The death on Monday of Bert Schneider, the man who, along with his business partner Bob Rafelson, brought you both the Monkees and Easy Rider, brings to a close one chapter in the life and death of New Hollywood. As Mark Steyn wrote on Wednesday:
Bert Schneider was an obscure figure by the time of his death, but back in “New Hollywood” – that interlude between the end of the studio system and the dawn of the Jaws/Star Wars era – he was briefly a significant figure. He started in TV in the mid-Sixties, helped create “The Monkees” and then took them to the big screen in the feature film Head. That flopped, but the next film he produced, Easy Rider, cost less than 400 grand and within three years had made $60 million. There followed Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show.
But, as much as I like the latter, I prefer to remember the late Mr Schneider for his contribution to the gaiety of 1970s Oscar nights. Truly, that was the golden age of Academy Awards ceremonies. On April 8th 1975, Bert Schneider’s film Hearts And Minds won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Instead of an acceptance speech, he read out a telegram conveying fraternal greetings to the American people from Dinh Ba Thi of the Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government. Offstage, Bob Hope was mad, and scribbled some lines for his co-host Frank Sinatra. So Frank came out and said that the Academy wished to disassociate itself from the preceding. Then a furious Shirley MacLaine yelled at Frank that she was a member of the Academy and no one had asked her if she wanted to disassociate herself from the Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government. Then John Wayne said aw, the Schneider guy was a pain in the ass.
The rise of New Hollywood is a story that’s been told countless times, but one of the very best tellings is Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, originally published in 1998, but finally released in a Kindle version this week — entirely coincidentally, the day after Bert Schneider died. Biskind managed to interview many of the original players, and wrote a compelling narrative of the collapse of postwar Hollywood and the retirement of the last of the great moguls who built the industry, and the rise of the young turks who would be, for a time, their successors. And then their own usurpation, both through drug and alcohol-induced dissipation, and because Hollywood executives, with a little help from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rediscovered how to connect with mass audiences.
By the late 1960s, the Hollywood studio system was in ruins. There were multiple reasons — Michael Medved has blamed the demise of Hollywood’s self-enforced production code and its replacement with the G/PG/R/X rating system as alienating a big chunk of traditional moviegoers in the late 1960s. Concurrently, the urban “youth” market of the 1960s felt alienated by an industry still churning out formula clones of the last big film by “Old Hollywood,” The Sound of Music. The failure of so many of those films that came in its wake, including Dr. Doolittle, Hello Dolly, Star and other expensive, out of control musicals and family-oriented movies, nearly drove 20th Century Fox to financial ruin, and ultimately caused the once-mighty MGM to effectively close up shop as a functioning studio.
During the late 1960s, age had caught up with the industry as well. In an era whose slogan amongst the left was “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” most Hollywood crews were manned by people double that age, who had broken in around the time of World War II or immediately afterwards, and weren’t planning to leave anytime soon. As Steven Spielberg told Biskind:
“It was not like the older generation volunteered the baton,” says Spielberg. “The younger generation had to wrest it away from them. There was a great deal of prejudice if you were a kid and ambitious. When I made my first professional TV show, Night Gallery, I had everybody on the set against me. The average age of the crew was sixty years old. When they saw me walk on the stage, looking younger than I really was, like a baby, everybody turned their backs on me, just walked away. I got the sense that I represented this threat to everyone’s job.”
Ultimately he was — including many of the young turks in Biskind’s book, ironically enough. But prior to Spielberg’s rise as an industry unto himself, as Biskind tells it in Easy Riders, there were two milestones in the birth of New Hollywood in the late 1960s. The first was Bonnie & Clyde, the second was Easy Rider. As leftwing author Rick Perstein told Reason magazine in 2008 while promoting his then-recent book Nixonland:
My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.
But along with Bonnie & Clyde’s subversive script (written by Robert Benton and David Newman, who got their start at Esquire magazine, then at the peak of its journalistic style and influence), at least the film had a known-star in Warren Beatty, a ravishing looking Faye Dunaway, whose career was still in its ascendency, and a veteran director in Arthur Penn.
Categories: Movies, Pop Culture of the Past, Television
I recently went to see “Easy Rider,” and was so bored I walked out in the middle!
You didn’t stick around for the happy ending?
I’m surprised at how often I see commenters at PJM blow off really amazing films as dull and boring. Is there a left/right brain thing going on with liberals/conservatives that explains this? Is this why Sean Penn and Danny Glover have brilliant instincts as artists but devolve to idiots when they write about politics? Is this why dull and unclever parody is given kudos by conservatives who can nevertheless often write pitch perfect narratives about the undoing of America?
Since the happy ending of “Easy Rider” was attempted on me by cowboys using a car fender because I had long hair when I was hitchhiking a year after I saw the film, that scene and the restaurant scene resonated with me. I was often looked at like an animal my families when walking down the street. That was one of the whole points of the long hair; challenging people that a person in a tie was moral and that same person with long hair and bell bottoms was not. If only life were so easy that one could trust and judge by external appearances.
