- New York, 10 January: The doyenne of Hollywood actresses, Katharine Hepburn, lives up to her reputation for bluntness. In a rare television interview for CBS, to be shown next Sunday, she lashes out at the current pervasiveness of pornography in films.
- Los Angeles, 12 January: John Wayne, suffering from cancer, has undergone a serious operation in which most of his stomach had to be removed.
- Rome, 23 January: Sophia Loren's husband, Carlo Ponti, has been charged by the Italian courts with illegal exportation of capital.
- Paris, 24 January:
 François Truffaut's new film, L'Amour en fuite (Love on the Run), is the fifth in the series of the adventures of the director's alter ego Antoine Doinel alias Jean-Pierre Léaud. This picture is an affectionate backward look at the previous episodes, using some of the footage from them, the first being Le Quatre cents coups (The Four Hundred Blows) almost 20 years ago. Here, Doinel, at the age of 35, separated from his wife (Claude Jade) and young son, is involved with Sabine (Dorothée) until he meets Colette (Marie-France Pisier), a childhood sweetheart, now a lawyer. Although as lightweight as the other tales, the movie cannot hide the pain at the loss of youthful spontaneity and the difficulties of obtaining lasting love. This could be the last chapter.
- Paris, 24 January: Actress Jeanne Moreau has shown Adolescente, her second film as a director, with Simone Signoret and Francis Huster.
 - Paris, 3 February: The Césars have been in existence for only four years, but already one star has been crowned best actress twice. Romy Schneider received her second César (after L'Important c'est d'aimer) for Claude Sautet's film Une histoire simple, in which she plays a divorced woman with a teenage son, trying to come to terms with reaching 40. The best actor could have been awarded the best actress prize, because it went to Michel Serrault's outrageously successful drag queen Alban in Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux folles. L'Argent des autres (Other People's Money) was honored with Césars for both the best film and the best director (Christian de Chalonge), while the Italian Ermanno Olmi's L'Albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) took the best foreign language film award.
- Los Angeles, 13 February:
 One of the truly great figures of the cinema, director and writer Jean Renoir has died at his home in Beverly Hills, aged 86. The second son of the Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, the young Jean often modeled for his father and grew up within an artistic environment which profoundly influenced his attitude to the creative process. Throughout his life he preserved his creative independence, though he regarded the cinema very much as a collaborative art and was a quite talented director of actors. Renoir thus never became part of the French film industry, and fitted even less well into the Hollywood studio system when he arrived as a refugee from Occupied France in 1940. His great period as a director was during the 1930s, when he produced one remarkable film after another, ranging from the drama (Le Chienne 1931, Toni 1934, Le Crime de M. Lange 1935) to thrillers (La Nuit du carrefour 1932) and comedy (Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932). But Renoir will best be remembered for his celebrated anti-war drama La Grande illusion (Grand Illusion) (1937) starring Jean Gabin and Erich von Stroheim, and for his great masterpiece La Régle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939) which he scripted, directed and in which he starred. Despite his antipathy to the Hollywood system, he made five interesting films in the U.S. (including This Land Is Mine 1943, and The Southerner 1945) and went on to work in India, Italy, and back in his native France in the 1950s. Sadly, he found it impossible to get financing for many of his projects and turned to writing in his later years.
- New York, 16 February: Following outbreaks of violence in several movie theaters screening Walter Hill's The Warriors, Paramount has decided to cancel its advertising campaign and remake the trailers.
- West Berlin, 22 February: The Soviet Union and other communist countries have withdrawn from the West Berlin Film Festival in protest against the showing of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, a movie about the war in Vietnam.
- Hollywood, 23 February: Despite sporadic outbursts of violence and vandalism at theaters showing The Warriors, a film about teenage gang violence in New York City, Paramount Pictures has now decided to continue advertising the film. However, the company said it would release exhibitors from their contractual obligations if they felt it posed a threat either to property or people. The film grossed over $12 million in its first two weeks.
- Hollywood, 7 March:
 The American Film Institute has presented director Alfred Hitchcock with its Life Achievement award. With the leading celebrities in Hollywood in attendance, the evening ceremony was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and recorded by CBS-TV for broadcast later in the week. Many of the stars of Hitchcock's films, plus other associates, were there including Cary Grant, Jane Wyman and James Stewart, producer Sidney Bernstein and studio head Lew Wasserman, along with French director François Truffaut and Hitch's favorite female star of the 1940s, Ingrid Bergman, who served as the evening's emcee. Unfortunately, it was impossible to disguise the fact that this was a sad occasion. Hitchcock and his wife Alma, who had collaborated on so many of his projects, are both in extremely poor health and, quite clearly, were unable to fully appreciate this event held in their honor.
 - New York, March 14: After making films about adolescence in Czechoslovakia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a hymn to non-conformity, emigré Milos Forman was the logical choice to direct Hair, the movie version of hippiedom's hit 1967 stage musical. Although the Age of Aquarius is long over and the Flower People have withered and died, the film offers some vigorous dancing in the streets and parks of New York (choreographed by Twyla Tharp), some uninhibited playing from the young performers (including Treat Williams, Beverly D'Angelo, Nell Carter and Melba Moore), and a touch of nostalgia for the over-25s. Photographed by Miroslav Ondrícek, the episodic story follows a naïve draftee (John Savage) who gets involved with a bunch of turned-on hippies at a "be-in" in Central Park.
