it was a golden age of filmmaking because we were all single, ambitious and we were in love with film. we felt that we were gonna take over the world, make real change and things were gonna be different. this was the time to make it. this was going to be it. so there was a great deal of urgency in that. we're still in love with film, but we're not as ambitious and none of us are single. annenberg media ♪ and: with additional funding from these foundations and individuals:

and by: and the annual financial support of: hello, i'm john lithgow. welcome to "american cinema." what do the directors of "star wars" and goodfellas" have in common? they both went to film school. yet when the filmmakers of this generation graduated they had no plans to work for the studios. in fact, if hollywood was on their minds at all, it was as an example of what to do differently.

the first feature of a filmmaker from usc named george lucas had a title that read like a license plate, "thx 1138." a film with striking imagery, it perplexed studio executives. he later made "star wars." the first feature of a filmmaker from nyu named martin scorsese was picked up by an independent who changed its title and put it in local theatres. it didn't last long. he later made "goodfellas." steven spielberg, francis ford coppola, brian depalma. though their early work was not mainstream hollywood, their later work would ultimately represent what hollywood did best, with works like "e.t.," "the godfather," and "the untouchables," blockbusters. we are going to look at a band of filmmakers who thought they could change the world, and they did. "the film school generation."

(whizzing of rockets) (music playing)

(screams) don't try it. buddy, look, the lady obviously doesn't want -- look, creep, you want a knuckle sandwich? (narrator) in the beginning, however, only two things distinguished them from old hollywood. they have beards, and they almost all went to film school. (steven spielberg) i never went to film school. but when i went to royce hall one day to see a film festival of combined ucla and usc student films, that's when i first saw george lucas's work, thx 1138, and i met george that day and i realized there was an entire generation coming out of nyu, usc, ucla and i was kind of an orphan, abandoned in long beach, at a college that didn't really have a film program. so i even redoubled my efforts at that moment to attend those two universities.

and every time i went in with my application for transfer, they kept saying, no, your grades aren't high enough. and then i remember one teacher at usc said, "you're probably going to vietnam anyway." well for me, before i went to film school i was interested in maybe becoming an english major or becoming an anthropology student. i wanted to go to art school and become an illustrator. those were the options that i was playing with. i didn't know very much about film at all. i was interested in photography and it was really out of my interest to become an illustrator. i ended up at usc film school, didn't know anything about it. i thought: this might be interesting. (george lucas) i got in there and within a month i had discovered something that i loved, something that i was very good at. i was learning the techniques of filmmaking and i learned them very fast, in a period of 18 months. i learned about animation, screenwriting, directing, about camera, about editing. a whole range of techniques and i learned it very fast.

and i think that was a real advantage because when i got into the film business, i could work as a cameraman, as an editor. i could work as a writer. eventually i became a director. (staticky voice over intercom) (loud ringing sound) (staticky, unintelligible voice) (john milius) george lucas, i remember, did the first film. he spent his money to do the first film in color. that was a big breakthrough, somehow he'd gotten the navy or somebody to process it. he would take their money and their allotment of film and try and make the longest possible film, which was often just hideously boring. but they did achieve something, it was long. (music playing) feeling big never feels bad. money, pictures and sex,

it's kind of the same, it's interchangeable. sometimes i don't know whether it's sex and pictures that i'm working on, or pictures and sex. you know, i just really don't know, like, you know. well, when you've got an interchangeable medium... it's interesting that coppola who is the eldest of the group, went to ucla, a film school noted for more personal cinema, as opposed to usc which was always seen much more as a film school gearing people to the industry. their films -- ours were trying to be professional and imitative of hollywood. theirs had beautiful nude girls running through graveyards. that was a standard scene in any ucla film. (john milius) they were i guess you could say more left-wing, more far out. they used more powerful chemicals. and they smoked stronger things.

(japanese music playing) (martin scorsese) the reason i went to new york film school is i was living in new york. we were totally separated from the main part of the industry, which was california and hollywood. we always felt the students on the west coast, usc or ucla, in a funny way were -- this was our imagination -- i think to a certain extent it may have been true, too. they were out in the same city. they might have more ability to feed into the industry. and to a certain extent, the type of films that were made by california students, they looked better in a sense. they were slicker, but not in a bad way. i mean in a good way. they had more command of craft. whereas in new york, if we got an exposure we thought that was really good. if something came back, it was great. (martin scorsese) technique was not as important as what the film had to say. (music playing)

