In 2003 the Independent Film Channel produced a nearly three-hour long three-part documentary called A Decade Under The Influence (a nod to the 1974 John Cassavetes film A Woman Under The Influence), about American cinema during the 1970s. The general posit of the film, co-directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese, is that the 1970s were a ‘tweener period between the collapse of the old Hollywood film studio system and the rise of the Lowest Common Denominator summer blockbuster mentality, ushered in by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, that destroyed the template of directors having control and authorship of their works.
Now, anyone that has even a passing interest in film, American or otherwise, cannot disagree with this premise. The problem is that the documentary itself is all style (including a great opening musical track) and no substance. In short, it’s an MTV-like hyperreal and scattershot take on the films from that decade, which were anything but hyperreal and scattershot. Imagine Steven Spielberg bemoaning the loss of Orson Welles when his career is the utter antithesis of that man’s. Hypocrisy is a word that floats to mind. That or an ironic streak beyond sharp. Go with the former, people!
The film starts out with an homage to the European greats of the 1960s, who helped inspire the younger Americans. It also has the usual 1970s crowd of filmmakers, from greats like Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese to once-greats like Francis Ford Coppola and Hal Ashby, to has-beens like Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin, to never-weres like Monte Hellman. And there are some classic clips from Easy Rider, The Godfather, Bonnie And Clyde, Chinatown, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, The Graduate, Annie Hall, Network, and others, but it’s all perfunctory, surface, and vain. Not a single film nor scene is really looked at, analyzed, put into a blender and studied for why it worked, why it worked in the context it did, nor why such scenes are absent from the films of the Peter Jacksons and Michael Bays.
This is because there is not a single film critic or historian to counterbalance the non-stop critical fellatio these filmmakers give each other. Yes, critics and historians can be as blowhardy as this filmmaking lot, but at least it would have been wind from another direction, and one more in tune with the public. This film lacks any real insight and is too fawning, as if a study of a small group of adepts who have a secret they don’t want others to know. The problem is that their secret is well known and their acting like they can keep it is just plain silly.
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