How Auteurism Is Making a Comeback
variety.comSteven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentOnce upon a time in Holly-wood, and to be more precise, in the mid-’60s and ’70s, young Hollywood filmmakers saw what their “auteur director” counterparts around the world were doing with the cinematic arts, and they wanted some of that freedom of expression and fearless boundary-busting for themselves.
From Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” to Bergman’s “Persona” to Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” the action in creative storytelling was all over the place, except in Hollywood.So Hollywood’s best and brightest young artists accepted the challenge.The result was called New Hollywood, and the films that resulted from that impulse to innovate and experiment with forms and subject matter included “The Pawnbroker,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Mean Streets,” “The Conversation,” “French Connection,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Wild Bunch” and myriad other lively, edgy masterpieces of American film.
As you can see from that list of titles, the Oscars were also forever changed by that movement. The filmmakers of that generation essentially replaced the old guard directors of Hollywood’s golden age, back when the studios dictated content and conduct and the Motion Picture Code decreed that all Hollywood filmmakers would paint movie pictures that rigorously stayed inside the lines, drawn as they were, by an army of censors who held firm against any impulse to get too racy, raunchy or raucous.By the ’80s, multi-national conglomerates owned the studios, and blockbuster cinema, along with the rising power of the uber-agents such as Mike Ovitz, supplanted the director-driven cinema of the previous two decades.
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