We're Normal! Welcome to the 1970's, Perfomance.

So the whole idea of the new season of podcasts is that we are going to take a trawl through the 1970s, which I think can, would you agree, Mike, or not, is a sort of seminal period, or are, are all periods seminal ultimately? [laughs]

I think, I think in their own way they probably are all seminal.

Um, but '70s were, I mean, a lot of people would say it was kind of the start, it may be the end of the '60s technically, but p- the start of the new Hollywood, would you say?

Yeah, and it was actually, I mean, with hindsight it was a very short period of time that those, um, f- that that sort of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls thing happened.

Um, it was only really from sort of '70 to '74, '75.

By the time you got to Jaws, the landscape had sort of changed again, hadn't it? We'd invented the blockbuster and the-

Yeah

... um, I mean, I know Godfather was considered a blockbuster in what, 1972?

Two.

Yeah.

But not in the way Jaws was.

That kind of, that sort of invented the summer movie, and then Star Wars in '77 took it to a whole other place.

And that argument, well, I don't know whether you agree with me, that's like inf- what's the word? Infantilizing of cinema a bit.

Yeah.

I mean, uh, you know, 'cause that flowering of directors in the early '70s was quite extraordinary.

The Hal Ashbys, the, um, [lips smack] uh, even, um, Brian De Palma and, um-

Peter Bogdanovich

...

Peter Bogdanovich, uh, who was the-

Coppola

Yeah, the whole, the whole-

You know, all, all of those.

Yeah.

So what's interesting about this though is that we have these, uh, so looking at it from my cinema's point of view, we have all these ideas that 19- the '70s were this sort of, um, radical change in cinema, but here in the sticks they were not a radical [laughs] change in cinema at all.

Uh, the idea that we were all...