25 audacious film debuts that rocked Hollywood

Nothing like making The Greatest Film of All-Time your first time out. Renaissance brat Orson Welles had already pushed the boundaries of theater and radio with his Mercury Theatre cohorts when he turned his attention to movies. Teaming with master cinematographer Gregg Toland and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, Welles unleashed his genius on a visual medium that was still reeling from the paralyzingly stagey influence of sound. Welles was a filmmaking magpie, borrowing existing techniques and concepts and deploying them in seemingly counterintuitive ways. This is how it’s done and how filmmakers have been trying — largely in vain — to do it for nearly 80 years.

In 1958, François Truffaut was banned from the Cannes Film Festival for lambasting the “vile” mainstream tendencies of French cinema. The following year, he won the festival’s Best Director honor with a film of his own, “The 400 Blows.” His semi-autobiographical tale of the troubled young Antoine Doinel was the first significant film of the French New Wave, which only changed the face of cinema forever (sowing the seeds of the American film revolution of the late 1960s). 

Joel and Ethan Coen’s entire career can be summed up in that infamous tracking shot where the camera lifts up and over a drunk slumped over on a bar. This cheekily self-conscious move prompted some critics to dismiss the Coens as lightweight pranksters. Though the brothers might have a predilection for dopey, cold-around-the-heart protagonists, their bemusedly cynical worldview has worn well over the years. And they’ve never told a cleaner or crueler tale than they did their first time out in this neo-noir that also served as the big-screen debut for the great Frances McDormand.

Before the French New Wave there was Italian neorealism — a take-the-cameras-to-the-streets revolution that eschewed glamor and convention in order to depict more vividly the poverty and political turmoil of a war-torn 1940s Europe. Luchino Visconti’s sensual and unsentimental adaptation of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” brazenly presented the literal and figurative mess of real people, which launched a cinematic movement and a brilliant career.

At a time when most aspiring horror filmmakers were attempting to cash-in on the slasher movie craze, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell hatched an idea for a gonzo demonic possession tale that would push the boundaries of gore and general good taste. The result was one of the most inventively shot horror flicks of the 1980s — a work of unhinged genius unbound by rules or studio notes. Given how homogenized indie horror flicks are today, “The Evil Dead” somehow feels fresher today than it was when it first hit home video.

The French New Wave kicked into high convention-flouting gear with Jean-Luc Godard’s drunk-on-cinema debut “Breathless.” A jazzy, jump-cutting mélange of gangster movie tropes and quarrelsome young love, Godard broke as many rules as possible and influenced a generation of young filmmakers to cast off their formal shackles and shoot what they felt. Violent, angry and goofy, the echoes of “Breathless” can be heard in everything from “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Pulp Fiction” to “Good Time.”

When 1980s post-punk artist Vincent Gallo’s acting career failed to catch fire in the 1990s, he engineered his own breakthrough film with this wild family comedy about a just-paroled loser who kidnaps a young dancer (Christina Ricci) and forces her to pose as his wife to impress his disapproving parents. It’s a thrillingly unpredictable film that occasionally pauses to give its characters surreal, spotlighted singing/dancing solos. Gallo harnesses the power and possibility of the medium to defiantly tell his very personal story his way. Few first-time filmmakers possess his disdain for convention.

Spike Lee roared onto the scene in 1986 with this no-budget miracle about a sexually liberated young woman who lives and loves on her own terms — much to the chagrin of her three boyfriends. But for one regrettable scene late in the film (which Lee has since disowned), it’s an exhilaratingly funny feminist sex comedy — an extreme rarity in the meathead wasteland of 1980s American cinema. Lee’s formal audaciousness exceeds his resources at times, but his whip-smart writing and righteous passion overwhelm any technical shortcomings.

Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing descent into numerological madness was financed via $100 donations from friends and family, and the filmmaker pushed his $68,000 budget to the absolute limit. Aronofsky keeps in close quarters with his protagonist, Max (Sean Gullette), to amp up the claustrophobic horror. But it’s the sound design and Clint Mansell’s nightmarishly intense score that makes this paranoid thriller such a rough ride. Any doubts as to whether Aronofsky could repeat this trick with a reasonable budget were erased with his virtuosic sophomore effort, “Requiem for a Dream.” 

The quintessential counterculture film of the 1960s brought the New Hollywood revolution crashing down on the studios, sending the movie industry into a full-scale how-the-hell-do-we-replicate-this panic. The insurrection was something of an inside job, fomented in part by second-generation Hollywood royalty Peter Fonda. But the unruly genius at the center of “Easy Rider” was actor and first-time filmmaker Dennis Hopper, whose avant-garde instincts hooked into the fury and confusion of a deeply troubled time. 

Julie Dash’s labor-of-love retelling of her Gullah family’s history is as startlingly unique today as it was when it debuted at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. The first female African-American-directed film to receive theatrical distribution in the United States, “Daughters of the Dust” is, as Roger Ebert observed, a mesmerizing “tone poem” about an underrepresented people and their centuries-long struggle. Dash’s leisurely pace demands viewers shut out the world around them and surrender to its singular rhythm.

Wendell B. Harris Jr. came out of nowhere to win the top prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival with this hysterically hyperactive comedy based on a real-life con artist who impersonated lawyers, reporters and (shockingly) a gynecological surgeon (he performed thirty-six successful hysterectomies). It’s not a polished film, but it’s an uncommonly smart study of race and class that still feels like a blast of fresh air 28 years later. Sadly, Harris has yet to release a second feature.

John Cassavetes, the father of American independent cinema, first jolted moviegoers with his “improvised” drama about race relations and — especially controversial for its time — interracial romance. Cassavetes cast the film with students from acting workshop and shot on the streets of New York City with no permits, which allowed him to capture a raw naturalism that was invigoratingly new to moviegoers. “Shadows” was not a hit in its day, but it rewrote all of the filmmaking rules, opening up the medium to artists from all walks of life. It is the “Citizen Kane” of indie movies.

The 1958 murder spree of Charles Starkweather served as the unlikely inspiration for Terrence Malick’s sui generis first film — a lyrical, transporting reverie that evokes the feeling of being young and in love and hopelessly adrift in a mad world. “Badlands” launched the careers of Sissy Spacek and Martin Scorsese while also announcing Malick as a fully formed, utterly unique motion picture artist. Filmmakers have chased the simple, Orff-scored majesty of this hauntingly gorgeous road movie for decades, but it remains an inimitable feat deep, unconscious conjuring.

There’s no beating Charles Laughton’s filmmaking record. His first and only effort as a director is one of the greatest movies ever made, a strange and terrifying thriller about a murderous preacher (Robert Mitchum) stalking a widow and her children as he searches for a stolen $10,000. First-timer Laughton had a first-rate visual collaborator in cinematographer Stanley Cortez. The pair leaned heavily on the German expressionistic style, which imbues the tale’s peculiar gothic-noir trappings with a kind of magic realism.

Susan Seidelman’s vital and invigorating time capsule of New York City’s early-1980s post-punk scene remains a sympathy-challenging portrait of a self-promoting “legend in her own mind” protagonist played to the Jersey-girl hilt by Susan Berman. Several exciting young filmmakers hit the streets with 16mm cameras (sans permits) to document this period, but Seidelman’s much-needed female perspective proved the most bracing and unsentimental.

“Drugstore Cowboy” established Gus Van Sant as an American indie sensation, but his ultra low-budget black-and-white adaptation of Walt Curtis’s semi-autobiographical novel was a stunner in its own right. It’s very much a movie by a filmmaker finding his voice with each jarring cut and fascinating close-up. Van Sant’s depiction of Portland’s lower class gay community was unusually stark and authentic for its time. He presented a vastly underrepresented culture for what it was — in the process, inspiring a generation of LGBTQ filmmakers to share their experiences and community with the world.

