1960s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1966
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Sweeping revisions were made in the Hays Code regarding the standards of decency for films, suggesting restraint in questionable themes, rather than forbidding them completely. In the new code of the Motion Picture Association of America, virtue and the condemnation of sin were still encouraged. However, it eliminated previous prohibitions of "lustful kissing" and "passion that stimulates the base emotions," and permitted certain films to be labeled "recommended for mature audiences."
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1966
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The ground-breaking UK Swinging 60s comedy film Georgy Girl became the first film to carry the label "suggested for mature audiences" - or M rating.
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1966
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After an appeal by Warner Bros., Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became the first film containing profane expletives and frank sexual content (ie., "Hump the Hostess") to receive the MPAA's Production Code seal of approval, although the most extreme profanity was removed (i.e., "Screw you"). It was the first American film to use the expletive 'goddamn' and 'bugger'. It was also the first film to be released with an M-rating ("Suggested for Mature Audiences") warning. [The film was noted for its four acting nominations (one for every member of the four-person cast).] The second film to receive an MPAA exemption (and seal of approval) shortly afterwards was Alfie despite the use of the forbidden word "abortion." These exemptions marked the beginning of the breakdown of the existing system of industry self-regulation and censorship, and the relaxing of code standards.
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1966
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MGM distributed Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, the director's first non-Italian feature, in defiance of demands that it make cuts. Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills, acting as teenaged groupies in the film, displayed glimpses of full-frontal female nudity, introducing American film audiences to their first view of pubic hair.
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1966
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Paramount's purchase by Gulf & Western marked the beginning of a trend toward studio ownership by diversified, multi-national conglomerates.
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1966
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The Legion of Decency changed its official name to the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and, in respect to Pope John XXIII's policy of modernizing Catholic thought, announced a more progressive attitude.
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1966
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The 'Oscars' or Academy Awards ceremony was first broadcast in color.
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1966
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The first indigenous African (Senegalese) feature film was writer/director Ousmane Sembene's debut feature-length film Black Girl. It was also regarded as the first sub-Saharan African film from an African filmmaker to receive international attention and acclaim.
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1966
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The ABC-TV network paid a record $2 million for airing rights to The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - the screening attracted over 60 million viewers, and set a precedent for higher fees for hit theatrical films sold to television.
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1966
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The Star Trek TV series had its debut on network television on September 8, 1966 -- this popular and most successful science-fiction series of its kind was extremely influential in future years for various other versions, including the release of a Saturday morning animated version from 1973-74, and the first of many big-budget theatrical feature films in 1979 (there were a total of eleven Star Trek-related feature films by 2009).
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1967
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The first "spaghetti western," Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, opened in the United States, starring Clint Eastwood as the "man with no name." It was the first screen collaboration between Leone and Eastwood. (The western had earlier premiered in 1964 in Florence, Italy.)
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1967
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Director Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was promoted with the slogan for its anti-heroes: "They're young. They're in love. They kill people." The anti-establishment, violent film, originally criticized at the time of its release, was aimed at youth audiences by its American auteur and producer/star Warren Beatty.
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1967
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Mike Nichols became the first director to earn $1,000,000 for a single picture — for The Graduate (1967).
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1967
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Director/producer Roger Corman's visually-surrealistic The Trip (with a screenplay by actor Jack Nicholson), an American International Pictures (AIP) film, was the first Hollywood film to show the effects of taking psychedelic drugs (LSD). It was the ultimate late 1960s exploitation hippie film, with star Peter Fonda.
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1967
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Jack Warner, co-creator of Warner Bros., sold his remaining interest in the company to a Canadian corporation called Seven Arts Ltd. for $84 million. The company became known as Warner-Seven Arts.
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1967
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New Line Cinema was formed, marking its niche with films like director John Waters' Pink Flamingo and Polyester.
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1967
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The first contemporary music (rock 'n roll concert) industry film, Monterey Pop (1968), was filmed at the historic Monterey International Pop Festival in California, featuring such performers as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin and more. It was the precursor to Michael Wadleigh's concert documentary of the late 60s rock fest, Woodstock (1970).
