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During this same period (the late 1960s and early 1970s), in yet another effort to tap into the interests of younger audiences, studios began to hire a new generation of filmmakers who had learned their craft in the growing number of film departments in American universities. Mostly white, male, and heterosexual, these so‐called Film School Brats (including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola) reinvigorated the Hollywood industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Having studied film as an art, this new generation made films that reflected their knowledge of Hollywood (and global) film history. The Film School Brats revamped traditional genre formulas that had worked during Hollywood’s classical period, spicing them up with liberal doses of sex and violence, now that the Production Code had been replaced by the Ratings System in the late 1960s. (The ratings system restricted audiences rather than filmmakers.) Genre films that criticized or deconstructed American myths, which had been briefly popular with the counterculture, were now supplanted by genre films that reinscribed traditional form and ideology in a nostalgic fashion. In most of these films, women were once again cast as princesses, people of color appeared as villains or helpers, and physically strong white men remained the central heroes. This type of film, sometimes called the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster still drives the Hollywood industry today. (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, discussed earlier in this chapter, is an excellent example, as are the comic book superhero films of the twenty‐first century, discussed below.)

Rocky (1976) is a good example of the nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, a type of film that uses classical Hollywood formulas to reinscribe traditional concepts of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Rocky, copyright © 1976, United Artists.

Most of these Hollywood blockbusters were (and are) shrewdly calculated remakes and recyclings of what had worked (that is, made money) in the past. They are designed according to marketplace research, and work not to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain the ideological status quo. They are usually pre‐sold (they have name recognition from a previous incarnation as TV show, novel, comic book, etc.), and are considered high concept (they have a story that can be reduced to simple phrases and tag‐lines). Ever since the 1970s, Hollywood blockbusters are sold via saturation advertising and saturation booking, which means that the country is blanketed with ads for a film for weeks before it opens in thousands of theaters at once. The concept of synergy also drives current Hollywood production, wherein the film acts as an advertisement for other related products (and vice versa) – soundtrack music, movie novelizations, behind‐the‐scenes mini‐features, magazine specials, comic books, fast food franchises, posters, toys, video games, action figures, theme park rides, clothes, and other assorted collectibles. All of this media saturation convinces filmgoers of these films’ alleged importance. Independent films, which tend to offer the viewpoints of various marginalized groups, are frequently lost in the media flurry surrounding the more formulaic Hollywood output, films that still tend to center on white patriarchal capitalist ideals.

This situation is the result of the increased mergers of media companies into larger and larger corporate conglomerates (discussed in greater detail in the following sections). These large multinational businesses control multiple aspects of the entertainment industry, producing and distributing motion pictures, books, recorded music, video games, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows, as well as owning theme parks, sports teams, TV channels, cable TV distributors, home video releases, and chains of movie theaters. This is a new type of corporate oligopoly, since these global conglomerates control almost all of the world’s mass media. It is thus increasingly difficult for independent filmmakers to have their work screened within mainstream cinematic outlets, which are for the most part controlled by these multimedia corporate conglomerates.