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The History of American Cinema: 1980

1/1 -

Sherry Lansing is appointed president at 20th Century-Fox, the first time that a woman has occupied such a position with a major studio. [ADD}

3/1 -

Peter Yates' Breaking Away is awarded the best film award by the 35-member National Film Society of Film Critics.  Woody Allen's Manhattan and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer are runners-up. [ADD}

3/1 -

Alfred Hitchcock learns from the British Consul that he has received a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list. [ADD}

1/2 -

A record admission price of $7.50 is charged for first-run screenings of Bob Guccione's $17 million film Caligula at the Penthouse East Theater in New York. [ADD}

8/2 -

Paul Schrader's American Gigolo is released.   Richard Gere plays Julian Kay, a slick high-class gigolo who finds himself lured into a murder plot just as it seems he has found redemption with Lauren Hutton. [ADD}

8/2 -

William Friedkin’s Cruising is released after a difficult shoot that encountered demonstrations from the gay community, and amidst pressure for its R rating to be replaced by an X rating.   Al Pacino stars as an undercover cop hunting a killer amongst the gay community. [ADD}

17/2 -

Wise Blood, John Huston’s satirical look at obsessive religion, is released.   Adapted from Flannery O'Connor's novel, the film stars Brad Dourif, Harry Dean Stanton and Daniel Shor. [ADD}

7/3 -

Coal Miner's Daughter, Michael Apted’s biopic of country music star Loretta Lynn, is released.    Sissy Spacek stars in the title role, fighting drug addiction and marital breakdown as her star rises.   Tommy Lee Jones co-stars as her husband, Dolittle, and Beverly D’Angelo is Patsy Cline. [ADD}

11/3 -

Francis Ford Coppola acquires the Hollywood General Studios for $6.7 million after three months of negotiations.   He renames the studio Zoetrope, intending to make it a ‘complete, fully integrated film studio with the best features of the studios of the 1930s and 1940s.’ [ADD}

Mar -

Polygram Pictures is formed. [ADD}

14/4 -

Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer wins the Best Picture Award at the 52nd Annual Academy Awards ceremony. [MORE] 

29/4 -

British film director Alfred Hitchcock dies of renal failure at the age of 80 at his Bellagio Road home in Bel Air, where he had lived with his wife Alma since 1942. [ADD}

21/5 -

The Empire Strikes Back, the second part of George Lucas’s space epic, is released.   Lucas relinquishes direction of the film to Irvin Kershner, while the special effects are created by Lucas’s own Industrial Light and Magic Co.   The saga takes a darker tone in this second episode, in which principal cast members Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher reprise their roles from the original, and is considered by many to be the best in the series. [ADD}

23/5 -

Stanley Kubrick’s stylish adaptation of Stephen King’s best-selling horror novel The Shining is released.   Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a frustrated novelist who holes up as the winter caretaker in the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies with his family (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd). [ADD}

9/6 -

Richard Pryor is reported to be in critical condition after suffering serious burns when freebasing a mix of cocaine and ether. [ADD}

17/6 -

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining grosses $7,763,426 at 747 cinemas across North America in three days – the biggest opening day/weekend for any film in Warner Bros. history. [ADD}

The History of Cinema: 1980