Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

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)

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

1980s - Part 2

Year	Event and Significance
1984	The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that home videotaping or recording (for home use) did not violate copyright laws.
1984	The PG-13 film rating was introduced, in response to parental protest about the sexualized torture scene (a beating heart was ripped from a victim's chest) in influential producer/director Steven Spielberg's PG-rated Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (his follow-up film to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)), and also for violence in Gremlins. The PG category was split into two by the Motion Picture Association of America: PG and PG-13 (for a film having a higher level of intensity). Children under the age of 17 could be admitted, but with parental guidance strongly suggested.
1984	The first movie to be released in the US with a PG-13 rating was John Milius' Red Dawn.
1984	Tri-Star Pictures, formed in 1982 as a joint venture by CBS Television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures, released its first film in May, The Natural.
1984	The Voyager Company debuted its Criterion Collection line of special-edition video laserdiscs, with additional revolutionary features such as language options, original aspect ratio widescreen and letterboxed formats (rather than pan-and-scan), supplementary materials, commentaries by directors on audio tracks, interviews, making-of documentaries, photo galleries (stills, posters, artwork, storyboards, shooting scripts), state-of-the-art mastering, and other extras. Their contributions solidified the laserdisc as the choice of cinephiles for over 15 years. These features later became commonplace on releases of DVDs.
1984	The soundtrack of cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth's and director Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984), featuring the rock band Talking Heads, was recorded on a 24-track Sony digital recorder. It was notable for being the first all-digital film sound in history. Its documentation of the singing group during three nights in December, 1983 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater has often been considered to be the best rock concert film of all-time.
1984	Director John Hughes, the future master of comedic, "teen"-oriented coming-of-age or 'rites of passage' films directed toward a youth audience, released his debut film Sixteen Candles, starring his oft-used star Molly Ringwald, one of the Brat Packers of the time.
1984	Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap set the standard for a mockumentary in its depiction of a fictional heavy-metal rock band named Spinal Tap on tour in the US during the fall of 1982. Its most memorable scene was the one in which a band member described how the amplifier had an "11" on its dial: "These go to eleven"..
1985	Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (established in 1980) took over the Utah/US Film Festival and later in 1991 renamed it the Sundance Film Festival (held annually since 1981 in January in Park City, Utah and expanded in length) - "dedicated to the support and development of emerging screenwriters and directors of vision, and to the national and international exhibition of new, independent dramatic and documentary films." The first Grand Jury Prize went to the Coen Brothers noirish debut film Blood Simple (1984).
1985	The first Blockbuster Video store opened in Dallas, Texas.
1985	John Hughes' coming-of-age teen film The Breakfast Club was extremely influential in its depiction of five stereotypical teen characters (populars, jocks, druggies, brains, and loner groups), all portrayed by Brat Packers. They were attendees at a Saturday school detention while experiencing teen angst - struggling with issues of conformity and parental values. In the end, they all wrote one letter to Mr. Vernon, signed "The Breakfast Club," to describe their group as a whole: "...we think you are crazy for making us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the most simplest term, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out, is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?"
1985	The low-quality Blood Cult about devil worship, shot entirely on videotape, was the first horror film designed explicitly for the video market. It signaled the start of features made specifically for the home-video market (also the destination for sub-standard feature films unworthy of release), now that VCRs were abundant.
1985	75 year-old Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's historical samurai epic Ran, a re-interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear, was released. It was the last of his great masterpieces.
1985	Hunk film star Rock Hudson, a closet homosexual, died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at age 59 after a battle with AIDS. He was the first celebrity to announce publically that he had AIDS. As a result of the disclosure, the Reagan Administration finally responded to and acknowledged the burgeoning AIDS epidemic.
1985	When the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947), converted by Color Systems Technology (CST) for 20th Century Fox to a colorized version, aired in 1985, it became the highest rated non-network movie in syndication.
1985-6	Pixar Animation Studios, originally part of Lucasfilm (and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)) specialized in developing animation created exclusively on computers. It was purchased by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs and made an independent company in 1986. Pixar's first fully 3-D digital (or CGI)-animated character, the 'stained-glass knight' , was created for the Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), when Pixar was still part of Lucasfilm (and Industrial Light and Magic). It brought them a Best Visual Effects nomination.
1986	Computer-created Luxo, Jr. was Pixar Studio's first film (or short) -- and the first fully computer-generated, computer-animated film which was nominated for an Academy Award.
1986	Disney's The Great Mouse Detective marked the first major use of computer animation in an animated film -- in the scene of the gears of London's famed bell tower Big Ben.
1986	The comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills was Disney's first R-rated feature (with light adult themes such as adultery, homosexuality, brief partial nudity, etc.), causing the studio to release the film under its newly-formed adult-oriented film division Touchstone.
