7,714 Movies, and Counting

When I first saw "The Graduate" it seemed to uncannily mirror my own life. Like Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin, I had just graduated from a college in the East, returned home for a summer in Los Angeles (where I did my share of alienated pool-floating), and when I saw the movie I was, like Benjamin, in Berkeley. It was as if I were seeing my own life on screen for the first time: but of course everybody felt that way. Watching it again recently, I see that part of the secret of its phenomenal success was that Benjamin—who expresses no political opinions, never mentions any of the issues of the day, indeed barely speaks for the first (and best) half of the movie—was a blank slate upon which an entire generation was free to project its self-image. Like Benjamin, we weren't all sure what we wanted, but we knew what we didn't want: "plastics."

But no movie could have prepared us for the radical changes the High Sixties wreaked on our lives. I'll spare you the psychedelic (and stereotypical) details of my personal transformation, except to tell you that in 1970 I found myself, somewhat to my amazement, living on a commune in the mountains of southern Colorado (we were called the Red Rockers) in a geodesic dome we had built with our own heretofore uncalloused hands. My list went with me, but for the first time in my life, five months went by without my seeing a single movie. There was one drive-in theater in Walsenburg, but to see anything decent we had to drive our VW bus to Pueblo, a good 90-minute trek. It was there, in '71, that I saw "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," the beginning of my decadelong love affair with Robert Altman, my new main man. (I gave it an Excellent, having long since retired the Superior rating, which somehow seemed juvenile. The ratings disappeared from my list entirely after I started reviewing movies for a living, at The Real Paper in Boston in 1975.) When Hollywood tried to make movies about hippies and drugs and dropping out, the results seemed pathetically inauthentic. "The Strawberry Statement"? Give me a break. I know "Easy Rider" is supposed to be some kind of countercultural classic, but it struck me and my friends as a crock. Only the music of the period (Dylan, the Stones … you know the list) got it right, and the occasional documentary like "Woodstock" or "Attica." Many of us, of course, were not watching movies in unaltered states. You could smell the cannabis in theaters playing "2001," and if anybody ever sat through an Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey film ("Lonesome Cowboys," "Flesh") straight, they were probably asleep.

By 1972 I had come down from the hills and re-entered civilization. It was a jarring transition, but a steady diet of cinema eased the blow. The country was movie mad. Boston, where I was living, was filled with revival houses, where you could get a comprehensive education in old movies. You could see "The Godfather" and, on the same day and a few subway stops away, a Preston Sturges classic like "The Lady Eve." It's become a clich? to call this period a Golden Age of movies, but for us boomers it sure was. Nobody talked about how much money these movies made; we talked about what they meant to us. Here are just some of the contemporary highlights of the first half of the '70s: "5 Easy Pieces," "The Last Picture Show," "The Godfather, "Mean Streets," "American Graffiti," "Blume in Love " and "Badlands" jump-started the American New Wave. "The French Connection," "Cabaret," "Don't Look Now," "Blazing Saddles," "Dog Day Afternoon," "The Sugarland Express," "Chinatown," "Shampoo," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The Man Who Would Be King" pumped fresh blood into old genres. France gave us "Murmur of the Heart," "The Grand Bouffe," "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "Playtime"; Canada "Mon Oncle Antoine"; Australia "Walkabout"; Sweden "Cries and Whispers" and "The Emigrants"; India "Days and Nights in the Forest." "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "Deep End" came out of England, and Fassbinder ("The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant") and Herzog ("Aguirre: The Wrath of God") emerged from Germany. Altman was on the great roll that took him from "The Long Goodbye" to "California Split" to "Nashville," and Coppola astonished us with "The Conversation" and his great sequel "Godfather II."

Then a funny thing happened. Hollywood discovered the youth market—and it was no longer us. Sure, we went to see "Jaws" along with everyone else, and got great goose bumps, but teenagers were calling the commercial shots, and we were now easing into our 30s. In '76, The Real Paper sent me to L.A. to cover the Oscars. It was the year that "Rocky"—a throwback to the crowd-pleasing populist formulas of old—unaccountably KO'd "Taxi Driver," "Network" and "All the President's Men." It was a sign of things to come.

A new generation was demanding different dreams, and it would change the kind of movies that reigned in Hollywood for the next three decades. The following year, in 1977, I went off to a screening of a new studio movie in downtown Boston. It was rumored to be a sleeper. Outside the theater, an old friend offered me a joint. On an impulse I broke my professional rule and had a few tokes of something that proved to be much stronger than I'd expected. The movie popped off the screen like a rocket, resembling nothing so much as the "Flash Gordon" serials I'd seen as a child. I couldn't follow the plot to save my life in my addled condition, but I had the back-to-the-future sensation that the movies had looped back to where they'd started for me, in candy-colored "Demetrius and the Gladiators"-land. Writing about it the next day I had to shamelessly rely on the production notes to explain the story I could only fuzzily piece together, but it was easy to describe the whooshing-through-space special effects and the old-fashioned, bark-out-your-lines acting. The movie, of course, was "Star Wars" (page 36, No. 1,787). It made me feel young again, and, for the first time, very old.

© 2007