“Anarchy and rebellion”: the 1967 movies that made Ron Howard want to be part of a cinematic revolution
Ron Howard was lucky enough to grow up as Hollywood started to change shape, and as he grew into adolescence and adulthood, he witnessed a cinematic landscape taking form that he could never have predicted when he started his career as a TV star.
The actor of course started out when he was so young that he wouldn’t have even known what cinema really was, his screen debut coming when he was just two years old in the movie Frontier Woman. But by the time he was six, he was a familiar face on American TV screens, appearing as Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffiths Show.
It was here that his interest in the showbiz world began, although it wouldn’t be until the late 1960s, when Howard was a teenager, that he’d discover this new era of American cinema that would light a fuse in his mind – one that he has never been able to put out.
Howard was enamoured by this fresh wave of Hollywood filmmaking which emerged in the wake of movements like the French New Wave over in Europe. The traditional, studio-bound mode of cinema that had dominated the mainstream for years was suddenly turned on its head as the censorial Hays Code was replaced with a more lenient age rating system, allowing graphic violence, nudity, and other taboo themes and images to enter Hollywood.
As a result, filmmaking became more brutal, more honest, and more nihilistic. Influenced by the experimentalism of independent and European cinema, directors started to take risks, and much of Hollywood’s newfound glory emerged in 1967 – the year that changed everything for Howard.
“When I was 10, one of the directors on The Andy Griffith Show said, ‘I see the way you’re looking at the camera and following rehearsals even when you’re not in the scenes, and I have a feeling you’re gonna be a director,’” Howard told Harvard Business Review. “Then, when I was around 12, I began to fall in love with the movies. The Graduate, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde—those films were a bit neorealist, borrowing from Europe, and had an anarchy and rebellion that was beginning to emerge in American cinema.”
The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde both emerged in 1967 as monumental turning points for American cinema, particularly the latter, which is often cited as the defining moment of New Hollywood. Arthur Penn’s film was filled with incessant violence – and that final scene, in which the couple are hit with endless bullets, their deaths a brutal end to any hope, any semblance of the American Dream – was indicative of this new mode of filmmaking.
“It was a kind of cinematic revolution. I related to it, and I loved it, and I began to understand that there was this other thing beyond half-hour sitcoms. And the person behind that filmmaking was first and foremost the director. I wanted to play in that sandbox,” Howard explained.
From that moment on, everything changed for him. He continued to act in sitcoms – taking on a long-running role in Happy Days, starting in 1974 – but he made his directorial debut in 1977 with Grand Theft Auto, eventually winning a ‘Best Director’ Oscar in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind.
