Midnight Cowboys and Taxi Drivers: By the end of the 1960s, the Golden Age of Hollywood was over and the Movie Mogul, who had ruled over his celluloid fiefdom as a benevolent (at times) dictator, was all but extinct. The industry was adrift, battered by an influx of foreign films, conglomeration, and the counterculture revolution—all of which forced Hollywood to radically alter the way it did business. After a period of turmoil, what emerged was a cinematic renaissance known as New Hollywood. Its greatest artists and craftsmen were the first generation of filmmakers to be raised on television and to have gone to film school; its biggest patrons the massive corporate entities that gobbled up the remnants of once great studios. From this imperfect union emerged some of the most powerful—and personal—films the industry ever produced. Freed creatively by the new ratings system and hailed as auteurs by a burgeoning film intelligentsia, directors of this era ignored tradition to make cinematic history.
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