ABSTRACT
It was not the best of times, and it did not produce the best of movies. The old and the new were attempting a stormy coexistence in the mid-1960s, with all the seams showing and near the bursting point. They would split in Watts, in Hanoi and Gaza, and in Greenwich Village just east of Seventh Avenue. Everything seemed inevitable even as nothing made sense, and truisms seemed to change daily in the movie business, as everywhere else. With every new film hit a hopeful new trend would attempt to catch the notoriously intractable brass ring of public imagination. Spy films, historical blockbusters, bloated musicals—they were still the coin of the realm, and the king was dying. In those twilight times of crumbling studios and a cracking Code, the movies pretended to reflect the times even as they strove mightily to believe that it was still 1946.
