1971

Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Dario Argento, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg, and Steven Spielberg -- among many others -- were behind the camera, while an extraordinary array of stars filled the screen: Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Sean Connery, Faye Dunaway, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Vanessa Redgrave all featured in films released that year.

The remarkable artistic flowering of New Hollywood was just beginning. The old guard was fading, the new guard rising. With cinema attendance in decline by the late 1960s and studios struggling to gauge box-office success, executives granted unprecedented freedom to a new generation of filmmakers -- and the results changed cinema forever.

Drawing on interviews with cast and crew, bestselling author Robert Sellers explores this pivotal year in film history -- a moment when Hollywood and British cinema alike stood at the thrilling crossroads of revolution and reinvention.