- Pennsylvania, 28 March:
 The crisis that has gripped the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island has given a terrifying topicality to The China Syndrome, relased two weeks ago. The title refers to a melt-down in a nuclear reactor triggering an uncontainable fire that, theoretically, could burn through to China. They say it couldn't happen but The China Syndrome entertains the possibility of a serious nuclear accident being hushed up. Jane Fonda plays the journalist on the trail of a hot story, and Michael Douglas, who also produces, is her intrepid cameraman. Jack Lemmon co-stars as the plant's chief engineer, undergoing his own emotional melt-down as disaster looms. James Bridges' intelligent direction focuses not only on the safety of nuclear power but also on the role and responsibilities of journalists.
 - Los Angeles, 9 April: As Oscar® enters its 51st year, films about Vietnam are honored with Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter voted Best Picture and Cimino himself Best Director. Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, who co-star in Coming Home, won the Best Actor and Actress awards for their performances in that film. Christopher Walken was voted Best Supporting Actor for his harrowing performance in The Deer Hunter as the blue-collar boy from Pennsylvania undone by his experiences in Vietnam. Maggie Smith won her second Oscar®, this time the Best Supporting Actress award, for her work in California Suite as, ironically, a Tinseltown actress nominated for an Oscar®. The award for best foreign language film went to Préparez vos mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), directed by Bertrand Blier, while special awards were presented to Lord Laurence Olivier, director King Vidor and animator Walter Lantz, the man who created Woody Woodpecker.
- Hollywood, 9 April: After the Oscar® ceremony, actress Jane Fonda declared that Michael Cimino's Oscar® winner, The Deer Hunter, "was a racist film, which presented the official version of the war in Vietnam."
- Columbus, 9 April: Bob Rafelson has started Ohio location shooting for Brubaker. The cameramen's union is up in arms about the signing of Bruno Nuytten, the French director of photography, as Haskell Wexler's replacement, and are demanding the withdrawal of his work permit.
- New York, 20 April: Release of Woody Allen's Manhattan. Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy and Mariel Hemingway star. The luminous black-and-white photography is by Gordon Willis.
- Montana, 29 April: Michael Cimino, on location with Heaven's Gate, is 10 days behind on his shooting schedule despite the fact that he has been here since the beginning of the month. He has apparently already spent $11 million of his budget.
- Paris, 9 May:
 André Téchiné has wanted to make Les Soeurs Brontë (The Brontë Sisters) since 1972. Luckily, he waited until he could gather together three of the most talented young actresses in France to play the trio of celebrated Yorkshire authors: Isabelle Adjani (Emily), Marie-France Pisier (Charlotte) and Isabelle Huppert (Anne). The film, cut from three to less than two hours, centers around the sisters' somber relationship with Branwell (Pascal Greggory), their spoiled-genius brother, set in a careful recreation of the period.
 - New York, 24 May: Constructed as skillfully as the commercials he used to make, Ridley Scott's Alien is located in the pulpy, phallic world of the surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Giger's visions of a disturbing biomechanical world owe much to the tales of necromancy written in the 19th century by H. P. Lovecraft. It is on a planet full of these strange shapes that the crew of the space cruiser Nostromo find the derelict spacecraft that contains the ultimately terrifying alien of the title. The alien hitches a ride with the Nostromo and, in a manner that recalls an old B-movie, It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), begins to work its way through the crew (Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto), displaying a ferocious will to live and procreate at whatever cost to those around it. In the words of Alien's advertising slogan, "In outer space, no one can hear you scream!"
 - Cannes, 24 May:
 Françoise Sagan and the other members of the jury at this year's Cannes Film Festival had difficulty in choosing between Volker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Therefore they decided tht the two films should share the Golden Palm. In a sense, the German and the American movies have something in common since both evoke black pages in their country's history -- the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the misguided Vietnam adventure. The Tin Drum, based on Günther Grass' complex allegorical novel, is as disturbing look at Germany history through the relentless gaze of a weird child. The teenage Oskar stopped growing at the age of three by an act of will. Naturally, he is a concern to his parents, because he has tantrums, constantly bangs a toy tin drum, and has a scream that shatters glass. Oskar acts as a sort of conscience to the inhabitants of Danzig when the Nazis are in power and the war rages. The remarkable performance by 12-year-old David Bennent, son of actor Heinz Bennent, effectively brings the book's characters to life. War is the principal subject of Apocalypse Now, a film that contains some extraordinary set pieces. Coppola has explained that he wanted "to give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War." This the director has certainly achieved by camera and sound techniques that assault the senses.
