to have a special thanks to my husband, chuck parent who has been indispensable in his support of my endeavor to produce this program. and again, a special thank you to my host, the studebaker national museum. thank you for watching and listening.

well, today we're going to be talking. making sense of us or the united states in this period of 1970s. and we're going to use three handles as we're going to use vehicles, we're going to use film and we're going to use the crises of the seventies to weave this all together and somehow

come up with some sort of an understanding about changes in identity during this tumultuous decade. before i began, my co-host, dr. todd altman in indiana and rutgers, ph.d. , and an american professor. he and ended up writing an article. in 2014 in the journal popular culture, entitled stealing freedom, which dealt with film and auto theft. and i think the class read that as part of your assignment it and todd has done many other different kinds of studies during the past several years here at the university of dayton. and my colleague john heitmann of course, is a very well known historian of automobile and others. he wrote a very famous book that

won many awards. i'm plugging it for him here. the automobile an american life. very good read. wonderful book john has the most distinguished historian in the state of ohio award and he also won the award for best book. this book here by the pop culture american pop culture association. and what was that, 2017 june 2010th 2010 goes way back when it goes way back. and so currently dr. heitman is a professor emeritus and. he's been kind enough to come here today to talk with me so that we can talk to you about the 1970s. and that book a great present for your parents or your father. if he's interested in cars so see me after class and. i'll try to sell you a bit on that book. but anyway, this is what we're going to talk about today and we

are going to have vehicles and what we want to call auto. in at the center, or at least one of the big major handles of our talk today. i don't know how many of you know much about automotive history. i doubt many of you do. in 1990, some mit scholars wrote a book called the machine that changed the world and it was a machine changed the world, particularly in the 20th century. but even to this day, when i start off my course on the automobile in america, in life, i always mention notion of that the automobile was european by birth and that most of those early innovations were german and then, to a degree, promoted by the french but american by adoption and no other country

adopted automobile as a technology and essentially we made decisions personal decisions, collective decisions to adopt and to use and embrace the automobile, the way americans have. i just i'm only going to read one thing from the book today, but it's an important paragraph. i wanted to read it to give you a sense of the importance of the automobile to, this story, and to any 20th century american history, it is difficult to overestimate made the significance of the automobile to 20th century american history. the automobile and its related infrastructure transformed life as well as our basic values from top to bottom in american society, it created wealth and jobs. it played a crucial role in

transforming americans from producers of a limited number of goods. mostly farmers actually is what we were to mass production manufacturers and consumers living in a machine age. it influenced, among other things, the nature and structure of the communities we live in, how we define and value community, and the architecture styles of our homes and other living spaces. over the course of the 20th century, the car wetted our appetite for new things conveying status and personal attractiveness. petroleum based energy sources engaging at action movies which we're going to about today. primary rock and roll music and high fat, fast, which i will probably partake after this class. is. it's an industry that had roots

in the first decade of the 20th century in the united states, matured and was stagnant by the 1960s, particularly stagnant. the real new in automotive technology came from germany and japan. and this is a german vw, not the beetle. you're typically used to seeing from that era, but it was actually a new vehicle. the dasher in 1974 introduced. but the point is, is the american automobile industry had lost a lot of steam creatively over the last few decades. throughout the sixties and the seventies. now, with film films a kind of parallel sell to the automobile industry and its importance, american society. it's a modern technology, not invented by americans, although edison claimed to have invented it. the film was defined mostly

european made productions in the early part of the 20th century. as you guys have all learned in this class. but americans accepted film and adopted film, to use john's phrase, in a way that no other people did. and that's why i placed at the top of here the trick that altered reality is if cars with a machine that changed the world, then film was a trick that altered reality. because, of course you guys know that film is a trick. it's not a moving thing. it's a bunch of still shots which spun together, makes people believe that they're actually watching something shift and change when in fact nothing is changing. so it's a trick that can very much influence the the imagination of the individual and film in this sense, like the automobile was about ready to change the world. now, the irony here is that the

film industry had been in decline since the end of world war two. as you can see by the chart in the back here, the number of people visiting, going to see films had dramatically dropped in the postwar era. and we had reached by the time we arrive at this juncture of the class and discussion the 1960s, we had a fundamentally reached the bottom of that well. and so unlike automobiles and like automobiles this film was taking people on a journey. but here the journey is not necessarily a place except perhaps a place their imagination. well, that third leg or handle in our lecture today centers on crises and its vehicles, its film and its crises and its

crises from this decade of the sixties. in the seventies, particularly beginning around 1968, and then going all the way through 1979. and one of those really great films from the seventies, a film of nostalgia and remarkable cinema tomography is badlands from. 1973. i it was in the seventies and particularly we can pin it down to about the fall and winter of 1973, 74 that the remarkable miracle economy after world two and all the ruins that had taken place in europe as a result of the bombing and the war and the combat europe had recovered the west had recovered. america had become. and now the global power that it was and it was a country of enormous prosperity.

