1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ronald Brownstein
Rock Me on the Water is a paean to 1974, a most wondrous year in the mind of Ron Brownstein, a political analyst for CNN. The author makes the case that what happened that year essentially realigned the values and priorities of the entertainment business and represented a clear break with the traditional safe and predictable offerings of traditional media, music and movie moguls.
There are many central characters in the book which begins by chronicling a February 1974 party at the Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. David Geffen, who a few years earlier began his career in the mailroom of an ad agency, was the featured guest at the party that included Bob Dylan, The Band, Cher, Ringo Starr, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Bianca Jagger. The author makes a pretty good argument that Los Angeles in the mid-1970s was the center of the entertainment world. That year Hollywood produced classic movies including Chinatown and The Godfather Part II, and future hits Jaws and Nashville were filmed that year. The book argues that “popular culture became the bridge between the mass American audience and once-insurrectionary ideas that developed on the vanguard of the social and political movements of the 1960s.”
Brownstein is bummed out by the fact that the LA Renaissance was short-lived. The economic woes of the middle and late 1970s – long gas lines and out-of-control inflation – put the damper on the Up, Up and Away ebullience of 1974.
The book is organized into 12 chapters, one for each month of the year. The January chapter focused on Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. In 1974 Beatty was an established star - think about Splendor in the Grass and Bonnie and Clyde - while Nicholson was still trying to find his fame. Nicholson was an avid drug user; Beatty didn’t do drugs or even drink much. Both men had relationships with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. Each of them dated Joni Mitchell.
Enough trashy gossip. Nicholson’s career took off with Chinatown, which in my opinion is one of the ten best movies ever made. In 1974, Beatty was the lead in Shampoo, a frothy comedy about a hairdresser who was quite the ladies’ man, although many people thought he was gay since he was a hairdresser. Beatty was the insider while Nicholson was more of a rebel.
Brownstein reminds us that the big movie hits of the 1950s and 1960s were big, sprawling set pieces The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and The Sound of Music were typical blockbusters. Both Beatty and Nicholson starred in films that began to change the focus of Hollywood. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was sexy and violent and very popular. Easy Rider (1969) captured the ethos of the 1960s and made heroes out of ne’er-do-well motorcycle riders.
The February chapter revolves around Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne, who in the early 1970s traveled the same coffee house/folk music circuit trying to get noticed. They often opened for each other in clubs. Linda and Jackson were about the same age and were classic baby boomers. Ronstadt hit the music clubs in Tucson in her teens but knew that LA was where the action was. Browne’s family moved to LA when he was 12 so he was already there. They both were inspired by the 1960s folk revival.
LA in the 1960s was the center of the America’s music industry. Stephen Stills and Neill Young, Canadians, headed there to make their fortunes. The neighborhood of Laurel Canyon was home to many stars and also became a metaphor as well as a venue for the emergence of pop folk music. Becoming a singing star was a lot easier than becoming a TV or a movie star. As a singer, you didn't have to cozy up to a Hollywood studio or go to NYC to try to get on a TV show. There also were a lot more records produced than movies or TV shows. Songs were marketed locally, as contrasted to films or television programs which were national in scope.
The music scene in LA had shifted away from the smooth sounds of the Beach Boys to the folk-rock songs of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas. While these groups were popular, internal tensions caused them to break up and re-form regularly. The Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield spawned new groups like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The Laurel Canyon neighborhood of LA was home to many musical icons. Performers literally lived near each other and there was a lot of creative cross-pollination of musical genres.
Ronstadt and Browne evolved their sound in the late 1960s in LA. Ronstadt was influenced by Mexican music which she fused into her folk-rock style. Browne refined the angst-filled artist’s approach to writing and performing songs. Ronstadt and Browne played a lot of small clubs on their way up. Ronstadt added Don Henley and Glen Frey. who later formed the Eagles, to her band and she began to get noticed.