I was against the Viet Nam war but would never have communicated directly with the North; those were our guys over there for better or worse and I didn’t like what Fonda did.
It a long nice piece but I disagree with this and it is important: “Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.”
In fact that had been in the air since at least the 30s but mechanisms like the Hayes Office and the Comics Code Authority put the kibosh on that until they were simply defied then overwhelmed in the late 60s. I remember buying the first Marvel comic that purposely left off the Comics Code seal and films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The French Connection” pushed the envelope. Americans are natural eccentrics and that is its own rebellion.
“That was one of the whole points of the long hair; challenging people that a person in a tie was moral and that same person with long hair and bell bottoms was not.”
In my experience, having long hair was about your friends and your favorite rock groups having long hair. Most people in the 60s were not conducting a sociology experiment – they were trying to fit in.
Also, while it wasn’t always the case that the suit-and-tie guy was “moral,” it usually was the case that he had a job and responsibilities, often a family to take care of. The same could not be said for most hippies. America is a nation of rebels, but it’s also a nation of capitalists, hard workers, entrepreneurs, people who want things and do what they have to do to get them. It’s not a nation of people who lay around smoking dope and smelling the flowers.
OK, end of Joe Friday lecture.
I should’ve left out the “whole” cuz the sentence doesn’t really make any sense. My own experience was that long hair was dangerous in the beginning and this fictional depiction in the film is very real. And I’m talking about the big city. Going into the country was even more problematic, especially around bars and add 10 points in the South.
When I was in high school there were 6 “hippies” out of 1500 so it hadn’t got to the “you’re cool” stage but was still more in the “What the hell’s wrong with you?” stage. It’s interesting you mention a sociology experiment because in a way, we were; we were pushing. Sure, there was some social status and wanting to belong but it wasn’t like wearing a mod belt buckle bigger than your head or platform shoes – hair made people angry and we were a minority.
The film accurately depicts another little known phenomenon, that of the hippie (the commune) and the freak, the 2 leads. Hippies were rather contrived but freaks were natural eccentrics to whom the whole “scene” felt rather natural although they came from a far different and more pragmatic place. Nicholson’s character is a natural “freak” and that’s reflected in how he instantly connect with the leads. His suit is an illusion, he’s a freak, just with no one to connect with in that place.
A lot of normal people started in wearing “the look” in short order but we were never fooled. In my day and in my neighborhood if you wanted to vouch for a guy not present for a meeting, you just said “He’s a freak” and that was enough; there were other dangers than just cowboys such as police and narcs.
Ironically, the people who hated us the most, the country western crowd, today look the most like hippies and have for some years. They’re f–king f–ks.
I’m not disputing what you say about worthless hippies and hard working conservatives and who was in fact the backbone of the country; we were goofy not idiots. It is little remembered how much the movement, both freaks and hippies connected with farmers who were considered as very cool as the back to the land theme was a strong one.
I didn’t dislike the suit and tie guy so much as I wanted to avoid a 9 to 5 and paying taxes and living a boring life. We wanted to redefine what a “good” life could be and yeah it was hit or miss. Mostly miss in my case since me and my guys were criminals and almost no one made it out of the neighborhood with their senses intact, no prison time or even with their lives.
Good times though: I still remember our teenage girls with their long hair, halter tops, and very long bell bottoms frayed on the bottom from brushing the ground even though they’d wear high platform shoes. “Easy Rider” is more realistic then people give it credit for and it’s a journey through that world of the counter culture which was a different thing to different people in different places but which had touchstones well depicted in the film.
The two black guys, building those two bikes for Easy Rider, are totally forgotten. They’re the real heroes. American entreprenuers. Ingenuity at it’s best.
As for the 60′s and 70′s era “junk politik” was just that…junk! Gave us the riots, “Hell No, We Won’t Go!” chants about Vietnam and Cambodia (Pol Pot anybody?) Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky and all. Hollywood is stuck in this rut. “Junk politik” is still on the screens, even til today.
The “Red Carpet” has fixated Americans on Hollywood idols, all having a wide space between their left brain and right. They’re hauled out in front of TV news for their opinions on this or that, ultimately making total fools of themselves and films they’re acting…one might say, and Hollywood’s culture in general (degenerate, at best). Who wants to live a life on drugs?
Most americans prefer to invent, improvise, instruct, live in the real world…not some bubble!
Hollywood? Just that, a “hollow wood.” Never, ever will it define what We The People really are, true, blue Americans. Not “junk politik.”
Thank you, Mr. Driscoll. I did not know much of this.
One of my high schools screened Chinatown, and Shoot the Piano Player and Mad Max, for learning to read film as art.
My kids live la vida Jorge Lucas: movies, dvds, video games, tee-shirts, halloween costumes, actions figures, lego mini-figurines, lego sets, chapter books, comic books…I am glad that he has a healthy, and hopeful, non- trivial, imagination.