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Because the house didn’t have a washer and dryer, Fonda became surely the only recent Academy Award winner to wash her clothes at a Laundromat.
His grin seemed to eat Hollywood, and his expressive, unmannered acting captured the fresh breeze blowing through the industry;
The Last Detail raised the stature of both Towne and Nicholson when it finally went into production, but Chinatown still represented an entirely different level of ambition for both men.
The movie’s central metaphor came from a Los Angeles Police Department vice cop who sold Towne his beloved sheepdog, Hira.18 After the man told Towne he worked in Chinatown, the writer asked him what he did there. “Probably as little as possible,” the cop told him. “I said, ‘How’s that?’” Towne recalled pressing. “He said, ‘Look, you can’t tell what’s going on because we can’t crack the language. There’s so many dialects and things like that, we can’t tell, frankly, if we’re helping prevent a crime or helping somebody commit one, and so the best thing to do is nothing.’ I said, ‘Nothing?’ He
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The script advanced slowly. The Last Detail remained stalled. His girlfriend at the time grew so frustrated that she threw him out of the house. “It was my house,” he recalled plaintively, “but as a writer I was fairly fragile, and I skulked out of my own house.”
Towne’s strategy to deal with complaints about his scripts was to delay making changes, as if he could wait out the other side. This sometimes worked with Beatty, but not with Polanski.
Dunaway, perhaps taking her final measure of revenge for the months of conflict with Polanski, remained in her trailer for hours with her makeup man, delaying the filming.
Having Ashby involved defused conflict between Beatty and Towne, whose relationship mixed dependence and resentment in perpetually oscillating proportions.
Schrader had always been a strong brew: volatile, long-winded, strangely obsessed with guns. In 1972 his life blew up entirely. He had no job—he quit a fellowship at the American Film Institute in protest over budget cuts—and no money and had recently left his wife for a woman who then left him. For weeks he lay in bed all day, started drinking around five, and then drove through the darkness in his Chevy Nova, with a revolver in his glove compartment, often ending his night sleeping in porn theaters or the car.51 After several weeks of this, Schrader dragged himself to a hospital emergency
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In the hands of the Spielberg/Lucas generation, the movies would follow the same arc as music did from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s: from a roar of defiance to a recognition that a house “with two cats in the yard” might not be so bad after all.
At the peak of his power, wealth, and glamour, Schneider was a sunburst, but in his long fall, all that melted away. He was destroyed by the promise of unlimited freedom that beat down on Los Angeles as unstintingly as its desert sun. For the generation that transformed movies, music, and television, Bert Schneider lived and died as the Icarus of Los Angeles.
“You did not do TV,” Foster said of young actors hoping to break into movies. “There was no feature actor that went over and did television ever. That would be acknowledging that your career was over.”7
He initially expressed the same hesitation Gelbart had: with Vietnam still burning, he didn’t want to enlist in McHale’s Navy.
CBS frustrated the cast and crew by hopscotching M*A*S*H across different nights, deploying it like a search-and-destroy missile against shows displaying strength on the other networks, but its ratings were stellar anywhere it landed.
Hawkeye embodied everything the liberal Baby Boomers thought best about themselves: he was smart, humane, highly competent, and driven by a deep personal sense of morality even as he displayed witty contempt for mindless bureaucracy, outdated rules, and rigid social strictures.
Alda, the show’s undisputed center, set an inclusive tone. He was professional and grounded: during the show’s eleven-year run, he flew home to New Jersey every weekend because he didn’t want to uproot his family.
they thought it would be exciting to have Moore play a character who was divorced. (“I think every writer in Hollywood had a script in his trunk about divorce, because probably most of the comedy writers in Hollywood were divorced,” Burns said later.)44 More modestly, they wanted her character to be tethered to the world outside by as many specifics as possible: a career, a social life, an identifiable age. Each of these ideas unnerved CBS. Perry Lafferty, CBS’s West Coast production chief, told them, “Fellas, people are going to think she divorced Dick Van Dyke.”45 Lafferty even resisted
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both Tinker and Moore deferred almost completely on creative issues. Moore did not express strong opinions about how Mary Richards should develop. Treva Silverman remembers her objecting only once, when a script had Mary visiting a doctor to remove a tattoo.62 (As a Catholic, she didn’t want to promote tattoos.)
He aired the agenda of the Woodstock generation through the language and rhythms of the Catskills.
Mary Kay Place was bursting with ambition and talent. The day after graduating from college, she pointed her Volkswagen Beetle toward the West Coast with the name of one contact at CBS in her pocket.9 Place was creative and vivacious: she could sing and write songs; act and write dialogue. So, of course, she was offered only clerical jobs, and went through a series of them at CBS over the next few years. When Maude, the All in the Family spin-off, went on the air in 1972, Place became the secretary for the writing staff. Her first opportunity to show she could do more than type came one day
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White artists, like the guitarist Danny Kortchmar, might jam with Black friends over beers and blunts at night, but they rarely found themselves working in the same studio the next morning.
Bill Withers was one of the most unlikely stars in the early 1970s Los Angeles music scene. An African American navy veteran, he taught himself to play guitar and started writing his own songs in the 1960s.