In the early 1970s Jerry Brown, later to become governor of California and a presidential candidate, dated Linda Ronstadt as he was moving up the political food chain of the Golden State. Brown was a weird duck who almost became a priest. He became a lawyer but didn’t like being a lawyer, He became politically active in Gene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign and caught the political bug. He was elected secretary of state in California and reformed a moribund office. He brought an interesting combination of spiritualism and pragmatism to the office and made some good reforms.
Meanwhile LA continued to attract top musical talent. Los Angeles did not have the rigid hierarchy of New York City and there was more room to grow and get noticed in the city.
The March chapter is all about changes in television programming. CBS was the top network with All in the Family, Mash, and Mary Tyler Moore garnering strong ratings. These programs also marked a shift into more socially responsible television in that pushed the envelope about racial issues, anti-war feelings, and women’s liberation. For most of the previous two decades, viewers watched pleasant situational comedies like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, a bevy of horse operas including Bonanza and Maverick, or variety shows hosted by celebrities like Carol Burnett, Dinah Shore and Ed Sullivan. Although All in the Family premiered in 1971, it hit its stride in 1974 when the conversations about social issues between Meathead (Rob Reiner) and Archie (Carroll O’Connor) became more heated and relevant to what was going on in the real world. Norman Lear, the show’s creator, started off as a struggling writer in Hollywood and went on to help produce major television entertainment specials. He and his partner, Bud Yorkin, also did some production of light comedy movies.
At the beginning of the 1970s, CBS was probably the most conservative of the three networks. Its president was a big Ronald Reagan supporter and the programming was classic traditional American - The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show. One observer said that, with the exception of briefly broadcasting The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967, it seemed like the network did not even acknowledge what was happening in the 1960s.
Other networks were starting to sell ads not based on overall rating numbers but on the characteristics of the viewers – demographics. ABC and NBC were more daring in bringing new kinds of shows on to TV, including serious dramas. Norman Lear came up with the concept for All in the Family and went to pitch it to Robert Wood, the CBS president. While people loved the show, it was edgy and made executives and the company president nervous. It barely got approved but did go on the air on January 12, 1971. It became a huge hit, and, as the ratings went up, so did the level of controversy about the content matter of certain episodes – race, the war, abortion.
April On April 6, 1974, Don Henley and the Eagles performed before 200,000 people at the Ontario Motor Speedway outside of Los Angeles. After a halting beginning in 1971, the group’s popularity took off. The book discusses how challenging it was to fuse rock and folk/country into a coherent sound, but after a few years of hard work, they figured it out. The Eagles is among the most popular bands of all time and their greatest hits anthology has sold more copies than any other album. The members of the group lived life in the fast lane - lots of drugs and alcohol, lots of relationships and one-night stands, and lots of arguments and fights about the directions of the band. Linda Ronstadt’s band included several future Eagles, and she credits their musical skills as a key to her becoming a major star.
Other groups were dominating the scene. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in their various incarnations were wildly popular. David Geffen had a talent for being in the right place at the right time to help mega-groups get over their internal struggles so that they could become huge acts. Geffen worked out a half-ownership of the new Asylum Records and proceeded to sign lots of front-end acts as well as live high on the company’s expense account. Geffen had a talent for identifying talent. He signed the Eagles to a contract before they hit it big.
Pop music in the 1970s was reaching new heights. The baby boomers bought records and tickets to concerts. Promoters put on monster shows that brought in tens of millions of dollars. Local clubs like the Troubadour in LA were the launching pads for new bands. The power in the music industry seemed to shift from Columbia Records in NYC to Asylum and Warner Brothers Records in Los Angeles.
May While Richard Nixon’s days as president were winding down, political activity was increasing across the land. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of anarchists, kidnapped Patty Hearst, a rich California heiress, and featured her in a bank robbery they staged. In May of 1974, the LA police surrounded the SLA’s headquarters and a fight and fire broke out that led to the death of 6 SLA people, not including Hearst.
