In the 1970s, an ambitious band of young directors that included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and the late William Friedkin defined the New Hollywood with their idiosyncratic vision that rebelled against the safe and predictable norms of the studio system.
Their films were often in response, at least in metaphorical terms, to the zeitgeist, which, as it pertained to the late-’60s and early-’70s, constituted a reaction to political quagmires.
Through period or contemporary pieces, New Hollywood grappled with history.
One of the essential directors of this era, Steven Spielberg, took on a mentorship role to Robert Zemeckis, a younger and more commercially-drawn up-and-coming filmmaker.
Zemeckis, whose populist and crowd-pleasing sentiments contrasted with the downbeat cynicism of New Hollywood, nonetheless captured a blissful cultural moment at the dawn before the wave of political and social upheaval in his 1978 directorial feature debut, I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
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