1986	The Academy Award-winning, drawing-room adaptation A Room With a View, starring Helena Bonham Carter, was the quintessential Merchant Ivory film production, with lush and glossy scenery visuals, gorgeous costuming, an emotional soundtrack, an engaging romance and a sense of period history -- it was the first of three adaptations of E.M. Forster novels, followed by Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1991). The team at Merchant Ivory Productions consisted of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
1986	In Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and James Cameron's Aliens, Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ellen Ripley solidified her place as filmdom's greatest action heroine, with closely-cropped hair, no makeup, and a fight-to-the-death maternal instinct. She paved the way for other action heroines to follow, such as Angelina Jolie in The Tomb Raider franchise and others (Linda Hamilton, Carrie-Ann Moss, Michelle Yeoh). However, most female action heroine films were flops.
1986	Ted Turner, the Atlanta media mogul, took over MGM by purchase, but then sold off major parts of the studio. He retained the vast MGM (and United Artists) film library of more than 3,650 titles for $1.2 billion (2,200 MGM, 75 pre-1948 Warner Bros., including Casablanca (1942), and 700 RKO), intended for broadcast by his cable television stations. He then started the controversial fad of colorizing classic films (computer-altering black and white films) to make them appear as color films -- threatening initially to change John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). He did colorize King Kong (1933), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947), among others.
1986	In President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Address delivered on February 4, 1986, he referred to the future of America with a quote from the film Back to the Future (1985): "Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive -- a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film, Back to the Future: 'Where we are going, we don't need roads.'"
1986	Dolby SR ("Spectral Recording") was introduced as a system used both when a soundtrack was recorded and when it was played back. The system permitted the capturing of louder sounds with wider frequency response and lower distortion.
1986	David Lynch's surrealistic, psychosexual Blue Velvet (1986) was a throwback to art films, 50s B-movies and teenage romances, film noir, and the mystery-suspense genre. It was an original look at sex, violence, crime and power under the peaceful exterior of small-town Americana in the mid-80s. Beneath the familiar, peaceful, 'American-dream' cleanliness of the daytime scenes lurked sleaziness, prostitution, unrestrained violence, and perversity - powerful and potentially-dangerous sexual forces that could be unleashed if not contained.
1986	Woody Allen's richly nuanced film Hannah and Her Sisters, his biggest box-office success up to the time (without adjusting for inflation), was a thoughtful treatise on marriage, relationships, life, the existence of God and love, seen through the eyes of three sisters: Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest).
1986	Influential African-American film-maker Spike Lee independently produced the low-budget comedy She's Gotta Have It, his breakthrough film. It won the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes, and helped to usher in the American independent film movement in the mid-1980s.
1986	The Best Actor Oscar award was won by Paul Newman for his role as older pool hustler 'Fast Eddie' Felson - now manager of his pool-heir apparent (Tom Cruise) in director Martin Scorsese's sequel The Color of Money - a reprise/remake of his earlier role in The Hustler (1961). It was his seventh nomination and first win. He became the only actor, to date, to win an Oscar for reprising a role in a sequel.
1987	The first Disney tie-in with fast food vendor McDonald's was its Happy Meal toys based on its animated cartoon TV-series DuckTales (i.e., Magic Motion Maps with magnifying glass, Scrooge McDuck in car, Webby on Tricycle, Huey Dewy and Louie on Surf Ski, etc.) - Disney Studio's first daily, half-hour animated series for television.
1987	Director Adrian Lyne's blockbuster Fatal Attraction was a cautionary horror tale and milestone thriller film which garnered six Oscar nominations (including Best Picture); it told about a conflicted married man (Michael Douglas) who cheated with a career woman (Glenn Close) who turned into a murderous psycho when scorned and who subsequently threatened his family. Its explicit sexuality, besieged white male protagonist, and popcorn-slasher/horror elements were perfect for the AIDS era.
1987	The longest film ever made, the bizarrely-experimental The Cure for Insomnia, lasted 87 hours (5,220 minutes). It consisted mostly of poet L.D. Groban reading his own poem of over 4,000 pages.
1987	The comedy film Three Men and a Baby was the first Disney film to break the $100 million mark. It eventually became the biggest box office hit of the year (at $167 million), beating Fatal Attraction.
1988	Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released -- a coordinated effort produced by Disney, live-action directed by Robert Zemeckis, and animated by Richard Williams. It broke new technological ground with its remarkable blending of animated imagery and live-action human characters.
1988	The first of The Naked Gun films premiered -- it was based on TV's Police Squad!, created by Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry Zucker and David Zucker --the team that was also responsible for the popular disaster movie spoof Airplane! (1980).
1988	Bruce Willis' career was catapulted with the release of the action-thriller Die Hard - the first of a series of films (Die Harder (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), and Live Free or Die Hard (2007)), and rated as one of the best action films of all time. He starred as a terrorist-fighting action hero named John McClane, fighting the archetypal villain Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), and was noted for his infamous line "Yippee ki yay, motherf--ker."
