| Hollywood movie in the post-war period:
The modern period in Hollywood cinema started in the late sixties with the breakdown of the studio system. Interest towards traditional, stereotyped studio films with participation of stars steadily decreased and even many big film studios were on the verge of downfall. Studio bosses were perplexed about which film the audience would like to watch and experiments were taken up. George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma were amongst the younger generation of directors, who were given the chance to showcase their abilities. Particularly this group of directors shaped modern cinema into the kind in which it has entered the 21st century. In the late sixties and in the early seventies, their films tasted tremendous success and the concept of the “Blockbuster” originated because of their films. The heads of big studios started trusting young directors and inviting them to make films has become the fashion, since the young directors having left film schools and small studios were able to make films with very small budgets. The powerful wave of new, unusual, frank cinema of the 1970s grasped the audience and a new era started in Hollywood cinema.
The institute of stars in Hollywood cinema had started to appear approximately in the 1920s, having formed in 1930 and attaining prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. The stars looked like inhabitants from heaven to the audience and the future stars were especially imparted training at film studios.
The huge PR industry at the big film studios specially worked for creating and supporting the image of the stars. The media vigilantly tracked each step of stars, telling about all their incidents in their lives and about the eccentric pranks of stars, who thus checked the borders of their popularity. Only in the 1970s, with the downfall of studio system and the origin of modern Hollywood cinema, the interest towards stars took another shade: stars became closer and they did not seem to be inaccessible. On the other hand, stars became much more independent and eventually, by the end of the 1980s, stars were free from the control of film studios and started forming their own image and even started selecting the films in which they would act. And by the 1990s, the independence of the stars scaled such heights that it would not be an exaggeration to say that in many aspects, they dictate the style and direction of cinema making, choosing films, appearing in which brings popularity and huge profits to the films. Thus, the situation is cardinally changed in comparison with the 1940s.
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Despite the poor reviews from movie critics, Da Vinci Code movie has been so popular with the viewers that Columbia Pictures made the sequel sequel which hits theaters in May 2009.
