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Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History 1980s |
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Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History 1980s |
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 |
| 1980 | Ronald Reagan was elected the first movie-star president of the United States, noted for films such as Kings Row (1942) and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). |
| 1980 | 36 year-old Sherry Lansing became the first female to head a major studio when she became president of 20th Century Fox studios. |
| 1980 | UA premiered Heaven's Gate (1980) in late 1980, and then withdrew it for re-editing, and re-released it in 1981. The disastrous film marked the start of the death-knell of the American Auteur period that had blossomed in the 1970s, with original works by directors and producers, including Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976)), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show (1971)), Woody Allen (Annie Hall (1976)), and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter (1978)). |
| 1980 | Exemplifying dedication to the art of realistic acting, Robert De Niro set the world record for most weight gained for a film by gaining 50-60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. |
| 1980 | The Tinto Brass/Bob Guccione (publisher of Penthouse Magazine) trashy, adult-rated film Caligula (1979) engendered controversy over its graphic sexual content (self-rated for MA - Mature Audiences only), when released in the US in 1980. The high-profile film was a remarkable production, considering that it featured eminent film actors (John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell, and Helen Mirren) and an adapted screenplay by Gore Vidal. |
| 1980 | Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic drama Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally 15 and a half hours in length, was serialized into 14 parts (of varying lengths) for television viewing. Three years later in 1983, it was also released for theatrical viewing to US theaters. |
| 1980 | The acclaimed British director and "Master of Suspense" Alfred Hitchcock died at the age of 80. He was often noted as the originator of the "thriller" genre, the director of England's first feature-length sound film Blackmail (1929), the director of one of Hollywood's 3-D pictures Dial M for Murder (1954) and the originator of all slasher films Psycho (1960). His films were known for their themes and characters: an innocent man wrongly-accused (i.e., North by Northwest (1959)), sexual obsession (i.e., Vertigo (1958)), McGuffins, and cool blondes. |
| 1981 | Katharine Hepburn won her record fourth acting Oscar - Best Actress for her performance in On Golden Pond. She became the first performer to win that many Best Actress awards - the most successful actress in the award's history. |
| 1981 | The Best Picture winner this year was a surprise and major upset win for British producer David Puttnam's low-budget Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson, with seven nominations and four wins. The win signaled the start of another mini-British renaissance of film awards for this year and the next - with Gandhi (1982) soon breaking all British film Oscar records. |
| 1981 | MGM made a comeback when it was split into a hotel empire and a movie company in 1980, and then acquired United Artists. UA was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the disastrous Heaven's Gate (1981). The regular release of James Bond films provided most of the studio's hits for the remainder of the decade. |
| 1981 | MTV, a music video channel on cable, was launched 24/7. Its style of fast-moving montage was influential on films such as Flashdance (1983). |
| 1981 | Steven Spielberg's summer box-office hit Raiders of the Lost Ark was a breathlessly-paced throwback to cliff-hanging, non-stop action/adventure films of the past. This was the first collaboration between two legendary American film-makers, producer George Lucas and director Spielberg. Spielberg's phenomenally successful film, that cost only $23 million and made more than $200 million, contributed to the demand for bigger blockbusters. It was the first of three Indiana Jones films (from 1981-1989), and went on to make Harrison Ford a major, bankable A-list star (in addition to his original Star Wars appearances). |
| 1981 | 43 year-old Actress Natalie Wood accidentally drowned off Catalina Island, during the filming of Peter Hyam's Brainstorm (1983), thereby necessitating the alteration and rewriting of the final film around her disappearance. Ironically, the film dealt with the question of the afterlife. |
| 1981 | The disco film musical Can't Stop the Music (1980) won the First Golden Raspberry Awards - a recognition given to the most banal and awful 'turkey' film of the year. |
| 1981 | Director/actor/producer/writer Jamie Uys's film The Gods Must Be Crazy - a comedy about a Kalahari desert Bushman named Xi who decided to take a journey to the edge of the world to return a peculiar foreign object (a Coca-Cola bottle) to the gods - became the biggest foreign box office hit in history, although it wasn't released in the US until 1984 (after it broke records internationally). |
| 1981 | Cult director John Waters paid homage to 60s' era Smell-O-Vision (inspired by William Castle's mystery film Scent of Mystery (1960)) with scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" cards for his classic film Polyester. |
| 1981 | John W. Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Notoriously, Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver (1976) was linked to and may have triggered the political assassination (copy-cat) attempt by the inconspicuous John Hinckley, illuminating his dangerous fixation on young actress Jodie Foster who had hoped that his "historical deed" would impress her and gain her "respect and love". Ultimately, it resulted in the assassin's infamous media-hero status - he was tried and found not guilty for reasons of insanity in 1982 and thereafter was confined to a Washington DC mental hospital. |
