1970s

The 1970s in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1970 and 1979. The decade is remembered by many as the 1960s rapidly running out of steam, and the gloom of recession replacing the optimism of the 1960s Flower Power era.

The United States, which had become an influential global power, experienced much of the transition. While the sixties saw social activism, society became more self-absorbed in the seventies. Analyst and writer Tom Wolfe epitomized this feeling in 1976, calling the seventies the "Me Decade." Music became at once more introspective with the singer-songwriter movement and more carefree with the rise of disco music. As the decade continued on, the American world view became apprehensive, with continuing inner-city poverty and rising urban crime rates, the Watergate hearings broadcast on television, and the Vietnam War still fresh in the national memory. Network, arguably one of the decade's most representative films, dealt with narcissism and paranoia as violence escalated in the Middle East and America was crippled by the Oil Shock of 1973. As the economy slipped, the use of recreational drugs increased and many began to fear purported cults such as the Children of God. By the end of the decade the feminist movement had helped improve women's working conditions and environmentalism had become a major cause in the United States and Europe.

While the United States experienced recession, the economy of Japan rose to claim the top spot on the world stage. The economies of many third world countries continued to bloom in the early 1970s through the green revolution. They might have thrived and become stable in the way that Europe recovered after the war through the Marshall Plan; however, the economic growth was stunted by the oil crisis. In 1973, foreign peacekeepers fled Vietnam, and the war that had lasted for nearly a decade ended with the Paris Peace Accords and communism continuing to spread. In neighboring Cambodia, several million citizens were executed by communist leader Pol Pot. Meanwhile, black South Africans still remained under apartheid following the death of activist Steve Biko.

Worldwide trends in the Seventies

The ethos of the 1970s emerged from a transition of the global social structure. It reflected the transition from the decline of colonial imperialism since the end of World War II to globalization and the rise of a new middle class in the developing world.

Globally, the 1970s had several features that were similar and definitive across economic levels and regions. These aspects and essence that make up global essence of the 1970s are the defining points of the 1970s: the Bretton Woods system and its subsequent failure, the impact of the contraceptive pill on social-interactional dynamics, and the oil shock of 1973.

The developing nations experienced economic growth that came in the wake of political independence. However, several African economies declined and political states became dictatorial regimes. Many Middle Eastern democracies crumbled into chaotic regimes with pseudo democratic governments.

The 1970s ethos in much of the developing world was characterized by:

• the incessant need to redefine social norms to newer socioeconomic systems,
• the sheer pace at which they need to adapt to new social influences along with the need to integrate it to their native cultural context, and
• the constant aspiration for a more egalitarian society in cultures that were long colonised and have an even longer history of hierarchical social structure.

The green revolution of the late 1960s brought about self sufficiency in many developing economies. At the same time an increasing number of people began to seek urban prosperity over agrarian life. This consequently saw the duality of transition of diverse interaction across social communities amid increasing information blockade across social class.

Other common global ethos of the seventies world include: increasingly flexible and varied gender roles for women. Women could now enter the work force and not just be housewives. However the gender role of men remained as that of a bread-winner. The period also saw unprecedented socioeconomic impact of an ever-increasing number of women entering the non-agrarian economic workforce, and the sweeping cultural-religious impact of the Iranian revolution toward the end of the 1970s.

The global experience of the cultural transition of the 1970s and an experience of a global zeitgeist revealed the interdependence of economies since World War II, and showed the huge impact of American economic policies on the world.

Economy of the Seventies

The developed economies of the world, the 1970s adversely distinguished itself from the prosperous postwar period between 1945 and 1969. Then, the world economy was buoyed by the Marshall Plan and the robust American economy. However, the high standing enjoyed by the American economy gradually became discomposed by loose domestic and war spending, particularly the Vietnam war. The oil shock of 1973 added to the existing ailments and conjured high inflation throughout much of the world for the rest of the decade. World leaders, such as James Callaghan of the United Kingdom, and Jimmy Carter of the United States, could not control it, causing their support to dwindle. Although there was no economic depression, the period is known for "stagflation", in which inflation and unemployment steadily increased, therefore leading to lower economic growth rates than previous decades.

In Eastern Europe, Soviet-style command economies began showing signs of stagnation, in which successes were persistently dogged by setbacks. The oil shock increased East European, particularly Soviet, exports, but agriculture became a growing annoyance to such economies.

