The term New Hollywood (along with American New Wave, Hollywood Renaissance, and others) is used to define a period of American cinema that followed Hollywood's Golden Age with the end of the old Hollywood Studio System and the rise of television. There's no rule among critics on when the period begins and ends, but consensus holds that it started in the early 1960s and continued until the early 1980s. Some qualify this period as a "movement", as its films tended to deviate from conventional cinematic themes and narrative structures. Regardless, it is primarily characterized by a change in filmmaking from a producer-driven process to one led by film directors.
The overwhelming driver behind this change was financial. The movie studios started losing money in the 1950s, and with every spectacular gimmick they tried (Technicolor, wide screen formats like CinemaScope and Panavision, stereo sound, 3D movies, etc.), they kept losing audience share. Demographics were changing as the baby boomer generation came of age, and with the emergence of and reception to foreign film movements like the French and British New Wave, Italian Spaghetti Westerns, and Asian art cinema, as well as the rise of independent films, desperate studio heads figured they couldn't do worse by letting directors try new things.
The breakdown of the Hays Code in the wake of Freedman v. Maryland in 1965 followed by the MPAA rating system in 1968 set the stage for the New Hollywood era, typified by innovative, hard-edged, no holds barred output from a new generation of young directors. From early films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Planet of the Apes (1968) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), to period-ending films like Blade Runner (1982) and Return of the Jedi (1983), the era produced many of the greatest films Hollywood has ever made.
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