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New Hollywood refers to the brief time between roughly 1967 (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) and 1977 (Star Wars) when a new generation of young, cinema-crazed filmmakers came to prominence in America, drastically changing not only the way Hollywood films were produced and marketed, but also the kinds of films that were made.
In this ten year period, Hollywood was overrun by a new generation of film school-educated, counter culture-bred actors, writers, and, most importantly, directors. This group of people, dubbed the New Hollywood by the press (or, affectionately, the Movie Brats), destroyed the old, producer-dominated Hollywood system of the past and injected movies with a jolt of freshness, energy, sexuality, and an obsessive passion for film itself. The body of work from this period is in itself a list of the greatest films ever made. To name but a few: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, The French Connection, Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, Jaws, Badlands, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, Raging Bull. The talent behind these films is staggering: Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Roman Polanski, Terrence Malick, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton.
By the 1960s Old Hollywood had lost touch with its audience. The studios were still being run by the moguls who had created them back when Hollywood was a baby. Studios, in a defensive measure against the lure of television, had started churning out widescreen epics, escapist musical fantasies, and genre pictures that grew staler as the years went by. Nothing was reflecting the changing social mores of American society and the result was declining ticket sales. By the time the baby-boom generation was coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Old Hollywood was hemorrhaging money; they had no idea what the audience wanted.
What the audience wanted was something new. European art films, the French New Wave, and Japanese cinema were all making a big splash in America--the huge market of disaffected youth found something in themselves when they saw movies like Antonioni's Blow-Up, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity. Studio heads were baffled. Unable to figure out what was happening, producers gradually handed power over to the directors. This was when the Movie Brat generation broke in and Hollywood became an asylum that was truly run by the inmates. The New Hollywood came crashing down with the release of Star Wars in 1977. With its unprecedented box-office success, Lucas' film, along with Spielberg's Jaws two years before, jumpstarted Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, effectively ending the New Hollywood reign of smaller, idiosyncratic, envelope-pushing films.
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