Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1970s

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)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1970s - Part 1

Year	Event and Significance
1970	George C. Scott won the Best Actor Oscar for his memorable performance in Patton but then refused the gold statuette and didn't attend the awards ceremony.
1970	Disaster films became a main staple of films in the 70s -- the trend began with Airport (1970). The entire disaster film craze was really kick-started by The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
1970	The IMAX wide-screen format premiered in the Fuji Pavilion at the EXPO '70 in Osaka, Japan, with the 17-minute film Tiger Child.
1970	Nevada millionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM in 1970, and then promptly downsized the company. He sold off acres of the studio's real estate of backlots, and its valuable film memorabilia (such as Dorothy's The Wizard of Oz ruby slippers) for a fraction of its real value. The sell-off financed an expansion of Kerkorian's hotel-casino investments, and began a decline for the studio.
1970	The popular landmark tear-jerker and commercially-successful film Love Story, adapted from Eric Segal's screenplay and thin novel, was the first modern romance film blockbuster. Its story of a rich boy/poor girl romance, was backed by Paramount's fast-living head of production Robert Evans. It averted the struggling studio from financial collapse, and beautiful Ali McGraw (Evans married the starlet) was put on the January 11, 1971 cover of Time Magazine. Evans later made the equally-successful The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part 2 (1974) films and Chinatown (1974) in the early 70s.
1970	Following in the tradition of the "Kitchen Sink" UK films in the 50s and 60s, director Ken Loach's low-budget, documentary-style, second feature-film Kes, released in 1969, has since been regarded as one of the best British films ever made (it was a Best Film nominee for the 1971 BAFTA Film Awards). The dark and moving independent film was a heartbreaking, authentic, coming-of-age family drama about an abused 15 year old working-class Yorkshire boy who found meaning in his life by raising a baby kestrel (falcon). Surprisingly, the starkly-truthful and socially-conscious naturalistic film was never released commercially in the US.
1970	Let It Be was released, the last film starring the Fab Four; this effort chronicled the Beatles recording their last-produced Apple studios album - a comeback attempt that actually led to their breakup.
Early 1970s	Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) were representative of the New Hollywood movement of unconventional auteur directors with new ideas and personal visions. In 1971, USC film school graduate George Lucas released his first full-length feature film, THX 1138.
1970-71	For her performance in Women in Love (1969, UK), actress Glenda Jackson became the first performer to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for a role in which she appeared nude.
1971	Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev's controversial, X-rated, montage-filled, avante-garde, documentary-fiction film titled W.R.- Mysteries of the Organism was reportedly the first film to depict full frontal nudity amidst its plentiful nude sex scenes and frank dialogue about free love, masturbation and orgasm. The film engendered intense criticism and censorship demands, and was banned in the director's own native Yugoslavia.
1971	The blaxploitation film genre, with anti-Hollywood films aimed at a primarily African-American audience, was born with Melvin Van Peebles' groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! -- the first commercially-successful black-themed film. It forced Hollywood to acknowledge the monetary potential of the untapped, urban African-American market (similar to the effect Easy Rider (1969) had on its countercultural audiences) as a result of this influential film. The landmark crime/action blaxploitation film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree as a defiantly-proud black hero, was directed by Gordon Parks and would become a major cross-over hit. From then on through the end of the decade (but mostly in the first half of the decade), over 200 films would be released by major and independent studios which featured major black characters (and some black athletes such as Jim Brown and Rosie Grier), to profit from the black movie-going audiences. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson would play similar hard-edged roles for whites. Blaxploitation cinema experienced a revival in the late 1990s, with Larry Cohen's Original Gangstas (1996), reuniting stars from the earlier era. The director of Pulp Fiction (1994), Quentin Tarantino, paid homage to the blaxploitation genre twenty-five years later with Jackie Brown (1998), starring Pam Grier.
Early 70s	The success of blaxploitation films led to an onslaught of other black exploitation genres, with numerous remakes or lesser imitations ranging from westerns to martial arts kung fu films to horror and gangster films. Sample films included Hit Man (1972), Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1973), and Larry Cohen's Black Caesar (1973). However, the vast majority of these films were still distributed, produced, and controlled by non-blacks. All of the blaxploitation films set the stage for Hip Hop music and subculture, future directors such as Spike Lee and John Singleton, and movies like Harlem Nights (1989), Posse (1993), the Beverly Hills Cop series, and Pulp Fiction (1994).
1971	Two films released about the same time resurrected the controversy over violence in films: (1) Stanley Kubrick's satirical A Clockwork Orange - rated X and responsible for copy-cat crimes in the UK, prompting the director to withdraw the dystopic film about social conditioning and free will from distribution for many years; and (2) Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - criticized for glorifying violence rather than commenting upon it, re-edited for an R-rating, and banned in England for 30 years. [A Clockwork Orange was also the first film to use Dolby technology for its sound recording.]
1971	Billy Jack was the first film to be marketed in 'wide-release' at many theatrical venues on the same day. This was a change from the previous strategy of testing a film in a few markets to first see if results were positive, before expanding its market. This same marketing strategy was used for Spielberg's major blockbuster Jaws (1975) - and paved the way for the method in which all major releases are done today.
1972	The popular, low-budget, adult-oriented, X-rated Deep Throat, the second hard-core pornography feature film released in the US (after Behind the Green Door) contributed to the explosion of the porn industry and 'porn chic' by being exhibited in many mainstream film theatres. It was one of the most financially successful films ever made (grossing over $1,000,000, but costing only $24,000 to make).
