American Cinema in the 1960s-70s - Essay Example

All these measures were the effort of the giant called "Hollywood" to stand back on its feet. This was the age of the first 'multiplex' movie theatre in 1963 invented by Durwood who went on to run AMC Entertainment, which was the third-largest movie theatre company in the nation. The studios were fast being taken over and merged by multi-national companies soon after the sad demise of movie moguls like Harry Cohn of Columbia. The traditional, Hollywood studio era would soon be history, as more and more studios were acquired by other unrelated business conglomerates.

Now there would be a time of "packaged" films and the independent company and independent producer. In 1966, Gulf and Western Industries bought Paramount which would later be beheaded by Robert Evans to give such hits as Rosemary's Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), and Chinatown (1974). The very famous movie of Cleopatra(1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor as the Queen of Egypt and future husband Richard Burton as Marc Antony was a budget disaster for 20th Century Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck.

One can of course not ignore the British Influence on American Cinema during this time as most Hollywood movies started to be made in Britain due to budget constraints. Examples are films like Becket 1964 and The Lion in Winter 1968. This influence can also be seen in films like Doctor Zhivago (1965) which was about the Russian Civil War which became very popular for its "European" influence. There was a reduction, almost a complete phase-out of producing "inflated historical epics".The influence of the British realism ( styled "Kitchen Sink"), as well as the role of "Angry Young Man" - the hero who was economically and socially frustrated fast, became a part and parcel of American movies.

The era ended when Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 were released. These sequel-based films were based on the new formula of Sci-fi and commercial blockbuster reality and nothing like what the decade of 1960s produced and made popular. The term Blaxploitation refers to a group of films that found immense popularity in the early 1970s as they were all about black nationalism and the Black Power rebellion with an all-black cast.