University Course Notes: Screenwriting and the Paradigmatic Cinema of 1976

Historical Context of American Cinema and the Paradigm of $1976$

The course focuses on two paradigmatic films released in $1976$, exactly $50 \text{ years}$ before the course date of $2026$: Taxi Driver and Rocky. This year serves as a crucial juncture for both American history and the evolution of Hollywood cinema. These films represent two distinct philosophies regarding cinematic vision and scriptwriting, emerging from the transformative period known as New Hollywood. This era, which revolutionized American filmmaking between the late $1960\text{s}$ and early $1970\text{s}$, was led by a generation of filmmakers often referred to as the big five: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg.

Prior to this revolution, the American film industry operated under the Classical Hollywood model, which flourished roughly from the $1920\text{s}$ through the $1950\text{s}$. This system was characterized by a limited number of major studios, or majors, that employed vertical integration. This meant each major controlled the entire supply chain, including production, distribution, and exhibition. Within this rigid factory-like environment, professionals like screenwriters and directors were essentially office workers. The screenwriter was expected to provide a technically complete text, reducing the director to a mere metteur en scène, or a simple executor of the script. The producer was often the only figure who oversaw a project from its inception to its final screening.

The Crisis and Transformation of the Studio System

Classical Hollywood eventually faced a deep crisis driven by several factors. A primary legal trigger was the $1948$ Paramount Decree, which declared the vertically integrated system illegal, effectively dismantling the Studio System by forcing studios to divest from theater ownership. Simultaneously, the rise of television—which arrived in the United States in the late $1940\text{s}$ and in Italy by $1954$—severely impacted theater attendance. While television initially seemed a threat, it also became a cultural training ground for the public and a practical training field for new filmmakers.

The film industry first reacted to this crisis with technological gimmicks such as Technicolor, CinemaScope, and even early $3\text{D}$ to offer an experience television could not match. However, economic collapse continued, exemplified by the disastrous failure of Mankiewicz's Cleopatra in $1963$. This film’s exorbitant cost and subsequent box office failure nearly bankrupted $20\text{th}$ Century Fox and signaled the end of the old Studio System. Hollywood realized that renewal would not come from technology, but from storytelling. The revolution shifted toward the youth, mirroring global societal changes like the movements of $1968$. Stories began to focus on young protagonists struggling against institutions, influenced heavily by European auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni and Roman Polanski.

The Rebirth of Genre and the Rise of the Anti-hero

The formal rebirth of Hollywood is often dated to $1967$ with the release of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. This new wave of directors, including Arthur Penn, revisited and subverted classical genres. A notable example is the Western, which André Bazin described as the American cinema par excellence. Modern Westerns like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue inverted the epic conquest narrative, suggesting the nation was founded on genocide rather than heroics. This generation’s distinctiveness lay in a double influence: the entertaining tradition of classical Hollywood combined with European experimentation, such as Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave.

A significant innovation of this era was the introduction of the anti-hero. Unlike the classical hero—such as Ringo in Stagecoach, who enters the frame with a clear, predefined objective—the modern anti-hero is characterized by weakness, shifting goals, or a total lack of direction. Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver epitomizes this, existing in an environment where nothing is clearly defined. This period also saw a new Star System. While the $1970\text{s}$ prioritized unconventional faces like Dustin Hoffman over statuesque beauty, the $1980\text{s}$ shifted back toward the centrality of the body and the individual, emphasizing physical performance as seen in American Gigolo and the training sequences in Rocky.

Theoretical Frameworks: Deleuze and the Action-Image Crisis

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze analyzed this transition in his works Cinema $1$: The Movement-Image and Cinema $2$: The Time-Image. He argued that New Hollywood signaled the crisis of the classical action-image. Key elements of this crisis include dispersive situations involving uncertain realities and random spaces. Causal links, which formed the foundation of classical cinema, became deliberately weak to reflect a world where logic is difficult to discern. Characters transitioned from being agents who change their situation to seers or spectators who are modified by the situation. In Italian Neorealism, the figure of the child often serves as a metaphor for this modern subject who has minimal capacity for action but high sensitivity to observation.

