Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #11

Biskin, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How athe Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

(Introduction)

For our purposes, the (California) earthquake of 1971 was supererogatory, unnecessary, gilding the lily, as Hollywood has always been wont to do. The real earthquake, the cultural convulsion that upended the film industry, began a decade earlier, when the tectonic plates beneath the back lots began to shift, shattering the verities of the Cold War—the universal fear of the Soviet Union, the paranoia of the Red Scare, the menace of the bomb—freeing a new generation of filmmakers frozen in the ice of ‘50’s conformity. Then came, pell-mell, a series of premonitory shocks—the civil rights movement, the Beatles, the pill, Vietnam, and drugs—that combined to shake the studios badly, and send the demographic wave that was the baby boom crashing down about them.

Because movies are expensive and time-consuming to make, Hollywood is always the last to know, the slowest to respond, and in those years it was at least half a decade behind the other popular arts. So it was some time before the acrid odor of cannabis and tear gas wafted over the pools of Beverly Hills and the sounds of shouting reached the studio gates. But when flower power finally hit in the late ‘60s, it hit hard…It was one long party. Everything old was bad, everything new was good. Nothing was sacred; everything was up for grabs. It was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style.

By the late ‘60s and early ‘70’s, if you were young, ambitious, and talented, there was no better place on earth to be than Hollywood. The buzz around movies attracted the best and the brightest of the boomers to the film schools. Everybody wanted to get in on the act. (p. 14)

1970-1979

Corey, Melina and George Ochoa, editors. The American Film Institute Desk Reference. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2002.

The decade that began bleakly with MGM’s auction of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers saw the art of film revitalized through iconoclastic young directs. Their hits included The Godfather (1972) and Star Wars (1977).

In the early 1970s, Hollywood hit bottom. The years 1969-71 marked a depression for the American film industry, with 1971 the nadir of the 25-year economic decline begun after the peak year 1946. In 1970 MGM, once Hollywood’s grandest studio, had sunk so low as to auction off its costumes and props—everything from the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz to Ben-Hur’s chariot. Hollywood, it seemed, had forgotten how to attract audience so theaters and had no idea how to deal with the youth culture and social and racial polarization.

Hollywood’s salvation came from a new generation of filmmakers: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Friedkin, and Brian De Palma. Having grown up on Hollywood movies and lived through a tine of social transformation, these directors proceeded to reinvent whole genres. They were given relatively free rein by studios that didn’t know what else to do. Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) recast the gangster film as dark historical epic. Friedkin brought a new kind of urban realism to the crime film with The French Connection (1971) and a new level of shock to the horror film with The Exorcist (1973).

All these films were big money makers, but none compared to Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), the first films to earn more than $100 million in rentals. These two movies…permanently changed Hollywood economics. From here on, the studios focused on the annual production of a few huge blockbusters, usually youth-oriented, genre-base, action-packed, and laden with special effects. Before that trend solidified in the 1980s, commercial filmmakers enjoyed an unusual degree of latitude to innovate and experiment. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) and Nashville (1975), Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) could not have been made in an earlier time and would perhaps be difficult to make today…

Aiding in Hollywood’s economic resurrection was the introduction of multiplexes—theaters with many screens that could show more films profitably; new cable outlets, such as Home Box Office; and the discovery, with Jaws, that saturation advertising on television coupled with wide release could translate into big box-office profits. (p. 97)

Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.

Martin Scorsese: “I had met Roger Corman the first month I got to Hollywood, in January 1971, but I heard nothing from him for months. He’d wanted met to do a sequel to Bloody Mama, but then he offered me Boxcar Bertha. I worked hard preparing Boxcar Bertha, laying out every hot, five hundred shots in drawings, but Roger Corman said, ‘let me see what your planning is like.’ He went through the first ten pages, then flipped the rest and said, ‘You’re fine, because you’ve got to shoot this picture in twenty-four days, and you’ve got all the shots. If you’re this well planned, you’re going to be okay.’”

“Boxcar Bertha,” a character based on a woman who rode the rails during the Depression, was played by a young actress, Barbara Hershey. She is in love with a union organizer, portrayed by David Carradine. (p. 65)

Barbara Hershey: “…it was the most fun I’d wver had on a movie. We covered eight years of a story in four weeks of shooting, and that could have been a nightmare, but in this case it was a delight…It was a tough movie; they were tough guys, the AIP crew. (Roger Corman’s American Pictures International). Marty had a fragility to him and a vulnerability, but he was able to deal with those people and the situation and make us feel good.” (pp. 66-67)

Scorsese: “Roger Corman was…very open to letting you express yourself on film as long as it worked within the structure of what he needed. And that was an ‘exploitation’ film. Roger, for example, would look at the script. Then he’d tell us to make sure there’s a touch of nudity or a promise of a touch of nudity every fifteen pages. And violence—there had to be a certain amount of violence in it. Once we knew that and once we dealt with that form, we could move the camera, we could use certain actors, we could cut a certain way, as long as it worked.”

“Boxcar Bertha,” wrote the (New York Times) critic, “showed imagination beyond what one would expect from a film showing in a theatre on Forty-second Street.” (pp. 67-68)

Boxcar Berta (1972)

http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0068309/trivia

Trivia 
According to both David Carradine and Barbara Hershey, their sex scene was not faked.

The train sequences were shot first and they took about a week. This was done to get the most complicated element of the production, working with a moving train, out of the way first.

Director Cameo: [Martin Scorsese] as a john who is just finishing dressing himself when he asks Bertha if he can spend the night.

He was given $600,000 and told to make an exploitation film.

After he finished this film, Martin Scorsese screened the film for John Cassavetes. Cassavetes, after seeing this film, hugged Scorsese and said, "Martin, you just spent a year of your life making shit!" He urged him to make a personal film, and the result was Mean Streets. (Released in 1976.)

Schedule for the movie was 24 days (according to director Martin Scorsese's commentary for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore).

Filming Locations

• Camden, Arkansas, USA 
(interiors/street scenes)

• Reader, Arkansas, USA

http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000339/bio

Roger Corman Biography 


After studying engineering (a subject he said was ideally suited to making low-budget films on a tight schedule), Roger Corman attempted to break into films by the tried and trusted method of working as a messenger for 20th-Century Fox, eventually rising to the position of story analyst. He started direct involvement in films in 1953 as a producer and screenwriter, making his debut as director in 1955. Between then and his official retirement in 1971 he directed dozens of films, often as many as six or seven per year, typically shot extremely quickly on leftover sets from other, larger, productions. His probably unbeatable record for a professional 35mm feature film was two days and a night to shoot the original version of The Little Shop of Horrors, though several other films were made in less than a week. In the early 1960s, his budgets got bigger (though never big), when he made a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories starring Vincent Price. Apart from Frankenstein Unbound, he retired from directing in 1971 to concentrate on production and distribution through his company New World (and later Concorde), making low-budget exploitation films and using the profits to distribute distinguished art films. Apart from making dozens of enormously entertaining films (there are amazingly few duds in his output), Corman's place in film history is assured simply through his unrivalled eye for talent - among many world-class names who were employed by him at a very early stage in their careers are Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante and many others - which means that his influence on modern American cinema is almost incalculable. 
Written by: Michael Brooke