Ageing, raging Bulls: Back from the brink

They were the kings of 1970s Hollywood and then they fell from grace. So why, asks Tobias Grey, are the big-shot directors now the talk of the town?

Maybe it's the dearth of decent contemporary American movies that's sparked it but all of a sudden everyone in Hollywood is waxing lyrical about the 1970s. You wouldn't for instance think that a documentary about the life of a duo-tanned, one-time coke addict would make America's film critics squeal with collective delight. But evidently you'd be one of the large majority who's neither heard of Robert Evans nor understands why a documentary about him should be called The Kid Stays in the Picture. Plans are even afoot to turn the man into a naughty but nice cartoon character. Evans, who headed up Paramount Studio during the 1970s and has often been credited with putting together the talent for film classics such as The Godfather I and II and Chinatown, is sitting pretty all over again.

And he is by no means the only one. The film-makers who came to prominence during the 1970s and were famously christened the "New Hollywood" are hogging the limelight once more. So far this year there have been two piquant ensemble dramas from Robert Altman (Gosford Park) and Peter Bogdanovich (The Cat's Meow). A return to form of sorts from Brian De Palma with Femme Fatale, the first film he has scripted in over a decade. Roman Polanski, meanwhile, picked up the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes festival for his holocaust film The Pianist.

Optimism is in the air. It's widely hoped that William Friedkin's The Hunted, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro, will be an Oscar contender. And then there's Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York to look forward to – despite negative rumblings, it should be the film event of this year. Francis Ford Coppola has said that towards the end of the year he'll start filming on his ambitious "Megalopolis", a project he's variously described as a "futuristic epic (that) centres on the rebuilding of New York after a disastrous accident" and as having "the size of a Cecil B De Mille picture".

Others from that era such as Bob Rafelson and Paul Schrader are also generating heat with their most interesting looking films in a long time. Rafelson has Samuel Jackson and Milla Jovovich headlining for his No Good Deed, a crime thriller based on a Dashiell Hammett short story and Schrader has rapped on Auto-Focus, his take on the life, death and perverted times of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane starring Greg Kinnear as Crane and Willem Defoe as his best buddy John Carpenter. Perhaps the most boggling piece of recent news, however, is Michael Cimino's announcement that he's going to adapt Andre Malraux's La Condition Humaine. Actors he is talking up for roles include Daniel Day-Lewis, Alain Delon, Johnny Depp, Uma Thurman and John Malkovich. Whether they are interested is another matter. Even with the reputedly small budget of 25m dollars, Cimino has to be the biggest glutton for punishment of them all – or the most visionary. This was a film after all that almost got made by Fred (High Noon) Zinnemann only to have the plug pulled on it after going through three years of excruciating rewrites. What is the man thinking?

Peter Biskind, who had all kinds of trouble from irate film-makers after he published his enthralling dirt disher Easy Riders Raging Bulls, posits: "All the great film-makers of the 1970s were genuinely talented – particularly Scorsese and Coppola – and with the right project, any one of them can come back and make another masterpiece. So I wouldn't bet against any of them." So there.

Variety's Todd McCarthy points out that, if anything, Biskind's book and the Robert Evans documentary have helped resuscitate interest in the work of the "New Hollywood" directors. Re-cut versions of films such as Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist as well as the burgeoning DVD industry have also played their part, introducing a new generation to these directors' works. "Sometimes you've got to go away to come back," says McCarthy. "They're respected as older statesmen now, because people have realised that the Seventies was the last golden age of American cinema."

As Peter Bart, Vice President of production at Paramount during the Seventies, says: "These guys were trying to create alchemy." Most of the time they succeeded. Think: the Godfather films, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Polanski's Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Altman's Nashville, Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, Friedkin's The Exorcist, Brian De Palma's Blow Out and Ashby's Being There to name but a few.

And then it all went haywire. "All but the most tenacious and disciplined directors of the Seventies who had managed to walk the tightrope between art and commerce, fell to their death in the Eighties," wrote Peter Biskind in Easy Riders Raging Bulls. Stephen Spielberg was the one director who managed this tightrope act, and his sustained level of success now looks like an anomaly in itself. Most of his peers veered off either too far in one direction or too far in the other. A frequent undoing was the so-called vanity project, a deeply personal take on a given genre. Coppola met his Waterloo with Apocalypse Now. Maybe if it had been hailed as the masterpiece back then that it is now Coppola would still be matching stride for stride with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. But it wasn't and the seemingly indestructible Coppola was chastened.

He wasn't the only one: Cimino was never forgiven for making the muddledHeaven's Gate; Friedkin was ridiculed for pretentiously remaking Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur as The Sorcerer; Scorsese made a hash of New York, New York. Meanwhile, Polanski sank Pirates, and Altman made Popeye, in what was one of the most stunning mismatches in movie history. These failures struck hard, such was their novelty value. Film-makers had rarely been given so much money before. With Heaven's Gate Cimino managed to single-handedly bankrupt an entire studio – United Artists. It was the signal to disappear, do something else, and lie low for a while. Coppola went and grew grapes at his Napa vineyard; Bogdanovich went bankrupt twice, came up with the infamous line "Remember me? I used to be Peter Bogdanovich", then moved back to acting; Altman disappeared until The Player brought new-found recognition, Cimino too dropped out of view only to return with a first novel, Big Jane; and Friedkin almost went the way of Ashby after suffering a heart attack, before turning to opera.

All now, though, seem to have re-focused on film, and not just studio fodder, but projects close to the heart. The gambling instincts which made the 1970s such an exhilarating decade for film lovers look like they are finally getting a dust down. Long live the revival.