Author Ronald Brownstein had a popular culture epiphany whereas driving house from a political gathering at producer Norman Lear‘s home.
It struck Brownstein that Lear’s groundbreaking reveals like “All within the Household” arrived on TV simply as film classics “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” hit theaters and the Los Angeles music scene of Joni Mitchell and the Eagles flourished on the radio and in file shops.
It was all right here in a single place, at one second.
“I keep in mind considering on the best way house, like, wait a minute, this was additionally taking place on the similar time,” Brownstein says. “And what turned more and more clear to me, as I learn a variety of the work that had been accomplished, was that books have appeared vertically at every certainly one of these dynamics, whether or not it’s the change in tv, music, then motion pictures.
“However there actually wasn’t something that explored how all of them occurred concurrently,” he says. “And what have been the forces that formed all of them, and the way they interacted with one another.
“I simply obtained actually excited concerning the thought.”
The just-published “Rock Me On The Water: 1974: The Yr Los Angeles Reworked Motion pictures, Music, Tv, and Politics” tells the story by way of deep analysis and greater than 100 interviews Brownstein pieced collectively.
Structured in 12 chapters, every dedicated to a month, the e-book focuses on cultural milestones — breakthrough albums by L.A.-based singer-songwriters Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne or how the roiling political upheaval of Watergate scandal affected the creation of movies like “Chinatown” — and weaves collectively a tapestry as an example how a time and a spot turned the wheel on which the tradition turned.
“For Los Angeles, these 12 glittering months represented magic hour,” Brownstein writes within the prologue, and the case he makes within the e-book is strong.
Making motion pictures
In the beginning, in fact, Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a CNN political contributor, didn’t know 1974 would find yourself the 12 months of his focus.
“I knew that this transformation didn’t all happen in a single 12 months,” he says. “That is clearly a multi-year course of. So I actually sat there with authorized pads — I nonetheless have them someplace upstairs — and form of listed the flicks and the albums and the TV of every 12 months from like 1970 by way of 1975.
“I felt ’74 was each when most of this related stuff occurred, but additionally it was form of the apex within the sense that ’75, in a variety of alternative ways, is when the present begins to go in one other course,” Brownstein says. “It was only a 12 months of unbelievable popular culture mastery and achievement, but additionally, it was the final 12 months earlier than this begins to slide away.”
One chapter focuses on actors Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, friends whose Hollywood careers diverged within the ’60s. Beatty discovered stardom early, then struggled for artistic success. Nicholson scuffled by way of a lot of the decade till 1969’s “Simple Rider.” Each reached new heights in 1974 with Robert Towne screenplays in “Shampoo” and “Chinatown.”
One other chapter appears on the winds of change that may blow apart Hollywood auteurs reminiscent of “Nashville” director Robert Altman in favor of blockbuster wunderkinds reminiscent of Stephen Spielberg, who was making “Jaws.”
“They have been each filming in the summertime of ’74, they have been launched per week aside in June 1975,” Brownstein says, additional noting that on launch “Jaws” obtained the duvet of Time, “Nashville” the identical place for Newsweek.
“That to me was an actual a-ha second,” he says. “As a result of ‘Nashville’ — not essentially the perfect film of the early ’70s — in some methods is the ‘Moby Dick’ of early ’70s cinema. It’s the film that tries to embody all the themes of the interval in motion pictures and attempt to wrestle it to some form of conclusion.
“And ‘Jaws,’ however, is the start of what comes subsequent,” Brownstein says. “And I don’t suppose they’ve been seen in that gentle. That, to me, is form of the energy of the e-book, that you simply’re capable of perceive how these cultural forces intersected, in addition to the interaction between the cultural forces and political forces.”
Politics and progress
Politics, particularly the election of Gov. Jerry Brown to his first time period in 1974 and the activism of Tom Hayden and his spouse Jane Fonda, are matters well-known each to Brownstein, who lined politics for a few years on the Los Angeles Instances.
Regardless of the largely progressive politics of this new wave of leisure, there was a scarcity of outreach behind the scenes.
“This was a interval of nice cultural innovation, but it surely was actually managed by White males,” Brownstein says. “Each girls and minorities, only a few of these voices obtained to be heard.”
Even a Hollywood determine reminiscent of producer Bert Schneider, who’s featured in a wild chapter about his efforts to assist Black Panther and fugitive Huey Newton flee to Cuba, had a blind spot to the dearth of variety in Hollywood, Brownstein says.
“Schneider is giving a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} to the Black Panthers however by no means critically entertained the considered working with a Black filmmaker,” Brownstein says.
The identical obstacles blocked development for ladies in leisure, reminiscent of producer and studio government Sherry Lansing, screenwriter Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and then-writing associate, actor Mary Kay Place.
“Lots of the girls discuss concerning the rule for getting within the room was not questioning why so few girls have been within the room,” he says. “These have been pioneers. Clearly, the problems are nonetheless no resolved 40 years later when it comes to illustration in Hollywood, however they did open the door.”
Household viewing
Of all of the popular culture touchstones that Brownstein makes use of in “Rock Me On The Water” the Norman Lear-produced TV collection “All In The Household” could be most central to his narrative.
The story of the bigoted Archie Bunker, his put-upon spouse Edith, and their still-at-home daughter Gloria and son-in-law Mike demonstrated the divide between previous and current virtually in real-time.
“It was primarily the technology hole diminished to a single front room,” says Brownstein, who grew up in Queens, New York with an electrician father who watched the present as a result of he appreciated Archie, a fellow blue-collar employee from the identical borough.
“That was the genius of Norman Lear,” he says. “I feel the macro-storyline of ‘All In The Household’ was what was taking place in society. It was form of negotiating the phrases of give up from the older technology to the brand new social and cultural guidelines being imposed by the youthful generations.”
Brownstein says he watched hours upon hours of “All In The Household,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Present,” and “MASH” — three reveals that shared Saturday nights in 1974, and a chapter in his e-book — as a part of his analysis.
“I watched ‘Chinatown’ most likely 10 occasions,” he says. “The Dialog,’ ‘Shampoo,’ I watched a number of occasions. After which, you realize, listened to the albums over and over.”
The work was all the time satisfying. “I’ve written a bunch of books, and this was one the place I didn’t get bored with engaged on it,” he says. And the interviews with topics from Beatty and Fonda to Graham Nash, Peter Bogdanovich, Anjelica Huston and lots of extra, added insights and voices to the narrative he wrote.
“You see the frequent threads extra once you’re all of it,” Brownstein says. “After which once you begin speaking to folks, you’re capable of get a way of each the exhilaration and the sense they’d that they have been a part of one thing particular in L.A. within the early Nineteen Seventies.”
