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Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History 1960s |
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Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History 1960s |
Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.
Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points (by decade) |
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1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s |
| Year | Event and Significance |
| 1960 | The master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock's psychological horror-thriller film Psycho terrified audiences. It served as the "mother" of all modern horror suspense films, featuring Bernard Herrmann's famous and memorable score with shrieking, harpie-like piercing violins, and the notorious shower scene. It was the first American film ever to show a toilet flushing on screen. |
| 1960 | Alfred Hitchcock received his fifth and last nomination as Best Director for Psycho (1960). His four previous nominations (all losses) were for Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), and Rear Window (1954). |
| 1960 | Michael Powell's disastrous Peeping Tom, a UK film about a voyeuristic photographer and sadistic serial murderer, was so vilified at the time of its release that it nearly destroyed Powell's career. However, critics, archivists, and other film enthusiasts, notably Martin Scorsese, have championed the film since then. |
| 1960 | The talented scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, received full credit for writing the screenplays for Preminger's Exodus and Kubrick's Spartacus, thus becoming the first blacklisted writer to receive screen credit. In 1960, Trumbo was finally reinstated in the Writers Guild of America. This official recognition effectively brought an end to the HUAC 'blacklist era'. (After his blacklisting, he wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms, such as the co-written Gun Crazy (1949) with the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, and Roman Holiday (1953) under the name Ian McLellan Hunter (he was properly credited and given a posthumous Oscar for the latter in 1992). He also won the Best Writing: Original Story Oscar for The Brave One (1956), written under the front name of Robert Rich. He wasn't presented with his award until May of 1975, almost 20 years later.) |
| 1960 | 31 year-old Stanley Kubrick was brought in to salvage the epic costume drama Spartacus (originally directed by Anthony Mann) -- a highly-successful production by star Kirk Douglas. It was auteur Kubrick's sole work for hire - he was able to avoid Hollywood almost completely afterwards, and began to direct movies on his own. |
| 1960 | The first feature film released in Panavision was Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960). The film was also the last B/W film to win the Best Picture Academy Award Oscar until Schindler's List (1993). |
| 1960 | Gimmicky Smell-O-Vision, developed by Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed showman, piped odors or scents (through a "scent vent") to each seat in a theatre auditorium. Scent of Mystery (aka Holiday in Spain) was the only film made in Smell-O-Vision. (Over twenty years later, cult director John Waters paid homage to Smell-O-Vision with scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" cards for his classic film Polyester (1981).) |
| 1960 | The decline of Italian Neo-Realism was evidenced by director Federico Fellini's epic film La Dolce Vita and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. |
| 1960 | Exploitation producer/director Roger Corman directed the original version of the low-budget horror comedy The Little Shop of Horrors, featuring an early appearance by actor Jack Nicholson. The cult film, a satire of the teen horror exploitation film, was later created in differing versions, including a big-budget off-Broadway rock musical in 1982 (and subsequently a Broadway production), director Frank Oz's expensive musical comedy remake Little Shop of Horrors (1986) (with an Oscar-nominated song: "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space"), and a Saturday morning cartoon series called Little Shop in 1991. |
| 1960 | Although the tradition of embedding 5-pointed pink stars in the sidewalk ("the Hollywood Walk of Fame") along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was established by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, it wasn't until February 9, 1960 that the first star was awarded to actress Joanne Woodward. |
| 1960 | Low-budget showman William Castle (known as "The King of Ballyhoo") released his first "Illusion-O" feature film, 13 Ghosts - audience members were given red-and-blue colored 'ghost-viewers' in order to see the ghosts on-screen in the haunted house. |
| 1961 | The Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, Germany was closed during the production of Billy Wilder's Cold War comedy One, Two, Three (1961), forcing the studio to build a replica on a sound stage. The closing of the Gate was the precursor to the construction of the Berlin Wall -- and led to the film's famous opening lines, delivered in voice-over: "On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs #44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with - REAL SHIFTY!" |
| 1961 | Sophia Loren was the first foreign-language performer to win the Best Actress prize for Two Women (1960) - in a film that was not in English. She currently remains the only actress to win an acting Oscar in a foreign-language film. |
| 1961 | Alain Resnais' enigmatic, puzzling, hallucinatory, and dream-like Last Year at Marienbad (aka L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, Fr.), was a film that explored the themes of time, truth and memory. It was one of the first films in a strong wave of post-war European art movies in the early 1960s. |
| 1961 | The 1957 Broadway hit West Side Story was adapted for the big screen, receiving eleven Academy Award nominations and winning all but one - Best Adapted Screenplay. Its achievement as a ten Oscar winner was only surpassed by three other films (each with eleven Oscars): Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Its many Oscars included wins for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris), Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno), and Best Director (co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). The Best Director Oscar marked the first time that awards went to co-directors, and Robbins was the only Best Director Oscar winner to win for the only film he ever directed. |
