THAT '70S GROWTH INDEPENDENT FILM CHANNEL LOOKS AT THE DECADE THAT CHANGED FILMMAKING.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski TV Writer

The '70s were a significant turning point in filmmaking, with changes in stories, storytelling techniques, camera work, editing, dialogue and, of course, graphic depictions of sex, drug use and violence.

Getting film buffs to agree on that is easy. More difficult is putting a finger on why it happened then.

That's one of the missions behind ``A Decade Under the Influence,'' a three-part documentary series debuting at 8 tonight on IFC.

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (``The Ref,'' ``Living Out Loud'') began the project with director Ted Demme, who died unexpectedly just a month into their interviews with Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Sidney Lumet, Dennis Hopper, William Friedkin, Paul Mazursky, Roger Corman and many others.

The interviews, conducted by LaGravenese, Demme and other film professionals, such as director Neil LaBute and writers Alexander Payne and Scott Frank, were loosely structured, making for frank conversations between colleagues rather than orchestrated Q&A's. But at one point or another, everyone was asked why the 1970s were such an important era in U.S. filmmaking.

What happened?

Actress Pam Grier (``Foxy Brown'') saw it as a politically and socially driven phenomenon, suggesting that the '70s were a celebration of the freedoms won in the '50s and '60s.

Director Sydney Pollack gave credit to the changing appetites of moviegoers. Before the gritty reality hit the big screen, he said, ``You measured your pleasure at movies by the distance they lived from your life.''

Actress Sissy Spacek, who broke out in the '70s with starring roles in Terrence Malick's crime tale ``Badlands'' and Brian De Palma's telekinetic thriller ``Carrie,'' said it was all in who held the reins. ``In the '60s, studios were calling the shots. In the '70s, artists were calling the shots.''

The rare confluence of those events, along with young filmmakers' appreciation of foreign trailblazers such as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Jean-Luc Godard, made the market ripe for sweeping change, LaGravenese said.

``Decade'' does not suggest that it all happened in 1970 or later. The film acknowledges landmark projects such as John Cassavetes' ``Shadows'' (1960), Mike Nichols' ``The Graduate'' (1967) and John Schlesinger's ``Midnight Cowboy'' (1969), among others.

The significant shift came when filmmakers and actors like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson - all graduates of the shot-on-a-shoestring B-movie training ground operated by American International Pictures and a few others - found themselves under the wing of traditional studios and distributors, with their financial backing if not always their unconditional blessing.

As Corman observed, the studios saw that moviegoers and critics actually liked the offbeat, low-cost work of the young directors and rightly concluded, ``If you can't beat them, buy them out.''

``Like (former Warner Bros. executive) John Calley said, on the one hand he was making John Wayne movies, and on the other hand he was buying 'Woodstock' and making 'Midnight Cowboy' and 'Deliverance,' '' LaGravenese said.

Altman recalled making his dark Korean War comedy, ``M*A*S*H,'' with all its gallows humor, at 20th Century Fox while production executives there were preoccupied with their epic war dramas ``Patton'' and ``Tora! Tora! Tora!'' The key to making the movie he wanted to make, he learned, was to keep a low profile and stay within budget.

Labor of love

Some early reviews have criticized ``Decade'' as overly congratulatory for an era that was less progressive in its images of women and minorities than it was for men.

``I can't deny that this was something Teddy and I were doing out of love,'' LaGravenese said. ``Teddy wanted it to be a love letter, and when he passed on, I had no doubts about keeping it going, primarily to keep him around for as long as I could. We didn't really have a big plan, and it wasn't until the editing room and having 60 hours of material that I had to figure out how to form this.

``And I guess I couldn't help, in the time that I had and the constraints that I had, falling back on being the fan,'' he said.

It could be argued that the documentary isn't very instructional for typical viewers of the Independent Film Channel, people who would be more inclined to seek out a marginal film festival on Saturday night than queue up at the mall multiplex for a white-bread offering. After all, they've seen ``Bonnie and Clyde,'' ``Coming Home,'' ``Harold & Maude'' and ``The Last Picture Show,'' haven't they?

Maybe not. LaGravenese and producer Gini Reticker screened early edits of the documentary for film school students in Dallas, Denver and New York City and were surprised at their lack of exposure to '70s material.

LaGravenese said one graduate student at Columbia University said she hadn't known of Nicholson's early work. Other students didn't recognize the name or face of Julie Christie (``McCabe & Mrs. Miller,'' ``Shampoo''). One said he didn't really know films made before 1983. And nearly all expressed plans to head to their nearest video stores to catch up.

``For anyone to think that everyone knows all these stories already, that was confirmation that it wasn't true,'' Reticker said. ``I think 'Decade Under the Influence' will have a place in academia.''

``We've become a society where we're very much in the moment,'' LaGravenese said. ``Bogdanovich said, in other media like art and music and literature that have lasted hundreds and hundreds of years, when you become an artist or a musician or a writer, you study the whole history of the art.

``But film doesn't, he says. And (the medium is) only a hundred years old. You talk to young filmmakers nowadays about the silents, for instance, and Bogdanovich says you might as well be talking about Sanskrit.''

IFC will air ``A Decade Under the Influence'' at 8 p.m. tonight through Friday, followed at 9 p.m. by one of the titles discussed in the documentary: Scorsese's ``Mean Streets'' tonight, his ``Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore'' on Thursday and Francis Ford Coppola's ``The Conversation'' on Friday. The ``Decade'' series repeats 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday.

Valerie Kuklenski, [phone]

valerie.kuklenski(at)dailynews.com

A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE

What: Documentary look at Hollywood filmmaking of the '70s.

Where: IFC.

When: Tonight: Part 1 at 8 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by ``Mean Streets''; Thursday: Part 2 at 8 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by ``Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore''; Friday: Part 3 at 8 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by ``The Conversation''; Saturday: Parts 1, 2 and 3 at 8 p.m.

CAPTION(S):

7 photos

Photo:

(1) Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd teamed up in ``The Last Picture Show'' (1971).

(2) Sissy Spacek, seen here in a publicity still from ``Carrie'' (1976), is one of many artists interviewed for the IFC series.

(3) Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voigt starred in John Schlesinger's ``Midnight Cowboy'' (1969), one of the seminal movies explored in IFC's ``A Decade Under the Influence,'' a series about films from the 1970s.

(4) Watch, rewind, repeat: Goldie Hawn, left, and Warren Beatty worked together in ``Shampoo'' (1975).

(5) Martin Scorsese directed Ellen Burstyn in ``Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore'' (1974).

(6) The IFC series recognizes landmark films from the 1960s as well, such as Mike Nichols' ``The Graduate'' (1967), with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.

(7) Faye Dunaway played Bonnie Parker in 1967's ``Bonnie and Clyde.''