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1967
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In the Heat of the Night was the first Best Picture Oscar winner to be adapted into a regular prime-time television series, in 1988, with Carroll O'Connor as Sheriff Bill Gillespie and Howard Rollins as Virgil Tibbs. It was also the only true 'who-dun-it' detective story that won Best Picture.
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1967
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Sony introduced a portable (but bulky), expensive, out-of-studio, black-and-white video camera system (or video tape recorder - VTR) called the PortaPak -- it inaugurated the modern era of video.
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1967
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Two UK films were released in this year - both noted for the first use of the four-letter word 'f--k': director Michael Winner's film I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name and Ulysses.
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1967
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The first major (commercially-released) US studio film to include the word 's--t' in its dialogue was Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood. It was also said a year later in Boom! (1968, UK) (spoken by actress Elizabeth Taylor as Flora 'Sissy' Goforth: "S--t on your mother!" Note: Taylor was the first actress to say 's--t' in a major motion picture).
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1967
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French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's chaotic and apocalyptic experimental film Weekend told about a weekend car trip involving a massive traffic jam symbolizing the collapse of the modern consumeristic society, including one of the longest dolly shots in cinematic history.
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1967
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Writer/director Charlie Chaplin's romantic comedy A Countess From Hong Kong, starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, was Chaplin's first color (and widescreen) film, and the first to be funded by a major studio (Universal Pictures). It was his last-directed film and ended up a major flop. Chaplin appeared in a small cameo role as an unnamed, elderly steward.
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1968
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A new voluntary ratings system was developed and went into effect in late November by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) - it was announced by its President Jack Valenti. The new system classified films according to their suitability for viewing by young people, in four categories: "G" for general audiences; "M" for mature audiences; "R," no one under 16 admitted without an adult guardian (later raised to under 17 years of age); and "X," no one under 17 admitted. The four criteria used in the ratings included theme, language, violence, and nudity and/or sexual content. Many parents thought films rated M contained more adult content than those that were rated R; this confusion led to its replacement in 1969 by the rating of GP (or General Public, or General Audiences, Parental Guidance Suggested). In 1970, the GP (or earlier M) rating was changed to PG: Parental Guidance Suggested, and the age limit was increased to 17. [The PG ratings category would again be revised in 1984.]
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1968
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Brian De Palma's draft-dodger comedy Greetings, (Robert DeNiro's debut film), was the first film in the US to receive an X rating by the MPAA for nudity and profanity (in its original release), although it was reduced to an R rating.
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1968
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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey reinvented the science fiction genre. It introduced the character of HAL, a computer that could see, speak, hear, and think like its human colleagues aboard the spaceship, and fantastic special effects of outer-space by Douglas Trumbull.
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1968
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The flesh-eating zombie sub-genre of films was given a boost with George A. Romero's cheap, stark black and white horror flick, Night of the Living Dead.
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1968
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The classic science fiction film, Planet of the Apes was one of the pioneering, modern multimedia marketing blockbusters, spawning not only four sequels and two television series spinoffs, but merchandising, such as action figures. It provided both solid entertainment value, and an effective, politically-charged message of social commentary.
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1968
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The German film Maedchen in Uniform (1958) (first filmed in 1931) was the only lesbian film seen publicly in the US --- until the release of Robert Aldrich's X-rated The Killing of Sister George.
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1968
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Peter Bogdanovich was the first critic and film scholar to become a Hollywood writer-director, with his directorial debut for Targets, made for American International Pictures. He deliberately revered past American directors in his own work which extended into the 70s.
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1968
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Writer/director John Cassavetes' Faces was the first independently-made and distributed American film to reach mainstream audiences. Cassavetes himself has been considered to be "the father of independent cinema in America." The stark and grainy look of this amateurish-looking, non-studio, ragged film about infidelity (over two hours long, and made with a hand-held camera in 16mm) was told as an improvisational character study. It was a highly-influential, low-budget independent cinema verite film that had a highly individualistic style (with unscripted and often inaudible dialogue).
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1969
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Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, became the only X-rated picture to ever win an Oscar for Best Picture (the rating was later changed to an R). More and more mainstream films contained sexual content that was unacceptable only a few years earlier.
