Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I don’t care if you guys bust my balls for this or not. I can’t help it. Whenever I see a mention of this film, it tears at me a bit. I miss Ted Demme.
I miss him because I had just started to get to know him, and I recognized in him the same thing that I recognize in all my best film geek friends: a profound and unshakeable love of the medium, and a knowledge that comes not from studying or trying to memorize key details, but from that drunk-on-cinema kind of immersion that hits every serious fan at some point. He was one of those guys who was just plain fun to talk to, about any film, and who always seemed to be thinking about something he’d seen. I miss Ted because I miss the conversations we didn’t get to have. In a way, this film sounds like it’s that conversation, Ted’s final chance to explain what it is that he loves about a particularly rich era of film, and I think it’s pretty great that Ted had a friend like Richard LaGravanese who could finish this up and let it stand as a testament to the conversations they shared.
Here’s the review. Man, I want to see this one soon...
A good review should, among other things, inform the reader more on the item being reviewed and not just be a place where the writer can create poor prose. “A Decade Under The Influence” is a great film that deserves a little more than what I have read online about it. So here goes.
“A Decade Under The Influence” starts off with a quote by Francois Truffaut about the random elements that make a film work and then goes right into a collage of great directors. In the first part of the film we learn why all the great films that flourished from 1968 to 1980 were allowed to be made in the first place. The why is because no one was going to see the Hollywood spawned garbage being churned out year after year. The four primary actors who fill us with a lot of information about the time and the films being made, through current interviews, are Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Julie Christie and Dennis Hopper.
No one was going to see Hollywood films and every studio was rumored to be on the brink of bankruptcy. Then came “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967 and “Faces” in 1968 and the amount of money and accolades they received threw the whole movie business in a spin. After these two seminal films several directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich, Sydney Lumet, Syndey Pollack, etc.) recount so many wondrous stories of the making of these films. Leading us into the next chapter of this great documentary: Eurpoean directors and films of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Paul Schrader tells us how directors would come into studios and get almost any film greenlit; former Warner Bros Executives tell us how after “Deliverance” they admitted they no longer knew what sold or not and Robert Altman tells us of the era he lived in. Roger Corman discusses his no rules style of filmmaking and all the fledgling directors he employed. Just as everything else gets delved into the politics, media and events of the late 60’s and mid 70’s also become issues that are discussed as well as explained as being catalysts for the type of films people were going to see.
Then in the last third of the documentary we learn why it all ended. Vietnam had come to a close, people were looking for something more optimistic instead of just ambiguous and “Rocky” burst on the scene and started a shift in what audiences were looking for. But really what changed the type of films being produced was greed. “Jaws” came out in 1975 and the studio releasing it did something very common for today but unheard of 28 years ago, they opened the movie in 100 theaters. And people went in droves to see it. By the time “Star Wars” was released in 1977 the film industry saw that it could make as much money on the merchandising as it could reap from the film itself or from the soundtrack as in the case with “Saturday Night Fever.” Of course the type of audience that “Star Wars” reached and the amount of times people would rush to go see it sparked a clone war were studios would replicate whatever the current film was and produce it with either the same or different actors and get another director to make it and then it became assembly line movie making.
But as Martin Scorsese states it was not the fault of the Lucas or Spielberg, though some would disagree, that the industry changed but the greed of the studios. Simultaneously with films like “New York, New York” even some of the genius directors, like Scorsese, of that era were beginning to falter.
So much more to discuss but it’s best if you go see it for yourself. This documentary is not just about the films of the 1970s but about the late 1960’s to the late 1970’s as well. The detail that the directors, producers, and actors go into to recount how these wondrous films were produced is as much a delight as seeing clips of the films that we have come to revere from this era. This documentary is insightful, hilarious, thoughtful, nostalgic and an encyclopedia of anecdotes. But the best thing about this documentary is that after watching you’ll have a list of films that you’ll either want to revisit or have never heard of and want to now see. I hope this encourages anyone who reads it to go check out “A Decade Under The Influence.” It’s certainly worth the ten dollars price of admission if you live in or around one of the select cities playing it.
Thanks, man. I have got to make the time and get out and see this one for myself, not only for the reasons I stated above, but also to compare it to EASY RIDERS & RAGING BULLS, the documentary that covers similar ground that I saw earlier this year.
"Moriarty" out.
