Martin Scorsese names the movie that changed the entire film industry forever: “The plug got pulled”
Martin Scorsese has famously been the face of a monumentally influential era in cinematic history, with a love for the medium sparking at a young age and then steadily rising through the ranks with his early films Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
After this, the director became synonymous with the New Hollywood movement, with his 1976 film Taxi Driver changing the industry forever and marking a new era in which independent directors were given more freedom and creative control. Suits and Hollywood executives had previously ruled the studio system, but the arrival of fresh new talent like Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin and Francis Ford Coppola signalled the birth of a Hollywood revolution.
Alongside the creation of arthouse films like The Conversation, Raging Bull and Paper Moon, there were also some directors who were changing the industry in ways that hadn’t previously been possible, with directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas becoming responsible for the creation of the blockbuster/popcorn picture. Scorsese has since reflected on this era, looking back on the one film that changed everything.
After the release of Jaws, E.T. and Star Wars, the industry was forever changed, with both pictures earning a huge amount of money and shattering global box office records. At the time that Star Wars was sweeping at the cinemas, Scorsese’s latest film New York New York was being absolutely obliterated by critics and bombed at the box office.
Because of this, it marked a new era in cinema in which the pictures that Scorsese wanted to make would be replaced by the kinds of pictures that Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make, with the independent revolution slowly dying as the studios once again reclaimed power and aligned with the directors that could earn them more money.
It was through this era that we saw the birth of what we now would call commercial films or as Scorsese so aptly called it, ‘roller-coaster’ pictures, referring to conglomerate studios like Marvel who create visual spectacles without any artistic substance.
When describing this era in cinema, Scorsese highlighted the importance of one film in particular that marked the end of the New Hollywood movement and welcomed in the studio system, saying, “Everything changed, I think. The end of the ’70s was the last golden period of cinema in America. The power of the director ended with the Heaven’s Gate opening, which is a picture that actually has some extraordinary things in it. And the next thing you knew, E.T. made so much money, and it only cost $10million. It made, I think, what, $700million? The plug was kind of pulled. And it got pretty rough”.
While directors like Lucas and Spielberg argued that the success of their blockbuster films subsidised the arthouse films that Scorsese wanted to make, Scorsese argued that they didn’t subsidise everything else but took over everything else. The rise of these pictures hurt his career, with the director saying, “I had to start all over again. I was trying to do Last Temptation of Christ at Paramount. The climate just wasn’t right, and the plug was pulled. I came back to New York, and I made this low-budget film, After Hours, where I was trying to learn if I could do a film again in 40 days rather than 100 days”.
