...it was like the sky was the limit!

It's IFCs labor of love: three hours just to talk about the 1970s and its films. Extrememly Special Interest no doubt. If I had to hear another interviewee say "all of a sudden we could do anything" or "there was no limit to what we could do anymore" or some other such quote I would have turned the DVD played off right in the middle of another close up on Bruce Dern's face (star of such greats as The Burbs and apparently one hundred other movies in the seventies I've never seen).

I made notes to see MASH, The King of Marvin Gardens, Last Detail (and all Hal Ashby), and Roger Corman movies. My question is why directors were so obsessed in the 70s with two-lane asphalt who-knows-where America. That stuff bores the crap out of me. Then I started to think just how many movies in this decade fall victim to this weird obsession. Easy Rider, Fat City, Scarecrow, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Five Easy Peices, Deliverence, all those Westerns! The list goes on and on. I mean those are good movies, but I don't care who you are, you have to be able to endure some intense boredom to enjoy them. Maybe that's the nineties talking, but I don't feel the struggle with the American Dream so much. Did it take these movies to allows us to live in the ruins?

I conclude that everyone interviewed is pretty smart and worth listening to (except Bogdanovich - I mean seriously who is that guy kidding?!), but especially so with Altman and Lumet. Those guys are giants. Coppola is pretty excellent as well, like how he ADMITS he hasn't made a good movie since The Conversation(!). Did I hear him right?