In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life.

Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking.

Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

Introduction: The New Hollywood Revisited
Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis
1. The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman's Film:
The Age of Ambivalence Revisited
Molly Haskell
2. Antonioni's America: Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point,
and the Making of a New Hollywood
Jon Lewis
3. "Jason's No Businessman... I Think He's an Artist":
BBS and the New Hollywood Dream
Jonathan Kirshner
4. Robert Altman: Documentaries, Dreamscapes,
and Dialogic Cinema
David Sterritt
5. City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and
the New Hollywood Cinema
Heather Hendershot
6. The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone?
David Thomson
7. Cinematic Tone in Polanski's Chinatown: Can "Life"
Itself Be "False"?
Robert Pippin
8. "I Don't Know What to Do with My Hands":
John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
George Kouvaros
9. The Spirit of '76: Travis, Rocky, and Jimmy Carter
J. Hoberman
Coda: What "Golden Age"? A Dissenting Opinion
Phillip Lopate
Appendix: Time Line—the New Hollywood Years
Notes on Contributors
Notes
Index