| 1961 | Audrey Hepburn starred as NYC socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Henry Mancini won two Oscars (Best Score and Best Song - Moon River) and four Grammy Awards for his musical score. |
| 1961 | TWA exhibited the first in-flight feature film on a regularly-scheduled commercial airline. It was MGM's By Love Possessed, starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., shown on TWA flights from New York to Los Angeles. |
| 1961 | The film How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), the first wide-screen CinemaScope Hollywood comedy, was the first film to be aired on the weekly NBC series Saturday Night at the Movies - in September of 1961. |
| 1961 | Method actor and maverick auteur film-maker John Cassavetes' low-budget, black and white, non-Hollywood studio film Shadows, was his first directorial effort - deliberately created as a contrast to Hollywood's studio system. The self-financed, self-distributed cinema verite film (initially shot in 1957) with a jazzy score was a story about an inter-racial couple. It was first publically screened in 1958, but then withdrawn, reshot in 1959, and then re-released - first to European audiences and then to US audiences in 1961. Shot on 16-mm film and using a non-professional cast and crew, the improvisational film symbolized the emergence of the New American Cinema movement, and inspired the growth of underground films and other independent ("indie") and personal works. |
| 1961 | The daringly courageous, landmark UK film, Victim, a noirish thriller starring leading man Dirk Bogarde, was the first important British film with a non-judgmental homosexual theme - a major turning point. It was the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual." Without prejudicial stereotypes, its message was tolerance at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime in the UK and US. [Six years later, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 finally decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults over the age of 21 (with a number of exceptions) in the UK.] As it pushed the boundaries of permissiveness, it was denied a 'seal of approval' from the MPAA for its US release in 1962. |
| 1961 | Marilyn Monroe's last completed film, before her death in 1962, was director John Huston's anti-western The Misfits (1961) -- it was also the last film of screen icon Clark Gable. |
| 1962 | More than 700 foreign-language films were released in US theaters during 1962. |
| 1962 | 36 year old sex symbol Marilyn Monroe died (August 5) in the Los Angeles area (Brentwood) in a Mexican style bungalow of an apparent drug overdose. She was in the midst of filming with director George Cukor in Something's Got To Give (1962). Speculations arose over her associations with President John F. Kennedy and his brother. |
| 1962 | Dr. No inaugurated the successful, long-running, and highly profitable James Bond series of action films based upon Ian Fleming's works, with its first Agent 007 -- unknown actor Sean Connery. Other lead characters included George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig. Two non-canonical Bond films were Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983). |
| 1962 | The controversial production of Lolita, the first of Kubrick's films produced independently in England, was marked by a long casting search for the proper 'Lolita', the appointment of Vladimir Nabokov to write the screenplay for his own lengthy novel, Kubrick's rewriting (with co-producer James B. Harris) of Nabokov's unacceptable versions of the script, and the threat of censorship and denial of a Seal of Approval from the film industry's production code. |
| 1962 | Universal was purchased by talent agency MCA. |
| 1962 | Government regulations forced studios out of the talent agency business. |
| 1962 | The multi-directed Western epic How the West Was Won was the first non-documentary Cinerama film. It was also one of the last to use the old three-camera technique, that produced visible lines between the three panels. |
| 1962 | Marlon Brando was paid $1.25 million for his role in MGM's flop Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) as Fletcher Christian. It was a record sum - he was the first actor to break the $1 million threshold. |
| 1963 | Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor Academy Award (awarded in 1964) for Lilies of the Field, thereby becoming the first African-American to win this award. This was the only instance in the 20th century that this award was given to an African-American. |
| 1963 | Director Shirley Clarke's mainstream, fictional feature crime film The Cool World, a cinema verite-style examination of the rise of the Black Power movement and street gangs among African-Americans in the inner-city, was the first commercial film venture to be shot on location in Harlem. It was also the first feature film produced by documentarian Frederick Wiseman. |
| 1963 | The most expensive film ever made (in terms of real costs adjusted for inflation) -- and one of the biggest flops in film history -- opened: Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Negative publicity was generated by the off-screen extra-marital affair conducted between major stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (as Julius Caesar) (married to Eddie Fisher and Sybil Burton respectively) - in the long run, it was beneficial for the film's bottom line, since it became the most expensive film made-to-date. The stars' off-screen indiscretions helped (although they were criticized on moral grounds), but it took many years for the film to recoup its enormous costs. |
| 1963 | Elizabeth Taylor was the first female star (or actress) to be paid a record $1 million for a film, for her lead role in the legendary epic film Cleopatra (1963). |
