1970s Decade

The new television season looks ready to "boogie oogie oogie" like it hasn't since the days when both hair and disco were big. In addition to the 1970s resurgence taking place in theaters with films such as "Boogie Nights" and the current release "54," the fall television lineup features several outright revivals or programs seemingly inspired by fare from two decades ago, though few of them appeared destined for such immortality at the time.

People who love movies and know a bit about them agree that the '70s were a golden decade for American film. The studio system had lost its strangle hold on U.S. movie production, the social revolution of the '60s had broken the culture wide open, and in rushed a generation of young actors and directors on fire to make films. This was when Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, De Palma, Ashby, Altman, Rafelson, Beatty and Nicholson did the great work that launched their careers.

Is there something in the millennial air that's driving pop singers of fiftysomething vintage back to their roots? First Rod Stewart comes swaggering out with an effort to recapture his old rocker's joie de vivre, and a few weeks later Linda Ronstadt releases an album that's being touted as a return to her classic '70s country-rock form.

The fall TV season is still a few months away, but already concerns have been raised over the pilot episode for a new comedy scheduled by Fox that derives some of its humor from a group of teens obtaining beer and smoking marijuana. Although they have not yet seen "Feelin' All Right," two anti-drug groups have criticized the pilot, saying that any comedic depiction of teenage marijuana use is irresponsible. The series is scheduled to air Sundays at 8:30 p.m.

In the summer of 1978, in such Hollywood haunts of the day as Le Dome, Ma Maison and Imperial Gardens, a button appeared on lapels that read "Free the Baby Moguls." It was an inside joke, or as inside as jokes can be in Hollywood, which is to say a few thousand people probably got it. The reference was to six studio executives and one agent in their late 20s and early 30s profiled in an article, "The Baby Moguls," in New West magazine.

Jim Marshall is the definitive "rock" photographer--that is, he was the first photographer to become indelibly associated with the music and its musicians. Marshall moved back to his hometown of San Francisco in the mid-'60s after spending two years in New York photographing musicians and hanging around the Greenwich Village folk scene, where he met Bob Dylan. It was auspicious timing.

"Oh! You Pretty Things Don't you know you're driving your Mamas and Papas insane." --David Bowie, 1971 * This is a film set with a whole lot of ch-ch-changes going on. Actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks as if he stepped from the pages of a 25-year-old British music magazine, dressed as he is in platform heels and a figure-hugging sweater, with a leopard-skin scarf trailing from his neck. He wears a reddish-brown wig of spiky, layered hair, with an ultrashort fringe exposing his entire forehead.

Think back, if you can, to the summer of 1977 and try to remember what a summer night out on the town was like back then. Perhaps you were squeezed into the anatomically correct confines of a pair of Jordache jeans and followed the disco commands of "Shake Your Booty" and "Get Down Tonight." Maybe you went the rougher rock route--Frye boots, flared cords and "Take the Money and Run" or "Life's Been Good" blasting out of the conversion van's 8-track player.

"The Mack"--the 1973 blaxploitation classic--may be back. If producers Doug McHenry and George Jackson have their way, Goldie the pimp will go before the cameras in '90s garb--perhaps by the end of the year. Eyeing a hip-hop culture heavily influenced by that imagery and tremendous African American want-to-see, the duo--like a host of others in Hollywood's creative community--is drawing inspiration from the genre.