Narrative Principles: Aristotle, McKee, and Field

At its core, a story is an action performed by an individual in a specific space-time, involving motivation, objectives, and relationships. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, events must follow the principles of necessity and verisimilitude. A story must have a beginning, middle, and end, forming a unified whole like a living organism. Classical narration relies on a rigorous causal chain, summarized as Situation-Action-Situation $1$ ($S-A-S_1$). In contrast, modern narration often adopts an episodic structure where sequences could theoretically be rearranged without losing meaning, as seen in Bicycle Thieves.

Robert McKee’s story triangle categorizes narratives into three types: Archplot, Miniplot, and Antiplot. Archplot represents classical narration with causality, closed endings, linear time, and active protagonists facing external conflicts. Miniplot weakens these principles, favoring open endings, internal conflict, and passive protagonists. Antiplot, or anti-structure, entirely questions narrative logic, often featuring non-linear time and inconsistent realities. Complementing this is Syd Field’s Three-Act Paradigm, which suggests a $120\text{-minute}$ film corresponds to roughly $120 \text{ pages}$. Act $I$ ($Setup$) occupies approximately $30 \text{ pages}$ and includes the inciting incident and the first plot point. Act $II$ ($Confrontation$) involves the midpoint at page $60$ and leads to the second plot point. Act $III$ ($Resolution$) culminates in the climax.

Analytical Case Study: Rocky ($1976$)

Rocky uses a circular structure, beginning and ending on a boxing ring, though the context shifts from a low-tier bout for a few dollars to a world championship. The film establishes Rocky’s morality and dissatisfaction early on through visual cues like his childhood photos and a poster of Rocky Marciano. The setting is Philadelphia, November $12$, $1975$, a symbolic location given the upcoming bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. The narrative bifurcates into two main plots: the professional line (the fight with Apollo Creed) and the relational line (the romance with Adrian).

Adrian and Rocky are presented as complementary figures; he is physical, she is intellectual. Their relationship develops through several calls to adventure, eventually leading Adrian into a metaphoric extraordinary world, such as the empty ice rink. A technical shift occurs at the $34\text{-minute}$ mark when the audience's POV is separated from Rocky's; we see Apollo choosing Rocky as a challenger while Rocky remains unaware. This creation of suspense delays Rocky’s call to adventure until an hour into the film. The inclusion of a pop-culture reproduction of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew in Rocky’s apartment underscores the theme of Rocky being a chosen one whose individual resurrection revitalizes his community.

Analytical Case Study: Taxi Driver ($1976$)

Narratively, Taxi Driver is built on a metaphor for loneliness. Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, suggests the taxi is a metal box that isolates a man inside the social context while keeping him separate. The script begins not with action, but with a psychological description of Travis Bickle, highlighting its debt to existentialist literature. Travis is a narrator who is potentially unreliable, possibly making up his past in Vietnam. The film uses a mechanism of planting and payoff, such as the overhead camera shots that appear throughout the film before culminating in the final massacre.

Travis attempts to escape his isolation through Betsy, whom he perceives as an angelic, idealized being from a diurnal world. This attempt fails due to his self-sabotage at a pornographic theater. He then shifts his focus to Iris, attempting to play the role of the knight errant, which mirrors John Ford’s The Searchers. His transformation into a mohawk-wearing warrior is a failed military action; he is spotted immediately during his initial target—Senator Palantine. Ultimately, Travis’s impulse for self-destruction is turned outward. The film ends with a paradox where the media acclaims him as a hero for the same violence that could have easily made him an assassin.

Genre Hybridization and Specialized Studies

John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie ($1976$) uses the noir genre as a mood rather than a strict structure. It focuses on the protagonist Cosmo Vitelli’s existential path through digressions and long backstage sequences, subverting the suspense expected in a crime film. Similarly, John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct $13$ ($1976$) is a western-horror hybrid that applies the classical themes of the siege—rooted in the Iliad and the Odyssey—to an urban Los Angeles ghetto. Carpenter uses the pseudonym John T. Chance in the editing credits as a tribute to Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo.

Brian De Palma’s Carrie ($1976$) blends the teen movie with horror, using telekinesis as a metaphor for the transformative confusion of adolescence and the isolation of the individual from the group. All the President’s Men and Network both explore the search for truth. All the President’s Men uses the Platonic allegory of the cave, visually contrasting the white light of the newsroom (truth) with the darkness of power. Network critiques the dehumanization of society through the spectacle of television, where the boundaries between information and entertainment vanish entirely. Both films reflect the cynicism of a post-Watergate and post-Vietnam America.