New Hollywood: The 1970s Director Decade

A generation of film school graduates took over after Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider proved youth tickets. Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Bogdanovich, and De Palma made personal films inside the studio system: unhappy endings, antiheroes, location realism.

The Godfather and Jaws made enormous money with opposite methods, and Star Wars pushed the industry toward the modern blockbuster. By 1980 the experiment was closing, but the decade remains the most studied era in American film..