AMERICAN FILM OF THE 1960s AND 1970s Throughout the 1960s and ''70s the American film industry accommodated itself to the
competition of the world market, to a film
audience that had shrunk from 80 million to 20 million weekly, to the tastes of an increasingly young and educated audience, and to the
new social and sexual values sweeping the industrialized world. Major Hollywood studios were often subsidiaries of huge conglomerates like Gulf + Western. (In the 1980s, however, ownership began to move overseas, when Fox was bought by Rupert Murdoch''s Australian-based company, and Japanese companies bought Columbia and Universal.) Hollywood began to produce more material for television than for movie theaters, and films were shot in places other than Hollywood. New York City, for example, recovered its early status as a filmmaking center. American movies of the period moved strongly into sex, violence, and social criticism with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Medium Cool (1969), The Godfather, Part II (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976)Ñfilms that searched for meaning in a society that had become entangled in Vietnam, enslaved by the rigidly institutional and the merely material. The collapse of the 1930 Hollywood Production Code and its 1968 replacement by the Motion Picture Rating System (G, PG, PG-13, R, and X), which indicated the level of audience maturity each film demanded, was an effect of these new themes. The X rating proved unworkable and in 1990 was replaced by a new label, NC-17 (no children under 17). The most successful directors of the periodÑStanley Kubrick, Robert Altman (Nashville, 1975), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, 1972; The Conversation, 1974), Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969), John Cassavetes (Faces, 1968), Woody Allen (Annie Hall, 1977), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)Ñplayed most vividly with the tools of film communication itself, perhaps influenced by such American avant-garde filmmakers as Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man, 1961Ð64), Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising, 1963), Bruce Baillie (Castro Street, 1966), and Bruce Conner (A Movie, 1958). The same two decades saw the rebirth of U.S. documentary films in the work of Fred Wiseman (Titicut Follies, 1967), the Maysles brothers (Salesman, 1969), and Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, 1968).