One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Novel by Ken Kesey (1962), and the movie (1975) starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.
The popular rebellion against forced institutionalization in mental hospitals, and against the degrading institutional treatment and forced medications and electroshock treatments, was already a growing movement, I believe. The book and the movie further planted the distrust of mental institutions in the public mind, and I think was instrumental in the movement towards de-institutionalizing the mentally ill.
I think this also gave a big boost to Jack Nicholson’s acting career. His prior main movies, such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces I think were seen more as cultural niche films.
Not influential, but Saturday Night Live succinctly summed up the reasoning that led to the treaty.
At the time, it was being recognized that forward-based nuclear weapons were vulnerable to being overrun in the early hours of a military crisis, creating unbearable pressure to “use them or lose them.”
In an SNL skit mimicking those current-events roundtable shows where talking heads argue and bloviate, Phil Hartmann’s Frankenstein’s Monster was asked his opinion on forward-based intermediate nuclear forces.
“FIRE BAD!” the monster bellowed, his signature phrase. Becoming agitated, he had to be calmed by his fellow talking heads.
And in a nutshell, that’s the single thought that drove both nations to the bargaining table.
I don’t think Cuckoos nest was very effective at all.
There is also a difference between “humanization”, which was of the 60’s, and de- institutionalization which was of the Reagan era and not humane at all.
It was said at the time the film came out and a few years after that every time *The Longest Day *played in a town, enlistments in the military went up.
I had a professor who contended that the films that had the most effect on society were Birth of a Nation (mentioned earlier) and Battleship Potemkin. He contended that Battleship Potemkin could be credited with keeping the Soviet Union afloat on a number of occasions early in existence.
The 1948 film The Snake Pit (great film, btw) catalyzed legislation to improve conditions in mental institutions in half the states in the nation (or so the studio. claimed).
Possibly The Truman Show popularised reality TV, which was a very small part of television back then. Trainspotting certainly took the lustre off ‘heroin chic’. A certain movie may have led to people buying less shit they don’t need with money they don’t have. Saving Private Ryan was a lot of positive PR for the war industry after the self-admonishing Vietnam War movies. There are plenty of examples like Lord of the Rings which promoted countries as holiday destinations.
Somehow this made me think of this other thread where a bunch of college students who were offended by “Trump 2016” sidewalk chalkings couldn’t figure out anything better to do about it than protest to the school’s president.
It gets better than that. French growers were in a real bind. The demand for Pinot Noir outstripped the supply, while there was a plentiful supply of Merlot nobody wanted.
What to do, what to do?
As a result of this scam, directly caused by Sideways’ influence on the US wine market:
Ernst and Gallo paid €7m for the wrong wine
The people behind it were eventually jailed and reputations were damaged for years.
A lot of easily influenced clowns who had made great play of how wonderful the “Pinot Noir” they were drinking was and how superior it was to plonk like Merlot found that they had, in fact, been drinking Merlot all along.
I’ve always been told that it’s a symbolic building of a monument.
When I was a kid, I once asked a rabbi in a religious school Q&A if you can leave stones on gentile graves, and was told that it was fine, so I guess by the same token, anyone who wants to adopt the tradition is welcome to it. It’s not like keeping kosher, which the Torah says is specifically for the people of Israel, and not incumbent upon anyone else.
The Wallace and Gromit films definitely had an effect on the financial well-being of Wensleydale cheese (which I’d never heard of before seeing A Grand Day Out.
Wikipedia says:
I recall seeing Wensleydale cheese with a Wallace and Gromit label on it when Curse of the Were Rabbit came out.