but the postwar boom was pending. we were very wealthy in this country. in fact, there's a historian from yale by the name of david potter who wrote a book in the fifties called people of and we were people of plenty. but the vietnam and there were other as well that came to be all move us to a point of reckoning beginning in 1973 related that prosperity and this war this moment really had brought about a fundamental change in american society that we all live with. still today, because the postwar era, the period roughly from 1945 to 1970, was one that historians like to refer to as era of consensus. we've talked about consensus. this idea of consensus in the class, it was the belief that america stood for a very small

set of things the future, progress, democracy and that sense of consensus began to break down under the stressors that were about ready, talk about and out of it emerge a fundamental socio political landscape very different from the world of the postwar era. well, at the heart of the american economy was the ottoman automobile industry, and it remains to some degree still is at the heart of the american economy when our economy declined, beginning 2008, 2009, what picked us up were car after 2010 again an end. this is an interesting shot. it's a foreign car. it's of course a volkswagen beetle and you all it at the industry was very fragile by

1973 and indeed beginning in 1968, in part because of imports from germany like that beetle from japan, like the honda civic and what would trigger that fragility and cause it to totally fragment was the issue of cheap oil and a gasoline shortage. until 1973. sales and profits in the auto industry remained relatively high. and so sometimes in history, we don't see. the clouds that are approaching us. and that was clearly true in detroit in the spring of 1973. but there were these difficulties that were kind of sub in that would soon emerge front and center among the

difficulties that the big three general motors, the most significant valued company in this country, number one, ford, number three, chrysler, not even in name anymore. number five, and at that was a totally unregulated industry until the 1960s. and when autonomy was compromised after the mid 1960s, in terms of both safety and emissions, that fragility really became evident. so in an interesting way the film industry, as we've already talked about, runs parallel to the history of the auto industry. it had bottomed out, but in the 1960s, late 1960s and early seventies, it was beginning a new rise and. no film better represents that new rise than this film right

here does. anybody know what the name of this film is. easy rider, easy rider. that's right. 1969 easy rider represents the new element of, the film industry, because it was an independent film production where the studios had begun to collapse. it. it was made for $400,000 and went on to make tens millions. also, it was directed by directors dennis hopper in this case, who had learned to make films from the master of independent filmmaker roger corman, a man who would have an important influence on martin scorsese. he francis ford coppola, many, many, many others. this independent filmmaker was going to produce the new stage of american film. but was film made for popular

consumption? film made not for art, but for entertainment and to make money and. much of that was dependent upon sensationalism. they didn't have the money to advertise the films. so what did they do? they simply took stories, ripped them from the headlines and, used the news in order to sell the movie. and that's where many of the films we're going to talk about today come from. and there was a lot of music in that film. and i can remember the first cassette that i ever bought was steppenwolf, and steppenwolf was featured and easy rider. and so it's music and film coming together in a big way and, you know, it's in the late sixties and early seventies. all these young people are out and about and traveling. they're following jack kerouac's admonition to get on road as his

famous from the fifties. it kind implored us to do. and the question was is this a road trip and all of you've probably taken road trips or you're going to take road trip soon. it's a great experience. is it a trip to nowhere where really nothing much happens in the end that you can conclude? or is it a trip where you have self-discovery or? is it a trip where you discover about others? okay, but in 1970, 71, the road trips in were trips to nowhere and very much a part of that whole ethos of what emilio of what the seventies, early seventies started out to be famous film two-lane blacktop famous only later on. it's one of those great films. it's a cult film now, but in 71

it was a flop. it starred, among others, singer james taylor. here we have brian wilson of the beach. we have laurie bird, who is a girlfriend of director hellman. and then we have the great warren oates. and one of the reasons why this becomes a cult film is because three of the four die rather deaths oates dies at age 53 of a heart attack. wilson dies in a rather bizarre drowning. laurie bird ends up committing suicide. but it's a road to nowhere with great film. film technique. there is no real dialog amongst the characters. lots of frustration and facial tics that sort of convey a sentiment or an idea on the part

of the person that is being centered on in the film. two-lane blacktop maybe. oh, now my favorite film from that same year, if i can go back. well yeah, we're having a little trouble. yeah. there you go. is that you? vanishing point. and i don't know if any of you have seen vanishing point or not. i would sort of doubt it. it is a great film, a film of people, the margins of american society. barry newman is a the driver of a dodge challenger with supercharger in it and his job is to drive back and forth from denver to san francisco, essentially ferrying automobiles for people. and he's going to take this dodge challenger to san francisco, just come back from san francisco to denver. has no time, get some drugs back

