New TV specials celebrate '70s cinema

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Looking over the list of landmark films in "A Decade Under the Influence: '70s Films That Changed Everything," a new three-part documentary that premieres on IFC Aug. 20, snatches of dialogue kept popping into my head even though I hadn't seen any of these movies in years.

"Annie Hall" ("D'jew?"), "Chinatown" ("She's my sister and my daughter!") "Dirty Harry" ("I gots to know"), "The French Connection" ("Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?"), "The Godfather" ("An offer he couldn't refuse"), "The Graduate" ("Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?"). Etc.

But with "Jaws," the only line I could remember was not from the script but from the marketing campaign for the sequel - "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water" - which is fitting. Because "Jaws" marked the moment when the lure of the blockbuster opening weekend began to swallow up the notion of the independent vision like a great white shark going after swimmers.

"It's like the four-minute mile," director Sidney Pollack said at the IFC news conference. "That was always the yardstick that no one could reach, until someone reached it. Nobody ever believed that a picture could possibly gross $100 million. Once that happened, small studios began to be bought up by large companies that were marketing experts."

"And for them, the science became not about making the movies, but marketing the movies. Right now, when you take a movie to a Hollywood studio, you cannot get it made unless the marketing department can see the poster."

"It just happened that 'Jaws' was the first one the broke the tape in under four minutes," Pollack noted. "Can you go back? I don't think so."

Pollack is one of almost 30 directors, writers, producers and actors interviewed in "A Decade," a project hatched by producer/directors Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme during the narrowly avoided 2001 Writers Guild strike.

"Teddy said, 'Listen, why don't we do this documentary during the strike, so we'll have something to do?'" recalled LaGravenese. "Then, of course, the strike never happened. We did it anyway - partly to have some fun and partly to meet all these incredible filmmakers."

The three-hour TV special - expanded from the theatrical feature that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last spring - may sometimes seem a bit leisurely if you're not a hardcore film buff.

But there are plenty of rewarding moments for anyone who loves movies: Pam Grier recalling how she studied Method acting for her role in Roger Corman's "Foxy Brown"; Peter Bogdanovich describing how Dennis Hopper taught him how to use an editing machine in 15 minutes - a seat-of-the-pants kind of filmmaking that's hard to imagine today; Bruce Dern on how he and fellow character actor Harry Dean Stanton couldn't get roles "carrying Lee Majors' luggage in 'Big Valley'" until they found their niche in offbeat films.

"A Decade Under the Influence" defines the cinematic '70s as from around 1967 ("The Graduate") to 1977 ("Star Wars"). "Because that's when culturally things started to change," LaGravenese responded, when I asked about the timeframe. "And in the late '70s it shifted again."

As Pollack points out in the documentary, before the late '60s audiences wanted to see stories - like "Casablanca" in the '40s, or early '60s fluff like the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies - that they knew would never happen to them.

By the late '60s, they wanted to see films with flawed, rumpled characters, like "The Graduate," that they could imagine might happen to them.

And by the late '70s, audiences were ready for escapism again.

"Optimism started happening," noted Pollack at the news conference. "Just a reflection on me personally - the last film of the '60s I made was 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' The last film of the '70s I made was 'The Electric Horseman.' One ends with a girl asking a guy to kill her and he does. And the other is a kind of cotton candy with two pretty actors. It was what was happening in the country."

"A Decade Under the Influence," by the way, isn't the first suggestion that the '70s may have been more of a watershed decade than the '60s. David Frum made the same argument three years ago in his book "How We Got Here: The '70s (The Decade That Brought You Modern Life - For Better Or Worse.)"

The much-ballyhooed Don't Trust Anyone Over 30 generation of the '60s, Frum pointed out, was basically limited to the college campus elite: ordinary young men then supported the Vietnam War.

But in 1975, three weeks before the fall of Saigon, the winner of the best documentary Oscar went to "Hearts and Minds," a film so sympathetic to the North Vietnamese that the directors read a Viet Cong telgram of congratulations instead of an acceptance speech.

"Hearts and Minds" is tactfully left out of "A Decade Under the Influence." And so is "Animal House," a landmark film in its own way that came out in 1978 and so probably belongs more to the new era of lowbrow, escapist entertainment.

Those with fond memories (and I am one) of that vulgar and hilarious movie, however, can tune into Spike TV's "Go Inside: 'Animal House'" a one-hour behind-the-scenes special premiering Aug. 24. "Animal House" is also being released on DVD Aug. 26, for the film's 25th anniversary.

The film almost had to be shot on the Universal lot instead of at a real college, director Ivan Reitman noted at the Spike TV news conference. "We got turned down by about a dozen different colleges," Reitman said, until the president of the University of Oregon in Eugene said OK without even bothering to read the script.

The university president explained to Reitman that he'd turned down "The Graduate" from filming at another college when he was presidnet there, because he'd hated the script. "Then he realized, once he saw 'The Graduate,' that obviously he had no ability to get a sense of what a movie is going to turn out like from the screenplay," Reitman said.

One '70s film in which old Hollywood met new was Alfred Hitchcock's last movie "Family Plot," starring two oddball character actors - Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris - in the romantic leads that would have gone to glamorous leading men and ladies in the old days.

"He was aware that things were changing," Dern recalled of Hitchcock at the IFC news conference. One day during the "Family Plot" shoot Dern asked the legendary director why he and Harris had been cast.

"He said, 'Well, first of all, Bruce, you're very cheap. I had to pay Paul Newman and Julie Andrews $750,000 [in "Torn Curtain"], and actors aren't worth that.'"

"But he also said, 'Because you're unpredictable,'" Dern added. "In his office, there were pictures drawn of every single frame of his movie. And they worked. But it was our job to fill that frame with moment-to-moment behavior."

Dern recalled that Steven Spielberg, fresh from his mega-success with "Jaws," used to hang around on the "Family Plot" set at Universal, begging Dern to get him just 10 minutes with Hitchcock.

"So I'd go down and sit next to Hitch," Dern said. "And Hitch would say, 'Bruce, is that the boy who made the fish movie?' And I said, 'Yeah, and he just want to let you know what a fan he is.' And [Hitchcock] says, 'Look at my hands, Bruce, they're shaking. I could never speak to him, because I feel like such a whore."

"I said, 'Why is that?'"

"He said, 'I'm the voice of a "Jaws" commercial!'"

Auteurs of '70s cinema, by the way, aren't snobby about all contemporary movies.

"Studios are looking for sensation," said Pollack. "It's a little like eating food with hot sauce - you get addicted and you have to keep adding more hot sauce. And you are doing two things: Giving yourself a sensation but also knocking out taste buds. It's just a different point of view. They're hungry for sensation rather quickly."

"That doesn't mean that there aren't very good films made," Pollack added. I enjoyed enormously a film like 'Run Lola Run,' which is a pure product of modern sensibilities. It's a product of video games, for God's sake. But look, it got turned into art - real art in some way."

"On the other hand," he noted, "some of it just stays video games."