Blowing things up/robbing banks is one way to bring about societal change. The other approach is to work the political system. Jane Fonda was a popular Oscar-winning film star in the mid-1970s. She joined with Tom Hayden, a founder of the anti-Vietnam War movement, to work to end the war. Both Fonda and Hayden took a step back from their more activist approaches to protest and began to focus on how to use politics to get us out of Vietnam. In the late 1960s, Fonda had lived in France and didn’t realize that the radical approach to liberating the USA didn’t work. Hayden experienced the violence in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention first-hand and realized that the American public was not ready to understand that the country needed to make fundamental changes. That would take a lot of hard political and educational work on the ground.
In 1972 Fonda visited Vietnam and essentially sided with the North Vietnamese as the good guys in the fight. While history has shown that North Vietnam actually had the hearts and minds of more of the Vietnamese people than did the South Vietnamese government, her remarks were harmful and unfortunate. She quickly realized that her comments were a bit off.
She came home and began to organize anti-war opinions. After Richard Nixon was easily reelected in 1972, Tom Hayden realized that the only way to end the war was to elect a Democrat as president, Jane Fonda’s contacts and Hayden’s practical knowledge about organizing people made them an effective team. They brought in a lot of celebrities to work for peace - Paul Newman, Robert Redford, James Taylor, Carole King - and Hayden also started to directly lobby Congress about the need to end the war.
The war finally ended in 1975. Hayden and Fonda got married. In 1982, Tom was elected to the California state senate. In 1990 they got divorced. But their activities, as well as those of many others, moved the country to accept a lot of the cultural and social values of the 1960s. They were a good team.
June The movie Chinatown opened in June of 1974. It was a dark film that symbolized the inscrutability of evil and the inability of even good people – Jack Nicholson’s character J. J. Gittes in the movie – to do anything about it. It was a perfect movie to reflect the times of Watergate and the failed war in Vietnam. One critic noted that Chinatown was “Watergate with real water.”
The film was very hard to produce. There were strong creative differences about the plot and how it should end. The director, Roman Polanski, had lost his wife, Sharon Tate, to the savage brutality of the Manson Family in 1969. Polanski and lead female star Faye Dunaway did not get along. The director was a harsh taskmaster who demanded 12 hours of shooting each day, sometimes even on weekends.
While Chinatown encapsulated the fractured politics of the day, Warren Beatty’s vehicle, Shampoo, focused on the casual sex of the period. At the end, there are a lot of losers in Shampoo as there are in Chinatown. Beatty’s character, George, ends up a lonely man who never gets to open his own hair salon. Relationships shatter and people go their own ways. Chinatown is much darker, with a rougher finale, but both films are downers. <br>
In 1974, Jerry Brown was nominated for governor of California. He was an ex-seminarian who was a good guy with a very eclectic approach to getting elected and governing. Brown often ignored the electoral base and went after young people who normally didn’t vote. He was a good liberal with strong anti-war credentials, but he also thought that the governor should govern responsibly which meant being fiscally prudent, something that put him at odds with other liberals. In some ways, his gubernatorial campaign echoed some of the themes of Chinatown, with its focus on long-term systemic rot in our institutions. That summer, Watergate was pushing. Richard Nixon to resign, which set an interesting backdrop to the Brown campaign.
July During the summer of 1974, Steven Spielberg began filming Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard. Robert Altman was filming Nashville – his sprawling take on the world of country music and how the genre helped define the United States. Brownstein observes that Altman was one of the last of the classic old-line Hollywood directors while Spielberg represented the next generation who would take the film industry into new territory.
The old-line directors made films that were important because they highlighted the American condition. Nashville, The Godfather, All the President’s Men (about Watergate), Bonnie and Clyde, and The Graduate were movies that mattered in that they provoked thought and discussion among the people who saw them. Not so much with Jaws, Star Wars, and the Indiana Jones movies, which were high-quality throwbacks to the action-adventure Saturday matinees that I went to see with my friends in Richmond.