on the road and. of course, this is a world outlaw speeds. this is a world of defiance and it's a word of where it's a film of car chases, but it's much more than that. there are all these subtle meetings in here, as i call ski is driving a cross-country. he keeps on going back in memory, has memories of his past life past life as a policeman as a soldier, as a race driver, as a motorcycle racer, as and so he's living his life as on the road, going 120 miles an hour, being chased, never actually harming anyone as he's leaving them in the dust, although they often are in the ditches and as the police converge on, he has a

savior, so to speak. and blind disc jockey at station kuow. cow in the desert by the name of super soldier who sees kowalski as a free spirit, as the last american hero he calls him as the last free american at a time of great constraints. that got to john. it ends in futility. the authorities block a road as he gets into california he's almost made it. he's gotten some help from two hippies living in the desert and ultimately he runs and he makes a decided moment and decided moment. he decides he will drive into

these two these two earth movers. and that's the end of his life. and other futile cross-country drive. here's the two-lane blacktop poster with the stars that i just mentioned. bird, taylor oates and wilson at the very same that we're seeing this rebelliousness, we're seeing a flexing a muscles on the part of the government relay it to what rights do you really have on the road. and it's right before the government we're really clamped down and come up with a 55 mile an hour speed limit that will take place after 1973. oil shock. john volpi, dottie secretary rights to auto enthusiasts and motortrend in 1971. so this is to the converted, so to speak.

i and saying basically whenever you are in on a public road you surrender your private life and you are autonomous rights away. the roads belong to the state. the state is that state sets the standards and. how you can use those roads and no matter what you think about individual ism, you are not simply an individual in american society. if you have an accident, even if you are the only one hurt, it's going to cost the state money to take care of you. that's a pretty hard statement, i think, and i that was john volpi and that was really the federal government at this time. i so what happens after. 1971 and this clamp down related to speed we see a series coast

to coast no holds. unofficial outlaw races that are called the cannon balls and it's named after a man by the name of cannonball baker, who beginning around world war one and then on into the thirties kept on setting coast to coast records, driving first motorcycles and then cars. he had a rather significant career that included as well and brock yates, who was a journalist at car and driver, had watched two-lane blacktop and he came up with the idea, let's have a race across country and see how fast we can. from new york to california. so then we began to see this the way movies establishing the way people act and a very clear way in this in this example and so

the first cannonball takes in 1971. now the reason i mention now we're going to kind of drop for a minute and then come back is it will be the source of a good number of films. after 1975. okay. and there will be cannonballs in 71, 72, 73, 75, 79 will be the last official cannonball by brock gates. but to this day, if you look youtube, you will find there are people doing cannonballs to this day. okay. and how fast can you go from new to l.a.? all right. 35 hours is a pretty good time i think i saw 33 or 32 now. now you know what that means. that means the ohio patrol and i, 70 aren't going to be very happy with you in your ferrari,

or maybe you're going to try to sneak through in an ambulance or in a van or in a cadillac. or maybe you will do what some of the cannonballs would do and you'd go to hertz, rent a car, and you'd rent car for a week and then drive the hell out of it, and then turn it in. okay. and this is the first it's in new york at a bar and the winner will be this ferrari here to the left. and it will be driven by quite a significant american race car driver dan gurney, who is one of the great american formula one race car drivers in history. he just recently died and his copilot will be brock yates. but there'd be about cars involved in this and dozens of speeding including one of the entrance you get five speeding tickets in one town. okay?

yeah. so 1973 was a significant year. the story, this bigger story we're telling you about the 1970s, because. 1973 had two parts. it had the summer. and that summer part we'll see in film in the nostalgia of of american life that was beginning to slip away. 73 was the year vietnam was coming to an end, and america had lost the war. but then in the fall or the winter of 73 was also the great first oil shock and. so we've come back to the image of badlands here and then the sunset, the summer of nostalgia of this extraordinary year begins with american graffiti and george lucas's. second film, which focuses on this nostalgic past, how many of you seen american graffiti one of you? that many? all right, i yeah.

is a coming age film it is actually autobiographical of george lucas at various stages his life from about the eighth grade to high school and the characters, the central characters tend to be george lucas at grade nine. great george lucas in grade 11. george lucas at grade 12 in modesto, california growing up in the valley, the center of car culture and it's supposed to take place in 1962 at end, it's about the end of an era because vietnam is just starting now. and actually one of the central characters was, well, let's go back here. in the early 1960s, every commune party in america had like mel's drive in. there is a mel's drive in in san francisco. think i've been there at least

have in my mind whether i've actually been there or not. i don't know if we have to go back this mind, get scrambled sometimes, but my wife, aiken, carolina, there was a frost up and all the kids from aiken, i'd go there on a friday night and. this was the central kind of focal point. this film night. the last night between two of the central characters ronnie howard and richard will end up plant. they're planned anyway to go to on plane to the east and to start college and it's supposed to be this night and it's about it's about and there's a tinge of sadness in because this character here told who's the nerd you know he never has a girlfriend he's always awkward. he's always stumbling.

