at the age of 87 in late 2009.
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1985-6
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Pixar Animation Studios, originally part of Lucasfilm (and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)) specialized in developing animation created exclusively on computers. It was purchased by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs and made an independent company in 1986. The first fully 3-D digital (or CGI)-animated character in a full-length feature film, known as the 'stained-glass knight', was created for the Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) by Pixar, when Pixar was still part of Lucasfilm (and Industrial Light and Magic). It brought them a Best Visual Effects nomination.
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1986
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Computer-created Luxo, Jr. was Pixar Studio's first film (or short) -- and the first fully computer-generated, computer-animated film which was nominated for an Academy Award.
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1986
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Disney's The Great Mouse Detective marked the first major use of computer animation in an animated film -- in the scene of the gears of London's famed bell tower Big Ben.
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1986
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The comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills was Disney's first R-rated feature (with light adult themes such as adultery, homosexuality, brief partial nudity, etc.), causing the studio to release the film under its newly-formed adult-oriented film division Touchstone.
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1986
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The Academy Award-winning, drawing-room adaptation A Room With a View, starring Helena Bonham Carter, was the quintessential Merchant Ivory film production, with lush and glossy scenery visuals, gorgeous costuming, an emotional soundtrack, an engaging romance and a sense of period history -- it was the first of three adaptations of E.M. Forster novels, followed by Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1991). The team at Merchant Ivory Productions consisted of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
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1986
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In Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and James Cameron's Aliens, Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ellen Ripley solidified her place as filmdom's greatest action heroine, with closely-cropped hair, no makeup, and a fight-to-the-death maternal instinct. She paved the way for other action heroines to follow, such as Angelina Jolie in The Tomb Raider franchise and others (Linda Hamilton, Carrie-Ann Moss, Michelle Yeoh). However, most female action heroine films were flops.
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1986
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Ted Turner, the Atlanta media mogul, took over MGM by purchase, but then sold off major parts of the studio. He retained the vast MGM (and United Artists) film library of more than 3,650 titles for $1.2 billion (2,200 MGM, 75 pre-1948 Warner Bros., including Casablanca (1942), and 700 RKO), intended for broadcast by his cable television stations. He then started the controversial fad of colorizing classic films (computer-altering black and white films) to make them appear as color films -- threatening initially to change John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). He did colorize King Kong (1933), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947), among others.
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1986
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In President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Address delivered on February 4, 1986, he referred to the future of America with a quote from the film Back to the Future (1985): "Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive -- a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film, Back to the Future: 'Where we are going, we don't need roads.'"
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1986
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Film reviewers and critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert remained on the nationally-syndicated show At the Movies until 1986, when they had another dispute (with Tribune Entertainment), and left to create a new Disney-produced show (Buena Vista Television), titled Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, later shortened in 1989 to Siskel & Ebert. Their popular and influential show, nominated for numerous Emmy Awards, lasted until 1999, when Siskel died from a brain tumor in 1999, and the show was renamed Roger Ebert & the Movies for one year.
[Tribune attempted to keep At the Movies alive in 1986 with critics Bill Harris and Rex Reed, and then Dixie Whatley, but the show was eventually cancelled in 1990.]
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1986
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Dolby SR ("Spectral Recording") was introduced as a system used both when a soundtrack was recorded and when it was played back. The system permitted the capturing of louder sounds with wider frequency response and lower distortion.
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1986
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David Lynch's surrealistic, psychosexual Blue Velvet (1986) was a throwback to art films, 50s B-movies and teenage romances, film noir, and the mystery-suspense genre. It was an original look at sex, violence, crime and power under the peaceful exterior of small-town Americana in the mid-80s. Beneath the familiar, peaceful, 'American-dream' cleanliness of the daytime scenes lurked sleaziness, prostitution, unrestrained violence, and perversity - powerful and potentially-dangerous sexual forces that could be unleashed if not contained.
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1986
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Woody Allen's richly nuanced film Hannah and Her Sisters, his biggest box-office success up to the time (without adjusting for inflation), was a thoughtful treatise on marriage, relationships, life, the existence of God and love, seen through the eyes of three sisters: Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest).
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1986
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Influential African-American film-maker Spike Lee independently produced the low-budget comedy She's Gotta Have It, his breakthrough film. It won the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes, and helped to usher in the American independent film movement in the mid-1980s.
