The 1980's

The legacy of the 1970's left on American film was the public's acceptance of more graphically realistic depictions of sex and violence. Enter directors like Ed Wood, John Waters, and David Lynch. We think it would be incomprehensible for someone like Lynch to make a movie that could win an Academy Award in the 1960's or even the early 1970's. The Elephant Man is like, well, an elephant while Easy Rider, which was controversial for its time, is like something a lot smaller than an elephant. The 1980's also saw a flourishing of actual independent films, rather than "independent" studios like American Zoetrope that worked inside the system financing directors with interesting visions. The formation of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute helped to finance many independent directors like Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, Stephen Soderbergh, and more especially in the early 1990's. Which we won't get to. But who cares. Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and others released independent films towards the end of the 1980's and into the early 1990's. They were called the video generation because, due to the increasing availability of VHS home videos, they were able to amass huge libraries of movies from all over the world that would influence their work. This can be seen in the large number of references to other films, such as Kiss Me Deadly for example, in Tarantino's work.

The studios lost money in the 1980's too perhaps because of all the crappy blockbusters that Kamala hates that they made or perhaps because of all the cool independent movies coming out that were pretty available for viewing.