he will end up being the character in the postscript where you see where these characters go. according to lucas, it's toad who dies in vietnam vietnam. another central character and there's a there's a drag race, the end involving harrison ford. and this character john milner. i but milner is the greaser milner is the guy who never goes anywhere. he doesn't go to college. he's just going to work around the garage. but it goes to show you that sometimes people have the least amount of education have the most sensitivity of the world around them. and what's changing and he does he cannot really fathom the changes that are taking place in the early 1960s. he can't really understand what is happening in 1962. the whole is shrinking.

that's the strip where the folks are doing the cruises and, doing the cruises on a friday night. it's during that cruise that a 16 year old girl gets into his car. he's totally embarrassed. he tries to hide. he's driving on during the cruise and but they end up going to a junkyard. there's some very poignant dialog, but he understood fans that the world is changing a way that he doesn't like. postscript this character will end up dying in a drag race. and so another tinge of sadness. but it's this film that marks the obsession during the 1970s of the nostalgia of a day that was happy. that was still a part of american memory.

somehow, america was great back then. it'll be the off the show of course this movie generates happy days, the sitcom of the 1970s. and then it has multiple spin offs as well. so george lucas was really his he and coppola, who worked with him very closely, understood that america americans at this time wanted to go to movies marked by nostalgia. many people you guys have learned, many people don't think star is a nostalgic film they think of as science fiction. but in fact it's a very much nostalgic film and they become that's the biggest they're the biggest conveyors, nostalgia of this lost time. so the key thing that happens here is the oil shock, which really brings about the winter of 1970, it comes at the winter, the oil shock is caused by a

series of global crisis involving us support for israel. and what it does is it drives a moment in american history when gas prices as dramatically rise as we can see right here with this chart, you can see the price. it seemed not too bad just and then. one response is richard nixon passes a plan to conserve energy by lowering the the driving speed on the highways and rationing gas. and this is exactly the moment to when inflation starts to rise and the postwar war economic expansion begins to die too. whether it's right the result is a crisis and that crisis explodes on american society and december of 1973 when truckers who rely upon cheap, cheap

diesel to drive across country and deliver all the consumer goods that americans are using suddenly spontaneously without plan protests. one of the one of the truckers ran of gas on the pennsylvania turnpike and and instead of pulling off the road, he spontaneously decided to stop truck right in the middle of the highway producing the traffic jam. and then he told everybody else using a cb about this, all the other, and they stopped. and these truckers. produced the first outcry against america and the changes taking place in america. and we can here this is from the akron beacon, a newspaper talking about the truckers. and now you see one being arrested and can see these are what comments that people in about the truckers. and if you yell these comments, what you see is that people are

really supporting truckers because think the truckers represent them in terms of their rejection of corporate capitalism, as you see here oil companies or they that they're against the corrupt watergate is at a moment of completely breaking out right now a year from this moment, richard nixon would leave office and then rationing, which is on its way. it will happen in a days. and you would have 55 and that's tyranny. many people see that as the tyranny of government intervening in their lives. and finally that the government had been lying to them about vietnam. and this was becoming clear now that the war was lost and now the government is taxing cars with high fuel consumption called the gas guzzler tax and the government is now setting standards for mileage, age and new cars and tesla is telling the american auto industry how

to design cars. they had already done that earlier in terms of safety and emissions. now it is in terms of fuel consumption. and here we see the the polling that was done by the akron beacon showing that 69% of people cited with the truckers even though it was inconveniencing them in december. so how did this happen? how did the trucker become a symbol of america, an unhappiness, a symbol of in american society and? to tell you that story, i have to go back and explain the origins of the trucking industry. so the trucking industry was growing rapidly at this time, the vision was created back in 1935, during the great depression, in which was long distance trucking. it was controlled by large and run by unions. the teamsters. on the other side there was the

non-regulated trucking, which was called rural trucking, and this was mostly farmers moving agricultural goods to market. now the interstate commission was created in to regulate the regulated market and the corporate, but roughly around 1960s corporations like iowa beef packing began to use unregulated truckers in order to avoid the expense of the corporate trucking. and as they did so, more more goods were to the unregulated side of the market. and this how they were producing cheaper beef and bringing it to the market. but at the same, they were generating a whole new type of culture as truckers, as the rural truckers began to expand. who were these rural truckers? many them were farmers who had been run of business by corporate corporatized corporate corporate farming agro business. and they had to trucking because