Old-line Hollywood was interested, if not fixated, on commenting on social issues. George Lucas’s American Graffiti was filmed in the summer of 1972 a few months before Nixon’s landslide win over George McGovern. The movie celebrated the past without being too critical of the shortcomings of yesterday, especially racial discrimination and limitations on opportunities for women.
Lucas, who grew up in a nice middle-class California town, was up front in saying that he wanted to make a movie “where people felt better coming out of the theater than went they went in.” His next big picture was Star Wars. I felt great after seeing that in the summer of 1977.
Steven Spielberg also came from a traditional middle-class family. Like Lucas, he wasn’t inclined to criticize the country that had been so good to him, although he certainly was aware of our nation’s faults. The most sympathetic figure in Jaws is the police chief played by Roy Scheider. (I related more to the shark, who was just being a shark.) Spielberg knocked politicians, specifically the town of Amity’s oily mayor who insisted on keeping the beaches open even with a hungry shark nearby. Spielberg’s next film was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was a classic sci-fi flick that looked way beyond our earth.
The filming of Jaws was a thrash. Spielberg had a limited budget and only two months to get the job done. There were problems with the mechanical shark – it didn’t work very well – and with the weather, and with some of the actors being jerks. By the time the shoot had ended, it was way over budget and Spielberg had to wade through 400,000 feet of film to get the movie finished. That is a lot more footage to edit than is normal.
Nashville was also being shot in the summer of 1974. Director Robert Altman, who hated Nixon, changed the direction of the film as the Watergate summer unwound. There was a very loose structure to the movie – Altman’s style – and he increasingly added political commentary to the production.
The two movies were released in June of 1975. While thoughtful people and many critics were impressed with Nashville’s social commentary about our country soon to celebrate its bicentennial, the movie wasn’t a huge hit. Jaws was a blockbuster that grossed 25 times more in ticket sales in 1975 than did Nashville, although critics were split about the merits of the film.
August BBS was a Los Angeles production company that produced great films including Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. Bert Schneider was the creative inspiration behind the company. He was a magnet who attracted the Hollywood elite to his company and his parties, which included beautiful women, lots of drugs, and free-flowing booze. His mates included Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Black Panther Huey Newton, and a bunch of A-List musicians. Schneider produced Easy Rider which propelled Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda into stardom and also made BBS a hot company, presenting an alternative to the traditional corporate Hollywood studios.
During the early 1970s, Schneider’s interests moved away from making great films. He became more interested in drugs, sex and political action. He got divorced and started dating Candace Bergen, who was 13 years younger. His focus turned political and his house became a home to activists like Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton. Schneider’s politics shifted to the radical left and he became a major supporter of the Black Panthers who did good things and bad things.
Schneider was fascinated by Daniel Ellsberg who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which documented the shaky assertions and beliefs that supported the war in Vietnam. Director Peter Davis was put in charge of making a movie that showed why we had lost the war. He got great interviews with most of the key people behind the war effort including Clark Clifford and General William Westmoreland – who said a lot of anti-Asian racist stuff on camera.
The film, Hearts and Minds, had a lot of production pains but was finally released in December of 1974 to mixed reviews and weak ticket sales. It did win the 1974 Oscar for Best Documentary. Schneider tumbled out of control before dying in 2011. He became “more and more'' crazy and isolated in the years before his death, and his company was long gone, but he did, for a brief, shining moment, change the trajectory of Hollywood film making.
September During the 1974-75 season Norman Lear produced five shows in the top ten including Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons which were about African American families. It was hard work to create all of that programming, with 12-hour work days the norm. TV was considered to be a second-class citizen compared to the more glamorous world of movies.
MASH, which was one of the most popular TV series of all time, debuted on CBS in September of 1972 coincident with solid anti-war feelings across the country. Choosing the unknown Alan Alda as the lead was a smart choice. He set the tone for the show’s blend of sincerity and frivolity. For eleven years, the very grounded Mr. Alda flew home to New Jersey every weekend to be with his family.
