Cinema: The New Hollywood: Dead or Alive?

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The corpse sprawls over the business and entertainment pages of daily newspapers. In the Polo Lounge and at college seminars, amateur detectives search for the murder weapon. And, as in an Agatha Christie movie, there are suspects aplenty, all swearing they were the deceased's best friend. The Producer: claims he tried to keep the costs down; charged with lack of vision and insufficient use of his power. The Studio Executive: claims he really does support good pictures; charged with not knowing the business and caring only about his skin. The Agent: claims he has filled the creative vacuum left by producers and studio men; charged with seeing films as "packages" of familiar actors and directors, all of whom are his clients. The Star: claims he is the main attraction, thus has the responsibility to supervise production; charged with squandering his leverage by spoon-feeding the public with junk-food comedies. The Audience: claim they are the victims; charged with leaving the scene of the crime.

The prime suspect is the Hot Young Director. In the '70s, a swarm of graduates from film schools and TV revitalized an industry grown geratic with aging talents and traditions. Coppola (the Godfather films), Scorsese (Mean Streets), Lucas (American Graffiti), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and others became Hollywood royalty. They worked on each other's projects, helped even younger film-school grads make movies, dreamed bigger dreams, sweated to put their dreams on film. They made millions for their studio sponsors: of the eight alltime highest-grossing films, six were directed by men who were under 35, and the other two were produced by men under 35. The experience was a heady one, and for some the thrill is still there. Says Coppola, now 41: "If we coordinated, we could take control of the movie business in one minute."

These Young Punks couldn't play Leonardo and Peter Pan forever. After their early hits the hot directors almost mega-bucked their way to disaster. In the mid-'70s Coppola went to the Philippines to make his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now; battled typhoons, Marlon Brando and a regiment of skeptical bankers; mortgaged his home to pay for the movie; spent $31.5 million. Spielberg lavished $27 million on the slapstick 1941; critics reviewing it replayed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. John Landis, whose $3 million National Lampoon's Animal House earned $74 million in North America, invested $30 million in a two-hour car chase called The Blues Brothers. The rampant inflation of budgets and ego may even have affected Warren Beatty. Beatty has spent two years and more than $30 million on Reds, a biography of Writer-Revolutionary John Reed, and the picture is still at least nine months from release.