Oil crisis

Scenes like this one, at an Amoco station in 1973, were common throughout the Western world. Also common were long lines to receive rationed petrol products.

Economically, the seventies were marked by the energy crisis which peaked in 1973 and 1979 (see 1973 oil crisis and 1979 oil crisis). After the first oil shock in 1973, gasoline was rationed in many countries. Europe particularly depended on the Middle East for oil; the US was also affected even though it had its own oil reserves. Many European countries introduced car-free days. In the US, customers with a license plate ending in an odd number were only allowed to buy gasoline on odd-numbered days, while even-numbered plate-holders could only purchase gasoline on even-numbered days. The experience that oil reserves were not endless and technological development was not sustainable without harming the environment ended the age of modernism. As a result, ecological awareness rose substantially.

Social movements

Environmentalism

The seventies touched off a mainstream affirmation of the environmental issues early activists from the '60s, such as Rachel Carson, warned about. The moon landing that had occurred at the end of the previous decade transmitted back concrete images of the earth as an integrated, life-supporting system and shaped a public willingness to preserve nature. On April 22, 1970, the United States celebrated its first Earth Day in which over two thousand colleges and universities and roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools participated.

Over the course of the decade, in the US a series of environmentally friendly legislation would be passed. Notable actions included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the passage of Clean Water Act in 1972, and the enactment of the Endangered Species Act the next year.

The takeoff of environmental thought rose parallel to the increased usage of nuclear power over fossil fuels. However, with the increasing expenses of nuclear power the opposition likewise grew. [1] Opposition to nuclear power became widespread in reaction to the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant on March 28, 1979.

Feminism

Feminism in the United States got its start in the 1960s, but began to take flight starting in 1970, with the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (which legalized female suffrage).

With the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful and other works being published at the start of the decade, feminism started to reach a larger audience.

Gay rights

The Stonewall riots, which occurred in New York City in June 1969, are generally considered to have ignited the modern gay rights movement, especially in North America (England and Wales had already decriminalised homosexuality in 1967). In the 1970s, in western countries and especially so in major urban centers, gay and lesbian people came out of the closet as never before (even as many others remained closeted) and a vocal and visible gay-rights movement coalesced in an unprecedented way.

Considering the profound stigma attached to homosexuality at the dawn of the 1970s, the movement, although still nascent, saw tremendous gains over the course of the decade. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders in 1973. Gay-rights ordinances were passed by several cities (beginning with Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1972), and in 1977 Quebec became the first jurisdiction (larger than a city or county) in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in the public and private sectors.

For the first time, a few openly gay people were elected to political office in the United States. In 1977 Harvey Milk, a politically active gay man in the emerging gay neighborhood The Castro, was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. Milk and liberal San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated the following year; in 1979 their assassin, Dan White, received a sentence of voluntary manslaughter. The anger the gay community felt about the murders and about White's light sentence further galvanized the movement.

The increasing visibility of gay people also generated a backlash during the seventies. In perhaps the most discussed anti-gay rights campaign of the decade, singer Anita Bryant led a successful drive in 1977 to repeal a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. The new openness about homosexuality proved disconcerting to some heterosexuals who had been accustomed to gay and lesbian people remaining closeted and politically silent. "The love that dare not speak its name," Canadian author Robertson Davies wrote during the decade, referencing the famous Lord Alfred Douglas quote, "has become the love that won't shut up."

On October 14, 1979, approximately 100,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., in the largest pro-gay rights demonstration up to that time.

Culture during the Seventies

Emerging social perspectives in the Seventies

In the wake of the 1960s many of the social dimenisions and perspectives towards issues were increasingly seen in liberal perspectives. Universities became more friendly and less authoritative towards students. This was reflected in the corporate culture of the 1970s, where the hierarchy between supervisor and subordinates became increasingly flat. This had influence in social interaction and family relationship as well. The nuclear family rose to prominence in the third world and the role of women in nuclear families took radical shift from those of earlier generations. With the rise of nuclear family and liberal attitudes towards social structure came new perspectives to child rearing and education. The 70s saw a decline in attendance to boarding schools and a rise of local day schools. The role of the nuclear family and the parent was increasingly noticed and given new impetus. Social norms and laws were increasingly framed in favour of women.

