Introduction 31
special-effects cinema, Julie Turnock insists that though the work of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas is often considered “the opposite of the auteurist-driven ‘personal’ film,” their films should be understood as “extensions of this ethos, not rejections of it.” Critics are now tempted to view “Star Wars and Close Encounters as the beginning of an end,” Turnock notes, but “it is clear from reviews and critical commentary that both films were received enthusiastically as a fresh and exciting development in auteur-driven popular filmmaking.”108 In chapter 3, I put Spielberg’s early career and Zanuck-Brown directly on the heels of Altman in effort to restore them to this historical moment. Indeed, Spielberg’s first theatrical feature was a defection movie, The Sugarland Express, which he believed fared poorly at the box office because it dropped in the same period as two other defection movies, Badlands (Malick, Warner Bros., 1973) and Altman’s Thieves Like Us (United Artists, 1974). The genre had by then been exhausted, and hence Spielberg combined its impulse with the disaster movie in his next feature, Jaws. Turnock astutely notes that not only were Spielberg and Lucas received in the moment as auteurs, but they described their aesthetic projects in terms of avant-garde traditions of “pure cinema” and “graphic dynamism.”109 From the perspective of Zanuck and Brown, who were both eager to reestablish their creative bona fides, Spielberg was avant-garde enough to help them declare the medium specificity of cinema as the Zanuck-Brown Company was being rolled into the corporate structure of Universal, whose media production had largely been given over to television. If Jaws reconfigured Hollywood marketing in 1975, the Academy Awards ceremony the next year was the theatrical moment in which New Hollywood declared its own hegemony and consigned Old Hollywood to the past. In that year’s ceremony, Bert Schneider received the Best Documentary Oscar for Hearts and Minds (Davis, Columbia, 1975) and relayed greetings from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam, signaling both that the Vietnam War was over and that the youth movements had taken over in Hollywood and elsewhere. In chapter 4, I turn to Schneider’s BBS Productions, which produced such movies as Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens (Rafelson, Columbia, 1972), as a case study in this process, demonstrating that