I got my job at the Sun-Times because of it they looked around the features department and appointed the long-haired new kid who had written a story about the underground films on Monday nights at Second City.īertolucci is two years older than I am. 'The Movie Generation,' Time magazine called us in a cover story. To be 16 in 1968 is to be 50 today, and so most younger moviegoers will find this film as historical as ' Cold Mountain.'įor me, it is yesterday above all it evokes a time when the movies - good movies, both classic and newborn - were at the center of youth culture. I indulge in this autobiography because I have just seen Bernardo Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers,' and am filled with poignant and powerful nostalgia. By the summer of 1969, I was in Hollywood, writing the screenplay for Russ Meyer's ' Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.' It would be an X-rated movie from 20th Century-Fox, and although it seems tame today (R-rated, probably), it was part of a moment when sex had entered the mainstream and was part of a whole sense of society in flux. In April of 1969, driving past the Three Penny Cinema on Lincoln Avenue, I saw a crowd lined up under umbrellas on the sidewalk, waiting in the rain to get into the next screening of Godard's 'Weekend.' Today you couldn't pay most Chicago moviegoers to see a film by Godard, but at that moment, the year after the Battle of Grant Park, at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, it was all part of the same alignment.

Later I realized they might have thought I was saying tourista, which is slang for diarrhea. 'Tourist!' I shouted, trying to make myself into a neutral. The police charged, I was pushed out in front of them, and rubber truncheons pounded on my legs. I was in the middle, standing outside my hotel, taking it all in. Demonstrators had barricaded one end of the street where my cheap Left Bank hotel was located. In the spring of 1968, I was on vacation in Paris.

Movie the dreamers