(brian de palma) we really were making street movies. marty was making movies about the lower east side, the italians of the lower east side. we'd have seen all the 16-millimeter documentaries that had shown us things we'd never seen before. and in the combination of the crazy things going on in the theatre with grotowski and environmental theatre and interacting with the audiences and that strong black movement, and anti-war movement. so all this stuff was churning around in one's consciousness. (brian de palma) this whole new way of involving an audience in a kind of visceral way they'd never done before. (policeman) what's his real name? (yelling) how does he know? freeman, martin freeman. i know him. my name is zinn, murray zinn. (overlapping dialogue)

c'mon, martin! aahh! aahh! aahh! and the only thing we could do was try to express ourselves on film the way people around us were doing. we'd hoped that that would lead to making films in narrative. when we were in film school there was absolutely no chance of making it into the hollywood film industry. and nobody even considered it. the most chance we had was as a disneyland ticket-taker. well, at the time all these directors emerged, there was actually no way they'd be hollywood employees. hollywood was very much a closed industry those days. and the way in to theatrical filmmaking was via roger corman. and coppola was the first one to work for him and later, scorsese. corman provided the model for independence they wanted. his big advantage was his output deal that he had with american international and some television companies.

anything that he produced they would put on the air. it didn't matter what it was, as long as it was long enough. he realized more than anybody working in commercial industry that there was a lot of talent amongst film students. they would work inexpensively. and work very hard. "who's that knocking" was shown in california, only the theatre manager didn't like the title, so he changed it, which was a good idea. and roger corman saw it, or people who worked for roger. and roger was always looking for new, young talent coming out of universities or anywhere in california. he offered me the sequel. the sequel to bloody mama, which was "boxcar bertha." (john milius) the thing that applied well from student filmmaking to that kind of filmmaking was to make what you had go as far as it was possible, to try and get it to look as much like a bigger film as possible.

and to never sit there and say, "i need more." i'd like to withdraw my entire account. (woman) your entire account? yes, ma'am, the whole thing. (woman) your name? john dillinger. (woman screams) hold it right where you are, this is a robbery. i look at it today and it looks real crude. but i didn't feel terribly constrained when i did it. the things that i liked and wanted to put into it, the sense of the land and the kind of folk tale told in a john ford vista, that's all free, that's there. (woman) johnny! (john milius) you just have to be inspired by "the searchers" or something else good to steal and i didn't need a big budget. (harmonica playing) in those days, that was the end of the 60s,

the studio system, which had had such force in the 30s and 40s and had difficulty in the 50s, was really nearing the end of its thrust. but it was still in place wielding considerable power and held things in a considerable inertia. so the option of 25-year-old's who were interested in film was not as clear as it is today to get into the industry, because once you got in, it was kind of unnerving how sclerotic it was. the studios were still turning out films like "darling lili" and "they did paint your wagon," where clint eastwood and lee marvin got to sing. (peter biskind) they were all trying to repeat the success of "sound of music" and "my fair lady," with little success. and a lot of the studios were close to bankruptcy. some studios were put on the block. a number of executives lost their jobs. and there was a real fear in the executive suites

because they weren't sure what people wanted to see. particularly what young people wanted to see. (peter biskind) "easy rider" came in 1969, cost $500,000. made by nobodies. dope, unhappy ending, hippies, long-hairs. i mean it cleaned up, it was a huge hit. and it was really a revolution. these old guys in the studios had not the foggiest idea of why this film was so successful, or what was going on. and all they knew was dennis hopper directed it. so they grabbed onto the directors as saviors. although that's a film -- i wasn't part of that culture, but it did open a lot of doors for many people in california. and at the same time, giving you the chance behind the camera and almost a deification of the director. (man) "rain people" are people made of rain.

and when they cry, they disappear altogether. (narrator) one such deified director was francis coppola. coppola's dream was to run his own studio, to be called american zoetrope. where did you hear about the rain people? i don't remember. were they in a story someone told you? no, it's true. (woman) did you ever see them? (walter murch) francis wrote a script involving a cross-country trip. it was an existential leap into the unknown. in fact, they wound up in nebraska. and they said, "if we can do this in nebraska, there's no reason we'd have to be in hollywood." it was 3 or 4 months after that francis had made the decision to set up american zoetrope in san francisco. francis wants to own everything that he needs to make a film.

