New Hollywood - Background and Overview

Background and Overview

Following the Paramount Case and the advent of television, both of which severely weakened the traditional studio system, Hollywood studios initially used spectacle to retain profitability. Technicolor became used far more frequently, and widescreen processes and technical improvements, such as Cinemascope, stereo sound and others such as 3-D, were invented in order to retain the dwindling audience and compete with television, but were generally not successful in increasing profits. By 1957 Life magazine called the previous ten years "the horrible decade" for Hollywood.

The 1950s and early 60s saw a Hollywood dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing and improved sound, and as early as 1957 the era was called a "New Hollywood". However, audience share continued to dwindle, and by the mid-1960s had reached alarmingly low levels. Several costly flops, including Tora, Tora, Tora, and Hello, Dolly!, and failed attempts to imitate the success of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, put great strain on the studios.

By the time the baby boomer generation was coming of age in the 1960s, 'Old Hollywood' was rapidly losing money; the studios were unsure how to react to the much changed audience demographics. The marked change during the period was from a middle aged high school educated audience in the mid 60s, to a younger, college-educated, more affluent one; by the mid 70s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, and 64% had gone to college. European art films (especially the Commedia all'italiana, the French New Wave, and the Spaghetti Western) and Japanese cinema were making a splash in America — the huge market of disaffected youth seemed to find relevance and artisic meaning in movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity.

The desperation felt by studios during this period of economic downturn, and after the losses from expensive movie flops, led to innovation and risk taking through allowing greater control by younger directors and producers. Therefore, in an attempt to capture that audience which found a connection to the “art films” of Europe, the Studios hired a host of young filmmakers (many of whom were mentored by Roger Corman) and allowed them to make their films with relatively little studio control. This, together with the breakdown of the Production Code in 1966 and the new ratings system in 1968 (reflecting growing market segmentation) set the scene for New Hollywood.