The Seventies in music

Main article: Timeline of trends in music (1970-1979)

The seventies were a time when a new generation of young people were exposed to new media and hence newer ideas in almost every field. Elvis was still probably the biggest entertainer in the world in the 70´s and in 1973 he held the historic Hawaain concert which was televised worldwide to almost 1.5 billion people in over 40 countries. TV and motion picture brought to varied audiences images, lifestyles and music from diverse regions and peoples. This led to the emergence of a new vocabulary and experimentation in music. After the war the second generation of German musicians began experimenting with music, these included experimental classical music and the tradition of Krautrock or Kraut music, rooted in the experimental classical music. This later influenced both art rock and progressive rock. The main exponents of this genre include Genesis, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and space rock giants Pink Floyd. The experimental nature of progressive rock is exemplified in songs such as Pink Floyd's Echoes.

The seventies is also when many legendary rock bands started, or hit their peak, including The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, AC/DC,Queen (Band), Black Sabbath, KISS, The Who, and Van Halen.

Another experimentation in European classical music was brought about by composer Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, with what was to be called Minimalist music. This was a break from the intellectual serial music of the tradition of Schoenberg which lasted from the early 1900s to 1960s. Minimalist music sought to appreciate simple music with systematic patterns repeated in complex variations.

These experimentations were also used in several movies made in the early 1970s. In world music the musical collaboration of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and L. Subramaniam was appreciated by a large audience.

The commercial cinemas around the world tended to imitate nuances of disco beats in their movies to present their movies as western and upbeat. These included the increasingly popular Kung-fu movies in far East Asia and Bollywood movies from India.

One of the most successful European groups of the decade was the quartet ABBA. The Swedish group, who are still the most successful group from their country, first found fame when they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. They became one of the most widely known European groups ever, and were the decade's biggest sellers. "Waterloo" and "Dancing Queen" are two of ABBA's most popular songs.

To many people, the Seventies will be most remembered for the rise in disco music. First creeping into dance clubs in the mid-seventies (with such hits as "The Hustle" by Van McCoy), songstresses like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Dalida and Anita Ward popularized the genre and were described in subsequent decades as the "disco divas." The Village People scored a Top Ten hit with "Y.M.C.A." and the Bee Gees had a string of #1s following their collaboration on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

As quickly as disco's popularity came, however, it fell out of favor with the new decade, and effectively died in 1981, with the popularity of New Wave bands such as Blondie and Devo, who both formed their respective bands in the seventies. Many of the aforementioned singers who became popular during the disco era found themselves out of tune with the 1980s, and were out of work for many years, until a renewed interest in disco brought many of them back to the forefront. Many songs from the disco era are still very popular dance hits and receive continuous airplay in nightclubs throughout the world.

The mid-seventies saw the rise of punk music from its protopunk/garage band roots in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and The Clash were some of the earliest acts to make it big in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Groups like the Clash were noted for the experimentation of style, especially that of having strong reggae influences in their music. Punk music has also been heavily associated with a certain punk fashion and absurdist humor which exemplified a genuine suspicion of mainstream culture and values.

Towards the end of the decade, the Jamaican reggae music, already popular in the Caribbean and Africa since the early 1970s, became very popular in the U.S. and in Europe, mostly because of reggae superstar and legend Bob Marley as well as his band, The Wailers, his former bandmate Peter Tosh and other artists like Burning Spear and Jimmy Cliff.

The Seventies in cinema

World cinema

In cinema all over the world, the seventies brought about vigour in adventurous and realistic complex narratives with rich cinematography and elaborate scores. The cultural interaction between aided with TV and visual media and the rise in motion picture technology ushered in a new period of motion picture making.

In European cinema, the failure of the Prague Spring brought about nostalgic motion pictures reminiscent of the ones that celebrate the 1970s itself. These movies expressed a yearning and as a premonition to the decade and its dreams. The Hungarian director István Szabó made the motion picture Szerelmesfilm (1970), which is a nostalgic portrayal and a premonition of the fading of the young 1970s ethos of change and a friendlier social structure. The Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci made the motion picture The Conformist (1970). German movies after the war aksed existential questions especially the works of Rainer Fassbinder. The movies of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman reached a new level of expression in motion pictures like Cries and Whispers (1973). Young German directors made movies that came to be called as the German new wave. It was the voice of a new generation that had grown up after the second world war. These included directors like Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Werner Herzog.