he wanted to own the cameras, own the lights and sound, own the editing machine, and the building. he didn't want to have to answer to anybody. he wanted to be able to mount a movie 2 days after he thought of it, if he, if he wanted to. that grew to a bigger version, later in the 70s, where he came back to hollywood and bought this studio, (fred roos) this physical old studio. that was the second incarnation of his zoetrope dream. every time i've seen a studio in different travels, you know, "ardmore in ireland" and my first impulse is to want to immediately buy it and bring a lot of people there and start it going again. but there are a lot of forces that work against that. i'm all for studio-based pictures. (teri garr) it's like we were in "gypsy," and he was our mother. and whenever these people came in that had the money,

he'd say, "dress up real, and do the scene for them." "here's what i'm doing, and give us some money." and then they did. and then he'd spend it all. he had many more ideas. he said, "eventually we're all going to be owners in this. we'll put under contract, and in the parking lot, we're going to put a beautiful commissary with a glass roof." and his imagination just was going on and on to stuff that wasn't really relevant to making the movie. but he had this wonderful idea and it just never works. in a way, francis attempted to be all of our godfathers. and to this day he calls me, little stevie spielberg. you know, i love it, but only he calls me that. but he would always have us sitting at his feet listening to the way movies should be made, because francis, of our entire group, he was actually a generation before mine, but francis was the first young guy ever to make it. (staticky unintelligible voice)

(walter murch) francis had a development deal with warner brothers. so the first film that zoetrope produced under this agreement was "thx 1138," which george made at usc. the challenge was to take a student film, which was 20 minutes long and expand it into a feature, a story that had a beginning, middle and an end, and yet had something of its crazy futuristic vision. i was very involved in nonlinear filmmaking and non-story, non-character driven scenarios. and i felt this was a chance to sort of push the envelope, to do the kinds of films that i had done in film school and do it on a grander scale. we kept saying that this is not a film about the future,

it's a film from the future. (echoing squishy sounds) (walter murch) so there are things in the film that are mysterious, that we don't bother to explain because in the future, everyone would understand this. but, you know, it still has a car chase. it still has a romance. it has an escape. (george lucas) when i made "thx," i knew it was going to be controversial in terms of what the studio wanted. they gave me the chance to make the movie. they didn't really understand it. it was the opportunity of a lifetime. and i even said to francis, "i'll never get a chance to make a movie like it again, i'm going all the way with it. and if it destroys my career, that's what's going to happen, i'll never get this shot again. so i took it. this was the time to make it, if there was any time at all, this was it.

so there was a great deal of urgency about that. and a lot of energy. we did everything and anything to get in there. pain in hell has two sides: the kind you can touch with your hand, the kind you can feel in your heart, your soul, the spiritual side. and, you know, the worst of the two is the spiritual. (jonathan taplin) marty knew every setup, every shot, and he had it all drawn out so he could literally show his cameraman in pictures how the shot would look. we were doing 28 setups a day, which is phenomenal. (loud music playing) he had thought out almost every single tracking shot and it became his signature. and we just left the camera on the dolly all the time. so every move had a little bit of choreography.

marty today is much calmer than he was then. marty was about to burst at any minute in 1973. i didn't even think the film was going to be released. i just got the money and i thought it was great. and maybe some day they'll be showing it. but i doubted it would get on the screen. i borrowed money all over this neighborhood, left and right, from everybody and i never paid 'em back, so i can't borrow no money from nobody, no more, right? so who does that leave me to borrow money from, but you? we went to warner's at lunch and it was in a screening room. there was an executive there named, john calley, who is really responsible for many interesting pictures from that time. i borrow money from you cause you're the only jerk-off that i can borrow money from without paying 'em back, right? and about ten minutes into it, a waiter comes in with a tray.

literally right in the middle of the picture. and says, "who's got the tuna on rye?" and marty is just dying. they're not watching the film, they're trying to figure out their lunch order. and this was just typical hollywood arrogance. come on, come on, come on. come on, come on, f--- face. and calley comes and sits down next to me and we were both dying, and he says, this is the best movie i've seen all year, but i have to take a leak. do you mind stopping it? and "where's the button?" and so he went back and then we started. we finished the movie and he got up and he said, "we're buying this movie." as soon as the film came out, as soon as it was released, it was around the same time as "american graffiti." and our picture, a few weeks later went into the ground buried forever to an extent,

except that then it came out on tv and things like that. people still stop me in the street about it. (martin scorsese) but "american graffiti" was the overall, across-the-board, a real american memory, nostalgic piece. (narrator) george lucas' "american graffiti" was a massive surprise hit. it cost less than $1 million, and earned over $55 million. any time a film comes along that is different, there is a risk. the risk is nobody's going to get it, or the other risk, which is the good side is, the studio is behind the curve and this film is in advance of the curve, with the audience, and it was a surprise. that's what happened with "graffiti." the audience was more ready for the film than universal in 1973 thought they were. (george lucas) it was an exercise in learning the craft of storytelling and the craft of character development. but even then i pushed the envelope very far

