The cultural landscape of the 1970s

The cultural landscape of the 1970s emerges through the later consequences of choices and reputations already taking shape in Hollywood: independent distribution could turn a shoestring production into a hit, foreign films could command the devotion of an adventurous viewer, and a star’s career could either find new footing or collapse into increasingly precarious work. The decade is not a single backdrop so much as a set of diverging futures for people whose lives the narrative first encounters in 1969.

Film culture and new routes to success

Four years after Tom Laughlin’s low-budget production of Billy Jack, Laughlin starred in and directed a Warner Bros. film of that name. Dissatisfied with the studio’s marketing, he bought back the rights and sold the film state by state and market by market. He booked theaters on a four-wall basis and flooded local television stations with specially cut advertisements aimed at children watching after school. The film’s success rested both on those distribution innovations and on the movie itself; it became one of Hollywood’s major sleeper successes. That reversal had a small but concrete effect on Cliff Booth: his blue-jeans outfit, including the leather boots he had chosen instead of a seventy-five-dollar payment at the end of the earlier production, became so closely associated with the high-kicking hero that he had to stop wearing it. A piece of wardrobe selected as compensation had acquired a public identity of its own.

Cliff’s moviegoing offers another view of the decade’s changing film culture. His interest in Japanese cinema extended well beyond the directors and stars whose names he knew. During the seventies he enjoyed Three Outlaw Samurai, The Sword of Doom, Hara-Kiri, and Goyokin, and later became devoted to Shintaro Katsu’s blind swordsman, Zatoichi. For a time Katsu displaced Toshiro Mifune as Cliff’s favorite actor. Cliff was especially enthusiastic about Katsu’s brother’s Baby Cart series, particularly Baby Cart at the River Styx. He also saw In the Realm of the Senses with several different dates, and liked the first of Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter films. These titles mark a taste for films whose violence or sexual content could depart sharply from the family-oriented Hollywood movies he had found juvenile after returning from World War Two. His preferences were not indiscriminate: after a Sunday-afternoon screening of all three films in Mifune’s Samurai Trilogy, he was so bored that he avoided Japanese films for two years.

Careers and the changing value of a name

The decade also records Janet Himmelsteen’s movement from an office role into a position of influence. In 1972 she became a full-fledged agent at the William Morris Agency; by 1975 she was one of its top talent agents. The rapid professional advance stands in contrast to the young secretary’s place behind the desk when Rick Dalton and Cliff came through the agency. It is one of the clearest instances of a future career being stated directly: the office’s junior figure would become an agent with considerable standing.

Rick’s career, meanwhile, remained bound to the unstable value of a familiar screen persona. During his work on Lancer, he initially disliked the transformation into Caleb DeCoteau, but came to regard the shaggy hair and fringed jacket as a possible escape from the image of an aging television cowboy. In the set-window reflection he could imagine a more contemporary actor, rather than the figure Marvin Schwarz had called an Eisenhower actor in a Dennis Hopper Hollywood. That shift depended on role, costume, and the way others read his face: Jim Stacy had been excited that Rick, known as Jake Cahill, would play the pilot’s villain, because the young hero’s victory over a recognized television star would give the new series a striking launch. The casting made Rick’s established reputation useful even as the changing style of the period made that reputation feel like a limitation.

The narrative eventually places that insecurity beside a different kind of accounting. In a later moment with Trudi Frazer, Rick recognizes the scale of the good fortune attached to his years of work: acting alongside performers including Ralph Meeker, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Victor Morrow, Darren McGavin, Robert Blake, Glenn Ford, and Edward G. Robinson; traveling, receiving attention, and living in a house paid for by the work he had once done for free as a child pretending to be a cowboy. The reflection does not erase his career anxieties. It marks a change in how he can see the career: not only as a fading public identity, but as a life that gave him experiences and material security.

Drinking, illness, and professional survival

The seventies carry forward the narrative’s examination of alcohol as both a tolerated industry problem and a private means of coping. Rick’s own drinking is connected to violent mood swings he had experienced since high school, although he would not learn for years that he had an undiagnosed condition. After the end of his Universal four-picture deal, his downturns deepened; loneliness, boredom, and self-pity made whiskey sours seem like medication. His friendship with Pete Duel, whom he met while filming Cannon for Cordoba in Mexico, gives that history a tragic parallel. The two actors drank tequila, complained about Hollywood, and enjoyed one another’s company, without knowing that both were undiagnosed bipolar. They understood their drinking as weakness rather than self-medication.

At the height of his success in Alias Smith and Jones, Pete Duel died by suicide in 1971. Rick felt, though he had no explicit diagnosis to explain it, that he understood something of why Duel had died. The loss became a turning point in Rick’s effort to rely less heavily on alcohol. By 1973, while filming The Deadly Trackers with Richard Harris in Durango, the two heavy drinkers had settled into a weekly compromise: they stayed sober from Monday through Thursday, then drank from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. The routine shows change without suggesting recovery; Rick’s restraint was bounded and negotiated rather than absolute.

The book sets such private patterns against an older generation’s more publicly accepted drinking. Many leading men had served in World War Two or Korea, and the suffering attributed to wartime experience could make their alcoholism more readily tolerated. Lee Marvin, haunted by soldiers he had killed, reportedly drank himself into a stupor before facing the climactic scene in The Spikes Gang in which his character shoots a young co-star. The film’s otherwise ordinary western is remembered for that violent sequence and Marvin’s expression. George C. Scott’s contract, in turn, stipulated that three production days would be lost because of his alcoholism. These examples make clear that tolerance did not mean the drinking was harmless; it shaped performances, schedules, and the conditions under which productions continued.

Aldo Ray and the long descent

Aldo Ray’s career traces a more extreme decline across the decade and beyond. By the summer of 1969 he had fallen far from his fifties prominence, when he starred opposite performers such as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Anne Bancroft, and Judy Holliday. The later view of his life makes that moment look almost favorable by comparison. In 1975 he could be trusted with a role lasting no more than two days, the longest period he was expected to remain sober. As the seventies gave way to the eighties, work came from low-budget filmmakers such as Al Adamson and Fred Olen Ray, rather than from the productions associated with his earlier status.

In 1979 Ray became the first former Hollywood star to appear in a seventies pornographic film, Sweet Savage, and received a best-actor award at the Erotic Film Awards. He was also the first former Hollywood star sued by the Screen Actors Guild for appearing in cheap, nonunion films. The sequence is presented as more than a fall in prestige: a former star’s search for work collided with the industry’s labor rules and with the increasingly narrow range of employment available to him. By looking back from these later outcomes, the narrative turns the 1970s into a measure of how differently old Hollywood reputations could fare under new commercial conditions.