 The New Youth Audience
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The Graduate
The Graduate (1967) was one of the first films to succeed, wrapping Dustin Hoffman's aimless adolescent rebellion in selfconscious stylishness.
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Dennis Hopper, actor, director, photographer and art collector, began his film career in the mid-1950s when he started acting as a teenager with a small role in “Rebel Without a Cause,” followed by “Giant.” He has starred in more than 150 films and appeared in over 140 television shows.
In 1969, he scored his greatest success on screen with a starring role in “Easy Rider,” a film he directed and co-wrote with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern. The film received two Academy Award nominations — one for a then-unknown Jack Nicholson for Best Supporting Actor and one for Hopper, Fonda, and Southern for Best Original Screenplay.
The year 1967 was a pivotal one in Hollywood's development. Audience figures increased for the first time since 1946, partly because of the massive success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, each made for $3 million and returning more than ten times its cost.
The significant increase in attendance was among 18- to 25 year-olds, and the studios began to search for new product to cater to this young audience. Easy Rider, made in 1969 for $400.000, grossed $25 million, bringing into being a new genre, the youth film, and a new system of low-budget independent production, based on the model pioneered by Roger Corman, who had specialized in “schlock” movies for the drive in market. The film tells the story of two young men, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), who "went looking for America but couldn't find it anywhere."
The Hollywood “Renaissance” of the early 1970s followed an influx of a new generation of managerial talent - Richard Zanuck, Robert Evans, Alan Ladd, David Picker. The success of Easy Rider sent them scurrying in search of untried directors who could turn a low-budget “personal” film into both artistic masterpiece and commercial success. Production companies such as BBS and Pressman-Williams emerged to provide the brief delusion that in the Hollywood renaissance anything might be possible.
Movies made for the youth market - Medium Cool, The Revolutionary, The Strawberry Statement - even suggested that Hollywood might be capable of an explicit political radicalism as well as an increasingly explicit depiction of sex and bloodshed. The films that enticed Tarantino were part of a wave of independently financed and distributed motorcycle sub-genre that brought the rebellious counter-cultural antics of bikers to b-movie enthusiasts. These low-budget, quickly-produced films helped launch the careers of many actors, including Larry Bishop, Bruce Dern, who toplined CYCLE SAVAGES, Dennis Hopper of THE GLORY STOMPERS and EASY RIDER, and even Tyne Daly, who starred with Bishop in ANGELS UNCHAINED.
"I was under contract to AIP -- American International Pictures," Bishop says of the roots of his impressive career. "I did about twelve movies for AIP, and about half of them were motorcycles movies. Relatives stop talking to you when they heard that you were doing these movies. Your parents stopped talking to you. They didn't want to know anything about these motorcycle movies."
Bishop also placed an emphasis on sexuality in his films, largely in part because of the limitations placed on the motorcycle sub-genre in the late 60s: "I definitely wanted to up the ante with the sexual quotient. When I made these films in 1967 through 1972, there was only a hint of sexiness. I thought that this was one of the things I always felt like could be improved upon given the nature of the movies that have been made since like 1972, prior to LAST TANGO IN PARIS."
Those moral guardians who feared that the Code's collapse would usher in the demise of decency were not far wrong. As Hollywood grew increasingly explicit in its treatment of sexuality, so the pornography industry grew less peripheral. In 1972 Deep Throat became the first piece of hardcore “porno-chic” to play in regular movie theaters as well as in those that showed only “adult” rated films.
By 1973 the Hollywood Renaissance had collapsed. It had become possible, however, to take American cinema seriously. In the early 1970s courses in film began to be available at American universities, and to use the words “film” and “art” in the same sentence was no longer the mark of an oddball or a film publicist.
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