The 1950s and early 60s saw a Hollywood dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing and improved sound, and as early as 1957 the era was called a “New Hollywood”. By the mid-1960s, ‘Old Hollywood’ was rapidly losing money; and the audience was changing demographics. European art films (especially the Commedia all’italiana, the French New Wave, and the Spaghetti Western) and Japanese cinema were making a splash in America…
New Hollywood, post-classical Hollywood or “American New Wave”, refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s to the early 1980s, when a new generation of film school-educated, counterculture-bred young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and impacted the way major studios approached filmmaking.