20th Century Studios By Bill Bria March 1, 2025 11:00 pm EST In hindsight, the American cinema of the 1970s has two major legacies attached to it. On the one hand, there’s the American New Wave aka the New Hollywood movement, in which “Five Easy Pieces,” “Klute,” “The French Connection,” and other films like them eschewed the mainstream studio filmmaking formula in favor of telling stories that were creatively daring and heartfelt. On the other, there’s the dawn of the blockbuster, a trend that continues to this day and whose beginning is most often attributed to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” from 1975. But while “Jaws” gets the lion’s (er, shark’s) share of the credit for birthing the blockbuster, a good dollop of credit must also go to the other populist trend in
