![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/choose-me-1.jpg\" "\\"choose-me-1\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nChoose Me<\/em>.<\/p>\n DB here:<\/p>\n In an earlier post<\/a>, I proposed that film historians can’t safely assume that decades mark off meaningful periods. Yet I can\u2019t help succumbing to the temptation myself. It happens every time I hear about how the 1970s were the last great decade in American film.<\/p>\n We\u2019re often told that back then, countercultural forces gave us movies of restless auteur ambition like Five Easy Pieces<\/em> and Nashville<\/em> and Mean Streets<\/em> and Shampoo<\/em>. Meanwhile, The Godfather<\/em>, Jaws<\/em>, American Graffiti<\/em>, and even Star Wars<\/em> not only rejuvenated the studio system but also reflected something of their directors\u2019 temperaments, providing Hollywood with an enduring new mythology. So far, so plausible.<\/p>\n Then, the story goes, came the age of the blockbuster. Thereafter, moviemaking was simply selling out, winning the weekend, building franchises, and catering to disposable teenage income. Like big hair and padded shoulders and Wham!, the films of the 1980s are apparently something to be ashamed of.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The glorious burnout<\/strong><\/p>\n This judgment is spelled out most fully in Peter Biskind\u2019s Easy Riders and Raging Bulls<\/em>, a celebration of and postmortem on the Movie Brats era of the 1960s-1970s. Biskind doesn\u2019t try to make a critical case for the films of the period; he assumes that everyone counts these movies as edgy masterpieces. He\u2019s more interested in the sensational lifestyle of the filmmakers. Filling his pages with gossip about alcohol, cocaine, backbiting, squabbles, and the horizontal mambo, he could hardly deny that his favorite directors were somewhat self-destructive. He justifies their escapades by treating them as driven artists fighting a corrupt system\u2014mavericks, in fact. (Yes, he uses the word.) This idealization occasionally leads to mawkishness that Biskind would castigate if he saw it on the screen:<\/p>\n Hal Ashby did die just after Christmas, on a raw, rainy Tuesday. . . .The papers said it was liver and colon cancer, but it could just as well have been a broken heart.<\/strong> (1)<\/p>\n Forgiving the flaws of these all-too-human directors, Biskind spares no sympathy for the producers who focused on the bottom line. With rising budgets and distribution costs, the studios\u2019 cynical leaders chose to play safe with megapictures that purveyed \u201csmarmy, feel-good pap.\u201d (2)<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good, simple story, and the problem is the simplicity. The top-grossing movies of the 1970s include Love Story<\/em>, Fiddler on the Roof<\/em>, The Sting<\/em>, The Towering Inferno<\/em>, Rocky<\/em>, Grease<\/em>, Smoky and the Bandit<\/em>, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture<\/em>. These aren\u2019t exactly testaments to personal expression. The megapicture mentality we associate with the 1980s was already present in some of these, as well as in The Poseidon Adventure<\/em>, Earthquake<\/em>, and Superman<\/em>. The four-quadrant movie was taking shape well before Heaven\u2019s Gate<\/em> brought auteur ambitions crashing to earth.<\/p>\n Further, not every 1980s movie aimed to be a blockbuster. I tried to argue in The Way Hollywood Tells It<\/em> that just as in the classic studio era, we have to look for creativity beyond the titles that dominate the best-10 and top-grosser list. In addition, there are always filmmakers whose sensibilities naturally match the demands of big-budget projects: David Lean and Anthony Mann managed it in the 1960s, Spielberg and Lucas in the 1970s. In the 1980s several directors were able to make strong, original megapictures.<\/p>\n So you can make a good case that the 1980s gave America a burst of first-rate films and remarkable new talent. At all levels, from ambitious prestige items to dazzling genre pictures, the decade is nothing to be sneezed at. The maw of home video had to be fed, so the demand was for product of all sorts. Videotape rental expanded specialty niches and cult markets. Filmmakers could finance projects through video and foreign presales, and investors took chances at many levels. The era saw a revival of ambitious independent films, which played alongside program pictures, Oscar bait, and summer blockbusters. Romantic comedy, action movies, and science fiction enjoyed a strong run. And many of the people we still consider genuine movie stars\u2014Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Glenn Close, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, and Tom Cruise\u2014are ineluctably creatures of the 80\u2019s.<\/p>\n My defense doesn\u2019t spring from generational bias. I don\u2019t have the excuse of adolescent nostalgia<\/a> that makes Tom Shone write:<\/p>\n What a grand piece of historical luck it was to be in your early teens when Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em> came out\u2014when Spielberg and Lucas were in their prime and the very act of going to the movies seemed to come with its own brassily rousing John Williams score. Later on, we would learn to cuss and curse the infantilization of the American film industry, just like everyone else, but back then we were too busy infantilizing it to notice.<\/strong> (2)<\/p>\n So here are some assorted, more or less objective reasons to consider this decade as making a remarkable contribution to U. S. film history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n New talents, old genres<\/strong><\/p>\n Near Dark<\/em>.