"I don't think a movie today that captured all the things that we did in the seventies could come close, because it's like asking to recreate the seventies and the audience sensibilities and that's impossible"
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Glaser is refusing the nostalgia-industrial demand to make the past legible on today’s terms. On the surface, he’s talking about filmmaking logistics: you can’t “capture all the things” a 1970s production pulled off. The sharper point is that the seventies weren’t just a set of costumes, camera lenses, or scripts; they were a contract between artists and audiences about what felt true, permissible, and exciting. That contract is gone.
The key phrase is “audience sensibilities.” He’s not romanticizing old craft so much as describing a vanished feedback loop. Seventies film and TV lived in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, amid economic anxiety and a loosening of censors; cynicism and grit weren’t “a look,” they were the air. Glaser’s subtext is that modern remakes inevitably launder that air. Today’s viewers arrive trained by franchise logic, algorithmic taste-shaping, and a different moral vocabulary about violence, gender, policing, and authority. Even when a reboot copies the plot, it can’t reproduce the risk profile: what could be implied, what could be ugly, what could be unresolved without being “fixed” by a closing beat or a wink.
His intent also protects the work from being judged as an imitation of itself. By calling the recreation “impossible,” he stakes out a respectful boundary: the seventies aren’t a brand asset to be revived, but a moment that only made sense to the people living through it. That’s not defeatism; it’s an artist reminding us that authenticity is historical, not technical.
The key phrase is “audience sensibilities.” He’s not romanticizing old craft so much as describing a vanished feedback loop. Seventies film and TV lived in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, amid economic anxiety and a loosening of censors; cynicism and grit weren’t “a look,” they were the air. Glaser’s subtext is that modern remakes inevitably launder that air. Today’s viewers arrive trained by franchise logic, algorithmic taste-shaping, and a different moral vocabulary about violence, gender, policing, and authority. Even when a reboot copies the plot, it can’t reproduce the risk profile: what could be implied, what could be ugly, what could be unresolved without being “fixed” by a closing beat or a wink.
His intent also protects the work from being judged as an imitation of itself. By calling the recreation “impossible,” he stakes out a respectful boundary: the seventies aren’t a brand asset to be revived, but a moment that only made sense to the people living through it. That’s not defeatism; it’s an artist reminding us that authenticity is historical, not technical.
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| Topic | Movie |
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