Days of Heaven’s Gate

In the late ‘70s, Michael Cimino was riding high. Fresh off The Deer Hunter and about to go into production on his epic dream project, Cimino could seemingly do no wrong. The same could be said for many of the young auteurs of the New Hollywood era, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and a handful of others. It was the time of the little studio picture, and executives were eager to throw a couple million dollars at small, character-driven scripts without giving it too much thought.

To help put it in perspective, imagine Harold and Maude being financed by a major Hollywood studio today. Yeah. Times were crazy.

And then came Heaven’s Gate.

With it, Cimino single-handedly put United Artists out of business and drew the curtain for good on New Hollywood. What followed, from 1981 to 1989, was a period that many consider to be the nadir of the studio era (remember Howard the Duck?). Executives were scared to finance another bomb and directors were hamstrung by the need to turn a buck instead of tell a story. The 1980s were, basically, the dawn of the movie-as-product period that eventually peaked in 1993 with The Last Action Hero.

Tucked away among the plentiful detritus, though, were a collection of subversive, authorial, entertaining (and profitable) films that deserve a second look. These are not necessarily the films you may remember most fondly from that period (I’m not talking about One Crazy Summer here), but rather those that were somehow able to incorporate the spirit of the ‘70s into the monolithic entertainments of the ‘80s. Some examples:

They Live

John Carpenter’s 1988 thumb-in-the-eye to mass culture and groupthink is a perfect example of this sort of film. Not to mention it starred “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Coming at the end of Reagan’s presidency, it was the perfect anecdote to Rambo: First Blood, Part II, upending the dominant hero paradigm and making way for a lumpy, somewhat unkempt anti-hero. From the very first moment Piper dons the top-secret sunglasses until he utters his now famous line (“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum”), you know you’re in for a good time, albeit a little rough around the edges. They Live became a box office hit that made Universal Pictures truckloads of cash. As something of an outsider, though, Carpenter did not experience the full mood swing of the studio system as some of his more famous peers certainly did.

The King of Comedy and After Hours

After making a trio of landmark films during the 1970s, Martin Scorsese attempted to get a number of more serious projects off the ground, but as the new studio reality dawned, was eventually forced to make back-to-back comedies for his demanding distributors. What resulted are two of the most eclectic, off-the-wall, dark comedies ever made: The King of Comedy and After Hours. Once again, both films feature a decidedly anti-heroic protagonist, a recurring theme in many of the films that fall into this category. So much so that one could make the argument that the anti-hero was a surrogate for the directors themselves. Both films are examples of a great director working within a set of constraints that forces him or her to transcend the normal boundaries of a common genre in order to make it his or her own.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven pulled off a similar feat with 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, a genre film that put New Line on the map (the studio is often referred to as “The House That Freddy Built”) and rejuvenated Craven’s flagging career. Craven came of age in the anything goes heyday of early ‘70s exploitation cinema, making his mark with The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. With the rise of the Moral Majority in the ‘80s, that type of filmmaking was quickly relegated to the drive-in ghetto (coincidentally, the very place where it began) and Craven had to find a way to keep working.

Like the great Surrealist filmmakers before him (Bunuel, Makavejev), Craven found his way in through dreams, creating a character (Freddy Krueger) that could fuck with people when they were their most vulnerable. An unforgettable moment comes during one of the first dream sequences, when Freddy’s arms extend to three times their normal length as he approaches an unsuspecting teen. This image could easily have appeared in Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and it helped distinguish this film as something more than the cheap Halloween knock-offs that were popping up on screens across the country. Not surprisingly, the original Nightmare was a massive success, paving the way for numerous, lesser sequels (save for Renny Harlin’s Dream Master in 1988). As a historical footnote, this film also launched the career of none other than Johnny Depp, giving him his first starring role and a place in the horror film pantheon.

It’s difficult here to do little more than provide a brief overview of what I’ve come to call the Golden Age of Hollywood Commercial Filmmaking. It was a transitional period where commercial interests began to trump artistic ones, but just prior to when films became little more than a commodity to by hyped and sold in an increasingly crowded entertainment market. It was the last collective gasp of a generation of artists that was, for the first time, being forced to play by a new set of rules. They had to subvert these rules just as they had upon their arrival in Hollywood (when the studios had become hung up on musical spectacles and melodramas). If the ‘70s were the period of the writer-director, the ‘80s were the time of the studio whore.

With the advent of VHS, though, the doors were opened for a new generation to enter the game, with the founding of independent studios such as Troma, Full Moon and New Concorde to produce content that would eventually line the shelves of the neighborhood video store. But even this fare was a watered down version of the original ‘70s-era grindhouse films that give exploitation cinema its reputation.

The ‘80s has always been a much maligned decade, for its fashion, for its music, and, especially, for its movies. But for every Howard the Duck, there was a Back to the Future; for every Police Academy, there was a Stripes. Considered on a case by case basis, the films of the ‘80s were not merely flotsam in a cultural wasteland, but rather a calculated effort by a generation of filmmakers to remain relevant (and working) in a landscape dominated by the Religious Right and other moral watchdogs. It wasn’t until Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape took the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that “independent” films were seen as viable revenue generators and the floodgates were once again open for filmmakers to flaunt convention and once again pursue their creative visions on big screens across America.

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