Ray Pride

In "A Decade Under the Influence," writer-director-raconteur Paul Schrader notes that after the 1960s, the studio system was "a decaying whorehouse that had to be assaulted." But now the accountants are running the whorehouse. For studios, movies are products and product lines. Cinema is an ancillary stream, not stream-of-consciousness.

Two documentaries on the era have been released this year, reflecting filmmakers' continuing fascination with a time when art wasn't a dirty work in Hollywood. (Paul Schrader once told me, "Call me motherfucker, call me cocksucker, just don't call me dark," reflecting modern-day executives' fear of the complex and adult.) The sentiment toward hagiography began as early as 1979, when Lynda Myles and Michael Pye published their "The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood."

First of the documentaries is Kenneth Bowser's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," which debuted at Slamdance and then showed on the Trio cable network, based on Peter Biskind's snotty bestseller that made the veteran magazine journalist look like a jerk as he attempts to make everyone from the era look like a jerk. Bowser, whose sturdy documentary on the life of Preston Sturges is on Criterion's "Sullivan's Travels"' DVD, dug up contemporary footage of several filmmakers, notably a scrawny young George Lucas. His rambling narrative also lacked latter-day interviews with directors like Robert Altman, who detest Biskind. "That Peter Biskind book is not a book. It's a real piece of shit," Altman told me. "It was commissioned, and it was hate mail. We were all lured into talking to this guy because people thought he was a straight guy but he was filling a commission from the publisher for a hatchet job. He's the worst kind of human being I know."

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme had better luck with their casting for the Sundance entry "A Decade Under the Influence," which opens Friday. Its appeal lies largely in its mix of faces, pairing young iconoclasts with their forebears; 1990s figures influenced by 1970s filmmakers who were in thrall to 1960s European cinema. My favorite examples are Neil LaBute talking to Paul Mazursky ("Bill and Carol and Ted and Alice," "An Unmarried Woman") and screenwriter-DreamWorks executive Michael DeLuca with John Calley, the seventysomething chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose tenure at Warner Bros. included supervision of "The Exorcist," "Dirty Harry," "All the President's Men" and all the Kubrick and Eastwood movies. A warm underlying feeling to all the interviews comes from a sense that everyone was a co-conspirator in a revolution of sensibilities. At least until the release of "Star Wars."

As "Shampoo" and "Last Detail" screenwriter Robert Towne puts it in the film, "There was a disparity between a conventional view of the country and what the filmmakers felt the country was about, and I think there was an audience for that disparate view." Along with Schrader and Altman, there are also telling anecdotes from Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper, Scorsese, William Friedkin, screenwriter Robert Towne, Jerry Schatzberg ("Panic in Needle Park") and actors like Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern and Jon Voight.

In August, "Decade" and additional material will be shown on IFC as a mini-series, programmed with films from the era. That seems a better use of the material on view, keyed to the work of a particular director rather than jumping from figure to figure without much critical context, all the while struggling to keep the unwieldy mass of history at a running time under two hours. The official website (http://www.adecadeundertheinfluence.com/) Ioffers extensive additional material, including LaGravenese's list of seminal 1970s movies and the movies that influenced the filmmakers: it's more than 300 titles long.

"Well, it was a golden time," Altman told me once. "There was a lot more creativity allowed. But now, if you see anything original, you won't see it [out there for] very long. It's time turtling on. These kids... they don't understand anything else. There's so much saturation. There's not a policeman today who didn't learn his behavior from watching films or television. We all imitate each other." And collect each others' DVDs. And watch documentaries that aren't complete until we collate the new information alongside the romantic myth in our cinephilic brains.

"A Decade Under The Influence" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-06-04)

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