The show took swipes at the military and at politicians at a time when the country was at war. The producers never went over the top, and the program's growing popularity insulated it from censorship.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show thrived during the 1970s as it broke new ground by featuring a single young professional woman facing challenges in the male-dominated workplace. The show dealt with issues around dating, birth control and gender bias, new topics for TV. As was the case with MASH and All in the Family, the MTM show’s popularity kept the censors at bay. The show was critiqued by some liberals who thought that Mary didn’t push back hard enough against the injustices of the TV studio, but her approach to prodding change as opposed to demanding it resonated with most viewers. As was the case with MASH, choosing Mary Tyler Moore as the lead was the right choice. She was easy to work with and captured the essence of her character really well. The producers’ first job was to get people to like Mary. Then they could move into the social change arena.
All in the Family continued to dominate the ratings throughout the 1970s even as the show’s creator, Norman Lear, and the star, Carroll O’Connor, grew very distant from each other. They never really reconciled, even after the show went off the air. One critic summed up the program’s core: “A moment’s listening identifies Archie as trapped and outraged, afraid and embittered, confused and resolute. The world is no longer his world, and America, land of the free and home of the brave, is teeming with pinkos, fags, meatheads, and intellectuals. Everything he sees and hears reminds him of what he has lost or is in danger of losing.”
Fifty years later, Donald Trump picked up on those sentiments and was elected president.
October This chapter features the careers of two aspiring women TV producers, Mary Kay Place and Linda Bloodworth. After college, Place got a job as a secretary at CBS TV where she learned a lot. Bloodworth, who came from a family of Mississippi liberals, moved to Hollywood to get into TV. She and Place met at a party in the early 1970s and they clicked professionally.
The team started to pitch concepts and scripts to the all-male TV literati. In 1973 they sold a script to MASH, the wildly successful anti-war show, and within a few months, they sold more scripts to more producers. Although the 1970s saw the creation of many programs that reflected American diversity – The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Mary Tyler Moore – the bosses were all old white guys. As Mary Kay Place recalled, “We’d pitch a script involving women in the workplace and these 58-year old men would explain to us how we really didn't understand females who worked.”
When the duo had an appointment to propose a show, security people assumed that they were just secretaries delivering something. Even concerning women-oriented shows like Maude or Mary Tyler Moore, the writers were almost all male. Brownstein writes about the handful of women TV writers in the early 1970s. He notes that unequal pay was a given and that many men in power expected women who wanted something should expect sexual advances. Women in the business remained isolated since they saw each other as rivals and not part of the sisterhood of aspiring TV writers.
From 1971 to 1975 Hollywood released some two hundred movies aimed at a Black audience. These included Shaft and Superfly and they made a lot of money. Blaxploitation films did play to stereotypes and some civil rights groups protested the films, holding signs that read, “We Are Not All Pimps and Whores.” On the other hand, these films demonstrated the strong buying power of Blacks and they opened the door for young Black actors, directors and film support staff. Unfortunately, blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars in the middle and late 1970s appealed to diverse audiences and reduced the demand for films with Black stars and directors.
November While there were emerging female singers like Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and Carole King in the early 1970s, the music business was a man’s world. Most bands were all-male and most of the artists were more interested in groping groupies than in gender equality. Linda Ronstadt was becoming a mainstream performer in the early 1970s; but even though she was the star, she had trouble having her band pay attention to her input on song arrangements.
In 1973, Linda Ronstadt had a new manager – Peter Asher of the British group Peter and Gordon fame – and he got her noticed in the right places. He helped her refine her special sound and assemble a good backing band, and he insulated her from all the jerks in the business. In November of 1974, her album Heart Like a Wheel took off and hit Number 1 on the pop and country charts and produced two top-ten records, “When Will I Be Loved” and “I Can’t Help It.”
