For many film lovers, the 1970s represent a high point in creativity, a golden age of individualist directors making their marks. In this book you'll find a host of key movies of the era that saw a flowering of talent and the arrival of the blockbuster with the likes of Jaws and Star Wars.

While the anti-establishment rebels of 1969's Easy Rider were morphing into the nostalgic yuppies of 1983's The Big Chill, Seventies movies brought us everything from killer sharks, blaxploitation, and disco musicals to a loving look at General George S. Patton. Indeed, as Peter Lev persuasively argues in this book, the films of the 1970s constitute a kind of conversation about what American society is and should be—open, diverse, and egalitarian, or stubbornly resistant to change. Examining forty films thematically, Lev explores the conflicting visions presented in films with the following kinds of subject matter: Hippies (Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant) Cops (The French Connection, Dirty Harry) Disasters and conspiracies (Jaws, Chinatown) End of the Sixties (Nashville, The Big Chill) Art, Sex, and Hollywood (Last Tango in Paris) Teens (American Graffiti, Animal House) War (Patton, Apocalypse Now) African-Americans (Shaft, Superfly) Feminisms (An Unmarried Woman, The China Syndrome) Future visions (Star Wars, Blade Runner) As accessible to ordinary moviegoers as to film scholars, Lev's book is an essential companion to these familiar, well-loved movies.

In 1969, a low-budget biker movie, Easy Rider, shocked Hollywood with its stunning success. An unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (onscreen and off), Easy Rider heralded a heady decade in which a rebellious wave of talented young filmmakers invigorated the movie industry. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind takes us on the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s, an era that produced such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and how, along the way, some of its executives helped smuggle Huey Newton out of the country; how director Hal Ashby was busted for drugs and thrown in jail in Toronto; why Martin Scorsese attended the Academy Awards with an FBI escort when Taxi Driver was nominated; how George Lucas, gripped by anxiety, compulsively cut off his own hair while writing Star Wars, how a modest house on Nicholas Beach occupied by actresses Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt became the unofficial headquarters for the New Hollywood; how Billy Friedkin tried to humiliate Paramount boss Barry Diller; and how screenwriter/director Paul Schrader played Russian roulette in his hot tub. It was a time when an "anything goes" experimentation prevailed both on the screen and off. After the success of Easy Rider, young film-school graduates suddenly found themselves in demand, and directors such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese became powerful figures. Even the new generation of film stars -- Nicholson, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino, and Dunaway -- seemed a breed apart from the traditional Hollywood actors. Ironically, the renaissance would come to an end with Jaws and Star Wars, hugely successful films that would create a blockbuster mentality and crush innovation. Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood's last golden age. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and about the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn. By turns hilarious and shocking, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the ultimate behind-the-scenes account of Hollywood at work and play.

The seventies were a decade of groundbreaking horror films: The Exorcist, Carrie, and Halloween were three. This detailed filmography covers these and 225 more. Section One provides an introduction and a brief history of the decade. Beginning with 1970 and proceeding chronologically by year of its release in the United States, Section Two offers an entry for each film. Each entry includes several categories of information: Critical Reception (sampling both '70s and later reviews), Cast and Credits, P.O.V., (quoting a person pertinent to that film's production), Synopsis (summarizing the film's story), Commentary (analyzing the film from Muir's perspective), Legacy (noting the rank of especially worthy '70s films in the horror pantheon of decades following). Section Three contains a conclusion and these five appendices: horror film cliches of the 1970s, frequently appearing performers, memorable movie ads, recommended films that illustrate how 1970s horror films continue to impact the industry, and the 15 best genre films of the decade as chosen by Muir.

If the made-for-television movie has long been regarded as a poor stepchild of the film industry, then telefilm horror has been the most uncelebrated offspring of all. Considered unworthy of critical attention, scary movies made for television have received little notice over the years. Yet millions of fans grew up watching them--especially during the 1970s--and remember them fondly. This exhaustive survey addresses the lack of critical attention by evaluating such films on their own merits. Covering nearly 150 made-for-TV fright movies from the 1970s, the book includes credits, a plot synopsis, and critical commentary for each. From the well-remembered Don't Be Afraid of the Dark to the better-forgotten Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, it's a trustworthy and entertaining guide to the golden age of the televised horror movie.

This publication is a major evaluation of the 1970s American cinema, including cult film directors such as Bogdanovich Altman and Peckinpah.

Winner of the 2018 Richard Wall Memorial Award​ from the Theater Library Association Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry. Throughout the 1970s feminist reform efforts resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of women directors, yet at the same time the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood continued to create obstacles to closing the gender gap. Maya Montañez Smukler reveals that during this era there were an estimated sixteen women making independent and studio films: Penny Allen, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Joan Darling, Lee Grant, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Peeters, Joan Rivers, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly Sebastian, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Tewkesbury, Jane Wagner, Nancy Walker, and Claudia Weill. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author, Liberating Hollywood is the first study of women directors within the intersection of second wave feminism, civil rights legislation, and Hollywood to investigate the remarkable careers of these filmmakers during one of the most mythologized periods in American film history.

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.

An in-depth summary of the Horror Cinema of the 60s and 70s, with references to earlier and later films. The topics examined are: Fear and contamination, Gothic and horror movies before 1968, 1968, Rosemary's Baby: satanic and demonic cinema, Night of the Living Dead, Horror movies in the ‘70s, New frontiers: monsters, zombies and chain saws. The following films were then analysed: Faust, The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, Repulsion, The Tenant, The Devil's Daughter, The Antichrist, The Exorcist, The Guardian, Twins of Evil, Lust for a Vampire, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Demons of the Mind, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, The Legend of Hell House, It’s Alive, The Omen, The Brood, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Exorcist III, Damien: Omen II, Rabid, Shivers, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies, Martin, Creepshow, Day of the Dead, Monkey Shines, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive, Salem's Lot, The Funhouse, Poltergeist, The Mangler, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. Of each film: technical cast, plot, criticism as well as the judgment of the Catholic church (Catholic evaluation). Finally, more than 120 images including posters and images taken from the films.

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.