Friday, May 25 was the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars. That film, along with Jaws, are the two films that changed American cinema forever. The late 1960s and early 70s was a renaissance time for American film. How about this for a partial list of filmmakers- Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich,Francis Coppola,Mike Nichols, Alan Pakula, Roman Polanski (not American, sure, but is there a better film about LA than Chinatown or the upper west side of New York than Rosemary’s Baby?) Martin Scorsese- who came of age as a director between 1968 and 1975. Pretty impressive, but with the exception of The Godfather films, none of the movies made by those men were box office smashes.
But with Star Wars Hollywood changed and the studios began to bankroll big budget spectacles- even Oscar-winning Rocky from 1976 was a low-budget, no star film. It became easy, and then the norm, for Hollywood to bet 25 million dollars (now 200 million) on one BIG film, than 25 million on six or seven smaller films. Would a Harold and Maude, The Last Picture Show and Taxi Driver get made today and shown at the local megaplex? Probably not, not when Spiderman 3 dominates the screens and people’s entertainment dollar.
Some quick statistics. Star Wars budget was $13 million it opened on 43 screen in the United States. By April of 1978 it had grossed $218 million. Spiderman 3 had a budget of $258 million dollars and it opened 4,252 screens in the United States, grossing $151 million its first weekend.
Star Wars is a good film and I like it. The question, however, is this: Are we better off with Star Wars and all the blockbusters that followed, or would we be better of with individual, iconoclastic films like the ones mentioned above?
PeterH
