Cinema Speculation

New Hollywood in the Seventies

The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats

In Peter Biskind’s historical examination of New Hollywood in the seventies, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he relates a story of Dennis Hopper, fresh off his Easy Rider success, having dinner with Peter Bogdanovich and his wife Polly Platt and legendary Old Hollywood director George Cukor.

During the dinner, Hopper apparently mocked the old man’s generation saying, “We’re gonna bury you.” With we meaning Dennis and his anti-establishment brethren, and you meaning Cukor and the rest of the grumpy old farts still making movies at the end of the sixties. Bogdanovich and Platt were shocked and horrified to see this old master, whose work they revered, treated with such an alarming lack of respect. “I hated Dennis for that,” Peter told me decades later. And if the story went down how it’s been told, Hopper deserved a punch in the nose.

Nevertheless, it does illustrate the attitude that Dennis’ Hippie Hollywood had about Old Hollywood as it gave way to New Hollywood. These new filmmakers had an anti-establishment perspective. To them, John Ford, John Wayne, and Howard Hawks were the establishment. Charlton Heston was the establishment. Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, and Rock Hudson were the establishment. And since My Fair Lady was definitely the establishment, so too was George Cukor.

The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs had just won a revolution. The old studio Broadway musical based extravaganza (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!) was finally at long last dead (many filmmakers today can’t wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies). The Hays Code was dead and the rating board was alive.

You could make a movie about any subject (practically) and the material wouldn’t have to be compromised. The peekaboo parlor games when it came to sexuality that Hitchcock was forced to play could be a thing of the past. And if you made it—thanks to the rating board—the distributor could release it across the country without some hick sheriff in some jerkwater county claiming you broke their obscenity laws.

These Anti-Establishment Auteurs were as sorry to see the old studio system go bust as the French Revolutionaries were to see Marie Antoinette vacate Versailles.

Now to be clear, the Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs were: Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, Frank Perry, Michael Ritchie, William Friedkin, Richard Rush, John Cassavetes, and Jerry Schatzberg.

Other strong but less prolific members of this group were: Floyd Mutrux, Alan Arkin, Ossie Davis, Paul Williams (not the diminutive songwriter), James Frawley, Francis Ford Coppola (at the time), Stuart Hagmann, Melvin Van Peebles, James Bridges, Brian De Palma (at the time), Monte Hellman, Harvey Hart, and of course the Easy Rider trio Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson. These were the Hollywood Hills Hippies. The Malibu Beach Beatniks. And it was the foreign directors of the fifties and sixties (plus Orson Welles) that had made them want to be filmmakers. But it was the counterculture that had made them want to be artists.

After the devastation of Europe and Asia during World War Two, once countries started making movies again, they found that they were making them for a much more adult audience than existed before the war. And world cinema proceeded to get more and more adult as the fifties turned into the sixties.

However, in America, despite the best efforts of men like Stanley Kramer and Otto Preminger, Hollywood movies still remained stubbornly immature and committed to the idea of fun for the whole family. But with the rise of the sixties counterculture, the explosion of a youth culture movement, the new maturity that was introduced to popular music, and the excitement generated by films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and especially the surprise success of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, a New Hollywood was ushered in. An adult-oriented Hollywood. A Hollywood with a sixties’ sensibility and an anti-establishment agenda.

And by 1970 this New Hollywood was Hollywood. And films left over from that other sensibility like Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili, Vincente Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Guy Green’s A Walk in the Spring Rain, George Stevens’ The Only Game in Town, William Wyler’s The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, and Howard Hawks’ Rio Lobo were deemed dead on arrival. And except for Edwards’ and Wilder’s films, those films were dead on arrival (though I can somewhat make a case for Wyler’s L.B. Jones). But the attitude of both the hip critics and the audience of the day wasn’t that much different from Dennis Hopper’s at that infamous dinner.

Fuck George Cukor! Fuck George Stevens! Fuck William Wyler! Fuck Howard Hawks!

