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Movie companies, like cuckolded husbands, are always the last to know. In '69 and '70 they imitated the headlines, following the spoor of student protest and the little-read riding hoods of Easy Rider. All they got for their pains was a lungful of exhaust. "You can't fool the kids," says a character in Wilfrid Sheed's novel, Max Jamison. Replies the critic: "Good God, they're easier to fool than psychiatrists." So they are—but only once or twice. Getting Straight picked up a nice piece of change, but it was Elliott Gould's first film after MASH, the consummate war movie. The Strawberry Statement bombed in the U.S. So did The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart. And Move. It was all reminiscent of the Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn. The first night, half the town came to the non-show. The second night the other half came. The third night, both halves came—and nearly tarred and feathered the players.
No one rises against a piece of celluloid (though some aesthetes threw beer cans at the graven image of Myra Breckinridge). Contemporary audiences have a far more effective method of protest: they stay away. For Hollywood, the 1970 statistics are terrifying; the films that are still earning heavy profits constitute a mere skeleton crew. There is MASH, in a clash by itself. There is that blown-up personality poster, Patton, which knocks the military-industrial complex—and then gift-wraps itself in the flag. As for the biggest grosser of the year, it is an overpriced, oldfashioned, romantic rhinestone called Airport. By December it had pulled in $65 million.
So the financially shaken show-business industry has rushed out to take another look at the old seismograph. The youthquake, it finds, has faded to an indecipherable rumble. Irwin Winkler, co-producer of The Strawberry Statement, announces that his next picture is being overhauled to give it "more general appeal"—a nice way of saying that unemployed teen-agers are becoming bourgeois adults. "The Easy Rider syndrome," reports Variety, may have "been put to rest."
Then along came salvation in the pastel costume of Love Story. MCA President Lew Wasserman, who began learning about show business as a vaudeville candy butcher 45 years ago, has his own judgment of Love Story: "The audience that many companies felt was no longer there has been there all the time. I don't think the romantic interest went away. We went away."
Meet John Doe
Indeed, in its desperate effort to be With It, Hollywood has run against the American grain and emerged with splinters. American romanticism began with the Revolution and continued with validity through the poetry and philosophy of the 19th century. "Pioneering," wrote Lewis Mumford, "may in part be described as the Romantic Movement in action." That action animated Progress, and eventually Commerce. It also illuminated the writings of Philosopher William James, who championed sensation over determinism, and the thought and actions of Emerson and Thoreau, who sought wisdom in intuition and found God immanent in the natural cathedral.
America's romantic gospels submerged in the super-scientific 20th century, but were never far beneath the surface. In films, they seemed to fluctuate with the