Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope: Review By Null and Void.

"Some critics have blamed Star Wars and also Jaws for ruining Hollywood by shifting its focus from sophisticated and relevant films such as The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Annie Hall to films about spectacle and juvenile fantasy. Peter Biskind complained for the same reason: 'When all was said and done, Lucas and Spielberg returned the 1970s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of the pre-1960s Golden Age of movies… They marched backward through the looking-glass.'"

"Star Wars" marked the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood Era. Now, the New Hollywood Era was probably the best time for film in my opinion. Even better than the Golden Age. In the New Hollywood Era, we had some of the best films ever produced: "The Graduate", "Wait Until Dark", "Easy Rider", "Deliverance", "The Exorcist", "Network", "Taxi Driver", and/or "Barry Lyndon"

If you asked someone (born before 1991, that's when sh*t went even further downhill) if they liked anyone of the above mentioned films, they'd probably agree with almost all of that list. It was the time between roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1980s when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and impacted the way major studios approached filmmaking. The films they made were part of the studio system, and these individuals were not "independent filmmakers", but they introduced subject matter and styles that set them apart from the studio traditions.

In 1971, upon gaining his two year deal with United Artists, Lucas decided to write "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the 'Journal of the Whills': Saga I - Star Wars". United Artists responded with, "Yeah kid, we ain't that rich." After writing a third draft that wasn't so f*cking retarded and didn't have the longest title in cinema, 20th Century Fox bought the script and approved a budget of $8,250,000, which of course inflated to a budget of $11,000,000 because George Lucas is a money grubbing whor*.

The film wound up grossing $775,398,007. Yeah...

With it's unprecedented box-office success, George Lucas's film jumpstarted Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, giving studios a new paradigm of how to make money in the changing commercial landscape. The focus on high-concept premises, with greater concentration on tie-in merchandise (toys and sh*t), spin-offs into other media (such as soundtracks, "The Star Wars Christmas Special"), and the use of sequels (which had been made more respectable by Coppola's "The Godfather Part II"), all showed the studios how to make money in the new environment.

On realizing how much money could be made in films, major corporations started buying up the Hollywood studios. The corporate mentality these companies brought to the filmmaking business would slowly squeeze out the more quirky of the young filmmakers, while ditching the more malleable and commercially successful of them.

The New Hollywood's ultimate demise came after a string of box office failures that many critics viewed as self-indulgent and excessive. Directors enjoyed unprecedented creative control and budgets during the New Hollywood era, but expensive flops including "New York, New York", and "Sorcerer" caused the studios to increase their control over production. And that's why you have to have an action beat every 10 pages in your screenplay.

New Hollywood excess culminated in one of the ultimate financial disasters: Francis Ford Coppola's "One from the Heart" Coppola, having being a f*cking pompous ass flourished after the near financial disaster of "Apocalypse Now", plowed all of the enormous success of that film into American Zoetrope, basically becoming his own studio head. As such, motherf*cker bet it all on "One from the Heart", which closed in less than a f*cking week, bankrupting Coppola and his studio.

This costly example, as well as the above-mentioned box-office failures, coupled with the new commercial paradigm of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" gave studios a clear and renewed sense of where the market was going: high-concept, mass-audience, wide-release films. Therefore, the costly and risky strategy of surrendering control to the director ended, and with that, the New Hollywood era.

And what did we get in return? "The Phantom Menace."