that was area that they could they understood as they did so, they created an entire subculture based on honky tonks, truck stop, radio communication and and eventually entire version or form of country music, a subject called trucking trucker. now, just to go back a second. yeah, just for point of humor, more than anything, and all the truck stops i've ever been i've never seen good looking folks like this by the trucks. of course, they seem. you talk about reality and it doesn't seem that way. yeah but i mean, i just to make that comment now both of those of course these are covers for trucker specific trucker music albums, which becomes a major area. now, this is from a 1966 kurt comic book featuring truckers,

the independent trucker subculture to emphasize several key things it emphasize the notion of independence, individual men feeling they controlled their own businesses. and we see this in this idea of the independent so that so the independent man was both a traditional concept but also a modern concept because. they were driving these incredible machine, these modern trucks simultaneously, this traditional man was also a rebel because. he could stay out as long as he wanted on the road. he meet many women as he drove around those up on imagined women and the front of the cover of those of those albums and but nevertheless, they represented also a kind of real man patriarch. now the ideal of this was the end of the owner operator the

man who actually owned his own truck and this unusual industry but they were the ideal so truckers began to become popular for this reason to bring it back to the reason we're talking about this on hand. they had a job was respectable and at the same time it was sexy. men could begin to imagine a society in which they were rebels and at the same time respectable and. it was exclusive as well. at this moment rebellious against the government as we see this image from the 55 being turned into a swastika which comes from a trucker magazine at this time. and we images like this, the trucker magazine i'm referring to is overdrive. and which which begins to place the trucker as a kind of symbol for americans.

but there's one other thing here, too. well yeah, it's during the 1970s that we do see a rise in significance of the south in terms of american discussions, who we are. in part, it's because as our economy slowing down, we're starting to see the migration from the rust belt to the sunbelt. and so you're starting to see the emergence of charlotte and atlanta as really significant american urban areas and southern is being now celebrated in terms of its individualism. i mentioned vanishing point, the label was given kowalski, the last american hero in 1974. there is a film called the last american hero, and it's about junior johnson and about nascar. and what is he doing? of course, he's running liquor and trying to avoid the federal

eight federal agents and ends up going to prison, as does his father and but the value are that of rugged individ ual ism. don't tread on me and it's this notion of the pre-industrial south particularly tied into country music which explodes at this time. country music was really not a genre of for for for much for a long time. and then the late in the sixties, it begins to rise. and in the seventies it explodes. and trucking music was one subgenre of country music. so here is another dimension of this, which adds to the sense of rebelliousness of the trucker. right. and it's the tools the trucker would use. and what the cannonball folks would use to somehow avoid getting tickets being stopped by the police. we see the emergence of the radar and some of you probably

have a radar. your parents have a radar detector. this is one of the first from the early 1960s, but actually what few folks know is that the radar detector, as a sufficed decatur device, really came to me first here in dayton, ohio, for someone who worked at the air force base and who got a ticket one day and decided develop a radar detector called the fuzz buster. and to this day, that then took place to cincinnati and now you have cincinnati microwave and it be those folks who would appear at the cannon balls before the cannon balls would start selling their tools and. then the other was this origin before the cell phone of the nation wide warning system and that was the cb radio that had just been kind of made available to the population via the fcc.

and so it's smoky in the band it and it's the cb and yeah we see here the right and it's music again with jerry reed jerry reed was in vanishing point he had a song there he'll have a number of songs later on in the seventies it's very important but here he's talking whistler radar i detectors and to this day if a cannon baller you're going to have a cb, you're going to your phone and you'll software tools you'll have a radar and you'll have somebody with a binocular looking in both directions trying to see if you can find someone on the side of the road or wherever. anyway. so then what we see is you begin to understand the trucker actually becomes a symbol rebellion against what was increasingly seen as the tyranny of the modern state, which is

being blamed for this moment in american history when the american dream seemingly was slipping away. ironically, of course, we just learned that things like the cb, like the us radar detectors were invented by the military industrial complex. in other words, the federal government. however, and the roads that people were driving on were built by the federal government. all of this indicates the way that there's a kind of counter-intuitive about the way americans are rebelling against the society. one way we see this is in films that after the trucking. of 1973, what we have is the explosion of trucker movies and movies are captured captured this rebellious this white line fever was one of the first ones in 1975 and it the trucker film

is focused on the working man and how unhappy the working man feels about society. as these posters begin to indicate it's trucks, it's girls. it's guns. yes, trucks girls and guns, right? yeah. that are selling and so it's it's aimed at a particular constituency, particularly white males who are increasingly unhappy with the way the society seemingly because it's important to see here that 1975 or 1973 is about the time when the civil rights act of 1964 and 65 actually begins to be enforced so that women could compete with for men's jobs. okay. and many men very unhappy about this. the exclu of right that they had once had to access to good paying jobs where now they were having share with women and they were having to share with minorities. and so what we see is the films

