ReZoom

From high school angst through social upheaval and disillusionment, these great directors' bodies of work got our number.

The cinema has inspired and entertained us throughout our lives. Boomers came of age as the industry transformed from a dominating studio-system to a wide-open communication medium. Here are 10 great directors working in English whose films were still distributed by the Hollywood studios system. They redefined film during our lives and their amazing body of work left indelible marks on our generation.

Elia Kazan (Sept. 7, 1909 – Sept. 28, 2003)
Lionized for his creative stage direction in such movies as A Street Car Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), Kazan managed to capture much of the essence that theater performers mustered on Broadway, but typically lost in front of the camera. Kazan's wholehearted belief in Konstantin Stanislavski's method approach to acting endeared him to powerhouse personas like Marlon Brando. His films captured a rebellious, self-sacrificing individualism that appealed to boomers and helped frame some of our icons, like Brando. Many boomers struggling with love and passion during their secondary school years may particularly remember Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.

Sidney Lumet (June 25, 1924 – )
Even with over 50 films to his credit starting with 12 Angry Men (1957), Lumet does not get the "auteur" respect bestowed on the likes of Stanley Kubrick or Robert Altman, but is no less revered as a tactician who can bring a sound script to the screen with profound emotional impact as he did with The Pawnbroker (1964) and Serpico (1973). His reputation was that he largely left personal politics outside the cinema, but that doesn't exactly track considering controversial movies like Network (1976), a film that taught us to question the authority of big business, and the Oscar-nominated documentary King: A Filmed Record ... Montgomery to Memphis (1970) about Martin Luther King's Civil Rights work in the Deep South. He taught us even minor roles have clout, a sentiment summed up by his famous quote: "There's no such thing as a small part. There are just small actors."

Robert Altman (Feb. 20, 1925 – Nov. 20, 2006)
Altman came to great movie-making by working up through the ranks of TV and a few less notable features. But in 1970 he was offered the script for the antiwar film M*A*S*H, a seminal movie tapping boomers' dark-comedy funny bone, idealism and general disregard for authority. Following that closely with the outrageous Brewster McCloud (1970), and the anti-Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Altman honed an improv ensemble style that he would riff upon throughout his career as with The Player (1992) and Gosford Park (2001): namely layering action and dialogue among multiple characters presenting a remarkable realism through the confluence of divergent agendas. His controversial Oscar-nominated bicentennial opus, Nashville (1975), is a crowning example of the way he presented confused America to us on a musical "platter."

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999)
Controversy loved Kubrick, or vice versa: Lolita (1962), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) aren't the half of it. Kubrick's cold perspective and recurrent themes again displayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) resonated with baby boomers unsettled by how the power structures (political, commercial, social, technological) dehumanized people. His first-person point-of-view camera style and varied aspect ratios fed off the expressionistic juxtaposition that played out so much in the world as it underwent raging change.

Mike Nichols (Nov. 6, 1931 – )
Nichols along with Elaine May, Paul Sills, Byrne Piven, Joyce Hiller Piven and Edward Asner helped start the famed "Second City Improv" company. His $1,000,000 salary for Catch-22 (1970) was a first for directors, but his place in this list is guaranteed by his film The Graduate (1967), maybe the most fondly remembered film from the '60s for baby boomers. And Carnal Knowledge (1971), completed four years later, in many ways disconcerted boomers with an answer to the "now what?" question posed by Hoffman and Ross at the back of the bus at the end of The Graduate. Oddly, none of these movies, including his powerful debut film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), were among the two of his the American Film Institute selected for its 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time: Silkwood (1983) and Working Girl (1988). Maybe the critical word for this list was "inspiring." Nichols' often less than sanguine (albeit comic) view of our efforts to find self-realization as depicted in the former films and typified by Postcards from the Edge (1990) no doubt explain these seemingly glaring omissions.

Woody Allen (Dec. 1, 1935 – )
Neurotic, self-obsessed, dysfunctional: before Woody Allen, these were considered negatives. Allen's trailblazing idiosyncrasies would have been annoying had they not humorously illustrated so deftly many of the hang-ups that beset our generation after the '60s. His indelible style is rampant throughout his prolific body of work from Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), to Sleeper (1973), Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), to name a few.