Wim wenders made movies that explored psychological states of humans in situations intimate and significant to the characters. He made Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick) in 1972. It was based on a novella by Peter Handke. He further explored this realm in the motion picture Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities), 1974. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg created a sensation in 1977 with the motion picture Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler a film from Germany). It was a seven hour movie which attempted to investigate hitler under the shadows of wagner art and Nazi nationalism. This was followed by the expressionist movie Woyzeck (1979) by Werner Herzog.

Asian cinema of the 1970s catered to the rising middle class fantasies and struggles. In the Bollywood cinema of India this was epitomised by the movies of Bollywood superhero Amitabh Bachchan. These movies portrayed adventurous plots with car chase trying to imitate hollywood movies like The French Connection, presented music with Disco beats and also presented the young middle class man as an "angry young man". The women on the other hand were shown as ones who have adopted western values and outfits especially by heroines like Parveen Babi (who was featured on the cover of TIME for a story on Bollywood's success) and Zeenat Aman. However towards the very end of the 1970s, especially after the steep rise in land prices in urban areas and the decline in employment security, the heroines were seen more often as saree-women striving to have a prosperous middle class family especially heroines like Jayaprada and Hema Malini. In this way the cinema of asian region becomes a sociological statement of the social-economic times of the region and its people.

Other movie industry of the region produced fine masterpieces like in Malayalam cinema. Adoor Gopalakrishnan made Swayamvaram in 1972, which got wide critical acclaim. This was followed by the movie Nirmalyam by M.T. Vasudevan Nair in 1973.

Hollywood

The decade opened with Hollywood facing a financial slump, reflecting the monetary woes of the nation as a whole during the first half of the decade. Despite this, the seventies proved to be a benchmark decade in the development of cinema, both as an art form and a business. With young filmmakers taking greater risks and restrictions regarding language and sexuality lifting, Hollywood produced some its most critically acclaimed and financially successful films since its supposed "golden era."

Marlon Brando won Best Actor honors at the Academy Awards for his role in the 1972 hit The Godfather. He boycotted the ceremony and sent Native American Sacheen Littlefeather to reject the award on his behalf. Also pictured are Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann.

In the years previous to 1970, Hollywood had began to cater to the younger generation with films such as The Graduate and Topless Nurses. This proved a folly when anti-war films like R.P.M. and The Strawberry Statement became major box-office flops. Even solid films with bankable stars, like the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora!, flopped, leaving studios in dire straights financially. Unable to repay financiers, studios began selling off land, furniture, clothing, and sets acquired over years of production. Nostalgic fans bid on merchandise and collectables ranging from Judy Garland's sparkling red shoes to MGM's own back lots.

More of the successful films were those based in the harsh truths of war, rather than the excesses of the '60s. Films like Patton, about the World War II general, and M*A*S*H, about a Korean War field hospital, were major box-office draws in 1970. Honest, old-fashioned films like Five Easy Pieces, Summer of '42, and the Erich Segal adaptation, Love Story, were commercial and critical hits. (Love Story and "Summer" remain, as of 2005, two of the most successful films in Hollywood history. "Summer," costing $1,000,000 USD, brought in $25,000,000 at the box office, while "Love Story," with a budget of $2,200,000, earned $106,400,000).

One of the most insightful films of the decade came from the mind of a Hollywood outsider, Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman, whose Taking Off became a bold reflection of life at the beginning of the seventies. The 1971 satirized the American middle class, following a young girl who runs away from home, leaving her parents free to explore life for the first time in years. While the film was never given a wide release in America, it became a major critical achievement both in America and around the world (garnering the film high honors at the Cannes Film Festival and several BAFTA Award nominations).

An adaptation of an Arthur Hailey novel would prove to be one of the most notable films of 1970, and would set the stage for a major trend in seventies cinema. The film, Airport, featured a complex plot, characters, and an all-star cast of Hollywood A-listers and legends. Airport followed an airport manager trying to keep a fictional Chicago airport operational during a blizzard, as well as a bomb plot to blow up an airplane. The film was a major critical and financial success, helping pull Universal Studios into the black for the year. The film earned senior actress Helen Hayes an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and garnered many other nominations in both technical and talent categories. The success of the film launched a slew of disaster-related films, many of which following the same blueprint of major stars, a melodramatic script, and great suspense.

