{"id":171377,"date":"2025-06-09T22:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T22:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/171377\/"},"modified":"2025-06-09T22:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T22:31:09","slug":"the-new-hollywood-trailblazer-bruce-dern-cant-stand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/171377\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘New Hollywood’ trailblazer Bruce Dern can’t stand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bruce<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ The Weinstein Company \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Mon 9 June 2025 18:45, UK <\/p>\n

Bruce Dern<\/a> isn\u2019t a name that everybody will immediately recognise, but to his fans, he\u2019s a god amongst men. In her early years, he was a bit-part player in a number of major movies, such as Elia Kazan\u2019s Wild River and The St Valentine\u2019s Day Massacre. Over his lengthy career, he\u2019s cropped up in everything, from The Hateful Eight to Bonanza, Coming Home to King of the Hill. In 2013, at the age of 76, he was nominated for a \u2018Best Actor\u2019 Oscar for his role in Alexander Payne\u2019s Nebraska. <\/p>\n

Since he first started acting way back in the early 1960s, Dern has worked with some of the best actors and directors<\/a> to ever grace the industry. Not only is he a phenomenal talent, but he\u2019s also a fascinating resource. He\u2019s been there for some of the biggest shifts in Hollywood history, particularly the move away from the studio system and the beginning of the \u2018New Hollywood\u2019 era. <\/p>\n

Widely believed to have started in the mid-1960s, the New Hollywood movement was one of increased creative control for the people actually making movies. Through films like Easy Rider, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde, New Hollywood directors and actors opened audiences\u2019 eyes to a new world of sex, obscenity, and violence that had previously been kept from them by the powers that be. The old \u2018Hays Code<\/a>\u2019 of content regulation simply couldn\u2019t compete, and a brave new age of filmmaking was thoroughly underway.<\/p>\n

Dern was right in the thick of this astonishing period. He rose to prominence through some of the gritty, unrelenting pictures that dominated the early years of the movement, sharing the screen with other icons such as Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. Unfortunately for Laura\u2019s father, he didn\u2019t always see eye-to-eye with his fellow revolutionaries. <\/p>\n

As per the book Jack Nicholson: The Early Years by Robert David Crane, Dern really wasn\u2019t a fan of working with one of the biggest names of the era. \u201cAny time you\u2019re in a movie with Peter Fonda, it\u2019s very hard to do quality work as an actor, because he\u2019s just not an actor,\u201d he said. \u201cHe just doesn\u2019t have a clue. I don\u2019t know why they stand for it; I don\u2019t think they will much longer. I think his career has definitely waned as an actor. He might be a pretty good filmmaker someday.\u201d The book was released in 1975, but it\u2019s unclear when Dern made these comments.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Dern, he ended up working with Fonda a lot. They both appeared in The Wild Angels, a motorcycle movie that put Fonda on a Harley-Davidson three years before Easy Rider. Then there was 1967\u2019s The Trip, an LSD flick directed by Roger Corman and written by Nicholson himself. When he wasn\u2019t working with Peter, Dern could also be found collaborating with his sister Jane. In Coming Home, the pair play a married couple whose union is tested when Fonda\u2019s character falls in love with a disabled Vietnam War veteran (Jon Voight). Turns out the Fondas are like Japanese knotweed \u2013 once you let them in, they\u2019re very hard to get rid of. <\/p>\n

Peter Fonda\u2019s career did indeed wane somewhat until the release of 1997\u2019s Ulee\u2019s Gold, which marked his major comeback. It\u2019s unclear what Dern thought of his old rival\u2019s return to the spotlight, but you\u2019d like to think he was magnanimous about it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ The Weinstein Company \/ YouTube Still) Mon 9 June 2025 18:45, UK Bruce Dern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[71314,77,3943,71315,71316,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-171377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bruce-dern","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-new-hollywood","12":"tag-peter-fonda","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114655781442710098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}