1988	This was the year of one of the longest work stoppage in Hollywood history at the time -- the WGA (Writer's Guild of America) strike of US film and television writers against producers and networks that lasted 22 weeks (from March-August). The costly and crippling strike delayed the start of the fall television schedule.
1988	The landmark Film Preservation Act implemented a plan to allow the federal government to designate 25 films each year as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films." In 1989, the National Film Preservation Board began selecting 25 films for entry to a national list of film treasures. The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress was designated as the registry for films that were selected as leading examples of American cinematic art.
1988	Director Martin Scorsese's controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ opened in nine cities despite objections by some Christians who felt the film was sacrilegious.
1988	Pixar's 5-minute Tin Toy, the inspiration for Toy Story (1995), was the first computer animation to win an Academy Award. Billy, the baby character in the short film, marked the first time that a CG character had realistic human qualities.
1988	Digital morphing (the seamless change from one character or image to another) of several animals was first introduced by ILM and debuted in the live-action film Willow.
1988	Two of the biggest stars of the 1990s decade got their start in the late 80s. Tom Hanks earned his first Oscar nomination for the film Big - it also marked Hanks' first $100 million blockbuster film, with a salary allegedly at $2 million. In the same year, another future star Julia Roberts appeared in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza (1988) -- it gave Roberts her first Best Actress nomination (in the Independent Spirit Awards), with a salary reported to be $50,000. After being noticed, Roberts starred one year later as the health-declining Shelby in the tearjerker Steel Magnolias (1989) in which she earned her first Oscar nomination; the next year after that, she starred in Pretty Woman (1990).
1988 and after	Kevin Costner starred back-to-back in two classic baseball-themed films: as "Crash" Davis in Ron Shelton's minor-league baseball romantic comedy, Bull Durham (1988), and then as farmer Ray Kinsella in the Best Picture-nominated mystical baseball fantasy, Field of Dreams (1989). In the next few years, the actor/director played the lead role in two other Best Picture nominees - Dances With Wolves (1990) (which won), and JFK (1991).
1989	The Sony Corporation of America purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. and Tri-Star Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion, naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment.
1989	Warner Communications merged with Time, Inc. to become the largest media company in the world.
1989	After African-American film-maker Spike Lee's second feature School Daze (1988) - his major studio debut film, his third film Do the Right Thing (1989) brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and launched the director to the forefront of the filmmaking community. His film told of incendiary urban-racial violence and ethnic tensions on one hot summer day in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Lee and a new generation of other African-American film-makers and actors (John Singleton, Denzel Washington) were becoming 'mainstreamed' and more commonplace in the Hollywood film community.
1989	26 year-old writer and first-time feature film director Steven Soderbergh's voyeuristic sex, lies and videotape, written in 8 days and filmed over five weeks on a budget of $1.2 million, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival where it became a huge hit - eventually grossing $26 million. This landmark 'independent film' won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. After being aggressively marketed by Miramax - which subsequently became known as the leading supplier of indie films - the independent (non-Hollywood) film movement gained strength during the 1990s.
1989	A new generation of expensive computer-generated imagery (CGI) and graphics in the 1990s was heralded by the slinky, translucent water creature in James Cameron's big-budget The Abyss.
1989	The highest grossing movie of the year was director Tim Burton's neo-gothic and dark Batman (1989), an adult version of a comic-book thriller. It was released in mid-summer as a major 'event' film, and was hyped (with a large marketing budget) long before its release - a new trend, with various product tie-ins (i.e., Bat merchandise, such as Batmobiles, Batman miniskirts, etc.). It was then available as a video shortly after its theatrical release to add to its box-office take - influencing how future films would be marketed. Its dark vision of the caped crusader would signficantly shape the characters of other cinematic superheroes from now on.
1989	Disney's The Little Mermaid earned $74 million and revived animated films (contributing to the animation renaissance), especially for Disney Studios after the limited success of The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and Oliver & Company (1988).
1989	Madonna's controversial Like a Prayer music video (with prominent burning crosses before which she danced) prompted Pepsi to drop her $5 million dollar two-minute commercial (titled "Make a Wish") and their sponsorship of her Blonde Ambition tour, due in part to protests from Catholic groups and other religious groups who threatened to boycott. Subsequently, Madonna won the Viewer's Choice Award at the MTV Music Awards show for her video.
1989	The old-fashioned romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally... with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, similar in theme to Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), re-established the fact that rom-coms (and 'chick-flicks') could be profitable ventures - a trend that continued into the 1990s decade with Pretty Woman (1990). It also asked the important late-1980s question of sexual politics: "Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?" Its timely film script by Nora Ephron popularized the notion of "high-maintenance and low-maintenance" women, and a "Harry-and-Sally relationship," and the film's conclusion presented marriage in a favorable light. During the 1990s, Meg Ryan followed up with a series of romantic leading roles in numerous films, including being paired opposite Tom Hanks in three films: Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You've Got Mail (1998).