1972's The Poseidon Adventure was one of the most successful star-studded "disaster films."

Three Airport sequels followed in 1974, 1977, and 1979, each successor making less money than the last. 1972 brought The Poseidon Adventure, which starred a young Gene Hackman leading an all-star cast to safety in a capsized luxury liner. The film earned an Academy Award for visual effects (and Best Original Song for "The Morning After," as well as numerous nominations, including one for its notable supporting star, Shelley Winters. The Towering Inferno teamed Steve McQueen and Paul Newman against a fire in a New York skyscraper. The film cost a whopping $14 million to produce (expensive for its time), and won Academy Awards for Cinematography, Film Editing, and Best Original Song. The same year, the epic Earthquake featured questionable effects (camera shake and models) to achieve a destructive 9.9 earthquake in Los Angeles. Despite this, the film was one of the most successful of its time, earning $80 million at box office. By the late seventies, the novelty had worn off and the disasters had become less exciting. 1977 brought a terrorist targeting a Rollercoaster, a 1978 Swarm of bees, and a less-than-threatening Meteor in 1979.

1971 brought a rebirth of the action film, three years after the influential Bullitt. The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman, brought suspense to new heights with an adrenaline-broiling car chase through the streets of New York City, while Get Carter featured gratuitous nudity and A Clockwork Orange featured much blood and gore to complement its complex story. African American filmmakers also found success in the seventies with such hits as Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and more questionable films, such as Blacula and Blackenstein. Like other sequels in the seventies, Shaft went on to have two more adventures, each less successful than the last.

An adaptation of a Mario Puzo novel, The Godfather, became one of the best-loved and most respected works of cinema upon its release in 1972. The three-hour epic followed a Mafia boss, played by Marlon Brando, through his life of crime. Beyond the violence and drama were themes of love, pride, and greed. The Godfather went on to earn $134 million at American box office, and $245 million throughout the world. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. Its director Francis Ford Coppola was passed over in favor of Bob Fosse and his musical, Cabaret, which also earned an Oscar for its star, Liza Minnelli. The Godfather: Part II followed in 1974, with roughly the same principal cast and crew, earning Oscars for star Robert De Niro, its director, composer, screenwriters and art directors. The film also earned the Best Picture Oscar for that year.

The replacement of Sean Connery, first with George Lazenby and then with Roger Moore, in the James Bond series created a minor bump for the '60s hit in the seventies. While 1973's Live and Let Die was a moderate success, the following films in the series didn't live up to expectations. The highest grossing of the seventies Bond films, 1979's Moonraker, is viewed by many as the weakest of the franchise.

Other massively successful films would soon take Bond's place in the seventies. It was at this time that the blockbuster was born. While the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist was among the top five grossing films of the seventies, the first film given the blockbuster distinction was 1975's Jaws. Released on June 20th, the film about a series of horrific deaths related to a massive great white shark was director Steven Spielberg's first big-budget Hollywood production, coming in at a cool $9 million in cost. The film slowly grew in ticket sales and became one of the most profitable films of its time, ending with a $260 million dollar gross in the United States alone. The film won Academy Awards for its skillful editing, chilling score, and sound recording. It was also nominated for Best Picture that year, though it lost to Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which also won acting awards for Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher).

The enormous success of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the highest-grossing movie of 1977, was not soon surpassed.

The massive success of Jaws was eclipsed just two years later by another legendary blockbuster and film franchise. The George Lucas science-fiction epic, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, hit theater screens in May of 1977, and became a major hit, growing in ticket sales throughout the summer, and the rest of the year. In time earning some $460 million, the good versus evil fantasy set in space was not soon surpassed. The film's breathtaking visual effects won an Academy Award. The film also won for John Williams's uplifting score, as well as art direction, costume design, film editing, and sound. A New Hope effectively removed any specter of studio bankruptcy that had haunted the studios since early in the decade. When a television film, The Star Wars Holiday Special, was released as a spin-off from A New Hope in 1978, it failed to receive the status of the original film, and was deemed a flop. It would be two years until the Star Wars series would be revived with The Empire Strikes Back. Another success in visual effects came the same year as A New Hope, with Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another blockbuster and alien contact set in the wilderness. For the picture, Spielberg received his first Oscar nomination for direction.

