If the collaboration of Roger Corman and AIP was the most successful of the Sixties, it would not go without having its viable competitors, Joe Solomon's Fanfare Corporation, as an example was modeled on much the same lines as AIP; its roaring success with Hell's Angels on Wheels (1967) not only enhanced the career of the director Richard Rush (b.1929), the star Jack Nicholson and the cameraman Laszlo Kovacs, but also pointed directly ahead to Easy Rider.
There were stirrings too, on a truly independent level, Brian De Palma had every intention of becoming the American answer to Jean-Luc Godard with his hybrids of political documentary, improvisation and irreverence as seen best in one of his more commercially successful works - Greetings (1968) - a portrait of the young, aware and liberated Vietnam generation and The Wedding Party (1969) which was co-directed with actress-director Cynthia Munroe and Wilford Leach and featured Jill Clayburgh and Robert De Niro in a story of a couple who marry after doubts and hesitations. Around the same time Martin Scorsese was struggling to complete his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door? a 1968 feature that was also inspired by the French New Wave movement in its techniques and in the same vein of its portrayal of a young man growing up in Manhattan's Little Italy.
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| De Palma does Nouvelle Vague American style with Murder a la Mod (1968) |
In deepest Pittsburgh, George Romero would put the coda stamp on his tale of menacing resurrection, the seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) which was actually financed by a local advertising agency.. Yet this most influential of modern horror films was described by the trade paper Variety at the time of its release as ' amateurism of the first order' Nonetheless the so-called amateurs, were posed to take over Hollywood itself, just as Romero's undead took over him in his memorably frightening movie.