Withers represented a promising evolution of the Southern California sound. He combined the earthiness and grittiness of soul music with the lyrical fluency and confessional tone of the singer-songwriters. But his career plateaued after those triumphant first three albums.
The potential bridge Withers offered between LA’s Black and white musical traditions remained unfinished.
Linda Ronstadt could relate to the difficult experiences of Mary Kay Place, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Sherry Lansing, and other women pioneers in the television and movie industries. If anything, the position of women in the music industry was even more fraught.
As in movies and television, women in music faced an environment in which men held almost all the power in every facet of the business. But the music industry’s sexual politics, shaped by the era’s endemic groupie culture, seemed to especially encourage its men to believe that one of the perks of their position was the opportunity to have sex with almost any woman they met.
Some of the female artists, such as Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and Emmylou Harris, built a friendly network that functioned as a kind of support group, but neither they nor the few women in the record companies seriously pressed for the inclusion of more women in positions of power.
when women singers toured, they would sometimes hire female backup vocalists or wardrobe managers just so they had someone to talk to on the road besides a man.
Ronstadt’s endemic insecurity, her often giggly presence onstage, and her tendency to fall into dependent romances with men she worked with all complicated her desire to assert authority over her career.
even as those men respected her talent as a singer, they tended to dismiss her perspective, seemingly on the assumption that someone so attractive could not be trusted with decisions, even about her own path.
On the road, Ronstadt was the headliner, but she recognized that the boys (for it was always boys) in her band often bridled at following musical direction from a woman.
Jack Nitzsche, Young’s keyboardist and old friend, mercilessly hazed Ronstadt with abusive, drunken rants that she wasn’t up to the job of opening for their band.
The album’s secret weapon was the precocious Andrew Gold. A prodigy who could handle almost any instrument, Gold played guitar, electric piano, piano, drums, and percussion and worked with Asher and Ronstadt on the arrangements.
“I was no kind of early feminist, that’s for sure,” Asher said, “but at the same time, I was a normal, sensible person who realized she was an intelligent being with a lot to say, and [I] treated her accordingly,
It wasn’t too much of a stretch to say that Jerry Brown in 1974 embodied both the best of the Baby Boom (its intelligence, creativity, and determination to rethink old assumptions) and the worst (self-absorption, a tendency to value theory over experience, and an aversion to discipline and focus).
Cultural eras don’t precisely follow the calendar. The creative renaissance in Los Angeles did not begin on January 1, 1974 (or even January 1, 1967). It did not abruptly end on December 31, 1974. But the dynamics that rejuvenated culture and politics in Los Angeles reached their fullest expression through 1974. And as the year transitioned into 1975, forces gathered momentum that would end the city’s revival in movies, music, television, and politics. The most important of these was a shift in cultural preferences that reduced America’s appetite for popular entertainment that relitigated the
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The family hour, it turned out, was more a symptom than a cause of a cultural and political shift. It wasn’t only pressure groups and government officials pushing back against television’s advance into edgier and more contemporary content. A large slice of the viewing audience was ready for a break, too.
a sizable audience of Americans no longer wished to continue relitigating the arguments from that decade, even for laughs.
ABC’s market research in 1975 concluded that after Watergate and Vietnam, viewers had tired of “social issue or confrontation comedy” and craved a return to “the traditional values” of an earlier time.
A younger generation of filmmakers was steering the film industry toward its future by returning it to old verities of compelling stories, big stars, and engrossing effects. The sheer filmmaking bravura of their work entranced audiences, and produced box office returns so vast as to make the new direction irresistible to the studios.
A light saber, a shark, and, later, a superhero crossed cultural barriers more easily than one of Robert Altman’s conflicted antiheroes.
Excellence in Hollywood, like excellence on television, did not end after the early 1970s: great moviemakers in every decade continued to produce films of enormous skill, insight, and emotion. What did change after the early 1970s was the idea of Hollywood as a central source of social commentary on the changing American society. The film studios largely renounced that role, as if shedding a skin, beginning around 1975. The change in movies followed almost precisely the transition in television.
no one did more than Brown to integrate concerns of the sixties activists into the mainstream political system. At the same time that the brilliant collection of early 1970s music, television, and movie artists operating in Los Angeles were embedding those ideas in popular culture, Brown provided a beachhead for them in the world of politics and governance.
The Eagles, as the embodiment of the “Avocado Mafia,” were often brittle and defensive about the new sounds emerging from New York; they scoffed at the New York Dolls, and after Born to Run, Henley improbably insisted “our songs have more to do with the streets than Bruce Springsteen’s.”
“I thought that the LA sound had painted itself into a corner,” remembered Danny Kortchmar, the thoughtful guitarist who moved from New York to LA in the late 1960s. “There’s only so much you can do with banjos and steel guitars and acoustic guitars.”
The punk and New Wave bands that emerged in 1975 and 1976 “were coming out and giving us all the finger,” Kortchmar continued. “It had to happen, because things had gotten stagnant. ‘Enough already. Let’s bust out. Let’s try some other stuff. Let’s get rid of these clothes, bell bottoms and promo T-shirts and shaggy hair. Enough already. Let’s have some fun, this is dreary.’”
Anyone comparing photos of Glenn Frey and Don Henley in 1972 and, say, 1977 could track the price of the years of drugs and high living.
