Treading Water After Watergate: "Chinatown" and "Shampoo"

Pundit Ronald Brownstein, who has been a White House correspondent for the National Journal and a political analyst for CNN, is best known for writing and talking about Washington power-brokers. But his years of connection with the Los Angeles Times as well as his lifelong passion for pop culture have helped shape his brand-new book. He calls it Rock Me on the Water, after a Jackson Browne ballad that also inspired a powerful Linda Ronstadt version. There’s an important subtitle too—1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. In Brownstein’s view, there was a brief period of transition in which the high idealism and the political fervor of the late Sixties flowered into something quite wonderful, before movies and TV were taken over by the yen for nostalgia exemplified by Jaws (an updated “monster from the deep” B-movie) and the amiable sitcom, Happy Days.

 To my mind, the linking of this cultural shift to the twelve months of a specific year doesn’t entirely work. Still, Brownstein makes his point by way of some fascinating analysis of key media moments. In the realm of television, he pays tribute to the powerful transformation of a nation’s viewing habits through the rise of three essential TV series. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, introduced in 1970, looked like a sitcom, but also placed real people in real (and up-to-date) situations, paying particular attention to a young woman more focused on career than on finding a man. M*A*S*H, which debuted in 1972, obliquely reflected the realities of Vietnam, balancing humor with a sober reflection on the horrors of war. The hugely popular All in the Family, which ran from 1971 to 1979, took on such issues as racism, social inequality, and rape. It was America’s #1 favorite series until replaced in 1974 by Happy Days, with its cheery appreciation for a past that never was.

 At the movies, Brownstein cites two key masterworks as indicative of a nation’s mood in the wake of the Nixon era. (Both, as it turns out, hinged on the talents of Robert Towne, a Roger Corman alumnus who went on to write some of the era’s boldest screenplays.) Chinatown was—as Brownstein so wittily puts it—“Watergate with real water,” a story of political and moral corruption set in the L.A. of the past but revealing parallels with the present. Shampoo, spearheaded by writer/producer/star Warren Beatty, is a tale of aimless seduction by a Beverly Hills hairstylist who’s considered “safe” because hairdressers are stereotypically assumed to be gay. George’s romp through the beds of countless women takes place in November 1968, on the eve of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency. “It was in this way,” says Brownstein, “that Shampoo represented a bookend to Chinatown. Each film documented the decline in early 1970s America by exposing the corruption and decadence of an earlier era in Los Angeles. One movie is about concealment, the other about display, and yet they reach the same bleak destination.”

 Brownstein notes that it was filmmakers born before 1940 who circa 1974 were most insistent on chronicling the rot endemic to the American system. He also spends time on Robert Altman’s Nashville, the brilliant 1975 compendium of life on the country-music circuit, seeing it as one more dour reflection of the Nixon years by a man well along in his career. By contrast, says Brownstein, rising Baby Boomer filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned away from politics in the 1970s to explore (in films like Jaws and Star Wars) of adventure sagas in all their apolitical excitement.