Throughout the seventies, the horror film developed into a lucrative genre of film. It began in 1973 with the terrifying The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and starring the young Linda Blair. The film saw massive success, and the first of several sequels was released in 1977. 1976 brought the equally creepy suspense thriller, Marathon Man, about a man who becomes the target of a former Nazi dentist's torment after his brother dies. The same year, the Devil himself made an appearance in The Omen, about the spawn of Satan. 1978's Halloween was a precursor to the "slasher" films of the eighties and nineties with its psychopathic Michael Myers. Cult horror films were also popular in the seventies, such as Wes Craven's early gore films Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, as well as Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In the mid-seventies movies began to reflect the disenfranchisement brought by the excesses of the past twenty years. A deeply unsettling look at alienation and city life, Taxi Driver earned international praise, first at the Cannes Film Festival and then at the Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Leading Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Score (Bernard Herrmann), and Best Picture. All the President's Men dealt with the impeachment of Richard Nixon, while Network portrayed greed and narcissism in both American society and television media. The film won Oscars for Best Actor (Peter Finch), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Supporting Actres (Beatrice Straight), and Best Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky). Thanks to a stellar cast, experienced director, and a poignant story, Network became one of the largest critical successes of 1976.

Another film, Rocky, about an average man turned boxer (played by Sylvester Stallone) won the Best Picture Academy Award that year. The film also became a major commercial success and spawned four sequels through the rest of the seventies and eighties. 1978 brought the successful sequel, Jaws 2, which featured the same cast, but without Steven Spielberg. Another tailor-made blockbuster, Dino de Laurentiis' King Kong was released, but to less than stellar success. King Kong did mark the first time a film was booked to theaters before a release date, a common practice today.

Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney, introduced the "disco lifestyle" to the world.

The success of Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977 stirred a new trend in moviemaking. Annie Hall, a love story about a depressed comedian and a free-spirited woman, was followed with more sentimental films, including Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl, An Unmarried Woman staring Jill Clayburgh,the autobiographical Lillian Hellman story, Julia, starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and 1978's Heaven Can Wait and International Velvet.

Younger audiences were also beginning to be the focus of cinema, after the huge blockbusters that had attracted them back to the theater. John Travolta became popular in the pop-culture landmark films, Saturday Night Fever, which introduced Disco to middle America, and Grease, which recalled the world of the 1950s. Comedy was also given new life in the irreverent Animal House, set on a college campus during the 1960s. Up in Smoke, starring Cheech and Chong, was another irreverent comedy about marijuana use became popular among teenagers. The new television comedy program, "Saturday Night Live," launched the careers of several of its comedians, such as Chevy Chase, who starred in the 1978 hit Foul Play with rising star Goldie Hawn. Blockbusters like Superman, starring former Love of Life actor Christopher Reeve, were also still popular.

The decade closed with two films chronicling the Vietnam War, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Both films focused on the horrors of war and the psychological damaged caused by such horrors. Christopher Walken and director Michael Cimino earned Oscars for their work on the film, which earned a Best Picture Academy Award. Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep were also nominated for their work in The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now won for cinematography and sound, and earned nominations for Robert Duvall and Coppola.

1979 saw the poignant Kramer vs. Kramer, the inspiring Norma Rae, and the nuclear thriller, The China Syndrome. Meanwhile, The Onion Field and And Justice for All focused on the failures of the American judicial system. The year ended with Hal Ashby's subtle black comedy Being There and The Muppet Movie, a family film based on the Jim Henson puppet characters.

The Seventies in television

In the United States

All in the Family's Bunker clan, headed by the ignorant patriarch Archie, were popular with US television viewers throughout the 1970s.

At the start of the decade, long-standing trends in American television were finally reaching the end of the road. The Red Skelton Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, long-revered American institutions, were finally canceled after multi-decade spans. The "family sitcom," popularized by the travails of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the fifties and sixties, saw its last breath at the start of the new decade with The Brady Bunch, which ran for five seasons. Although the show was never highly rated during its original run, it has been broadcast in syndication continuously since 1974, and many children have grown up with it, causing them to think of the Bradys as the quintessential family—not only in 1970s television, but quite possibly all of American television.

