Lunch With Books: The New Hollywood with John Whitehead

September 27, 2016
12:00pm - 12:00pm

Conversation: Introduction to the New Hollywood and Wheeling Film Society’s 5^th Season

In 1967, the Golden Age of Hollywood, which had ruled international pop culture since the 1920s, was exhausted.  The old studio system still cranked out epics, but they were more likely to be notorious disasters like Cleopatra (1963) than blockbusters like The Sound of Music (1964).  A new culture – what we know as the Sixties Revolution – was emerging beyond the walls of the studios.  The Baby-Boom generation was now old enough to buy its own movie tickets, and they wanted to see something new.  In this introduction to a special anniversary season of the Wheeling Film Society, we’ll time-travel 50 years to revisit 1967 – the year that gave us Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Summer of Love, and the dawn of a new era of Hollywood movie-making.

Host: John Whitehead.

Wheeling Film Society, 5^th Annual Season: 2016-2017

Co-sponsored by:

Ohio County Public Library

Oglebay Institute’s Towngate Cinema

Wheeling Jesuit University’s Fine Arts Department

The Wheeling Film Society (WFS) announces its fifth annual season of screening-discussions of classic Hollywood films, which will focus on the unifying theme of the 50^th anniversary of the New Hollywood, when the old Studio System crumbled and a new generation of filmmakers, including Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, and eventually Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas became the artistic heart of American filmmaking.  John Whitehead, professor of film studies at Wheeling Jesuit University and author of Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (2011) and Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation (2014) will serve as host for the screenings and conversations.