Au Contraire, Says Jer

Many movie fans feel in the late 60s/early 70s Hollywood was at its best. Released from the Production Code, and appealing to a new generation, they turned out better art than ever before. Led by major 60s hits such as The Graduate, Bonnie And Clyde, Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, by the 70s they were able to deal with serious subjects in a more honest way.

Not that there wasn't fluff at the time--that's always around. It's just that there was also an explosion of acting, writing and directing that gave us something new: Five Easy Pieces, Mean Streets, McCabe And Mrs. Miller, The Godfather (I and II), Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, The Last Picture Show, Fat City, Shampoo, The Hospital, Chinatown, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, A Clockwork Orange, American Graffiti, The French Connection, Carnal Knowledge, Sounder, Save The Tiger, The Last Detail, The Conversation and many more.

On the other hand, I was recently looking through Jerry Lewis's 1982 autobiography, In Person, and found this:

...the current Hollywood trend [around 1970] saw selfish, ambitious men who called themselves producers beginning to transfer their poisonous ideas from television to the silver screen. Everybody crying out for happy entertainment, while everything in sight was being tainted by the grime of "realism" and magnified on celluloid. A decaying process, a chipping away like water that hits the rock, century after century, until one of nature's strongest minerals slowly erodes. And that's what they were doing to our industry. It was eroding under a heavy flood of X-rated films. So I backed off. I wouldn't play the game. I'd made forty-one pictures in thirty years; in the next seven years, I made only one.

Hmm. Perhaps. I'd guess, however, the main reason he stopped playing the game was that his films stopped making money. Otherwise, he'd have still been at it, and those selfish, ambitious men who called themselves producers would have put up the money.

(Let me say a few things in Jerry's defense. 1. I think he's a great talent. 2. He was a major movie star for about two decades. 3. He wrote that passage a long time ago--he may have more perspective today.)