1972	HBO transmitted its first cable television programming to 365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, PA -- this marked the start of pay-TV service for cable.
1972	The AVCO Cartrivision system (for CARTRIdige teleVISION) was a combination receiver / recorder / playback unit. It was also the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies (from Columbia Pictures) for sale and rental -- three years before Sony's Betamax VCR system emerged into the market. However, the company went out of business a year later.
1972	Sony introduced the U-Matic line of video cassette recorders.
1972	Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a reinvention of the gangster genre, was finally released. It won three Oscars from its ten nominations, including awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando, who refused to accept the award) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola). Sacheen Littlefeather declined Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar in the 1973 awards ceremony as a protest against government Indian policies. The Godfather was the first US film to gross $100 million domestically at the box office in its initial release.
1972	Director Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial, X-rated Last Tango in Paris was released to protest and criticism due to its explicit sexual content. Actor Marlon Brando and Bertolucci both earned Oscar nominations - making them the only Oscar nominees for an X-rated film that hasn't been re-rated since its release.
1972	Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat was the first X-rated animated feature in Hollywood history.
1973	Warner Bros. had its first major hit with the sensational and shocking The Exorcist, an originally X-rated film that encouraged the trend for big-budget horror films, other cheaply-made imitations - and more blockbusters.
1973	The once-powerful MGM Studios abandoned most of its movie-making business because of a string of failures due to ownership changes and bad production choices by head Kirk Kerkorian, who sold MGM's distribution system, and gradually distanced himself from the daily operation of the studio.
1973	The science-fiction classic Westworld was the first movie to make use of "digitized images", a primitive term for what has evolved into CGI (computer-generated imagery) in the present day.
1973	To maximize profits from weekend audiences, the industry decided to move major film openings from mid-week to Fridays.
1973	George Lucas' idea for Star Wars was declined by Universal and subsequently accepted by Twentieth Century Fox after his success with the nostalgic American Graffiti. It was one of the biggest hits of the year, with unknown but up-and-coming star Harrison Ford.
1973	In negotiations with Fox, George Lucas wisely cut his directing fee for Star Wars (1977) by $500,000 in order to gain ownership of merchandising and sequel rights. In a revolutionary approach to Hollywood film-making and merchandising, Lucas wisely accepted the small fee of $175,000 in return for the much more lucrative forty percent of merchandising rights for his Star Wars Corporation. Merchandising of movie paraphernalia associated with the film encouraged an entire marketing industry of Star Wars-related items (i.e., toys, video games, novelty items at fast food restaurants, etc.).
1973	The first full film score written by a popular artist for a film was in director Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with music by pop artist Bob Dylan. Dylan also made his acting debut as the mysterious Alias, one of Billy's sidekicks.
1974	Tobe Hooper's milestone cult slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released, inspired by the real-life Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein (also responsible for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)), featuring a horrifying, mask-wearing, chainsaw-threatening Leatherface character.
1974	Director Roman Polanski's neo-noir Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, was released, and grossed $30 million - much more than its budget of $6 million. Twenty-five percent of the film was financed by a tax shelter syndicate which received about 10 percent of the profits in return -- this avenue of film financing has since been closed by order of federal regulation.
1974	Best Director-winning Francis Ford Coppola's critically-acclaimed, Best Picture-winning gangster epic sequel The Godfather, Part II, -- actually a prequel -- was one of the rare instances in which the sequel was superior to the original film. It became the first 'sequel' to win Best Picture. It would help launch the trend toward blockbuster sequels.
1974	The hit disaster film Earthquake featured a gimmick called Sensurround, which created synchronized vibrations in theaters by means of thumping bass sounds. The scenes of the crumbling destruction of Los Angeles by a powerful earthquake were accompanied by the first use of low-frequency bass rumbling Sensurround (responsible for the film's only Academy Award Oscar win: Best Sound Oscar) and quite impressive special effects.
1974	People Magazine was launched.
1974	Hunger, an animated film short (11 minutes long) without dialogue from the National Film Board of Canada (and director Peter Foldes) was the first to use computer digitization to interpolate (or 'fill in') the animated action between various key cells drawn free-hand, although it had experimentally been demonstrated with his earlier film, Metadata (1971). The film's director was the first animator to use computer animation (a computer-assisted 'key-frame animation' system) that imitated conventional cel animation. Black and white animated illustrations appeared against a colored backdrop, with surrealistic figures that fluidly dissolved and reshaped themselves to take new forms - an early and primitive example of morphing. It was the first computer-animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Film (Animated) category. It also won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that same year.
1974	In the era before video stores and widespread availability of films for viewing, the LA-based, premium cable outlet Z Channel exerted a tremendous impact on the film industry. One of the first pay cable stations, it provided a wide variety of innovative programming from its troubled head Jerry Harvey in the 80s, including on-air film festivals, foreign films, hard-to-find rare classics, non-mainstream films, original and uncut 'director's versions,' works of new talent (actors, directors, and writers), late-night European softcore features (often starring Laura Antonelli), and the airing of other independent productions. The channel often regenerated interest in critically-acclaimed films that had flopped on initial release (i.e., Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986) or Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)). By the late 80s, the cable channel was eventually forced out of the market by giants HBO and Showtime when it was acquired in 1988 by a company that decided to combine its movie programming with sports.