American New Wave Research 3

A decade under the influence

• All the big production companies were struggling as these big budget movies that were following the same formula that Hollywood had been reusing for decades was no longer connecting and entertaining for audiences to watch.
• Actors, directors and writers being contracted to singular studios all broke up in the mid to late 60s which was already a sign of the new wave as it allowed a lot more freedom and control to Auteurs rather than the studios producing the film. A lot of studios didn't want this change but they were panicking as the industry was dying and if they wanted to continue making money and success they had to change with the society around them which many of them one nothing about hence why New Hollywood filmmakers were typically young because they understood and were inspired by the world they were living in.
• This new audience had been politicalised by Vietnam and whose consciousness had been changed with drugs and it was an open audience that the big production studios didn't even know existed.
  
  
• Sydney Pollack says The new generation was questioning everything that they had been taught by society up until the 60s what was authority, what was virtue, what was heroism, what was sexuality, what was male, what was female. Therefore movies that people would never have been made 20 years before due to being controversial and political were now allowed to be made because this new audience weren't shying away from these questions.
• Pam Grier says the 70s were the first time we could celebrate the freedoms won from the 50s and 60s with art.
• Audiences were looking for something more meaningful than the glitz of white rich people I the 60s that an audience had no connection to whatsoever. It wanted to see difficult and different films and as a whole it just wanted to be challenged and surprised, not only by audiences but filmmakers themselves as very different and ambitious films came from this new wave of cinema.
• Hollywood hadn't changed in a long time and pleasure of movies was no longer being measured by how glamourous it looked or how many stars were featured but how much an individual spectator related to the film itself and the distance they lived from your own life.
• Artists no longer had to be employed they now could make an impact on society as much as world leaders could because they now had the power of influencing public opinion on any subject matter.
• The European films of the 60s had the most powerful influence on American filmmakers at that time as in the 60s, every major college campus and the area around on Friday nights, was full of kids going to see foreign films.