New Hollywood: The Film School Generation (1967-1985)

If you want to understand modern Hollywood, look here. The 1970s were the decade of the director. A golden age where studios, shaken by a string of expensive commercial failures and uncertain about what audiences wanted, handed the keys over to a new generation of young, film school educated auteurs. What followed was an extraordinary run of creative output that has never quite been matched. Francis Ford Coppola gave us The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Martin Scorsese gave us Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. William Friedkin gave us The French Connection and The Exorcist. Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, each filmmaker had a distinct voice and studios largely let them run with it.

The decade also introduced the concept of the modern blockbuster, perhaps the most consequential development in Hollywood history. Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) demonstrated that a single film, marketed and distributed correctly, could become a cultural phenomenon on a scale never seen before. Studios took notice. The era of the auteur would not last forever, but while it did, it produced some of the most essential films ever made.

World cinema was equally thriving. Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Andrei Tarkovsky were all producing masterworks, and New German Cinema, led by Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was forcing critics and audiences to pay attention.