As with all old media, the movie business is in decline. This is partly because of the fast-growing popularity of competing new-media “platforms” like online entertainment and video games, and partly because the disintegration of America’s common culture has led to the shrinking of the market for the big-budget, mass-audience films that have always been Hollywood’s stock in trade. The decline may not be as steep as in the music business, but it is worrisome enough—and it is exacerbated by something less tangible than receipts. This is the growing feeling that American filmmakers have lost their collective touch: that they are no longer capable of making movies that large numbers of adults want to see. To be sure, the fact that today’s big-budget films are radically different in character from those of the not-so-distant past does not necessarily make them inferior. And while it is true that a considerable number of critics (myself among them) believe that the American film industry has lost its way, many seem to be motivated less by the critical spirit than by simple nostalgia for the 70’s, the decade when Hollywood was turning out such films as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Memorable as these movies were, however, I cannot help noting that the 70’s also brought us Airport, The Exorcist, Saturday Night Fever, and countless other successful films of similarly ephemeral interest.

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