New Hollywood

For about a decade, the Hollywood studios did something they had never done before and have never done since: they handed the keys to the kids.

The old audience had gone to television, the old formulas were losing money, and Bonnie and Clyde made a fortune in 1967 by breaking most of them. So the studios gambled on directors under forty, and on a few elders who worked like them, and the gamble paid for Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Nashville, The Godfather. The bet was that a director’s obsession would find an audience faster than a committee’s caution, and for ten years it did. Raging Bull closed the era in 1980, in black and white, about a man who ruins everything he is handed.