Empire Online take a look at a movement which had a huge influence on the DNA of the Star Wars and the blockbuster era that followed it. Of course, I’m talking about the Movie Brats.
What is it? Contained within a broader wave of filmmakers (Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich) storming the barricades of Hollywood following the demise of the studio system in the late ’60s, the Movie Brats, so named in a seminal study by Michael Pye and Linda Myles, were generally younger and more facially hairy than their counterparts. They were the first generation of filmmakers who hadn’t come through the system or via theatre, novels or television; instead they had learned film as film. Raised on watching movies on TV from an early age, they had learned their craft at film school — Coppola at UCLA, Lucas and Milius at USC, Scorsese at NYU and De Palma at Columbia, whereas Spielberg created his own movie curriculum by making films from 11 — and as such were both technically proficient — listen out for the dense use of sound in the films of Coppola and Lucas — and steeped in film lore. The Movie Brats films are choc-a-bloc with allusions to other films, be it Hitchcock (De Palma), Kurosawa (Milius) and Walt Disney (Spielberg). The level of referencing in Scorsese’s New York, New York makes QT look like a dilettante.