Francis Ford Coppola (April 7, 1939 – )
In many ways "Godfather" of the "New Hollywood" outsider hyphenates in the '60s and '70s that ushered in hyper realism and artistic experimentation, Coppola, like many that he mentored and supported, was a maverick who parlayed success into ambitious, inspiring features. In 1971 Coppola made the first of his three The Godfather movies (Part II – 1974, Part III – 1990) that would establish his legacy. The Godfather was one of the highest-grossing movies in history and earned Coppola Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, written with Mario Puzo. But it's his legendary work on the Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979) that is historic not only for it critical results but also for the stories behind its creation that lead to Coppola's breakdown and near bankruptcy. Apocalypse Now more than any other film framed Vietnam with images of the madnesses of war (and filmmaking) for our generation. Who can forget Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) saying, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Martin Scorsese (Nov. 17, 1942 – )
"Are you talking to me!?" In his unique way Scorsese has been continually talking to us with his mix of long-tracking takes and frenetic editing, studying obsessive characters in obsessive circumstances, dissecting the human compulsions to achieve ends by violent means. Not only from Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976) through Goodfellas (1990) to Gangs of New York (2002) and The Departed (2006), but with films such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997) Scorsese demonstrated both his incredible range, and, we could say, his own obsession with protagonists' often fatal drives (money, power, fame, control, recognition, transcendence) to be "somebody." There is no question that in his realm, he is very much somebody. Always working with a devoted crew and an ensemble of actors, he has given us memorable films for which he has been Oscar-nominated as best director six times and finally got his due last year with The Departed.

George Lucas (May 14, 1944 – )
As a filmmaker, Lucas reinvented how important sound is to the viewing experience, not to mention special effects with his Industrial Light and Magic. And regardless what you think of his films (the grandest of which were science-fiction fantasies), the monumental magnitude of his directorial entrepreneurialism that made him a very young billionaire will not likely be seen again. After his homage to cruisers, hotrods, and the pains of growing up in American Graffiti (1973), Lucas created a simple story that culled every distinctive quality boomers believe in and blended them into the lifelong cinematic saga that began the Star Wars sextet in 1977. Special effects geeks might not like to focus on how the entire saga is anti-authoritarian and idealistic, how it champions charity and the ability to reinvent oneself, but, indeed, you can see all those traits borne out in the stories and the characters of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.

Oliver Stone (Sept. 15, 1946 – )
Like no one else on this list, Stone has made a career making unflinching movies about the icons, events and trends that shaped our generation's lives. Among his others films, this Vietnam combat veteran mixed a very humanistic view with Old Testament metaphors of Vietnam horrors in Platoon (1986), he explored our worship of greed in Wall Street (1987), dug deep into our post Vietnam War recriminations in Born on 4th of July (1989), piqued our Big-Brother paranoia over the Kennedy assassination in JFK (1991), and reveled in the excesses of the '60s with his tribute to Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991). Often discounted for his own excesses and as a conspiracy theorist, there is no question that Stone has been willing to go out on a limb with sharp-edged filmic spikes that puncture our sacred American myths.

Steven Spielberg (Dec. 18, 1946–)
The youngest on this main list, Steven Spielberg could safely be considered the largest figure in entertainment of them all. His earlier movies may not have tweaked our generation's consciousness as much as older auteurs like Altman and Kubrick, but he is by far our most-celebrated filmmaker. Like Altman, Spielberg moved from TV to film, but instead of artsy technique, Spielberg tried to reinvent the viewing experience with almost every major film (one reason why he and Lucas worked so well together.) He is credited with launching the summer blockbuster with Jaws (1975), pioneered product placement in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Reese's Pieces – 1982), popularized the trilogy with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, 84, 89), Jurassic Park (1993, 1997, 2001) and Back to the Future (as producer: 1985, 89, 90) and seemed to have his finger in almost every genre of filmed media by mentoring other directors as the head of Amblin' Entertainment and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Having thoroughly conquered the American box office, he tackled immensely serious subjects with Schindler's List (1993), Amistad (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Munich (2005), not to mention the continued breadth he displayed with A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), and so many more.

BONUS BECAUSE:

Lawrence Kasdan (Jan. 14, 1949–) Kasdan wrote for both Lucas and Spielberg, before he launched into directing and got us hot and bothered with Body Heat (1981). But it was his The Big Chill (1983), along with its soundtrack, that quantified our boomer quandary about not only having graduated from college, but having to graduate some ten years later into mortal adulthood. Like Altman, Kasdan was able to attract a stable of actors to his ensemble works that he called upon with succeeding films, most notably Grand Canyon (1991), where he found us older still, confronting confounding midlife and all the affronts of urban living while trying to make heads or tails out of existence.