A Decade Under the Influence

This three-hour in-depth documentary by the late Ted Demme (brother to director Jonathan Demme) covers the groundbreaking approach to filmmaking by the "newer breed" of directors who began to make their mark in the mid-'60's into the '70's. It shows a group of directors who were from a different genearation and, after graduating film school, took a new approach to filmmaking. They cast off the technique of "old-school" directors and experimented with pioneering views. It shows the transformation of tackling storylines with a new "truth", taking films from a type of "audience escapism" and placing a grittier realism into them to match what actually goes on in life. Dozens of films are explored, including MASH, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, The Godfather. Vintage clips are generously interspersed thoughout the documentary. This film shows now-famous directors and their thoughts on incorporating the '60's take on Vietnam, Women's Lib, Civil Rights into their films...more specifically, shows a group of directors who exemplify the rebellion of the time by bucking the system and standing up to "the establishment". Lots of interesting interviews and clips here!!

Right on point, riveting,unbelievibely good.

This documentary has countless engaging stories from numerous filmmakers and actors about films of the 1970s. If you’re a film student or just like ‘70s culture, give this a watch, you won’t regret it!

This dvd is well put together and worth the buy. For those interested in 70's cinema aesthetic this will get you started. Lot's of key players genuinely interested in educating the public on the key events and times that defined the period.

It was a very entertaining and helpful education. Highly recommended to my fellow filmmakers! It gives a massive insight of the early 70s indie movement that I never really knew about until now.

only half of it was posted on the internet so i had high expectations when i got it, unfortunately it barely scratches the surface of the subject matter

Bought this for my husband, who loves film, but he said there wasn't that much new info. to be had.

The problems with both ADUTI and the similar doc EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS are: they are generally fawning in tone; they play fast-and-loose with the truth by presenting only selected bits of film history; and - most importantly - they attempt to explain the zeitgeist of the 70s by restricting their view only to movies, when movies are (and have always been) a milk container in the cultural icebox...taking the flavor of whatever's sitting next to it. The 'counterculture', or 'new aesthetic' (or however you want to phrase it) lasted longer and more meaningfully in other media (music, art, fiction) where there was substantially less money being invested. I love many late 60s/70s films...in fact, that whole era is genuinely fascinating...but 'explaining', or just examining in depth, that window in time is more properly the domain of a Ken Burns-length documentary series. (You'd need 10-15 hours just to take in the full view.) And blaming everything that didn't work or fell apart on either drugs, JAWS, STAR WARS, or all three, is as pat and false as showing a married couple sleeping in twin beds during the heyday of the Production Code.For instance, Bogdanovich is trotted out like a High Lama of Personal Cinema but the audience never gets the sense of how his lousy old-Hollywood imitations like AT LONG LAST LOVE and NICKELODEON catastrophically imploded his career, right in the middle of that halcyon decade (and STAR WARS didn't have a blessed thing to do with it). We get clips from DIRTY HARRY and MAGNUM FORCE, as if Eastwood's proto-fascist genuflections before Ruthless Authority were somehow considered hip and edgy by the intelligentsia of the decade, when they were uniformly bemoaned and despised. We get many cloud-cuckooland memories intimating that 70s cinema reflected the audience's desire for meatier, more challenging fare, when nothing could have been further from the truth (the top box-office stars for much of the decade were not Dustin Hoffman or Robert DeNiro but Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson). The biggest hits of the 70s were all spun off the AIP model, not the Truffaut/Godard model: sensation ruled the day, then as now. People stood on long lines stretching several times around city blocks to see THE GODFATHER or SERPICO because - as a Roger Corman ad campaign might have phrased it - they "rip the lid off today's shocking headlines!!"It's one thing to say that Hal Ashby and Francis Coppola made terrific films (they did indeed); it's another to claim that they made films during a golden time when the audience was, for once, on the side of the Artists. That time has never existed. Before JAWS, before STAR WARS, folks were packing theaters for DEATH WISH, BILLY JACK and THE EXORCIST - and not because they were diehard Cahiers du Cinema subscribers.And what is not even touched upon is the long-term effect of the heightened gory violence of 70s films. We hear auteur after auteur hiding behind that sad old trope of "in order to show people the HORROR of violence, we had to truly show the EFFECTS of violence". Gee, thanks, Teacher....I'd've never dreamed that getting shot in the head might actually hurt, otherwise. Too bad the nonstop,desensitizing, rolling-snowball-momentum of all those squibs and open wounds is with us still, and it is almost 100% due to the movies of the 1970s. Coppola's triumphs may be a thing of the past - but Moe Green getting shot point-blank in the eye is forever. Scorsese has run out of heartfelt Little Italy stories to tell us, but he's still 'teaching' us how it might feel to have your eye forced out of its socket by having your head squeezed in a vise, or simply how liberating & invigorating it is to be turning that vise on behalf of the Mafia. I recall a 70s-era Pauline Kael column called "Fear of Movies" where she chided the audience for being prim, prudish wussies afraid to viscerally experience the primal excitement of violent films; a year or two later, she was fretting over the increasing 'brutality' of mass-entertainment. Way to chart cause and effect, Pauline!Sorry. But if you're going to celebrate the films of the 1970s, you have to shine a little light on the warts and moles under the makeup too...or you end up with a puff-piece. Which is the case here, good intentions notwithstanding.

Packed full of interviews and juicy clips from the late 60s/70s auteur revolution in Hollywood when the big studios fell into decline and paved the way for the likes of Ashby, Scorcese, Coppola, Penn, Peckinpah, Altman, Spielberg, etc. Better than Easy Riders, Raging Bulls of the same year that covers the same material. Noticeably devoid of any real criticism of these directors and their work, more of an adulation. But well worth a look.

"A Decade Under the Influence" features all the major 1970s films you would expect and their directors - Francis Ford Coppola discusses "The Godfather" and William Friedkin discusses "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist". The documentary also features less well known films such as "Targets", directed by Peter Bogdanovich ("The Last Picture Show" is also featured) and also features several films by Woody Allen.The DVD also features interviews cut from the film, including an interview with Coppola, who interestingly comments that George Lucas would be a better director if he left Star Wars behind.

Generally quite well done documentary on the best of 1970's American films. Well worth viewing for film enthusiasts.

A+