and it was so far out the studios didn't like it. they didn't want to do it. "this is just a musical montage, it doesn't mean anything." but it was as straight and as conservative as i could get at that time. when you read the script of "graffiti," at the top of every scene was the usual things. "exterior parking lot, mel's." but then there would be the name of a song that george was playing when he wrote the scene. ♪ sixteen candles ♪ (walter murch) the problem was that this was for every scene in the film, which is 45 scenes, which meant 45 songs. up till that point, no film contemplated anything like it. we developed something in sound that photography's always had, which is depth of field. there are things in the front that are well lit and in focus and there are things in back less well lit and out of focus.

(screeching tires) (roaring engines and background music) (gary kurtz) wewe knew we had to approach it in a semi-documentary style. so for instance, at places like mel's drive-in, what we did was go around and change the light bulbs into photo floods and replace neon with new neon. most of the neon had gone. and that was really the lighting style. with a little bit of movie lighting thrown in where necessary to boost it up. but 80 percent of the lighting was real. (gary kurtz) inside the cars, we used a slight booster light of minimal kind to bring it slightly above ambient light. (george lucas) i was basically a documentary filmmaker from the streets. "american graffiti" was a kind of a documentary film in a dramatic context. i was actually in film school in the 60s, in 1965, 1966.

it was the beginning of all of the youth movements that were going on around the world. and the film departments were no different. we felt that we were going to take over the world, that we were going to make real change and that things were going to be different. i think what happened sort of in the mid-60s was it was the decline of the major studios, the rise of the independent filmmaker. and a sort of change in the intellectual attitude of college students in america, especially. those students that wanted to write a great american novel changed into those that wanted to make a great american movie. well, the people i was hanging out with then would go and see films like "the 400 blows" and we all just went, what the hell is that? that's a whole new feeling. and it leaves you stunned. how can we get hollywood people that are making movies like those elvis presley movies that are making a lot of money, come around to do movies like that?

and i think eventually it all melded together. a little left turn here and a little right turn there and finally, i mean, people listened. well i think actually they were all influenced by the new wave. the range of influences on them is actually quite vast. milius discovered "kurosawa," when he was surfing in hawaii. in fact, de palma in the late 60s was talking about wanting to be the american godard. i think truffaut, antonioni. (lynda myles) from "the conversation," "blowup's" an influence. so i think they absorbed a lot of influences from world films. the first and foremost were hollywood films. that was the main thing, i grew up experiencing those. ford and hawks. victor fleming. hitchcock. welles. british films. david lean. godard and the new wave. godard. truffaut and godard. godard and truffaut and louis malle.

philippe de broca. michael curtiz. francesco rossi. the first bertolucci films. antonioni. visconti. pennebaker, leacock. shirley clark. the maysles. john cassavetes. (ricocheting bullets) (jazz music playing) (peter biskind) all these kids were steeped in old hollywood movies, the movies of john ford and howard hawks and particularly in hitchcock. films were filled with homages to one director or another, and often entire films, particularly brian de palma's became reworkings of hitchcock's films. surprise. hey, now you know you're not supposed to cut the cake until you make a wish and blow out the candles.

well, i was very interested in that period of my career of learning how to express as clear in images as possible. and many directors of course are drawn to hitchcock. so i patterned something on very much like "psycho" and then created ways of characters observing others and following each other and learning specific hitchcock vocabulary. (loud, disturbing music) what is cinema and how do you express things in purely cinematic terms without trying other forms, which are, basically, me talking to the camera. (loud, disturbing music) it did become a limitation and even somebody like de palma

would say later in the 80s, after working off good scripts, like "scarface," "untouchables" and "casualties of war," i think he eventually realized he needed a stronger grounding in script than he recognized, 5 years, 10 years earlier. it's boring when every film student or most of the audience that was semi-literate, just sit watching a film and saying, "that's the shot sequence from 'psycho,'" or "that's the burnt homestead from 'the searchers.'" i mean, it's not interesting. and i think, again, if you were to analyze in fact all the films this group made, the most interesting films, i think, are the most personal, not the borrowings, but the ones that are rooted more in their own experience. and i think with milius, i think his best film was "big wednesday," which is absolutely rooted in the time he was a surfer in hawaii and in california.