Last night I finally watched Morgan Neville’s Breakdown: 1975 (12.19.25), a 92-minute Netflix doc that hurriedly recaps and, in a sense, celebrates the fertile and provocative moviescape of the mid ’70s. Glorious times!
Except Neville doesn’t strictly focus on 1975 films. The doc covers ’74, ’75 and ’76, during which, Neville asserts, the real meat and marrow of New Hollywood came to fruition. But every so often the early ’70s pop through and then, at the end, the ’77 finale (Rocky, Star Wars) is heard from.
Plus anyone who had hit puberty by the late ’60s or who’s read Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution” or Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging bulls” knows that New Hollywood was launched in ’67 with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.
So let’s cut the crap — Breakdown: 1975 is really about the whole span of the mythical New Hollywood era. Neville should’ve called it Rough-and-Tumble ’70s Free-For-All! or Hollywood Neverland: When The Inmates Ran The Asylum or something in that vein.
The problem is that Breakdown: 1975 is generally too fast and loose and simple-minded — it just skims along and barely gets into any nitty-gritty specifics. It’s primarily aimed at your none-too-bright kids who are too lazy or ADD-afflicted to have paid the slightest attention to what Harris and Biskind were on about.
Is it a good thing that Neville has made a dumbed-down primer for younger folks (Millennials, Zoomers, Gen Alpha) who haven’t a clue about films that were made before the 1980s? Okay, yeah, I suppose.
As I watched Neville’s doc I recalled that the same basic saga was concisely passed along in Spotlight on New Hollywood (‘24), a 15-minute Criterion Channel essay that was offered last summer as a supplement to Criterion’s streaming of The Graduate.
Alas, it has since been erased, at least according to a cursory Google + Criterion search.
Why can’t “Spotlight on New Hollywood” be offered as a stand-alone video essay on YouTube? That’s what I’m basically asking here. It would be terrific if readers of this piece could savor it.
The truth is that in 15 minutes Spotlight on New Hollywood delivers a much better, tighter, more sophisticated history of this fabled era than Neville, whom I know, respect and admire, manages in 92 minutes.
Such a shame that Harris’s 15-minute essay has been sent to the Criterion dustbin. Unless I’m missing something.
