8 Film scholar Peter Stanfield looks at a generation of new filmmakers who came up during the 1960s and 1970s and told stories about gritty, dirty, hard-working, and sometimes corrupt characters who tried to make it big amidst the glitz and glamour of Old Hollywood. How New Hollywood Reinvented Its Image By Turning to the Grimy Past By Luis Polanco As a book reviewer, I much prefer to read an assigned book with a physical book instead of a PDF on a screen. Screens are exhausting — not to mention any of the depressing effects of screens on our bodies and mental health, according to some studies. TV screens, phone screens, monitor screens, touchscreens at grocery stores, convenience stores, and pharmacies. Screens are so prevalent in every arena of our daily lives, whether for business, entertainment, or socializing, that when I sit down — or in reality, lie down in bed — to read a book, I want to hold the weight of the book in my hands (light and limp or heavy yet hollow), feel the texture of the pages on my fingertips (grainy or smooth), smell the scent of the pages (woody or chemical), and I want to make the cerebral act of reading into a bodily pleasure. So it’s to my dismay that I must review this book using a PDF instead of a physical advance reader copy, as was the case when I received Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys (344 pgs., Reaktion Books, 2024, $25), a new book by the author and film scholar Peter Stanfield, whose previous books, A Band with Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk and Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ’n’ Roll, cover pop culture and music. Of course, reviewing a book doesn’t change the process of required planning and preparing to write a review. The content of the book will always be the same whether in a PDF format or a material book. And most PDF-viewing applications allow you to highlight text and add notes, as you might with a physical book in your hands. Much of that stays the same, but at least with a physical advance reader copy, my eyes get a break. Perhaps some of the subjects of Stanfield’s book might appreciate this light-hearted sermon on the analog pleasures of reading a physical book. In Dirty Real, Stanfield is interested in the transition period from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, and how out of the latter came a coterie of filmmakers and artists who took to playing city cowboys, Harley-riding hippies, blue-collar workers, desert outlaws, and high school bad boys, all varieties of anti-heroes to represent a gritty authenticity. Stanfield’s deep dive into the genre of the dirty real centers on a specific set of movies from the era: Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971), Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971), Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Daryl Duke’s Payday (1973), Bill L. Norton’s Cisco Pike (1972), Stan Dragoti’s Dirty Little Billy (1972), Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966), Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), and TwoLane Blacktop (1971) — most of which riff on the American Western, and nearly half of which feature either Jack Nicholson or Kris Kristofferson. According to Stanfield, there are a few precursors to the dirty real figure of the cowboy, the vagrant, the reckless country singer, the teenage runaway, and so on. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan symbolized the poetic bad boy. Across his filmography, actor Humphrey Bogart played characters known for their unapologetic image of masculinity and authenticity, especially in his role as Fred C. Dobbs, the tough roughneck adrift in John Huston’s 1948 Western The Treasure of Sierra Madre. In popular music of the time, rock ‘n’ roll musicians like The Rolling Stones fulfilled the desire for role models known for their hard living and a penchant for sex and drugs. And yet, as Stanfield points out, underneath the dirty realist’s no-nonsense macho facade of grit and dirt was a schoolboy with a prim and proper middle-class background. “The middle-class dropout resurfacing as a bohemian artist, poet, painter, troubadour or film-maker is the shadow figure who flits through the following pages of Dirty Real, both as a protagonist in the films and as a persona adopted by the film-makers themselves,” writes Stanfield of his subjects. Despite New Hollywood’s disapproval of the phoniness and distracting glamour of Old Hollywood, the dirty realism of the new generation of filmmakers adopted their own mask as downand-out troublemakers, agitators, and loners. Of the films and filmmakers Stanfield writes about in his book, he says, “The films’ characters, as with the actors, writers and directors, were costumed in the pitch that showed too an acute nostalgia for the gutter none had known at first hand.” With Dirty Real, Stanfield has written a fascinating study of how Hollywood filmmakers in the late 1960s and 1970s revamped their style to become grittier, dirtier, and gutsier. There are a few precursors to the dirty real figure of the cowboy, the vagrant, the reckless country singer, the teenage runaway, and so on. VIDEOAGE November 2024 Book Review
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