A Decade Under the Influence

In retrospect, the 1970s was a golden era for the American cinema, as demonstrated and explored by this documentary directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese. This IFC effort serves to illustrate and clarify the main idea of what that time meant for the careers of these illustrious people seen in the documentary.

The amazing body of work that remains, is a legacy to all the people involved in the art of making movies in that period. The decade was marked by the end of the Viet Nam war and the turbulent finale of those years of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

One thing comes out clear, films today don't measure against the movies that came out during that creative decade because the industry, as a whole, has changed dramatically. The big studios nowadays want to go to tame pictures that will be instant hits without any consideration to content, or integrity, as long as the bottom line shows millions of dollars in revenues.

The other thing that emerges after hearing some of America's best creative minds speak, is the importance of the independent film spirit because it is about the only thing that afford its creators great moral and artistic rewards.

This documentary is a must see for all movie fans.

As I am a teenager, I have about one hundred years of movies to catch up on. I try to see a mixture of classics, mainstream, art-house, and other movies. The 70's is one of the most important decades for films: it's when the average, common, classical films changed into full of messages and anti-social behavior. It became like nothing anyone had ever seen before. What A Decade Under the Influence basically shows is how important all of the movies from around The Graduate to about Star Wars.

Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme are the primary interviewers in this documentary, which interviews such people as Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Jon Voight, among others about how those few years changed cinema forever. It's a very professional, polished documentary, and it's even financed by IFC films. However, as this is a very professional one, I would think that they would at least edit out the noise of someone behind the camera laughing. To me, that took out a lot of how neat and clean the whole thing was.

On the other hand, it's a very interesting documentary, about film by the people who make it. Of course, they aren't bashing their own films or anything of the like, but they're portraying honesty on what they thought of the films and what they meant. I don't know much about film (but I want to be involved around it when I become an adult), so I feel like to someone like me this movie is a huge asset. I have seen a good number of movies that they mentioned, like Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but a little more insight into those movies were very informative.

The main reason, however, I didn't love Influence is, as slickly as it was edited, it seemed to take its time in the beginning and be quite relaxed, therefore not having enough time to get to everything that they wanted to show. They crammed in Star Wars and Jaws in the last few minutes, when they were two of the most important. It seemed like they tried too hard to show lots of clips, and that's fine, but some of them were unimportant, such as an extended one from Network.

Overall, though, Influence is a very enthralling, informative documentary that helped me, at least, learn more about a second `golden age' in American cinema.

My rating: 7/10

Rated R for language, and images of sexuality, violence and drug use.

I swore I would never allow myself to devolve into to the bogus authority figures of the sixties who told me things were better in the "good old days" – the current Australian Prime Minister is a sordid example of just such a mind set.

But I switched over to "A Decade Under the Influence" because I found watching the much-heralded "Sneakers" documentary on the other channel such a dispiriting experience. I found the values expressed by the "Sneakers" interviewees too ugly to accept as reasonable. So materialistic! So devoid of any sense of outrage at a society that can countenance killing someone to steal his very ugly shoes! So lacking in any worthwhile purpose that they can report without distaste the exploitation an audience by haranguing them to hold those shoes above their heads to lock in a sponsorship deal for themselves with a company of cobblers was just too much to continue watching.

"A Decade Under the Influence" depicted a completely different response to the fruit of stupidity, corruption and concupiscence in high (and low) places.

I have noted the change in film-making that accompanied the exposure of America's disastrous foreign policy debacles in Vietnam and so many less reported places in my www.peterhenderson.com.au website. "A Decade Under the Influence" documents the precise moment at which that change took place.

Before the seventies, the armed forces were depicted in American films as an invincible fighting force comprised of decent human beings who transmogrified into conquering heroes on the battlefield. After the seventies they are generally portrayed as a dispirited rabble misled by a bunch of bureaucrat clowns in the Pentagon Before the seventies, the FBI agent and the honest cop tended to be depicted as your friend and protector. After the seventies, the FBI agents were all incompetent and the best a cop could aspire to was to ignore their foolishness and his superior's corruption and uphold justice in his own idiosyncratic manner.

Before the seventies, the archetypical American "little guy", the "average Joe", the Jimmy Stewart type would face down the problems encountered and thereby gain some insight into underlying wisdom of his elected leaders and justice of the "American Way". After the seventies, Kevin Costner usurps that role, but now he is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness for evil to be exposed, or accepting his lot and making out the best he can.

And now those "old time religion" mindsets have been stripped of any honesty and righteousness and portrayed (with a certain amount of justification) as sanctimonious bigotry and self-serving hypocrisy.