which reflect this rebelliousness. now, just to give you an idea subject wise, here we james playing a trucker. in 1976 and in which he in the film still cowboys. his truck is called outlaw oc and his wife has left him for a fruit burger. professor, i think that means and at the same time got a he's got a repossession man coming to his house driving a vw you and third. he has a corporate trucking company breathing down his to take away his job to him into a uniform and of course the owner of that company is called pinkus, highly suggestive and he says to him to brolin's character, i, i know you're a big man. i know what you got under the belt all of this is suggestive

of the way that film is, is aiming at those frustrated by the icc interstate commerce commission that was forcing the rules or corporations and at the end of the film, clay goes crazy and the furniture in his house screams, i'm a man before driving his truck into pinkus, his home in a hail of bullets committing suicide. back to cars and back to cannonball. so we want to reconnect my comments on cannonball. we're going to leave trucks behind for a few minutes. and this, the ultimate end of the cannonball films. and it stars david carradine, who actually was the star in the first cannonball film in 1975, entitled cannonball. so this death race.

yeah, yeah. death race 2000 leads into what john's talking with cannonball because death race 2000 was roger corman production and it this kind of sense of violence through vehicles. so then we're saying here we have cannonball, which is the first of the cannonball films. it infuriated this film, infuriated brock yates and car and driver because he thought somehow cannonball was his idea and almost could be his property. all right. and now all of a sudden in hollywood, some crime comes up with a b grade or even c grade movie and starring carradine. and it's not of a film, but in april of 1975, with the speed limit set at 55, yates sends out a call for a essentially.

for a 1975 cannonball. there is a race and hollywood quickly follows after the carradine film with my favorite, actually. but first, we to get to some other yeah these are a montage page of the kind of film posters of these of these topics. and i think what i really wanted to make a point of in the 1960s there were two really important films to how automobile ads are actually used in a film. one was a film called grand prix starring james garner, but then the other is a film that some of you may have seen. and all of you in my auto history class would see. and that's bullitt, starring steve mcqueen. okay. and it's because the nature of the filming, the use of cameras inside the vehicle, the use of cameras outside of the vehicle and chase scenes and the chase scene itself. and so in the seventies there is this flowering of car films want

to call it car exploitation, but there are so many of involving from it kind of very independent films like gone in 60 seconds to some of ronnie howard's first films as well in the later seventies. and they're everywhere. and i should say, john, two is that ron howard, of course was in greece, not in greece but in america if if american graffiti and central characters he was roger corman's he a protege of roger corman and my favorite of all the cannonball films is gumball rally. it's a coast to coast race made for in which the prize is one thing to get all the speeding tickets. it's a gamble. that's it. all right. and you have women involved. my favorite pair of women and.

i have a car like that, except we have the whale tail. and that's porsche 911, an early one, probably about a 74, 75. and one of those women will tell of those aggressive male types, if you can catch me, you can have me. all right, i but at any rate, so there's this issue, gender negotiation, there. but this is a remarkably fine. i really like it it involves a number of characters. the winners are in a cobra. this fellow are on the in the cobra is. an assistant professor at harvard who gets a call to get involved in this event and afraid to get involved because he thinks it might cost him his tenure. all right. and if you see his facial image at the beginning of the film and at the end of the film, two very

different figures, it's like the transformed him. all right in the background, an italian driver driving a ferrari. why he's lagging behind is because these two characters up front had already kind of connived to have a very good looking woman standing by the side of, the road back there, appealing to the italian driver. so he would stop for a while and and another interesting kind of male female gender negotiation. so so yeah, if i could comment on that. john that what we have here is that these in effect in this moment, gender and masculinity, particularly in whether because of women's liberation and men's increasing, particularly white males, that world is getting away from them. these kind of films both celebrate masculine for those white males, but simultaneously

we see an attempt to negotiate the the conflict so that women's liberation can be partially expressed and accepted and then partially women can be. they continue to be used sexualized objects in these films. so this is strange negotiation that's happening in the film. now, we'd be remiss not to mention that cataclysmic event of watergate and nixon and his resignation in august of 1974, his vice president convicted of tax evasion, the winter before we are told to turn down our thermostat to 60 degrees because of energy, conserve ation and walking around freezing in our homes during this period of time, if you could get fuel oil and if you were living in the northeast, that be a real problem here. is the greatest power on earth and we are suffering in many

ways in terms of inconveniences, but also political stability and, inflation. all of a sudden the price of everything is rocketing up. we it stag flag inflation, stagflation. in this land of opportunity. and can you trust the government? the truckers already have decided they trust the government. but then most americans trust the government. and that is true this very day. and we see here. has that evolved? one of the remarkable things in the postwar era is how much government was actually trusted, as you can see right here in 64, a little over 75% of americans identified the federal government as the most trustworthy institution in, the united. that makes sense, because the the new deal had brought them prosperity. the government had taken them to the war. now they had social security. there was a lot of very positive things. but these events we see the red