One of the key artistic forces of the New Hollywood movement, Bob Rafelson kicked off (and nearly killed) his career with the stream-of-consciousness “Head.” It’s as bizarre and uncommercial as you’d expect a Rafelson and Jack Nicholson-scripted vehicle for The Monkees would be. The aimless, stream-of-consciousness narrative is just an excuse to showcase some groovy new tunes written for the band by the brilliant likes of Carole King & Gerry Goffin and Harry Nilsson. The Monkees were basically “over” by the time Columbia dumped the film, but it lives on as a cult favorite and one of the ballsiest first features ever attempted.

Shane Carruth’s cerebral time travel tale knocked 2004 Sundance Film Festival attendees sidewaysm — picking up the Grand Jury prize even as ardent fans of the movie struggled to ascertain the particulars of the narrative. The shoestring-budgeted film might be dense with technical detail, but it’s always visually arresting and, at 77 minutes, practically made for instant repeat viewings. Carruth’s intellectually challenging masterpiece inspired a new movement of brainy/nerdy independent filmmakers like Rian Johnson (“Brick”), Colin Trevorrow (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) and James Ward Byrkit (“Coherence”).

It took David Lynch five years to realize this distinctly surreal and nightmarish horror film about a man (Jack Nance), his deformed child, a lady in a radiator and other sights you’ll never banish from memory once you’ve seen them. Lynch’s “dream of dark and troubling things” leans more to the experimental end of the spectrum, but it coheres just enough as a narrative to make you think you can solve it. People have been trying and largely failing to solve his work ever since. There is no truth — only interpretation.

Alex Cox’s “Repo Man” is one of the most punk rock movies ever released by a major studio. It was a radical, whacked-out film that threatened the docile, “Morning in America” status quo. It died at the box office but developed an immediate cult following on home video. That cult following riled up a generation of troublemakers to take insane chances and do things the wrong way — like run your end credits backwards just to irk people. 

George A. Romero gave birth to the zombie movie with this low-budget black-and-white shocker. The envelope-pushing gore and razor-sharp social commentary stunned audiences at the time. It was one of the first horror movies to accurately reflect the physical and psychological brutality incurred by the Vietnam War and the bigoted resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Horror movies had smuggled in political themes before, but none had been this brazen or — frankly — aggressive in getting across their message. No one wedded gruesome spectacle and righteous outrage better than Romero.

The era of the Gen X film brats began with a group of suited criminals arguing at breakfast over the metaphorical meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” Suddenly, every video store smart aleck who’d made someone laugh with an obscure, well-timed pop culture reference thought they could be the next Quentin Tarantino. “Reservoir Dogs” launched so many pale imitations, it’s easy to lose sight of how insanely original it was in its unabashed derivativeness. Tarantino was a mad sampler — the rambunctious cinematic love child of Jean-Luc Godard and Brian De Palma.

Jane Campion’s contentious and intoxicatingly off-center “Sweetie” left little doubt that we were witnessing the beginning of a major filmmaking career. Narratively, it’s fairly straightforward. But Campion presents her real-world family drama in a skewed, stylized dream state. You stagger through the film a little punch drunk, unsure what to trust or how to feel. You wonder why more filmmakers don’t take these chances. Campion’s fearlessness has tripped her up along the way, but her failures are just a speed bump on the way to the next masterpiece. 

John McNaughton’s first film was so audacious it almost never saw the light of a movie theater projector. McNaughton unnerved audiences with his austere, matter-of-fact character study of a remorseless murderer. As portrayed by Michael Rooker, we can only observe and reckon with the existence of this monster — who is the second most sickening creature in the film compared to his prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles). It’s a sleazy, revolting and scarring experience. One that languished on the shelf for four years until a distributor risked the outrage to let audiences judge its artistic merits for themselves.