The Contemporary Screenplay and Screenwriting Manual

Abstract

For Peter Biskind,

[t]he thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it.¹

The kind of film the passing of which Biskind laments is one that New Hollywood writers and directors had modified from European cinema of the 1950s, characterised by a relatively aimless protagonist, or one who could not fully understand the motivations behind his or her actions, or the actions of others. From Zavattini to Godard, there is the idea that story itself is suspect, an act of bad faith that places an externally imposed structuring principle on life; and traces of this European influence, combined with the broader counter-cultural and anti-establishment movements of the 1960s, can be seen in the screenplays considered in the previous chapter, notably Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. One manifestation of this resistance to narrative was the ‘open’ ending, in which significant questions are left unresolved, or resonating in the spectator’s mind; a late example is Being There (1979).