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1969
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ABC-TV programmer Barry Diller created "The Movie of the Week." By 1971, ABC was airing Tuesday and Wednesday night versions.
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1969
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Sony introduced a new device -- the videocassette recorder (VCR) for home use.
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1969
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Kinney National Company, a New York conglomerate whose interests included parking lots and funeral homes, acquired Warner-Seven Arts and in 1972 renamed the company Warner Communications Inc.
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1969
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After her last film, Fox's Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), former child star Shirley Temple entered politics after raising a family - she was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Later, she served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana (1974-1976) and Czechoslovakia (1989), and during the late 70s was the U.S. Chief of Protocol.
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1969
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A new wave of independent film-making in Hollywood (dubbed "The New Hollywood") was signaled by Dennis Hopper's anti-Establishment release of the low-budget Easy Rider. Its phenomenal success shook up the major Hollywood studios. This movement was termed Hollywood's New Wave (fashioned after the earlier French New Wave), and would last through the next decade. Hopper's next experimental film The Last Movie (1971) was less successful, both commercially and critically, and sounded a death-knell for his own ambitious film-making efforts.
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1969
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Sam Peckinpah's ultra-violent western The Wild Bunch was exceptional for its non-glorification of bloodshed, and its slow-motion, heavily-edited, stylized views of multiple deaths -- it was influential for other filmmakers ranging from Martin Scorsese to John Woo to Quentin Tarantino in years to come. Due to its violence, the film was originally threatened with an X-rating by the newly-created MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), but an R-rating was its final decision. A so-called 'director's cut' version of the film, threatened with an NC-17 rating when submitted to the MPAA ratings board in 1993 prior to a re-release in 1994, held up the film's re-release for many months.
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1969
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African-American film-maker and cinematographer Gordon Parks directed his own autobiographical The Learning Tree, and became the first black director of a major feature film for a major US studio. This laid the groundwork for Parks' next film -- the landmark blaxploitation action film Shaft (1971) with Richard Roundtree - a very successful cross-over film.
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1969
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A three-day rock music festival, dubbed Woodstock, occurred in a large farming field in upstate New York, attracting 400,000 young people for an outdoor concert marked by drug use, nudity, food shortages and profanity, as well as superb performances by the rock stars of the era. The landmark concert was captured in director Michael Wadleigh's successful widescreen (and split-screen) rockumentary Woodstock: 3 Days of Love & Music (1970) - winning the Best Documentary Academy Award.
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1970s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1970
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George C. Scott won the Best Actor Oscar for his memorable performance in Patton but then refused the gold statuette and didn't attend the awards ceremony.
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1970
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Disaster films became a main staple of films in the 70s -- the trend began with Airport (1970). The entire disaster film craze was really kick-started by The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
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1970
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The IMAX wide-screen format premiered in the Fuji Pavilion at the EXPO '70 in Osaka, Japan, with the 17-minute film Tiger Child.
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1970
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Nevada millionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM in 1970, and then promptly downsized the company. He sold off acres of the studio's real estate of backlots, and its valuable film memorabilia (such as Dorothy's The Wizard of Oz ruby slippers) for a fraction of its real value. The sell-off financed an expansion of Kerkorian's hotel-casino investments, and began a decline for the studio.
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1970
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Mike Nichols' war comedy Catch-22, an adaptation of Joseph Heller's 1961 book, was the first US film to depict an individual (Martin Balsam as Col. Cathcart) defecating on a toilet seat, and unwinding a long piece of toilet tissue, while non-chalantly talking to earnest Chaplain Tappman (Anthony Perkins). Both actors also appeared earlier in Hitchcock's thriller Psycho (1960) - another film with a toilet first -- the first on-screen toilet flush.
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1970
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The popular landmark tear-jerker and commercially-successful film Love Story, adapted from Eric Segal's screenplay and thin novel, was the first modern romance film blockbuster. Its story of a rich boy/poor girl romance, was backed by Paramount's fast-living head of production Robert Evans. It averted the struggling studio from financial collapse, and beautiful Ali McGraw (Evans married the starlet) was put on the January 11, 1971 cover of Time Magazine. Evans later made the equally-successful The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part 2 (1974) films and Chinatown (1974) in the early 70s.
