The industry and its new audience
By 1967 the Hollywood studios knew that their audience was changing. Attendance had fallen since the early 1950s, television had taken the family evening, and the most dependable cinema-goers were increasingly the young. The success of films like Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 suggested that audiences wanted something less polished, and the studios, still operating under a Production Code that was being loosened, began to look for subjects that would attract younger viewers. The hippies, newly famous through newspapers and magazines, were an obvious candidate. Often the people making these films were older and had little direct contact with the scene.
The Trip
The best-known 1967 example was The Trip, directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures and released in the summer. Corman was a veteran of low-budget genre films, and the screenplay was written by Jack Nicholson. Peter Fonda played a television commercial director who takes LSD for the first time, with Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper in supporting roles and Susan Strasberg also in the cast. Much of the film consists of hallucination sequences, using coloured lights, quick cuts and distorted images to suggest the experience.
Corman is reported to have taken LSD himself while preparing the film. The studio, concerned about how the picture would be received, reportedly added a closing disclaimer and a warning about the drug, so that the film could be defended against accusations of promoting its use. Critics were divided, and the picture was most successful with young audiences at drive-ins and urban theatres. It was cheap by industry standards, and it is generally regarded as having done well for its budget, though the details of its earnings are less certain than its reputation.
Fonda and Hopper
Peter Fonda had already appeared in Corman’s The Wild Angels in 1966, a motorcycle-gang film that raised debate about youth and rebellion. Dennis Hopper was an actor and photographer with close ties to the Los Angeles art world. The friendship of the two men and their work with Nicholson on Corman’s films is often described as a training ground for what came later, since in 1969 Fonda and Hopper made Easy Rider, which belongs to a later stage of what historians call the New Hollywood. In 1967, though, they were working inside the old system, on cheap pictures aimed at a niche audience.
Following the youth market
Studio executives did not study the counterculture closely; they watched box-office results. After The Trip and a few other low-budget successes, companies tried to fit the trend. In 1968 several releases, including American International’s Psych-Out and a political satire called Wild in the Streets, followed in the same direction. Late in 1967 The Graduate, which was not about hippies but about the unease of a young graduate, became a major hit, and executives took it as proof that the youth audience was large. The idea of a corporate youth market was quickly forming across the entertainment business, and television was at the same time producing programmes such as The Monkees, a manufactured band that borrowed some of the look.
Filmed hippies and real ones
Hollywood hippies and Haight hippies were rarely the same people. Several differences stand out:
- Films concentrated on drug experiences, which were dramatic and easy to film, while most accounts of the Haight stress ordinary routines like cooking, music and conversation, along with poverty.
- Screenwriters tended to treat the movement as either a threat or a fad, and often as both.
- Costumes and settings were produced in studios by people who looked at photographs.
- Real participants often found the screen versions silly or exploitative, though some enjoyed seeing themselves on screen.
The gap mattered because for most Americans outside a few cities, films and television were the main way they would meet the idea of a hippie. The studio version was simplified and often misleading, and it helped fix the stereotypes that participants in the Haight were already trying to reject by the autumn of 1967.
Los Angeles, the place
Hollywood is also a real location with its own youth scene on the nearby Sunset Strip, covered in a separate article. Some of the cast and crew of The Trip lived and worked within a few miles of it. But the film industry is better understood as a business that reacted to the movement than as a part of it, and its 1967 output tells us more about studio worries than about the lives of the young people it claimed to depict.