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1986
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The Best Actor Oscar award was won by Paul Newman for his role as older pool hustler 'Fast Eddie' Felson - now manager of his pool-heir apparent (Tom Cruise) in director Martin Scorsese's sequel The Color of Money - a reprise/remake of his earlier role in The Hustler (1961). It was his seventh nomination and first win. He became the only actor, to date, to win an Oscar for reprising a role in a sequel.
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1986
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The HBO network's first Oscar winner (Best Documentary Feature) was Down and Out in America (1986). It was the first cable program, an HBO production, to win an Academy Award.
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1987
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The first major Hollywood studio film produced (or shot) in the People's Republic of China (PRC), in Shanghai, was director Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.
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1987
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The first Disney tie-in with fast food vendor McDonald's was its Happy Meal toys based on its animated cartoon TV-series DuckTales (i.e., Magic Motion Maps with magnifying glass, Scrooge McDuck in car, Webby on Tricycle, Huey Dewy and Louie on Surf Ski, etc.) - Disney Studio's first daily, half-hour animated series for television.
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1987
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Director Adrian Lyne's blockbuster Fatal Attraction was a cautionary horror tale and milestone thriller film which garnered six Oscar nominations (including Best Picture); it told about a conflicted married man (Michael Douglas) who cheated with a career woman (Glenn Close) who turned into a murderous psycho when scorned and who subsequently threatened his family. Its explicit sexuality, besieged white male protagonist, and popcorn-slasher/horror elements were perfect for the AIDS era.
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1987
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The longest film ever made, the bizarrely-experimental The Cure for Insomnia, lasted 87 hours (5,220 minutes). It consisted mostly of poet L.D. Groban reading his own poem of over 4,000 pages.
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1987
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The comedy film Three Men and a Baby was the first Disney film (distributed by Touchstone Pictures) to break the $100 million mark. It eventually became the biggest box office hit of the year (at $167 million), beating Fatal Attraction (at $156 million).
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1988
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Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released -- a coordinated effort produced by Disney, live-action directed by Robert Zemeckis, and animated by Richard Williams. It broke new technological ground with its remarkable blending of animated imagery and live-action human characters.
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1988
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Tom Cruise starred in Best Picture-winning Rain Man (1988) and also in Razzie's Worst Picture of the same year, Cocktail (1988).
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1988
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The first of The Naked Gun films premiered -- it was based on TV's Police Squad!, created by Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry Zucker and David Zucker --the team that was also responsible for the popular disaster movie spoof Airplane! (1980).
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1988
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Bruce Willis' career was catapulted with the release of the action-thriller Die Hard - the first of a series of films (Die Harder (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), and Live Free or Die Hard (2007)), and rated as one of the best action films of all time. He starred as a terrorist-fighting action hero named John McClane, fighting the archetypal villain Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), and was noted for his infamous line: "Yippee-kai-yay, motherf--ker."
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1988
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This was the year of one of the longest work stoppage in Hollywood history at the time -- the WGA (Writer's Guild of America) strike of US film and television writers against producers and networks that lasted 22 weeks (from March-August). The costly and crippling strike delayed the start of the fall television schedule.
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1988
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The landmark Film Preservation Act implemented a plan to allow the federal government to designate 25 films each year as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films." In 1989, the National Film Preservation Board began selecting 25 films for entry to a national list of film treasures. The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress was designated as the registry for films that were selected as leading examples of American cinematic art.
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1988
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Director Martin Scorsese's controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ opened in nine cities despite objections by some Christians who felt the film was sacrilegious.
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1988
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Pixar's 5-minute Tin Toy, the inspiration for Toy Story (1995), was the first computer animation to win an Academy Award. Billy, the baby character in the short film, marked the first time that a CG character had realistic human qualities.
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1988
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Digital morphing (the seamless change from one character or image to another) of several animals was first introduced by ILM and debuted in the live-action film Willow.
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1988
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The popular comedy Big brought director Penny Marshall recognition as the first female director of a movie that grossed over $100 million. And after directing another $100 million plus film, A League of Their Own (1992), she became the first female director of two movies attaining that milestone.
