YOU MIGHT THINK you've already read and heard all you want to about how the 1970s were the last great years for truly maverick filmmaking. But A Decade under the Influence, a new documentary by Richard LaGravanese and the late Ted Demme, pulls together such a felicitous array of interviews, clips, and errata that those already familiar with the period will be fascinated all over again, while those who weren't around to see these movies the first time will want to rent everything they missed. Starting with a vision of mid- to late-1960s Hollywood as a "decadent, decaying, empty whorehouse" whose formulas were running dry, the movie checklists factors that led to a new generation invading the scared-pantless studios: new social attitudes and radicalized audiences, the influence of foreign films, the leg up provided to newbies like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese by exploitation producers Roger Corman and American International Pictures and others. The camel's backbreaking moment was 1969's Easy Rider, hardly the best film of this era, but which nonetheless made a mint throwing every convention of studio know-how to the wind. This led to "a time-space continuum of three or four years" where those same studios were open to just about any previously untried idea. While noting the rise of "imperfect" (by prior glamour standards) stars and the unequal distribution of funded artistic freedom (conspicuously, no female directors are interviewed here), the film stops to regard various seminal titles. They range from the obvious (Godfather, Chinatown) to the fairly neglected (The Last Detail, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Coming Home). Then the arrival of some unprecedented megagrossing pure entertainments (Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Grease) changed things once again – introducing a new studiocracy based on demographic studies, tie-in merchandise, saturation booking, and filmmaking as product. As Julie Christie (the most intellectually astute commentator) notes, today's Hollywood movies are now at least as creatively complacent and politically conservative as they were before this documentary's vaunted decade. There are some conspicuous absences (especially emblematic stars Jane Fonda and Jack Nicholson), but you can't complain much about a film that does include input from Polly Platt, Pam Grier, Jon Voight, and Jerry Schatzberg as well as the more de rigeur Scorsese, Coppola, Robert Altman, and Robert Towne. (Dennis Harvey)