L.A. ’74: NEXUS OF CHANGE
‘Rock Me on the Water’ explores why this moment proved electric for music, movies and pop culture
Writer Ronald Brownstein had a pop culture epiphany while driving home from a political gathering at producer Norman Lear‘s house.
It struck Brownstein that Lear’s groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family” arrived on TV just as movie classics “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” hit theaters and the Los Angeles music scene of Joni Mitchell and the Eagles flourished on the radio and in record stores.
It was all here in one place, at one moment.
“I remember thinking on the way home, like, wait a minute, this was also happening at the same time,” Brownstein says. “And what became increasingly clear to me, as I read a lot of the work that had been done, was that books have looked vertically at each one of these dynamics, whether it’s the change in television, music, then movies.
“But there really wasn’t anything that explored how they all occurred simultaneously,” he says. “And what were the forces that shaped all of them, and how they interacted with each other.
“I just got really excited about the idea.” The just-published “Rock Me on the Water: 1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics” tells the story through deep research and more than 100 interviews Brownstein pieced together.
Structured in 12 chapters, each devoted to a month, the book focuses on cultural milestones — breakthrough albums by L.A.-based singer-songwriters Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne, how the roiling political upheaval of the Watergate scandal affected the creation of films like “Chinatown” — and weaves together a tapestry to illustrate how a time and a place became the wheel on which the culture turned.
“For Los Angeles, those 12 glittering months represented magic hour,” Brownstein writes in the prologue, and the case he makes in the book is solid.
Making movies
At the start, of course, Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a CNN political contributor, didn’t know 1974 would end up the year of his focus.
“I knew that this change didn’t all occur in a single year,” he says. “This is obviously a multiyear process. So I literally sat there with legal pads — I still have them somewhere upstairs — and kind of listed the movies and the albums and the TV of each year from like 1970 through 1975.
“I felt ’74 was both when most of this relevant stuff happened, but also it was kind of the apex in the sense that ’75, in a lot of different ways, is when the current begins to go in another direction,” Brownstein says. “It was just a year of incredible pop culture mastery and achievement, but also it was the last year before this starts to slip away.”
One chapter focuses on actors Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, peers whose Hollywood careers diverged in the ’60s. Beatty found stardom early, then struggled for creative fulfillment. Nicholson scuffled through most of the decade until 1969’s “Easy Rider.” Both reached new heights in 1974 with Robert Towne screenplays in “Shampoo” and “Chinatown.”
Another chapter looks at the winds of change that would blow aside Hollywood auteurs such as “Nashville” director Robert Altman in favor of blockbuster wunderkinds such as Stephen Spielberg, who was making “Jaws.”
“They were both filming in the summer of ’74; they were released a week apart in June 1975,” Brownstein says, further noting that on release, “Jaws” got the cover of Time, “Nashville” the same place for Newsweek.
“That to me was a real a-ha moment,” he says. “Because ‘Nashville’ — not necessarily the best movie of the early ’70s — in some ways is the ‘Moby Dick’ of early ’70s cinema. It is the movie that tries to embody all of the themes of the period in movies and try to wrestle it to some kind of conclusion.
“And ‘Jaws,’ on the other hand, is the beginning of what comes next,” Brownstein says. “And I don’t think they’ve been seen in that light. That, to me, is kind of the strength of the book, that you’re able to understand how these cultural forces intersected, as well as the interplay between the cultural forces and political forces.”
Politics and progress
Politics, in particular the election of California Gov. Jerry Brown to his first term in 1974 and the activism of Tom Hayden and his wife, Jane Fonda, are topics wellknown to Brownstein, who covered politics for many years at the Los Angeles Times.
Despite the largely progressive politics of this new wave of entertainment, there was a lack of outreach behind the scenes.
“This was a period of great cultural innovation, but it was really controlled by White men,” Brownstein says. “Both women and minorities, very few of those voices got to be heard.”
Even a Hollywood figure such as producer Bert Schneider, who is featured in a wild chapter about his efforts to help Black Panther and fugitive Huey Newton flee to Cuba, had a blind spot to the lack of diversity in Hollywood, Brownstein says.
“Schneider is giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Black Panthers but never seriously entertained the thought of working with a Black filmmaker,” Brownstein says.
The same obstacles blocked advancement for women in entertainment, such as producer and studio executive Sherry Lansing, screenwriter Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her writing partner at the time, actor Mary Kay Place.
“Many of the women talk about the rule for getting in the room was not questioning why so few women were in the room,” he says. “These were pioneers. Obviously, the issues are still not resolved 40 years later in terms of representation in Hollywood, but they did open the door.”
Family viewing
Of all the pop culture touchstones that Brownstein uses in “Rock Me on the Water,” TV series “All in the Family” might be most central to his narrative.
The story of the bigoted Archie Bunker; his put-upon wife, Edith; their still-at-home daughter, Gloria; and son-in-law Mike demonstrated the divide between past and present almost in real time.
“It was essentially the generation gap reduced to a single living room,” says Brownstein, who grew up in Queens, New York, with an electrician father who watched the show because he liked Archie, a fellow bluecollar worker from the same borough.
“That was the genius of Norman Lear,” Brownstein says. “I think the macro storyline of ‘All in the Family’ was what was happening in society. It was kind of negotiating the terms of surrender from the older generation to the new social and cultural rules being imposed by the younger generations.”
Brownstein says he watched hours upon hours of “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “M*A*S*H” — three shows that shared Saturday nights in 1974, and a chapter in his book — as part of his research.
“I watched ‘Chinatown’ probably 10 times,” he says. “‘The Conversation,’ ‘Shampoo,’ I watched multiple times. And then, you know, listened to the albums over and over again.”
The work was always enjoyable. “I’ve written a bunch of books, and this was one where I did not get tired of working on it,” he says. And the interviews with subjects from Beatty and Fonda to Graham Nash, Peter Bogdanovich, Anjelica Huston and many more added insights and voices to the narrative he wrote.
“You see the common threads more when you’re looking at all of it,” Brownstein says. “And then when you start talking to people, you’re able to get a sense of both the exhilaration and the sense they had that they were part of something special in L.A. in the early 1970s.”