A fascinating year-by-year history of American film in the seventies, a decade filled with innovations that reinvented the medium and showed that movies can be more than entertainment.
In The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever, Vincent LoBrutto tracks the changing of the guard in the 1970s from the classic Hollywood studio system to a new generation of filmmakers who made personal movies targeting a younger audience. He covers in kaleidoscopic detail the breadth of American cinema during the 1970s, with analyses of the movies, biographical sketches of the filmmakers, and an examination of the innovative production methods that together illustrate why the seventies were unique in American film history.
Featuring iconic filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola and films such The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist, this book reveals how the seventies challenged the old guard in groundbreaking and exciting ways, ushering in a new Hollywood era whose impact is still seen in American film today.
Show moreA fascinating year-by-year history of American film in the seventies, a decade filled with innovations that reinvented the medium and showed that movies can be more than entertainment.
In The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever, Vincent LoBrutto tracks the changing of the guard in the 1970s from the classic Hollywood studio system to a new generation of filmmakers who made personal movies targeting a younger audience. He covers in kaleidoscopic detail the breadth of American cinema during the 1970s, with analyses of the movies, biographical sketches of the filmmakers, and an examination of the innovative production methods that together illustrate why the seventies were unique in American film history.
Featuring iconic filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola and films such The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist, this book reveals how the seventies challenged the old guard in groundbreaking and exciting ways, ushering in a new Hollywood era whose impact is still seen in American film today.
Show moreVincent LoBrutto is the author of four books on filmmaking, including Principal Photography: Interviews with Feature Film Cinematographers and Sound on Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. His articles have appeared in American Cinematographer and Films in Review. He teaches in the film, video, and animation department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and lives in Mount Vernon, New York.
Both a who's who of the film industry in a decade that changed
American cinema forever and a personal recollection of the films
that changed the author's life, The Seventies by Vincent LoBrutto
is an enjoyable and informative read for those who have a passion
for films. It made me want to go and (re)watch the revolutionary
masterpieces, looking back on a lost time when films mattered and
challenged art, culture, and society.
Film buff LoBrutto takes a revealing look at the cinematic movement
that grew out of the turbulent 1970s. He presents a detailed
analysis of the film world year by year, starting with "a long
string of failures" of big budget films in the '60s that indicated
the "Golden Age of Hollywood" was over. From this came a vanguard
of young, innovative directors who subverted the "beauty and
glamour" of the first half of 20th-century film and created complex
movies that treated the medium more like art, reacting to the
fraught political and social climate caused by the war in Vietnam.
These films "were unflinching in their approach to difficult
content," LoBrutto writes, and yielded a more realistic, if
sometimes somber, style, bringing to the fore such talents as
Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin
Scorsese and encompasing cult classic movies like The Exorcist
(1973), Chinatown (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976). Charting the rise
of stars including Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and
Jane Fonda, LoBrutto leaves no stone unturned in making his case.
Movie geeks won't be disappointed.
LoBrutto tells readers on the opening page that he and his wife
have gone "to every movie [they] could possibly see" since the
1970s. This volume confirms that claim with its nonstop flow of
fascinating details about hundreds of American films, their casts,
and their crews from 1970 through 1979--one year per chapter.
The 1970s have long been heralded as one of the greatest eras of
American filmmaking, and countless books have been written about
films and figures of the period such as Martin Scorsese, Francis
Ford Coppola, John Cassavetes, and Steven Spielberg. LoBrutto's
contribution is a highly detailed narrative breakdown of the major
films and players of the decade, in a year-by-year format.
Vincent LoBrutto has devoted his life to film. That devotion shines
through on every page of this, a book itself devoted to a decade
that changed cinema forever.
Vincent LoBrutto is a one-man library of the American cinema. The
author of definitive oral histories of key creative personnel,
director biographies, and film studies textbooks sinks his
formidable teeth into what is probably Hollywood's greatest unsung
decade of artistic and commercial film-making.
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