lines here, the johns to these events begin to erode confidence. vietnam war, the 25% down to 25%. and today we would probably be happy if it was 25%. right. so this is the moment, this problem with the distrust of government begins to happen. and is partially pardon the pun fueling the films that we're watching, the films we're talking about now, we end on a rosy note in 1979, there'd be a second oil shock and it would be even far more severe than the first with inordinate consequences. industrial analyst martin anderson would write from m.i.t. in 1980, particularly related the auto industry the largest shift in technological, human and capital resources in us industrial history.

and so it should be no surprise that by the late 1980s, as result of this shift, cities dayton, flint, the great gm cities end up becoming barren and starting to shut down as a result of oil shock too, as a result of what happened in iran. a friend of the united states, the shah, who had supported united states with with oil excess oil production during those lean months in 73, 74, 75 he ran a corrupt government he's flees iran and starts a revolution revolution where american hostages are an american government. a military force can't get those hostages out? another ignominious episode and again, we have no gas.

and inflation again and i can remember in 1979, i was living the east coast and i needed fuel oil. and the question was, i get any fuel oil is my tank was reading about e and would we just freeze to no at big ford general chrysler deficits chrysler becomes bankrupt in 1980 job losses follow it's the end of a world in some ways, particularly in the industrial northeast. now, of course, truckers reacted to this like they had in 1973. indeed, the independent truckers had now grown in numbers because of the industrial trends that i was talking about before. and what we have is a strike by independence in 1979, 75,000 independents, the teamsters, the

largest union of truckers, does not join them in the strike nonetheless, it produces a very significant conflict that that fact the teamsters the union doesn't them the the image of the outlaw trucker that we had seen in these films we've been talking about that image had now penetrated the subculture of truckers who now saw themselves increasingly as outlaws, who saw them selves as rebels fighting against a tyrannical state and these truckers became violent. like the films dead. they dropped rocks, overpasses. they used cb radios to issue threats and all together in 18 states, hundreds of instances of snipers shooting at truckers still on the road, one man died. now this the trucking film at

this point had created a conundrum, though. how was an independent man going to stand up and collective movement against the federal? state? this was against the idea of independent manhood to unionize unions were being demonized. so how could that be? so the out the answer was the growth of the anarchy local suicide that we saw earlier and white line fever. but this also was a downer. so another solution to the problem was as a convoy, as a spontaneous democratic rebellion against the federal, against the police. you've all at interstates where you see two trucks blocking both lanes and they're just making a statement for a minute sometimes. yes, but it's their and that's kind of a mini convoy type story at.

so there is a great film, a great song and yeah, an and interesting time on the road yeah convoy is the film is the song that we're talking about convoy happened in 1976 and becomes a huge hit, which then leads the film, but really we were to talk about ray john at there's no film that better indicates this it's not if there's one in film that better indicates this it is smoking in the band it it it vault had burt reynolds to the highest level in hollywood and that car that firebird is the iconic car of the 1970s there is. so if you go to a pontiac car meet, that's what you want to see. that five trans-am, firebird with that artwork on it.

now, if you look at the franchise that follows. yeah i mean if you look at this i mean what you see is that smoking about $4.3 million to make it today's adjusted inflation dollars, it has made over 521 million. the the entire franchise as we now call it, made three quarters of $1,000,000,000. to be clear, smoking the ban, it was, the second gross highest grossing film of 1977, i think you could probably guess what the highest grossing film of 1977 was. star star wars. so, okay, so this is to give you an indication just how big this film is. and what's very carefully here is, a southern dixie, right? so what we're seeing here is just as john is pointing out, is the of the film vision of rebellion with not only regionalism on the south, but

also an emergent new political culture. well, the cannonball films, beyond gumball, cannonball cannonball run, 1981. i more stars in one film that i can ever think. reynolds roger moore, farrah fawcett. dom deluise. dean martin sammy davis jr. jamie terry bradshaw. if you watch the football, pre-game programs. mel tillis. they were all their great film in terms of amount of money made. one of the worst films ever. i almost suggest you don't watch if you're looking at films that we have kind of covered in class today, it will disappoint to no end. it is terrible. there are some elements of race and nationalism in this film. we have a japanese team of incompetence who are driving a

subaru and are frustrated during the race. and then there is jamie farr as an arab chic who another stereotype with some minions in film as well. cannonball run 1981, and then others would follow all the way up to death race. if you really want to take that type of film forward now we've got to wrap up and this is an image from badlands and it's this notion of what reality and what is illusion and how does the reality of a a thing called the automobile how is that transformed an illusion in a way? and how does do that.

