10 Times Hollywood Regretted Giving Directors All The Freedom
3. New York, New York
There were a number of countless factors that led to the end of the New Hollywood and gave way to the era of the blockbuster, and you can rank them in importance by preference, as they were all equally significant. You could cite Manson and Polanski's rape charge, Jaws and Star Wars blowing competition away, and of course there was cocaine.
It's easy to joke about cocaine's influence on art in the 70s, particularly Hollywood, but it was pervasive. Most directors of the period talk openly about abusing it, including Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese's first noteworthy success, Mean Streets, continued a series of three films that were deeply Catholic. It also started to get him recognized and would lead to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and the near-instant classic Taxi Driver.
Beyond the Catholicism, all those films also share Scorsese's grounded, gritty realism - despite one of them opening with an homage to The Wizard of Oz.
By 1977, Scorsese wanted a change. Like Coppola, he turned to something vibrant and colourful: a musical. But his descent into cocaine addiction was in full swing, and the director was unable to control stars Robert De Niro and Liza Minelli's improvisation.
The film was a flop, and while some of the numbers and set pieces are impressive, you can't shake the feeling you aren't watching a musical so much as listening to a cokehead explain why he loves them.