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1988
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Two of the biggest stars of the 1990s decade got their start in the late 80s. Tom Hanks earned his first Oscar nomination for the film Big - it also marked Hanks' first $100 million blockbuster film, with a salary allegedly at $2 million. In the same year, another future star Julia Roberts appeared in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza (1988) -- it gave Roberts her first Best Actress nomination (in the Independent Spirit Awards), with a salary reported to be $50,000. After being noticed, Roberts starred one year later as the health-declining Shelby in the tearjerker Steel Magnolias (1989) in which she earned her first Oscar nomination; the next year after that, she starred in Pretty Woman (1990).
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1988 and after
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Kevin Costner starred back-to-back in two classic baseball-themed films: as "Crash" Davis in Ron Shelton's minor-league baseball romantic comedy, Bull Durham (1988), and then as farmer Ray Kinsella in the Best Picture-nominated mystical baseball fantasy, Field of Dreams (1989). In the next few years, the actor/director played the lead role in two other Best Picture nominees - Dances With Wolves (1990) (which won), and JFK (1991).
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1989
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The Sony Corporation of America purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. and Tri-Star Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion, naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment.
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1989
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Warner Communications merged with Time, Inc. to become the largest media company in the world.
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1989
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After African-American film-maker Spike Lee's second feature School Daze (1988) - his major studio debut film, his third film Do the Right Thing (1989) brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and launched the director to the forefront of the filmmaking community. His film told of incendiary urban-racial violence and ethnic tensions on one hot summer day in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Lee and a new generation of other African-American film-makers and actors (John Singleton, Denzel Washington) were becoming 'mainstreamed' and more commonplace in the Hollywood film community.
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1989
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26 year-old writer and first-time feature film director Steven Soderbergh's voyeuristic sex, lies and videotape, written in 8 days and filmed over five weeks on a budget of $1.2 million, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival where it became a huge hit - eventually grossing $50 million in worldwide box-office ($24.7 million in the US). This landmark 'independent film' won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. After being aggressively marketed by Miramax - which subsequently became known as the leading supplier of indie films - the independent (non-Hollywood) film movement gained strength during the 1990s.
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1989
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A new generation of expensive computer-generated imagery (CGI) and graphics in the 1990s was heralded by the slinky, translucent water creature in James Cameron's big-budget The Abyss.
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1989
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The highest grossing movie of the year was director Tim Burton's neo-gothic and dark Batman (1989), an adult version of a comic-book thriller. It was released in mid-summer as a major 'event' film, and was hyped (with a large marketing budget) long before its release - a new trend, with various product tie-ins (i.e., Bat merchandise, such as Batmobiles, Batman miniskirts, etc.). It was then available as a video shortly after its theatrical release to add to its box-office take - influencing how future films would be marketed. Its dark vision of the caped crusader would signficantly shape the characters of other cinematic superheroes from now on.
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1989
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Disney's The Little Mermaid earned $74 million and revived animated films (contributing to the animation renaissance), especially for Disney Studios after the limited success of The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and Oliver & Company (1988).
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1989
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Madonna's controversial Like a Prayer music video (with prominent burning crosses before which she danced) prompted Pepsi to drop her $5 million dollar two-minute commercial (titled "Make a Wish") and their sponsorship of her Blonde Ambition tour, due in part to protests from Catholic groups and other religious groups who threatened to boycott. Subsequently, Madonna won the Viewer's Choice Award at the MTV Music Awards show for her video.
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1989
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The old-fashioned romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally... with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, similar in theme to Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), re-established the fact that rom-coms (and 'chick-flicks') could be profitable ventures - a trend that continued into the 1990s decade with Pretty Woman (1990). It also asked the important late-1980s question of sexual politics: "Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?" Its timely film script by Nora Ephron popularized the notion of "high-maintenance and low-maintenance" women, and a "Harry-and-Sally relationship," and the film's conclusion presented marriage in a favorable light. During the 1990s, Meg Ryan followed up with a series of romantic leading roles in numerous films, including being paired opposite Tom Hanks in three films: Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You've Got Mail (1998).
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1989
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Director Robert Zemeckis' sequel Back to the Future, Part II was the first film to accomplish interaction between the same actor on the screen as more than one character. Computer-controlled camera work, called VistaGlide, allowed three characters (all performed by one actor, Michael J. Fox) to match up and interact seamlessly in the same scene (the "instant pizza" dinner scene), through impressive split-screen photography.
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1989
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Bruce Willis was paid $10 million - the highest reported fee at the time for only a voice-over role (as wisecracking Baby Mikey), in the sleeper hit Look Who's Talking (1989).
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