Like the Movie Brat generation that came after them, these Anti-Establishment Auteurs watched old movies growing up too. But unlike Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Big John Milius, when this era of filmmakers watched old movies on television, they weren’t as enamored of what they saw. When they watched John Ford westerns they were usually appalled by the jingoistic white supremacy on display. When they watched The Searchers they didn’t see a conflicted man trying to find his place in a society that had outlived his usefulness. They saw a movie about an Indian-hating racist bastard who is ultimately offered absolution by a grateful (white) community. And they saw a director who cosigned that absolution and expected the audience to do the same.

They rejected the morality of the wrap-up at the end of Ford’s Fort Apache. Where Henry Fonda’s genocidal cavalry officer is lionized in death for the greater good of the cavalry, esprit de corps, and for white America as a whole.

The Anti-Establishment Auteurs wanted to remake John Ford movies, but not the way Scorsese and Schrader would do with Taxi Driver and Hardcore. They wanted to remake Fort Apache from the Apaches’ perspective. And in the case of Arthur Penn with Little Big Man, and Ralph Nelson with Soldier Blue, and Robert Aldrich (not post-sixties, hardly a hippie, but absolutely anti-establishment) with Ulzana’s Raid, they did.

The reason to do historical pictures in this new climate was to finally examine and demonstrate America’s history of fascism, racism, and hypocrisy. All the elements that Old Hollywood spent fifty years whitewashing in the historical pictures of old.

Jesse James wasn’t Henry King’s dashing Tyrone Power, he was Robert Duvall’s homicidal religious fanatic in Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.

Billy the Kid wasn’t Johnny Mack Brown’s smiling charmer or even Paul Newman’s brooding method acting turn in The Left Handed Gun, he was Michael J. Pollard’s creepy little punk in Stan Dragoti’s Dirty Little Billy or Kris Kristofferson’s Billy in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. A Billy who slays with all the callousness of a modern-day serial killer.

Gen. George Armstrong Custer wasn’t Errol Flynn’s long-haired hard-drinking two-fisted hero, he was Richard Mulligan’s racial cleansing nincompoop in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man.

Wyatt Earp wasn’t Burt Lancaster’s ramrod-straight lawman, he was Harris Yulin’s fascist cop in Frank Perry’s “Doc.” In Perry (and writer Pete Hamill’s) version of events, there wasn’t so much a gunfight at the O.K. Corral than Wyatt and his brothers just murdering the Clantons in cold blood. And the reason is made abundantly clear, power and money.

During times of great political turmoil, modern political issues are always conveniently found in America’s past. When Arthur Penn, Robert Aldrich, and Ralph Nelson take on the subject of the American Indian wars every parallel with the war in Vietnam is encouraged. To the extent that Penn cast an Asian woman to play Hoffman’s American Indian bride who’s savagely slaughtered by the cavalry wearing blue coats in Little Big Man (just in case it’s not obvious to everyone).

In Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, Robert Blake’s outlaw Indian on the run for a self-defense murder represents a modern-day Black Panther political fugitive. And Robert Redford’s golden-haired posse-leading marshal represents the older white male western archetype. And just in case we don’t get it, he’s named Coop, as in Gary Cooper.

Unlike the Movie Brats who followed them, these filmmakers didn’t want to do their version of Psycho (Dressed to Kill) or The Searchers (Taxi Driver and Hardcore) or Little Caesar (The Godfather) or Flash Gordon (Star Wars) or Bringing Up Baby (What’s Up, Doc?).

When these directors would redo films, it’s films in the spirit of Fellini, and Truffaut, and Renoir that they aspired to. When Paul Mazursky was faced with the task of following his surprise smash hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, he placed his Fellini influence front and center with his paraphrased take on the Italian’s film 8½, which he titled Alex in Wonderland. When faced with his own mortality due to his recent open heart surgery director Bob Fosse looked inward and guess what? He saw 8½ too.