| 1963 | Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, an epic comedy with a lengthy running time (originally 175 minutes) and a huge cast (present day comedians and cameos from many big-name legendary stars from the past), was the first big-budget, all-star comedy extravaganza. |
| 1963 | Ampex, which had developed the world's first practical videotape recorder in 1956 for TV studios, began to offer its first consumer version of a videotape recorder, sold through the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue for $30,000 - a non consumer-friendly price. |
| 1963 | Friz Freleng (and David DePatie) created the cool, bluesy 'The Pink Panther' animation with a pink feline character for the opening credits of The Pink Panther. |
| 1963 | The low-budget, exploitative, and successful film company - American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956, released their first "beach" film (mostly to drive-in theatres), the first of a 'beach movie' cycle of films - the musical comedy Beach Party. It was designed to appeal to the lucrative teen market, and was the first of a number of films to star popular singer Frankie Avalon and grown-up ex-Disney Mickey Mouse Club Mousketeer Annette Funicello (as Dolores or "DeeDee" in later films). |
| 1963 | The first theater originally designed (by inventor Stanley Durwood of American Multi-Cinema, now AMC Theatres) as a multiplex (a multi-screen movie theatre) opened in the Ward Parkway shopping center in Kansas City - it was called Parkway Twin (for its two screens). Megaplex screens (with up to 24 screens) and stadium-style seating would become additional features. |
| 1963 | Buxom, platinum blonde sex goddess/siren Jayne Mansfield appeared naked (breasts and buttocks) in the unrated sex farce Promises! Promises! (1963). Mansfield became the first mainstream actress to appear nude in an American feature sound film. (The honor would have been held by Marilyn Monroe in Something's Gotta Give (1962), but she died during production.) The original version was banned in many cities (including Cleveland) and substituted with an edited version. The provocative film was heavily publicized in Playboy's June 1963 issue, with pictures to prove it, that led to the magazine's publisher Hugh Hefner being charged with obscenity (and later acquitted) -- the only time in his life. |
| 1964 | The first feature-length made-for-TV movie, an action film titled See How They Run and starring John Forsythe and Senta Berger, was broadcast on NBC-TV for its world premiere. It was the first broadcast of Project 120, an innovative deal between Universal and NBC. |
| 1964 | Michelangelo Antonioni's and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's visually-impressive French-Italian co-production Red Desert made spectacular use of the recently-perfected telephoto lens, to create a shallow depth-of-field. It was also Antonioni's first film in color, used in extreme and expressive ways. |
| 1964 | The mockumentary A Hard Day's Night, the first Beatles film, premiered. |
| 1964 | Sony began marketing the first reel-to-reel (video tape recorder) VTR designed specifically for home use in 1964 -- however, widescale consumer use of video tape recorders didn't really take off until the mid-1970s. |
| 1964 | Director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative black comedy/fantasy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics was released, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The landmark film - the first commercially-successful political satire about nuclear war, was a cynically-objective, Monty Python-esque, humorous, biting response to the apocalyptic fears of the 1950s. |
| 1964 | Goldfinger (1964), the third James Bond film in the long-running series, was the first James Bond film to receive an Academy Awards Oscar - Best Sound Effects Editing. It was also the first Bond film to receive an Academy Awards nomination. |
| 1964 | Ronald Reagan's last feature film appearance was in director Don Siegel's post-noir crime thriller The Killers in which he played 'heavy' or bad-guy crime boss Jack Browning - the first time he had ever played a villain. |
| 1965 | The film version of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music premiered. At the time of its release, it surpassed Gone With the Wind (1939) as the number one box office hit of all time. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it came away with five major wins including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Wise). |
| 1965 | Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker became the first major Hollywood film to daringly and boldly feature a sequence of partial nudity (the bared breasts of Thelma Oliver), essential to the plot. However, it received the infamous "condemned" rating from the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency. |
| 1965 | A small-time TV comedy writer Woody Allen wrote his first feature length screenplay for director Richard Donner's unexpectedly-successful sex farce What's New Pussycat?, with Allen in his first major screen role. Because the writer/star disliked the film, he would proceed to his directorial debut for What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), a satire/spoof of quickly-made, badly-dubbed, exploitative, Japanese spy films, made in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. |
| 1965 | Blonde teen star and the original Gidget character - Sandra Dee - was the last major star still under exclusive contract to a studio (Universal). |
| 1965 | Director John Lamb's nudist film, The Raw Ones, that extolled the virtues of a naturist lifestyle, was the first to openly show genitalia -- now allowed after a 1963 legal decision that ruled such displays of private parts were not obscene. This was an essential linkpin between the non-genital 'nudie-cutie' films of the late 50s, and the hard-core porn films of the 70s. |
| 1965 | The first Oscar-winning performance for a short, backside nude scene was for Julie Christie's portrayal of Diana Scott - an ambitious, vain, irresponsible, ruthless, promiscuous, and selfish hip, mini-skirted London model who tempted a serious-minded married journalist (Dirk Bogarde), and then tired and became a decadent, international celebrity/swinger, and finally ended up living a meaningless life as a disillusioned, bored wife of an Italian prince in Darling. |
