Word: hollywood
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...malaise and a supreme picture-maker. Blowup (1966), his first full-length English-language film, was a sensation for its frank view of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll in swinging London. It grossed $20 million (about $120 million today) on a $1.8 million budget and helped liberate Hollywood from its puritanical prurience...
...glum, frozen characters were even father removed from Hollywood cinema. The traditional movie hero was an action figure; the Antonioni antihero is inactive, passive, empty. Rich and pretty, he shows how meaningless it is to be a man of means. He in incapacitated by wealth, status and the availability of sex with good-looking people of the opposite sex. The advantages that the world's poor could only dream of have paralyzed...
...Agatha Christie novel. Stories end; life goes on. "I can feel the weariness of certain mechanisms that are resorted to in conventional films," he told a journalist. "I think those mechanisms are false." The old formulas had become as stylized as kabuki, as stale as week-old breadsticks. Hollywood stuck to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, but Antonioni didn't see why he had to. How about, in L'Avventura, boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-another-girl-and- gives-up-searching-for-the-first-girl? (In fact, the film has not only a twist ending that...
...Antonioni might be an art-film director, but he was no fool. He knew that making films in English would help him reach a wider audience; hence Blowup, Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). He spoke Hollywood's language without ever going Hollywood. Death Valley, the location for Zabriskie Point, was as close as he got to La-la Land...
...gentleman from Ferrara wouldn't consider it among his signal accomplishments, but with a couple of seconds in Blowup, he changed Hollywood history. The movie was produced by Carlo Ponti and was to be distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the stately old lion of American film studios. But the industry ratings board wouldn't give the picture a seal because, during a photo-shoot romp, the model Jane Birkin allowed the briefest display of pubic hair. Instead of trimming the scene to the board's specifications, MGM honored Antonioni's version of the film, invented a subsidiary, Premier Productions...