In recent years, the 1970s have come to be regarded as Hollywood’s Silver Age, a period where a crop of talented younger directors steeped in auteur theory transcended the increasing corporate commoditizing of the motion picture business and produced classic after classic. Many of the directors who came of age in the 1970s are today’s lionized cinematic elders — Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, even Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The recent death of Sydney Pollack underlines not just the passage of time since that heyday, but also the serious decline in the quality of output from Hollywood and the extreme scarcity of directors in today’s generation of filmmakers who can match up to their predecessors.
GOOD Magazine has this article about one of the truly outstanding directors of the 1970s, but whose early death in 1988 has caused him to become somewhat forgotten in comparison to his still-living counterparts: Hal Ashby. Ashby only made thirteen films in his career as a director (most of his time in Hollywood was spent as a film editor), but each of his first seven films went on to become an all-time classic: The Landlord, Harold And Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound For Glory, Coming Home, and Being There (one of my personal favorites of all time). As the GOOD article author, Jennifer Wachtell, says, not only are these truly great movies and examples of what was possible in the Hollywood of the 1970s, each one is stylistically so different from the next that it is almost impossible to believe that they were all directed by the same man.
The article includes some admiring comments from some current A-List directors like Judd Apatow and Wes Anderson, as they try to explain how Ashby’s work has been an influence on them, but none of them really are able to do that. They talk about Peter Sellers’ performance, or Warren Beatty’s or what-have-you, but say almost nothing about Ashby. That’s telling, I think, because it’s my observation that contemporary directors aren’t really influenced by cinema at all, but by the shallower storytelling of television. Apatow, in particular, is basically a television writer/producer who has lucked his way into a career as a filmmaker by making movies that are extended SNL sketches starring the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. He’s hot shit in Hollywood, but he’ll never make a film like “Being There” because he’s incapable of it. I won’t be around to see how film critics judge this period of film history forty years from now, but if I were I wouldn’t be holding my breath for a big AFI retrospective of “the works of Judd Apatow”.
Anyway, read the linked article, then rent a few of these movies if you’ve never seen them, especially “Harold And Maude” and “Being There”.
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