Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. New Hollywood 1967–1980

For over a century, Hollywood has helped America shape its mythology and export it to the world. As a result, the country has become a universal cultural construct – even those who have never set foot in the U.S. believe they know what America is like. And they owe this knowledge to cinema. In my Na bulwarach czyhają potwory. Filmowa historia Ameryki, I explore this mythology, dissecting the cinematic perception of a country shaped as much by fiction as by reality. I ask: where does the boundary between reality and illusion lie? Can it even be defined? Who is deceiving whom? Is Hollywood feeding America and the world an illusion, or is America itself a fabrication that Hollywood simply projects onto the screen?

After reading Na bulwarach czyhają potwory, festival founder Roman Gutek invited me to Timeless Film Festival Warsaw and proposed curating a special section. In it, we present a glimpse into the fascinating movement known as New Hollywood.

In the early 1960s, the vast backlots of 20th Century Fox – until recently bustling with hits starring Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Elvis Presley – began to resemble a ghost town. The wind howled through the skeletal remains of abandoned sets. Sound stages stood empty. Every few days, the silence was broken by bulldozers leveling yet another building.

Studio head Spyros Skouras was forced to sell off most of the backlot to developers. Like other major Hollywood studios, Fox had been in crisis since the mid-1950s, as theater attendance plummeted by half within a decade. In a desperate attempt to save the company, Skouras doubled down on lavish historical epics. The biggest gamble of all was Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Originally budgeted at $2 million, the film’s costs spiraled beyond $40 million. Plagued by scandals and endless delays, the production dragged on for years. Despite being the highest-grossing film of 1963, Cleopatra recouped only half of its enormous budget, pushing the studio to the brink of collapse.

With Cleopatra‘s failure and the sell-off of Fox’s land, The old Hollywood, built in the 1920s by Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Carl Laemmle, was being dismantled. The reasons? Television, antitrust laws, but most of all: America itself was changing too fast, and Hollywood couldn’t keep up.

In an era of rapid social change, the failure of big-budget productions disconnected from the new reality prompted Hollywood studios to let young enthusiasts take the reins. According to legend, when a Warner executive saw Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn (which will be screened at this year’s Timeless Film Festival), before its premiere, he famously asked, “What the f** is this?”

Turns out, it was a cultural phenomenon. Hippies flocked to see Bonnie and Clyde multiple times, and Warner Bros. raked in tens of millions. That same year, 1967, the biggest box office success was The Graduate by Mike Nichols – a film as different from Cleopatra as a kayak is from the Titanic. Over the next decade, directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polański, Peter Bogdanovich, Miloš Forman, and Sidney Lumet would redefine American Cinema – turning it into a megaphone for cultural change. As Peter Biskind put it in his seminal book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, “Everything old was bad, everything new was good.”

Baudrillard’s idea that “in America, life is cinema” manifested during this era in an unprecedented fusion between film and reality. Suddenly, realism ruled the screen. Cinema depicted crisis, rebellion, and, in turn, fueled these movements. A perfect example? John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). The film, shot by Adam Holender, is filled with themes of homosexuality and social alienation. It both documented change and actively provoked it: just a month after its premiere, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The uprising that followed became a catalyst for the LGBTQ+ rights movement, which soon spread across the United States and around the world.

The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, The Last Picture Show, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and Raging Bull – the films in this section – are more than just time capsules. They withstand the test of time because they put people, not politics, at their core. They also provided a showcase for legendary actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and the late Gene Hackman – proving that, for a brief moment in the counterculture era, the business of Hollywood reached the level of true art.

Curator Maciej Jarkowiec, author of Na bulwarach czyhają potwory. Filmowa historia Ameryki, will introduce evening screenings of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: New Hollywood 1967–1980 section at Muranów Cinema with TEDx-style lectures. These talks will explore the behind-the-scenes stories of these films, the people who made them and the social, political, and cultural landscape that shaped them. Each lecture will be a journey – from California to Texas to the East Coast, tracing the evolution of American cinema.

Films in the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: New Hollywood 1967–1980 section:

• The Graduate, dir. Mike Nichols, USA, 1967
• Midnight Cowboy, dir. John Schlesinger, USA, 1969
• The Last Picture Show, dir. Peter Bogdanovich, USA, 1971
• Dog Day Afternoon, dir. Sidney Lumet, USA, 1975
• The Conversation, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974
• Raging Bull, dir. Martin Scorsese, USA, 1980