| 1981 | President Ronald Reagan supported government spending on abstinence education to prevent teen pregnancy (by promoting chastity and self-discipline), with the passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA). The prevalence of permissive attitudes, and of sex in films (the 80s was the age of the teenage sex comedy), TV, and in music helped to spur this movement ("Just say no"). |
| 1982 | Jim Clark founded Silicon Graphics, a cutting-edge company that contributed to the growth of computer imaging and animation in films. |
| 1982 | Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan just beat Tron (1982) into release, to attain the honor of being the first film to use computer-generated images (CGI) to any extent. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the "Genesis Effect" sequence was cinema's first entirely computer-generated (CG) sequence. This visual effect, a brief fully computer-generated sequence lasting about one minute, marked the first use of a fractal-generated landscape in a film (created by the Lucasfilm division of Pixar at ILM), and a particle-rendering system (for the fire effect). |
| 1982 | Walt Disney Studios' Tron was released as both a feature film (with more state-of-the-art computer-generated animation than any other film) and an arcade video game. This film was heralded as the first live action film with over 20 minutes of full 3D graphics and computer animation (extensive use of 3-D CGI in the famed 'light cycle' sequence). However, the film's failure at the box-office held up greater development of computer animation. |
| 1982 | Director Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial was released -- another all-time champion blockbuster. Special effects were produced by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) Company. |
| 1982 | During the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), two child actors (my-ca Dinh Le and Renee Chen) and Vic Morrow (the father of Jennifer Jason Leigh) were killed in a freak helicopter crash. As a result, greater precautions would be taken on Hollywood sets through the passage of reformed US child labor laws and safety regulations. Almost a decade later, director John Landis and four others were found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. |
| 1982 | Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly actress Grace Kelly, died at age 52 of injuries from a car crash when she suffered a heart attack. During her brief six-year film career, she rose to prominence in High Noon (1952) opposite Gary Cooper, appeared with James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), and won a Best Actress Oscar for The Country Girl (1954) before retiring in 1956. |
| 1982 | The first feature-length free-form 'music video' film was Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall, based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. |
| 1982 | The biggest home-video seller from 1983-1985 was Jane Fonda's exercise video titled Workout (aka Jane Fonda's Workout), first released in 1982. The trend continued in 1986 (the top seller was Jane Fonda's New Workout) and in 1987 (Jane Fonda's Low-Impact Aerobic Workout). The videotape revolutionized the video industry, with numerous celebrities imitating Fonda with their own fitness and diet videotapes. |
| 1982 | The soft-drink giant Coca Cola Company bought Columbia Pictures in a $750 million transaction. In 1982, a Columbia movie, Gandhi, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the Company secured its first Oscar. The newly-organized studio Tri-Star Pictures was formed by CBS Television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures. |
| 1983 | George Lucas' THX sound system technology was developed with the main goal of recreating film sound in film theaters exactly as the filmmakers had intended. The first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983). |
| 1983 | The science-fiction film Brainstorm (1983) was not entirely completed when 43 year-old Natalie Wood died of drowning in late November 1981. The film was finished by changing its ending and using a stand-in, and then released posthumously - dedicated to her memory. |
| 1983 | The ground-breaking hit arcade game Dragon's Lair, introduced by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth and Rick Dyer, was the world's first coin-operated laserdisc arcade video game. The fully-animated, interactive cartoon challenged players to time their movements through the cartoon or otherwise face death. |
| 1983 | Never Say Never Again (a remake of the earlier Bond film Thunderball (1965)), starred Sean Connery as James Bond - the star's first appearance as agent 007 for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971). The film's title was a clever joke referring to Connery's reneged promise twelve years before that he would "never" star as Bond again. That summer, there was a so-called 'dueling' of Bonds - Connery's film competed with Octopussy, an "official" James Bond film starring Roger Moore, with both films in theaters at the same time. [A similar occurrence happened when the "unofficial" Bond film Casino Royale, starring David Niven, was released the same year as You Only Live Twice (1967), but these two films were not in theaters at the same time.] |
| 1983 | HBO (Home Box Office) became a leader in developing and creating programming content, with revolutionary shows such as: Not Necessarily the News (1983-1990) - its first original series, and the sports biopic The Terry Fox Story (1983) - the first made-for-pay-TV movie. |