Bonnie and Clyde was originally developed by screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman as a Hollywood movie for François Truffaut. And when Truffaut turned it down (he was too scared. Thank god!), who did they get? Arthur Penn. The only Hollywood director working at a studio level who, in 1965, tried to do a French New Wave–style movie in America, Mickey One, starring Warren Beatty.

Almost all of Frank Perry’s movies feel like American French films. But he wasn’t alone; Coppola’s The Rain People, Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Altman’s Images and later Three Women, and Kershner’s Loving and Up the Sandbox all play like American versions of European movies.

The first half of the New Hollywood seventies seemed to want to test the limits of both its newfound freedom and the type of edgy material it was allowed to make. And that’s why cinema lovers still enjoy discovering those films to this day.

But to the casual moviegoer, who didn’t know the difference between New Hollywood and Old Hollywood and lived someplace other than New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or a college campus, all they knew was, if you see a movie, you’d kinda like to understand it.

Did they understand 2001?

How ’bout Catch-22?

How ’bout Brewster McCloud?

How ’bout Little Murders?

Without a critic to tell them what to think did they understand Five Easy Pieces?

Did they misunderstand Joe?

You see a movie you wanna like the hero.

Do you like Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston in Rancho Deluxe?

Of course not, they’re assholes!

You like Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye in MASH.

But do you like Sutherland’s Alex in Alex in Wonderland?

Are we even supposed to?

Or work from the expectation that there will be a hero.

Is McCabe a hero?

Is Travis Bickle?

Is Maj. Charles Rane?

Is Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe?

Are Freebie and the Bean?

Is Warren Beatty’s George Roundy in Shampoo? I’m not just making fun of people back then who didn’t get it. I’m making fun of people now.

I screened Shampoo to an Oscar winning screenwriter who had never seen it, and when it was over, her response was; “So it’s just about a guy who’s trying to open up a hair salon?”

And yeah, I’m having a good laugh at Callie Khouri’s expense, but she isn’t the only person to say that.

The casual moviegoer knew movies had rougher language than before, but that doesn’t mean they were ready for The Last Detail. They knew movies were more violent now. They liked that True Grit was rougher than the usual John Wayne western, they liked the street realism of The French Connection, they liked it when Dustin Hoffman’s worm turns in Straw Dogs, they liked Dirty Harry shooting Black Panthers while he chewed on a hot dog, but that doesn’t mean they were ready for the throat-slitting scene in The Wild Bunch, or the singing-in-the-rain scene in A Clockwork Orange, or the male sodomy rape in Deliverance, or the climax of Joe.

Audiences liked the new risqué elements in movies like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Shampoo. They liked the funny discussions of sex in Summer of ’42, they thought it was funny when Hot Lips got exposed in the shower in MASH, but that didn’t mean they were ready for the tushy scene in Where’s Poppa? when Ruth Gordon bites George Segal on the ass.

Maybe they liked Julie Christie’s and Donald Sutherland’s making love in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Maybe (like my mom) they thought Ron O’Neal and Sheila Frazier’s bathtub scene in Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly was sexy. But were they ready for Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’ nude wrestling match in Ken Russell’s Women in Love? Were they disturbed, aroused, or both by Susan George’s rape in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs? And if they were disturbed, were they disturbed right away, or only at the end? And was that the disturbing part?

Sequences like these instilled a growing sense of anxiety at what audiences may be subjected to inside a darkened theatre with a room full of strangers. I mean, if you bought a ticket to Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls you probably had a good idea what you were getting into. But most audiences who bought a ticket to see Deliverance didn’t know they paid money to see Ned Beatty get fucked in the ass.