"A Decade Under the Influence" tells it like it was. "A Decade Under the Influence" tells it like it is now. It depicts the redemption of the American film industry from the hands of the artistically, morally and intellectually bankrupt studio moguls. It shows the storming of the Hollywood Bastille by the independent film makers who promised to get a disillusioned and tired audience back into the cinemas. The fact that their failures were numerous, and at times disastrous, merely underlines the greatness of their achievement. An achievement reflected in the adventurous and questioning attitudes of the big box office stars such as Clooney, Daman, Affleck etc and the directors and producers who provide the vehicles for their talent.

This is a great compendium of interviews and excerpts form the films of the late sixties and early 70s that were a counter movement to the big Studio Films of the late sixties. Directed by Ted Demme, it is obviously a labor of love of the films of the period, but it gives short shrift to the masterpieces of the times.

Many of the filmmakers of this period were influenced by Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, and of course John Cassavetes. Unfortunately the documentary logging in at 138 minutes is too short! The film is rich with interviews and opinions of filmmakers. Some of the people interviewed are: Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdonovich, Ellen Burstyn, and Roger Corman, Bruce Dern, Sydney Pollack, Dennis Hopper, and Jon Voight.

Bruce Dern has a moment of truth when he says that he and Jack Nicholson may not have been as good looking as the other stars that came before them but they were "interesting". This summarizes the other areas of this period of film-making in American history.

The filmmakers were dealing with a lack of funding from the Studios because they were expressing unconventional attitudes about politics, sex, drugs, gender and race issues, and Americas involvement in overseas conflicts like the Vietnam War.

There is a great interview with Francis Coppola saying that he got the chance to make "The Conversation" because the producers knew he had been trained by Roger Corman to make a movie with nothing so they bankrolled his film.

Another interview is with Jon Voight who was directed by Hal Ashby in "Coming Home" a clear anti-war film about a crippled soldier immersing himself back into society after his facing battle. Voight talks about how his working methods helped him achieve an emotional telling point when Ashby said that they were doing a "rehearsal" take and it ended up being the take used in the film- it was better because it was so un-rehearsed and not drained of its freshness by being over-rehearsed.

There are also many fine excerpts from Al Pacino's break-through film "The Panic in Needle Park", and interviews from Dennis Hopper on the making of "Easy Rider", and interviews from Sydney Pollack about making films.

All in all the documentary is a fine jumping off point for any film lover who wants to see great examples of what the new voices in film were like in the Seventies. Many of the Sundance Folks, where this film made a big splash, are unaware of just how much the Independent Film Maker today owes to the films of John Cassavetes, Milos Foreman, William Friedkin, and Roger Corman.

Rent it from your favorite shop. It will at least perk you up to some films you may not have seen before and can enjoy today. Amazon.com has it for as little as $11.50, if you want to buy right out.

This exploration of a unique decade in US cinema begins with the fall of one ailing, out-of-touch empire and culminates with the unstoppable rise of another, equally associated with escapism and box office receipts. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Or, as Peter Fonda observed in Easy Rider, "We blew it." In between, from Bonnie And Clyde to Star Wars, the young Turks (some under the guerrilla tutelage of Roger Corman) were creeping under the wires to produce some of the greatest artworks of the 20th century. While the story is already familiar from Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls directors Demme and LaGravenese are less concerned with muckraking than in providing a platform for the filmmakers and stars themselves.

Everyone from Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola and Julie Christie is interviewed and a roster of well edited clips places the decade in a socio-cultural and economic context. If their responses are self-congratulatory (to say the least), they're also highly quotable, funny and revealing, making this something of a cinephile's wet dream. Director William Friedkin reveals how the original The Exorcist poster was to feature a little girl's hand holding a bloodied crucifix and the legend 'For God's sake, help her", before he complained. Former Warner Bros.' head John Calley recalls that when he first saw Robert De Niro in Mean Streets he assumed Scorsese had secured a psychopath's day release for the shoot.

Happily, a certain amount of hard perspective has crept into the mix, as might be hoped from a politically motivated, consciousness-expanded generation; Hopper stresses "there's a lot of real crap in there too". Julie Christie observes that 1970s US cinema was "not a good time for women". But if Demme responds with a spoonful of sops to women's movies - brief clips of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, They Shoot Horses, Don't They and Klute - we're soon dragged back to the usual male wall-pissing contests.

The shift from tough, socially-conscious film-making to no-risk crowd-pleasers like Jaws for 'Nam-weary, fantasy-craving audiences is also documented, though a little rushed. But kudos too, for the inclusion of lesser-sung, but equally relevant films like Panic In Needle Park and Joe. "We weren't handsome," muses Bruce Dern on his contemporaries. "But we were f****** interesting."