Hollywood was in sharp decline

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In the late 1950s, many young writers from Cinema Notebooks had started making films. By the late 1950s, many of these new filmmakers were winning awards. Their so-called “arthouse” films initially attracted a small audience, but that was not the point. What these new directors had managed to do was strike a chord with a new, young and educated audience. What had been captured on screen was something of the mind then abroad: one that refused to accept traditional mores as fixed and at the same time offered new alternative ways of living.

In contrast, in the 1960s, . During the previous decade, his once stable, but effective studio system had started to crumble. But perhaps more alarming for Hollywood executives, television had arrived across the United States and elsewhere, breaking the cinema’s monopoly on visual entertainment for the masses.

Hollywood studios of the 1950s and early 1960s attempted to compete phone number library with this new technology by becoming “bigger” (Cinemascope), “brighter” (Technicolor) and more epic than television. However, what these film producers failed to take into account was that screen size did not replace the art of storytelling – this show alone was never enough. As a result, in the early 1960s, many films were indeed bigger and brighter, but also bombastic.

The French New Wave began with filmmakers who first had to become journalists. What would spawn a very different Hollywood started with two East Coast journalists who wanted to write screenplays.

Fittingly, David Newman and Robert Benton met while working in the early 1960s at Squire at a time when this magazine would be the pioneer of what we would call the new journalism. While there, Benton and Newman began working on a screenplay about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the leaders of a Depression-era robber gang. Remarkably, the first draft of the script was passed on to one of the emerging elites of French cinema, Godard. Initially, he agreed to direct the film. Eventually, however, the French abandoned him. In doing so, the film fell into the hands of a beginner Hollywood actor, not quite then a big name, Warren Beatty, who commissioned Arthur Penn to direct his film.