Audiences who didn’t live in New York or Los Angeles, or didn’t read the New York Times, or the New Yorker, or the Village Voice, began to become afraid of modern movies. After a steady diet of movies like The Panic in Needle Park, Joe, Lenny, Play It as It Lays, The Sporting Club, The Hunting Party, Last Summer, and Dusty and Sweets McGee, regular moviegoers were becoming weary of modern American movies. The darkness, the drug use, the embrace of sensation—the violence, the sex, and the sexual violence. But even more than that, they became weary of the anti-everything cynicism. As Pauline Kael suggested at the beginning of the decade, are the best movies suggesting the only sensible recourse for Americans is to get stoned?

Was everything a bummer?

Was everything a drag?

Was every movie about some guy with problems?

For hip audiences the hero dying futilely at the end of the picture was a come-on. It reaffirmed their pose, you can’t win. When Robert Blake and Stacy Keach died at the end of Electra Glide in Blue and The New Centurions, and when Fonda and Hopper bought it in Easy Rider it was senseless and tragically ironic. But that felt good because it reaffirmed the senselessness and tragic irony of American life. The senselessness of their deaths made them heroes. In the first half of the seventies you weren’t a hero for fighting a war overseas and killing a bunch of enemy soldiers. You were a hero if you fought the war, went back home, and got shot in a liquor store robbery. But that’s the Jack Nicholson audience, the Elliott Gould audience, and the Dustin Hoffman audience. Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson audiences didn’t feel that way.

When Burt Reynolds and Robert Aldrich’s follow-up to The Longest Yard came out, the gloomy cop film Hustle, it opened up to dynamite business . . . until audiences found out Burt died at the end. And it was a seventies cynical death. Burt’s audience wasn’t cynical, they liked America just fine. They’d rather watch him crack jokes about his early movies and see what clothes he wore on Johnny Carson for free, than pay to see a bummer.

If you wanted to watch a western-western, it was usually directed by Andrew MacLaglen or his buddy Burt Kennedy and starred old farts like John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, or Dean Martin. The youngest guys still doing straight westerns were James Garner and George Peppard. But if it was a true seventies picture, and not a nostalgic throwback for an aging star’s aging audience, then it was an anti-western. Almost every genre film made for a while was an Anti-Genre Film. With the idea behind the film being to expose the absurdity and unsavory politics that have hidden underneath said genre since the beginning of Hollywood.

And then suddenly a string of movies, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, The Godfather, American Graffiti, Paper Moon, Jaws, Carrie, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that were easily understandable, cut for maximum audience enjoyment—not artistic indulgence—and were new takes on old familiar genres. And these movies ended up being the films the public was waiting for.

The Movie Brats, so dubbed because of Michael Pye’s book-length critical study of them, were the first film-school educated generation of young white male directors raised on television, who emerged and ended up defining the decade with their snazzy pop flicks. The movement had as its members, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, John Milius, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader.

Coppola, the first film school graduate to break into the business, first with Roger Corman and later with Warner Bros., preceded the others from film students to professional filmmakers to auteurs by a decade. And as such he was sort of this group’s artistic and spiritual leader (Godfather?). A spot he shared sweetly with John Cassavetes on one end of the scale, and Roger Corman on the other. As John Milius once told me, “We all wanted to make Hollywood a better place because we were there. But those were Francis’ dreams! He was the only one who tried to do anything about it. And in a way you could say all those dreams failed. Hollywood isn’t a better place because E.T. made three hundred million dollars. Spielberg’s place is a better place.”

Coppola’s championship of Lucas and Milius is well known (Francis produced both of Lucas’ first two films, THX-1138 and American Graffiti. And directed Milius’ script for Apocalypse Now, which started life as a directorial project for Lucas). But his behind-the-scenes support for Scorsese is lesser known. According to Milius, “Nobody championed the young Scorsese like Francis.” At one point suggesting Scorsese should direct The Godfather sequel, it was Francis who suggested Scorsese to Ellen Burstyn when she wanted a young director to helm Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. He also suggested Scorsese to Al Pacino and producer Martin Bregman when they went looking for a new director when John Avildsen dropped out of Serpico. And according to Scorsese, Coppola even passed on a copy of the Mean Streets script to Mr. Pacino.