Jerry Brown was still running for governor. As a Democrat in the midst of Watergate, he should have been way ahead in the race but he wasn’t. He had a serious Republican opponent back when California was a two-party state. Brown’s eclectic, erratic, and esoteric campaign style turned off a lot of middle-class voters. Despite that, he did win a very close election.
Jerry Brown embodied the best of the baby boomers in being willing to be creative and rethink traditional approaches to problems. He also reflected the worst of the generation in his self-absorption and lack of discipline. Brown immediately was considered a possible presidential candidate. Although he was a liberal on social issues, he was somewhat of a fiscal conservative. Unlike the classic protesters of the 1960s and 1970s, Jerry liked capitalism and didn’t want to blow up the system. Nixon’s landslide win in 1972 made it clear that the radical politics of the late 1960s were a non-starter for many American voters.
The chapter closes by highlighting the four breakthrough albums released in 1974: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark , The Eagles’ On the Border, Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, and Jackson Brown’s elegiac Late for the Sky. His songs acknowledged that the 1960s were over and that we were now into new territory with Watergate and that the war in Vietnam still being fought. These albums, all produced by David Geffen, marked the peak of the Southern California sound. Later in the decade, the music world would once again be centered in New York City.
December By the end of the year, the sands were shifting concerning what was appropriate television programming. There were TV shows that featured and almost celebrated violence. A September 1974 TV movie, Born Innocent, featured a graphic portrayal of a rape. The Federal Communications Commission was getting complaints from people about some programs. The New Right and the Christian Right were beginning to gain power and they weighed in against gratuitous sex and violence on TV. In February, the FCC set out a new policy that required that adult programming be aired after 9 PM. This was not good for All in the Family and MASH which were on earlier. All in the Family moved to 9 PM and other shows airing before that hour made sure to produce acceptable scripts.
There was a huge backlash against this FCC policy and in late 1976, the courts threw it out as a First Amendment violation. However, even without the FCC’s involvement, the tide was turning against cutting-edge programming. Shows like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley were the big hits of the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, insightful shows like Hill Street Blues appeared, but most of the programming didn’t take any chances.
Hollywood also shifted its focus to big blockbusters that baby boomers liked. In the 1980s and 1990s, big films like Out of Africa (a love story), Ghostbusters (a slime story), and Rainman (not a weather story) drew crowds to theaters. There certainly were serious films produced: Philadelphia (about AIDS), Schindler’s List (about the Holocaust), and Saving Private Ryan (about heroism and duty). The big films tended to be spectacles with lots of computerized effects, which is what we see today.
Brownstein makes the case that one of the reasons that Los Angeles lost its position as the center of the entertainment world was rampant drug use, especially cocaine, which was much nastier than marijuana. Many rock artists had serious drug problems as did movie stars and directors. Almost every party featured unlimited cocaine. The actress Angelica Huston recalled that celebrities thought that they had an immunity that protected them from anything bad happening. Roman Polanski, Chinatown’s director, is a case in point. There were rumors that he liked really young girls. In 1977 he went to a party and ended up back at his hotel doing drugs and having sex with a thirteen-year old of whom he took pictures. What could go wrong? Somebody blew the whistle on Polanski and he fled the country to avoid doing serious prison time.
The last few paragraphs describe how Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks got together on the last day of 1974 and formed Fleetwood Mac, which would become the next big rock band. The torch had been passed.
Bob’s Take
Ron Brownstein argues that 1974 was a really big deal in shifting America away from the 1950s and into the post-1960s world. He makes a pretty good case. Television did change in the early 1970s as programming moved away from being fun and frothy to being more serious and focused on social problems. Movies shifted away from the somber and reflective and went to being loud and big and splashy. Music did reach new heights in the mid-1970s.
One could make the point that other years of the period were also pretty pivotal.
I enjoyed reading 1974, a big book with lots of facts and figures. Bob likes facts and figures. This was a textbook that presented great detail about a lot of what was going on in the 1970s. Clearly the author is a bit in love with all that happened in 1974, and his enthusiasm comes through in his writing.