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1970
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Following in the tradition of the "Kitchen Sink" UK films in the 50s and 60s, director Ken Loach's low-budget, documentary-style, second feature-film Kes, released in 1969, has since been regarded as one of the best British films ever made (it was a Best Film nominee for the 1971 BAFTA Film Awards). The dark and moving independent film was a heartbreaking, authentic, coming-of-age family drama about an abused 15 year old working-class Yorkshire boy who found meaning in his life by raising a baby kestrel (falcon). Surprisingly, the starkly-truthful and socially-conscious naturalistic film was never released commercially in the US.
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1970
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Let It Be was released, the last film starring the Fab Four; this effort chronicled the Beatles recording their last-produced Apple studios album - a comeback attempt that actually led to their breakup.
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Early 1970s
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Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) were representative of the New Hollywood movement of unconventional auteur directors with new ideas and personal visions. In 1971, USC film school graduate George Lucas released his first full-length feature film, THX 1138.
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1970-71
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For her performance in Women in Love (1969, UK), actress Glenda Jackson became one of the earliest performers to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for a role in which she appeared significantly nude. The first Oscar-winning performance for a short, backside nude scene was for Julie Christie's portrayal of Diana Scott in Darling (1965).
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1971
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Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev's controversial, X-rated, montage-filled, avante-garde, documentary-fiction film titled W.R.- Mysteries of the Organism was reportedly the first film to depict full frontal nudity amidst its plentiful nude sex scenes and frank dialogue about free love, masturbation and orgasm. The film engendered intense criticism and censorship demands, and was banned in the director's own native Yugoslavia.
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1971
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The blaxploitation film genre, with anti-Hollywood films aimed at a primarily African-American audience, was born with Melvin Van Peebles' groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! -- the first commercially-successful black-themed film. It forced Hollywood to acknowledge the monetary potential of the untapped, urban African-American market (similar to the effect Easy Rider (1969) had on its countercultural audiences) as a result of this influential film. The landmark crime/action blaxploitation film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree as a defiantly-proud black hero, was directed by Gordon Parks and would become a major cross-over hit. From then on through the end of the decade (but mostly in the first half of the decade), over 200 films would be released by major and independent studios which featured major black characters (and some black athletes such as Jim Brown and Rosie Grier), to profit from the black movie-going audiences. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson would play similar hard-edged roles for whites. Blaxploitation cinema experienced a revival in the late 1990s, with Larry Cohen's Original Gangstas (1996), reuniting stars from the earlier era. The director of Pulp Fiction (1994), Quentin Tarantino, paid homage to the blaxploitation genre twenty-five years later with Jackie Brown (1998), starring Pam Grier.
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Early 70s
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The success of blaxploitation films led to an onslaught of other black exploitation genres, with numerous remakes or lesser imitations ranging from westerns to martial arts kung fu films to horror and gangster films. Sample films included Hit Man (1972), Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1973), and Larry Cohen's Black Caesar (1973). However, the vast majority of these films were still distributed, produced, and controlled by non-blacks. All of the blaxploitation films set the stage for Hip Hop music and subculture, future directors such as Spike Lee and John Singleton, and movies like Harlem Nights (1989), Posse (1993), the Beverly Hills Cop series, and Pulp Fiction (1994).
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1971
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Two films released about the same time resurrected the controversy over violence in films: (1) Stanley Kubrick's satirical A Clockwork Orange - rated X and responsible for copy-cat crimes in the UK, prompting the director to withdraw the dystopic film about social conditioning and free will from distribution for many years; and (2) Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - criticized for glorifying violence rather than commenting upon it, re-edited for an R-rating, and banned in England for 30 years.
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1971
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A Clockwork Orange was the first film to use Dolby technology noise reduction for its sound recording.
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1971
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The independent film Billy Jack (1971) was the first film of its kind to be marketed as a 'BlockBuster wide-release' at many theatrical venues on the same day. This was a change from the previous strategy called a platformed release (testing a film in a few major metropolitan markets to first see if results were positive, before expanding its market). This same marketing strategy was used for Spielberg's first summer blockbuster Jaws (1975) - and paved the way for the method in which all major releases are done today.