Coppola and Bogdanovich shared a company together, along with William Friedkin, called The Directors Company. It produced one Coppola contribution, The Conversation (one of his best), two Bogdanovich films, Paper Moon (one of his best) and Daisy Miller (one of his most underrated), and absolutely no Friedkin (even though he got a nice slice of those Paper Moon profits).

Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ for Scorsese, Obsession for De Palma, and an aborted first draft of Close Encounters for Spielberg. John Milius would produce Schrader’s second directorial effort, Hardcore.

Milius would dictate over the telephone Quint’s speech about the USS Indianapolis for his buddy Spielberg and would later write and produce Spielberg’s epic comedy 1941.

Brian De Palma would introduce Robert De Niro to Scorsese, and be the one to hand him Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver.

And De Palma and Lucas conducted joint casting sessions for Carrie and Star Wars. Because Lucas was quiet and De Palma did all the talking, the young actors thought George was Brian’s assistant.

These filmmakers were and looked young. And they also looked talented and dynamic. Just look at them during this period.

Spielberg naked, except for baseball cap, dirty tennis shoes, and cut off white Levi shorts sitting in Bruce the mechanical shark’s mouth on the set of Jaws.

Scorsese in his crisp white button-down shirt on the set of Taxi Driver scratching his black beard next to Robert De Niro in his weirded-out Travis Bickle mode.

Bogdanovich in a sleek black leather jacket on the set of Paper Moon squatting down on his haunches so he’s eye level with little eight-year-old Tatum O’Neal in her Addie Loggins overalls.

Lucas almost dashingly handsome in his shearling coat on the set of Star Wars sitting in a director’s chair alongside Alec Guinness wrapped up in his Obi-Wan Kenobi robe.

Milius in desert headgear to protect him from the Moroccan sun on the set of The Wind and the Lion sitting alongside John Huston looking mythic in his ambassador uniform costume.

De Palma, young and slim, viewfinder dangling from his neck, yucking it up with Tom Smothers and Orson Welles on the set of his first studio feature Get to Know Your Rabbit.

Coppola in the pages of Life magazine dressed in a colorful Hawaiian shirt (trimmer than he’s ever looked) traipsing around the massive sets he built in the Philippines for Apocalypse Now.

Schrader, built up and beefy like a high school wrestling coach, posing in front of a poster for Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy in the pages of Esquire.

That Esquire article, February 1975, was called the Ninth Era and was written by L. M. Kit Carson (David Holzman himself). In Kit’s piece he’s the first to identify this growing group of filmmakers who are taking shape to lead the industry. But Kit’s piece prophesied a whole new top of the line. Directors. Producers. Writers. Actors.

Under actors he had Robert De Niro, Pam Grier, and Joe Don Baker.

Under producers he had Mike Medavoy, Gerald Ayres, Julia and Michael Phillips, Tony Bill, and Lawrence Gordon.

Under writers he had Schrader, Robert Towne, David Ward, Joan Tewkesbury, and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

Under directors he has Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, De Palma, Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick, and Ralph Bakshi.

In his 1979 seminal study of seventies cinema titled American Film Now, James Monaco called the group The Wiz Kids and included Bogdanovich, Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg, Scorsese, and adds William Friedkin to the mix. While Coppola is given Pantheon status alongside Cassavetes, Altman, Ritchie, and Mazursky.

Diane Jacobs called her 1977 book Hollywood Renaissance, and included as her Pantheon John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Michael Ritchie, and Hal Ashby.

And Michael Pye’s study with the name that stuck, The Movie Brats, kept the film school aspect literal by only including Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, Milius, Scorsese, and the wunderkind Spielberg.

What set the Movie Brats apart from the earlier generation of directors that had come before them, even more then their youth and film school education, was the fact that (mostly) they were film geeks.

