SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Book Review: Rock Me on the Water Hails 1974 Los Angeles.

“The movies produced by this process were, with rare exceptions, not quirky, idiosyncratic or experimental,” Brownstein writes sadly, preferring “big-budget, mainstream productions that aimed to captivate audiences, not challenge them.” It’s a familiar lament, but why Hollywood is constantly pushed to be the one business on earth that is supposed to antagonize rather than gratify its customers remains a mystery to me. (Moreover, just 15 years later the indie-cinema revolution created a second, artistically focused track for those who prefer depressing and eccentric movies to formulaic or entertaining ones, in many cases featuring the same talents who made the blockbusters.) Brownstein tags George Lucas as the kind of artist who steered Hollywood off the track of social relevance, but Lucas would disagree strongly that his career equals escapism; Apocalypse Now was his idea, and even Star Wars was a Vietnam allegory.

I agree, however, that early-Seventies Hollywood now looks like a discrete period compared with what came before and after; even the political undertone, which had been overtly revolutionary when hippie taste ruled, turned into a less obviously dated combination of generalized youthful angst (Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge”) and a frustrated sense of seeping and uncontrollable corruption (the makers of Chinatown marveled at how what they were filming seemed to echo the concurrent Watergate hearings). Brownstein grieves the turn away from early-Seventies films “that fundamentally challenged America’s self-image as an equitable society and a force for good in the world,” but there has been no shortage of those in recent decades. And as Brownstein grudgingly admits, television got far better, not worse, starting in the Nineties.

And California’s been living off the fumes of the 1960s and ’70s ever since. As Reason TV asked at the start of the month: Is California Over?

Related: Must Watch: Joe Rogan Completely Deconstructs Hollywood Liberalism.