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1971
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Mario Bava's influential and controversial, bloody Italian horror-thriller Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve) was the grandfather of all slasher films, for its characters (five murderers) and thirteen gruesome murders, including a machete to the face, a spear for impalement of two lovers, a hanging, a stabbing, etc. Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981) reportedly copied some of its death scenes verbatim from the film.
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1972
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The popular, low-budget, adult-oriented, X-rated Deep Throat, the second hard-core pornography feature film released in the US (after Behind the Green Door) contributed to the explosion of the porn industry and 'porn chic' by being exhibited in many mainstream film theatres. It was one of the most financially successful films ever made (grossing over $1,000,000, but costing only $24,000 to make).
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1972
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HBO transmitted its first cable television programming (via microwave transmission) to 365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, PA -- this marked the start of pay-TV service for cable. Sometimes a Great Notion (1970), starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda, was the first film to be broadcast, commercial-free and uncut, on the new premium cable TV network in its debut programming, along with a hockey game.
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1972
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The AVCO Cartrivision system (for CARTRIdige teleVISION) was a combination receiver / recorder / playback unit. It was also the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies (from Columbia Pictures) for sale and rental -- three years before Sony's Betamax VCR system emerged into the market. However, the company went out of business a year later.
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1972
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Sony introduced the U-Matic line of video cassette recorders.
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1972
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Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a reinvention of the gangster genre, was finally released. It won three Oscars from its ten nominations, including awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando, who refused to accept the award) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola). Sacheen Littlefeather declined Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar in the 1973 awards ceremony as a protest against government Indian policies. The Godfather was the first US film to gross $100 million domestically at the box office in its initial release.
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1972
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After making a few short films and documentaries, Italian-American director Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood feature film was the low-budget Roger Corman-produced exploitation film Boxcar Bertha.
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1972
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Director Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial, X-rated Last Tango in Paris was released to protest and criticism due to its explicit sexual content. Actor Marlon Brando and Bertolucci both earned Oscar nominations - making them the only Oscar nominees for an X-rated film that hasn't been re-rated since its release.
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1972
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Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat was the first X-rated animated feature-length film in Hollywood history. It was also the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million at the box office.
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1973
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Warner Bros. had its first major hit with the sensational and shocking The Exorcist, an originally X-rated film that was released as an uncut 'R' rating which allowed minors to view the film if accompanied by an adult. The landmark film encouraged the trend for big-budget horror films, other cheaply-made imitations - and more blockbusters.
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1973
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The once-powerful MGM Studios abandoned most of its movie-making business because of a string of failures due to ownership changes and bad production choices by head Kirk Kerkorian, who sold MGM's distribution system, and gradually distanced himself from the daily operation of the studio.
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1973
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The science-fiction classic Westworld was the first movie to make use of "digitized images", a primitive term for what has evolved into CGI (computer-generated imagery) in the present day.
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1973
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To maximize profits from weekend audiences, the industry decided to move major film openings from mid-week to Fridays.
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1973
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George Lucas' idea for Star Wars was declined by Universal and subsequently accepted by Twentieth Century Fox after his success with his second feature film - the nostalgic American Graffiti. The film recreated the feel, landscape, and sounds of early 60s, small-town America - an historical time period (of JFK's Presidency and the New Frontier before the jarring assassination of late 1963 and the rest of an unpredictable era) that had since been irretrievably lost. Advertising posters and theatrical trailers for the film asked: "Where were you in '62?", making viewers reflect back to the pre-Beatles era. It was one of the biggest hits of the year, with unknown but up-and-coming star Harrison Ford. With its great financial success, 28 year-old Lucas joined the ranks of a new breed of directors, including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. The film was noted for seamlessly lacing its story with a classic rock-n-roll soundtrack composed of over forty hits (often emanating from cruising car radios, or the school dance's record player). Other later youth-oriented films imitated this film's use of a pop soundtrack.
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1973
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In negotiations with Fox, George Lucas wisely cut his directing fee for Star Wars (1977) by $500,000 in order to gain ownership of merchandising and sequel rights. In a revolutionary approach to Hollywood film-making and merchandising, Lucas wisely accepted the small fee of $175,000 in return for the much more lucrative forty percent of merchandising rights for his Star Wars Corporation. Merchandising of movie paraphernalia associated with the film encouraged an entire marketing industry of Star Wars-related items (i.e., toys, video games, novelty items at fast food restaurants, etc.).