It’s almost amusing to think of a time when filmmakers took an attitude of almost indifference when talking about cinema as an art form. But before Scorsese and Bogdanovich and Spielberg that was the case. Even the generation just before them, the Anti-Establishment Auteurs didn’t talk about movies the way they did. Bogdanovich talks about the golden age of Hollywood with more authority than any director since François Truffaut. No doubt (at that time) Peter had seen more movies in one year then Altman had seen in his life (does anybody really think Altman watched other people’s movies?). Most filmmakers of earlier eras wouldn’t be able to read Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, no less write it.

They were the first generation of filmmakers who grew up watching movies not just in cinemas, but on television. Which meant they saw a lot more movies. They were also the first generation of filmmakers to grow up watching television on television. The directors before them (Peckinpah, Altman, Ritchie, Mark Rydell, Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, Ralph Nelson, George Roy Hill, Don Siegel) were too busy making television to watch it.

When the Movie Brats were young they grooved on movies the Anti-Establishment Auteurs wouldn’t be caught dead watching, god forbid being forced to make. Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, George Pal’s The Time Machine, Ken Annakin’s Swiss Family Robinson, J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone (Spielberg can quote the entire James Robertson Justice prologue narration).

Roger Corman, to the generation of filmmakers that preceded the Movie Brats, was a low rent colleague. When Warren Beatty considered working with Corman on a Robert Towne script titled The Long Ride Home (made as A Time for Killing without Towne’s name), Corman screened for Beatty his latest film The Tomb of Ligeia, also scripted by Towne. Beatty’s response to Towne about Tomb: “When I get married I don’t expect my bride to be a virgin. But I’d rather she not be the biggest whore in town.”

But Scorsese loves Ligeia so much he shows a clip of it in Mean Streets. To the Movie Brats, Roger Corman—even before he became a mentor—was a hero. They loved movies, dreamed movies, even received degrees in movies back when that was a dubious major. When the Anti-Establishment Auteurs did genre films they engaged in genre deconstruction. The Movie Brats embraced genre films for their own ends. They didn’t want (for the most part) to make art film meditations on genre films, they wanted to make the best genre films ever made. When Jaws came out in 1975 it might not have been the best film ever made. But it was easily the best movie ever made. Nothing ever made before it even came close. Because for the first time the man at the helm wasn’t a Richard Fleischer or a Jack Smight or a Michael Anderson executing a studio assignment. But a natural born filmmaker genius who grooved on exactly this kind of movie and would kill himself to deliver the exact vision that was in his head.

Spielberg’s command of Jaws showed how clumsy and badly timed most studio genre films were (Logan’s Run, Airport 1975, Towering Inferno, the ’70s James Bond movies).

This new generation didn’t aspire, like the generation before them, to adapt the great literature of their day. Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Day of the Locust, or Little Big Man. The books they were drawn to were more popular reads that they thought would make good movies. Jaws, Carrie, The Godfather, The Last Picture Show, Addie Pray (Paper Moon).

Also (for the most part) the Movie Brats entered the industry via exploitation cinema.

The Anti-Establishment Auteurs (for the most part) took themselves far, far too seriously to do exploitation films (television yes, drive-in fodder, no).

As far as they were concerned the American-International Pictures logo wasn’t a studio presentation credit, it was a stigma. It was the home of horror flicks and biker flicks, over the hill stars (Ray Milland & Boris Karloff), slumming stars (Bette Davis), dubious stars (Vincent Price & Fabian), and the place where failed international productions starring Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole went to die.

But the Movie Brats were young enough to be the audiences that American-International Pictures were aiming for. They were young enough to see the films in actual drive-ins. They were the first generation of leading Hollywood filmmakers who watched Gordon Douglas’ science fiction classic Them! because it was about giant ants.

In a way that was the reason that the Movie Brats wrestled the zeitgeist away from the Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs that had started the New Hollywood era that the youngsters were thriving in; the hippy directors couldn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, that some people watch movies about giant ants and take Them! seriously.