In the United States, television in the seventies was transformed by what became termed as "social consciousness" programming, spearheaded by television producer Norman Lear. All in the Family, his adaptation of the British television series Til Death Us Do Part, broke down television barriers. When the series premiered in 1971, Americans heard the words "fag," "nigger," and "spic" on national television programming for the first time. All in the Family was the talk of countless dinner tables throughout the country; Americans hadn't seen anything like it on television before. The show became the highest-rated program on US television schedules in the fall of 1971 and stayed in the top slot until 1976—to date, only one other series has tied All in the Family for such a long stretch at the top of the ratings. All in the Family spawned numerous spin-offs, such as Maude, starring Bea Arthur. Maude was Edith Bunker's cousin and Archie's arch-enemy. She stood for everything liberal and was an outspoken advocate of civil rights and feminism. Maude felt most comfortable, however, hiring a black woman as her housekeeper. Maude's housekeeper, Florida Evans (played by Esther Rolle), became popular in her own right and was given her own television series in 1974, Good Times, which proved to be another hit for Lear's production company. Lear developed two shows in 1975: The Jeffersons, a spinoff of All in the Family in which Archie Bunker's black next-door neighbors moved to a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and One Day at a Time, about a single mother raising her two teenage daughters in Indianapolis.

While the shoot-'em-up television western died out, the family drama Little House on the Prairie thrived during the seventies.

With the rise in socially responsible programming, the television western, a very popular genre in the 1960s, slowly died out. The first casualties were The High Chaparral and The Virginian, both NBC staples, in the spring of 1971. Bonanza suffered a blow when actor Dan Blocker died during surgery in 1972, and the show quietly ended its run the next year. CBS's Gunsmoke outlasted them all, and finally ended its run with a star-studded series finale in 1975. Bonanza actor Michael Landon helped popularize a television adaptation of the popular children's book series Little House on the Prairie. Debuting in 1974, the series ran for eight years. Little House's competitor family drama was CBS's The Waltons, which revolved around family unity but during a different time and place—Virginia during the Great Depression.

By the mid-to-late 1970s, viewers tired of socially responsible sitcoms. CBS had aired most of Lear's creations and had led the US television ratings since the mid-1950s; since then the network had received a reputation as being the "Tiffany Network," showcasing the best in television. Former CBS head of programming Fred Silverman defected to struggling ABC, which saw a glimmer of hope in the early 1970s with the #1 hit show Marcus Welby, M.D., but eventually retreated to its traditional third-place spot. Silverman was instrumental in starting a new movement in American television, centered around sexual gratification and bawdy humor and situations. Critics called the new era "jiggle television," exemplified by the crime-fighting television series Charlie's Angels, which starred up-and-coming sex symbols Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, and Kate Jackson.

Fred Silverman's rejuvenation of the struggling ABC network earned him a spot on the cover of TIME in 1977.

Silverman was responsible for green-lighting more risqué sitcoms such as Three's Company, modeled after the British series Man About the House, in which swinging single-man Jack Tripper pretended to be gay in order to live in an apartment with two single women. Mildly controversial at the time, the show quickly became a Top Ten hit in the ratings. ABC also aired Soap, a sitcom that parodied soap operas, and garnered controversy by writing in one of the first gay characters on U.S. television. Many stations refused to air the series (another storyline consisted of heroine Corinne Tate, played by Diana Canova, lusting after a priest who eventually left the priesthood to marry her).

Silverman's legacy also included the "fantasy" genre, which started in 1977 with The Love Boat. The series involved popular movie and television stars in guest roles as passengers on a luxury cruise liner that sailed up and down the Pacific Coast. Silverman followed up in 1978 with Fantasy Island, starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize. Montalban and Villechaize were the owner and sidekick, respectively, of a luxury island resort where peoples' wishes came true.

The soap opera Ryan's Hope, about an "everyman" Irish-American, middle-class family, proved quite popular with viewers in the late seventies.

Another popular medium in US television moving into the 1970s was the soap opera, which moved from being a genre watched exclusively by housewives to having a sizable audience of men (who largely watched The Edge of Night) and college students; the latter audience helped All My Children gain a devoted following, as it was on during many universities' traditional "lunch period." In a TIME article written about the genre in 1976, it was estimated that as many as 35 million households tuned into at least one soap opera each afternoon, the most popular being As the World Turns, which routinely grabbed viewing figures of twelve million or higher each day. The soap boom spawned a nighttime soap parody,