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1973
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The first full film score written by a popular artist for a film was in director Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with music by pop artist Bob Dylan. Dylan also made his acting debut as the mysterious Alias, one of Billy's sidekicks.
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1974
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Tobe Hooper's milestone cult slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released, inspired by the real-life Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein (also responsible for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)), featuring a horrifying, mask-wearing, chainsaw-threatening Leatherface character.
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1974
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Director Roman Polanski's neo-noir Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, was released, and grossed $30 million - much more than its budget of $6 million. Twenty-five percent of the film was financed by a tax shelter syndicate which received about 10 percent of the profits in return -- this avenue of film financing has since been closed by order of federal regulation.
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1974
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Best Director-winning Francis Ford Coppola's critically-acclaimed, Best Picture-winning gangster epic sequel The Godfather, Part II, -- actually a prequel -- was one of the rare instances in which the sequel was superior to the original film. It became the first 'sequel' to win Best Picture. It would help launch the trend toward blockbuster sequels.
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1974
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The hit disaster film Earthquake featured a new, short-lived movie gimmick called Sensurround, which used large speakers to create synchronized vibrations in theaters by means of thumping, high-decibel bass sounds. The scenes of the crumbling destruction of Los Angeles by a powerful earthquake were accompanied by the first use of low-frequency bass rumbling (responsible for the film's only Academy Award Oscar win: Best Sound Oscar) and quite impressive special effects. There were only three other films employing Sensurround: the all-star war film Midway (1976), the summer thriller Rollercoaster (1977), and the TV show crossover Battlestar Galactica (1978). Three serious detriments regarding this gimmick were the costly installation of speakers, the potential of structural damage to older theatres, and the disruptions caused for adjoining multiplex theatre auditoriums.
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1974
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People Magazine was launched.
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1974
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Hunger, an animated film short (11 minutes long) without dialogue from the National Film Board of Canada (and director Peter Foldes) was the first to use computer digitization to interpolate (or 'fill in') the animated action between various key cells drawn free-hand, although it had experimentally been demonstrated with his earlier film, Metadata (1971). The film's director was the first animator to use computer animation (a computer-assisted 'key-frame animation' system) that imitated conventional cel animation. Black and white animated illustrations appeared against a colored backdrop, with surrealistic figures that fluidly dissolved and reshaped themselves to take new forms - an early and primitive example of morphing. It was the first computer-animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Film (Animated) category. It also won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that same year.
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1974
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The first Claymation film, the 11-minute long Closed Mondays, which won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar award, was produced and co-directed by Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner. The short was the first instance of Claymation animation, using 3-D clay figures filmed with stop-motion animation. This animated short was included in the theatrical release of the compilation feature film Fantastic Animation Festival (1977).
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1974
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In the era before video stores and widespread availability of films for viewing, the LA-based, premium cable outlet Z Channel exerted a tremendous impact on the film industry. One of the first pay cable stations, it provided a wide variety of innovative programming from its troubled head Jerry Harvey in the 80s, including on-air film festivals, foreign films, hard-to-find rare classics, non-mainstream films, original and uncut 'director's versions,' works of new talent (actors, directors, and writers), late-night European softcore features (often starring Laura Antonelli), and the airing of other independent productions. The channel often regenerated interest in critically-acclaimed films that had flopped on initial release (i.e., Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986) or Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)). By the late 80s, the cable channel was eventually forced out of the market by giants HBO and Showtime when it was acquired in 1988 by a company that decided to combine its movie programming with sports.
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1974
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"The Way We Were" - the Academy Award-winning title song of the romantic drama The Way We Were (1973), featuring singer Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford as star-crossed lovers, topped Billboard's Hot 100 chart for a short time in early 1974. It was Streisand's first number-one pop hit single on Billboard's Hot 100.
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1974
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Future horror-filmmaker John Carpenter's directorial debut came with his low-budget Dark Star (1974), originally a student project enlarged to feature length; it was a major spoof of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
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