you know, how does our idea end up somehow twist in turn related to the products from hollywood and how do we identify ourselves that way? i watch gumball rally. i get in my car and i drive like hell through green. okay, that's identity coming through after being influenced by a film rebellion in terms of substance to this day, what that suggests, leave that to you. okay and the politics of theater and. what does that mean? and i ask you to close us out. dr. holman, we're on the last minute or so of our so yeah this politics the hollywood ification of america at this moment when the postwar consensus has ended

where america at the dream of the consumer republic as one historian has referred to it has now seemingly crashed and burned at this. what is america going to be? is it going to be an acceptance of, a changed future. will we move a metric system as jimmy carter would suggest, in 1976 or in any any place as solar panels on top of the white house and the vision a new future past petrochemical oils or as what happens in 1980, when ronald takes office, he takes off the the the panels right off the white house and says let's continue as we were. there's nothing wrong with there's only bad people thinking bad drill more for oil and dig more coal. so is this then at this moment do we begin to see the emergence of the theater of politics where

visions of american life have become to supplant actual american life, where people live more in the imagination of what america could be versus? the reality of america. so we'll leave you with those thoughts and we'll finish there. we have some questions perhaps that we want to have our talk. yeah, i was going to talk little bit about soft energy technologies that and missed opportunities from the seventies. the fact that electric cars were studied for a time in the 1970s in a big way synthetic were developed in the 1970s. but we never thought long term. and so crises of the seventies coming back to us in other ways and other times forward to this day. yeah. so you guys have some questions us about these this topic.

one. yeah. go ahead let where would the film. it's a mad mad mad world and the hanna-barbera cartoon wacky races fit into the cannonball movies you know i haven't seen that mad, mad, mad. i know there's some resurgent interest in the film and apparently there's going to be another mad, mad world that's coming out. but i haven't seen it in long. i can't give you a good answer for that. well, the mad, mad, mad world is, in a sense, an ensemble film, right, where we have this again this race. and again, that's played for a comic purposes. so but the film really have the element of of anger the way we sometimes feel, even in a comedic film like cannonball. there's there's an anger now the madmen, the world was this 1960s

before all of these elements together. so i think the film could be seen more as a as a film that reflects americans exuberance of the car and the possibilities of the car whereas cannonball and some of these other films are doing that at the same time they're expressing the anxiety that americans feeling because the car one of the things that john's been telling us here and it tells us so well in this book is that the car is the premiere symbol of once the horse once the cowboy could no longer be a modern example of america's going off into the sunset on your horse. the car replaced that and this is why we talk about the truckers a cowboys the car is tied our status whether you like it or not and it also has its own tricky way and is it makes

us feel more important than we really are because actually we are not terribly for the most. but inside that vehicle the masters so a sense of there's an illusion, a concern or bought illusion. well, it's driving control. driving in control. when if you can't have actual control working in a factory under a certain job conditions, working for a corporation, then at least you're in control when you're behind wheel of the car. unless of course, the federal or the state government or the police are watching how fast you ride. and if you see that, then you why it becomes so important to rebel against 55. did you ever have another question for us on one? yes, sir. so what were the some of like the lasting impact in society due to the the angry white male

films that we can discuss? well, i mean, we talked a little bit about this notion of the angry angry white male film films like, death wish, dirty harry. right. and we've talked about this in class here we see a version of this, right. or other examples would be walking tall right here we see a version of this kind of film, but it's not quite as explicit as it wants as these other films are. we don't see dirty harry telling an african-american, make my day in these films, what we see are largely white truck who want to get rid of hippies on the road who are bothering them, subservient police who are just doing what with the state. it would make making fools of police. yeah, making fools of late. i mean, there's no better example than in in smokey and the bandit.

jackie gleason plays a town sheriff who pursues the bandit and absolute tremendous. it's honestly it's the only reason to watch the movie gleason absolutely spectacular he's of the funniest characters in my opinion in film in this movie but but in fact what the audience is doing is laughing at authority and. so this idea that you're behind wheel that you're in control is a substance who for real politics. you because real politics had died in 1968 with the death of imoke and all one wonders what's going to happen when we go to autonomous cars and that outlet of control. yeah and being a captain behind the wheel no longer is a privilege for us at least if the future have their way right. which john and i have talked

this. we think that there's going to be a tremendous rebellion against the idea of the autonomous car because people don't they don't understand why they're it, but they don't want to give up the symbolic sense of control, which is now, in other words, democracy in a sense in this sense is reducible to a consumer purchase. right? the freedom of the road. the politic of democracy is increasingly threatened, as we well know today. it's frightened because people are satisfied with the consumer or sat version of freedom. okay, any questions to. all right, then. well, no other. thanks for that, guys. thanks for coming. and we appreciate you