<\/p>\n Put aside two highly influential 1980s films, E. T.\u2014The Extraterrestrial<\/em> and Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>, since Biskind would consider them feel-good pap. Put aside Raging Bull<\/em>, which he grants canonical status as the capstone masterwork of the 1970s generation. Even granting all this, most major 1970s directors didn\u2019t vanish in the megapicture decade.<\/p>\n Scorsese\u2019s underrated King of Comedy<\/em> was a portrait of a social type, the obstinate, delusional nerd; we all knew one, but we hadn\u2019t seen him on the screen before. Altman moved from Popeye<\/em>, a sort of anti-musical and anti-comic-book movie, to intimate theatre pieces like Streamers<\/em> and Secret Honor<\/em> and Fool for Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n From Jonathan Demme we had Melvin and Howard<\/em> and Something Wild<\/em>; from Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider<\/em> and Bird<\/em>; from Paul Schrader, American Gigolo<\/em>, Cat People<\/em>, Mishima<\/em>, and the Bressonian\u00a0Patty Hearst<\/em>. Coppola, supposedly a marked man after Apocalypse Now<\/em>, gave us another anti-musical (One from the Heart<\/em>) and a robust biopic (Tucker: The Man and His Dream<\/em>). De Palma outraged his audience with Dressed to Kill<\/em>, Blow Out<\/em>, and Scarface<\/em>. John Carpenter\u2019s B-movie sensibility was given full throttle in Escape from New York<\/em>, The Thing<\/em>, and Big Trouble in Little China<\/em>. And arguably David Cronenberg hit his stride with Scanners<\/em>, Videodrome<\/em>, The Dead Zone<\/em>, The Fly<\/em>, and Dead Ringers<\/em>. Maybe we should just call the 80\u2019s the Cronenberg Years.<\/p>\n Veteran directors also got in their licks. Sidney Lumet had a remarkable run; if you bet on\u00a0Serpico<\/em>, I see you\u00a0The Verdict<\/em> and raise you\u00a0Prince of the City<\/em>. Sergio Leone offered\u00a0Once Upon a Time in America<\/em>, a film that looks more ambitious on each viewing. John Huston checked in with\u00a0Prizzi\u2019s Honor<\/em> and\u00a0The Dead<\/em>, Sam Fuller with\u00a0The Big Red One<\/em>.<\/p>\n Biskind castigates the 1980s for parvenu producers like Don Simpson and Michael Eisner, but he doesn\u2019t mention all the new directors who emerged. Some allied themselves with independent companies or mini-majors, others worked through the studios,\u00a0but in any case it\u2019s strange to overlook Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Tim Burton, the Coens, Spike Lee, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, George Miller, Barry Levinson, John Sayles, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Katherine Bigelow, David Mamet, Steven Soderbergh, et al. Just cherry-picking their films yields up Thief<\/em>, Manhunter<\/em>, Salvador<\/em>, Platoon<\/em>, Wall Street<\/em>, Born on the Fourth of July<\/em>, Pee-Wee\u2019s Big Adventure<\/em>, Beetlejuice<\/em>, Batman<\/em>, Blood Simple<\/em>, Raising Arizona<\/em>, She\u2019s Gotta Have It<\/em>, School Daze<\/em>, Do The Right Thing<\/em>, Used Cars<\/em>, Diner<\/em>, Tin Men<\/em>, The Abyss<\/em>,\u00a0Return of the Secaucus Seven<\/em>, Matewan<\/em>, Mala Noche<\/em>, Drugstore Cowboy<\/em>, Stranger than Paradise<\/em>, Down by Law<\/em>, Mystery Train<\/em>, Near Dark<\/em>, House of Games<\/em>, Things Change<\/em>,\u00a0sex, lies and videotape<\/em>. Not many dribs of feel-good pap in this bunch.<\/p>\n There was a lot of bloated Oscar bait, I grant you. Is anybody, anywhere on the globe watching Gandhi<\/em> or Chariots of Fire<\/em> or Driving Miss Daisy<\/em> at the moment? But we had Amadeus<\/em>, an intelligent biopic, as well as Tender Mercies<\/em> and Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter <\/em>and Rain Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n The 1980s kept genres firmly at the center of Hollywood. Instead of working against genre conventions, as many Movie Brats had done (not all; remember Bogdanovich), many of the most talented Eighties directors found ways to do what they wanted in and through genres. In this sense, they were more like Hawks and Ford and other classical filmmakers. The “personal” mainstream film wasn’t a contradiction in terms.<\/p>\n Take science fiction. Blade Runner<\/em>, which became as influential as Metropolis<\/em> and 2001<\/em>, pushed to an extreme the premise of Alien<\/em>: The future will be rusty, drippy, and stygian. Blade Runner<\/em> also expanded teenage vocabularies by at least one word (can you say dystopian<\/em>?). Handed another cult science-fiction story, David Lynch turned Dune<\/em> into a pageant of hallucinatory grotesques. Voices float unbidden in the air, and boils never looked so glistening. Today, these overstuffed genre pieces repay viewing more than Out of Africa<\/em> does.<\/p>\n Granted, the 80s gave us plenty of earnest clunkers in the drama department, perhaps most notably The Color Purple<\/em>. But we also have Body Heat<\/em>, Never Cry Wolf<\/em>, Fatal Attraction<\/em>, Witness<\/em>, Kiss of the Spider Woman<\/em>, The Accused<\/em>, Terms of Endearment<\/em>, The Right Stuff<\/em>, Field of Dreams<\/em>, River\u2019s Edge<\/em>, Places in the Heart, The Big Chill<\/em>, and other sturdy efforts.<\/p>\n If you admire Ishtar<\/em>, then add it to this list. Ditto the parboiled stylings of Alan Parker: Pink Floyd The Wall<\/em>, Birdy<\/em>, Angel Heart<\/em>, and Mississippi Burning<\/em>. And if you grew up on John Hughes movies, there\u2019s no more to be said by me. You probably still love Sixteen Candles<\/em>, The Breakfast Club<\/em>, and the rest. Okay, maybe we should consider it the Hughes decade.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n