- Cannes, 24 May:
 Discovered on the Croisette in 1965 with his film Szegénylegények (The Round-Up), the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó has now been honored not only with a prize giiven to his complete œuvre, but with the screening of many of his films during the Festival. These include Szegénylegények, Fényes szelek (The Confrontation, 1968), Téli sirokkó (Winter Sirocco, 1969), Égi bárány (Agnus Dei, 1970), Még kér a nép (Red Psalm, 1971) and his latest production, Magyar rapszódia (Hungarian Rhapsody, 1979). The latter marks Jancsó's return to his native land after making three less successful films in Italy. There are few directors so akin to a choreographer, his films being elaborate ballets, emblematically tracing the movements in the fight for socialism and Hungarian independence -- ritual dances of life and death enacted on a bleak Hungarian plain where power constantly changes hands. The camera weaves in and out like an invisible observer, sometimes dancing with the people, at other times tracking them down, shooting them. A tracking shot takes on new meaning in Jancsó's films.
 - Hollywood, 11 June: John Wayne has lost a long and painfully fought battle with cancer. Three years ago he made his last film, The Shootist, playing an aging gunfighter who is dying of the same affliction. Later he appeared in TV ads for cancer research funds, using the scene from The Shootist in which doctor James Stewart diagnoses the disease. Wayne had been a major star since 1939, when he played the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, and grew into a monolith of survival. His approach to filmmaking was characteristically straightforward: "I play John Wayne in every picture regardless of the character, and I've been doing all right, haven't I?" But he has left a number of imperishable performances, notably as abrasive and solitary men, in Red River, Rio Bravo and, unforgettably, in The Searchers, where the character of Ethan Edwards is mapped so closely to Wayne's own gestures that he hardly seems to be acting at all. In recent years the actor's right-wing views have been known to stir controversy, but his death and the brave manner of his departing have moved the film world.
- Hollywood, 5 August: David Field, the joint head of United Artists production, has imposed a new budget of $27.5 million and a maximum of three hours viewing time on Heaven's Gate.
- Paris, 15 August: French release of J. Lee Thompson's UK production of The Passage, starring Anthony Quinn, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell and Patricia Neal. The story concerns a Basque shepherd (Quinn) during World War II who is approached by the underground to escort a scientist (Mason) and his family across the Pyrenees while being pursued by a sadistic German (McDowell). Mason had predicted to Kay Lenz, who plays his daughter, that the movie would be a flop at the box office. He said to Lenz, "You mark my words. All films that are predominantly in thick snow are a flop at the box office. Somehow they make an audience feel uncomfortable, cold and damp." It turned out Mason was right and the film flopped worldwide.
 - New York, 15 August:
 The making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's latest film, was almost as apocalyptic as its subject. This work on the Vietnam War (loosely based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) strted shooting in March 1976 on location in the Philippines, where Coppola and his team had planned to work for 13 weeks. They finished 238 days later, having raised the budget from $12 million to $31 million. Much of this came out of Coppola's own pocket and from funding for which he, as an independent producer, could be held personally accountable. During the course of filming, the director faced many difficulties, including a typhoon that destroyed most of the huge and expensive sets. He also had problems with top-billed top-salaried Marlon Brando, who appears as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz very far on into the two-and-a-half hour movie. After a week, Harvey Keitel, in the key role of Captain Benjamin Willard on the quest for Kurtz, had to be replaced by Martin Sheen, who then suffered a heart attack, which held up much of the shooting until he had recovered. To make matters worse, a civil war broke out in the Philippines, depriving Coppola of the helicopters he needed. Such were the troubles and delays on the producton that the press rechristened it "Apocalypse When?" After three nightmarish years, Apocalypse Now has finally reached our screens, but with two different endings -- on with a bang, the other with a whimper -- because Coppola himself was not sure how the film should conclude. The climax that was ditched from the one version, and reinstated in the other, is an assault on Kurtz's base by both American and Viet Cong forces, a sequence whose force justifies the movie's title.
- Melbourne, 17 August:
 Director Gillian Armstrong, the creator of several highly regarded short films, has made a sparkling feature debut with My Brilliant Career. Acclaimed at Cannes, and the winner of seven Australian awards, including best film and director, it reveals Armstrong's central concern with the rights of women to independence and free thought. Set in the late 19th century, Luciana Arrighi's production design beautifully evokes the sense of period in the story of Sybylla, a headstrong young girl from a farming family who eschews the conventional life mapped out for her in order to become a writer. In this role, Judy Davis not only has presence, but also displays the kind of intelligent talent that gives notice of a star in the making. The supporting cast, especially Sam Neill, is excellent.
- Telluride, 31 August: As part of the Festival in this Colorado resort town, the uncut original version of Abel Gance's Napoléon (1934), reconstructed by historian Kevin Brownlow, with its final scene projected onto a triple screen, was shown in the open air. The director, who was present at the screening, was given a standing ovation by the public.
 - Paris, 8 September: This evening in a side street of the 16th arrondissement, the corpse of Jean Seberg was found in the back of a car. The American-born actress had disappeared from her home a week ago. Eleven days earlier, on returning from filming in Guyana, she attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a subway train. She succeeded on her second attempt with an overdose of sleeping pills. The 40-year-old Seberg shot to fame at the age of 17 playing the title role in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan. She later moved to France and for a while was married to the writer and filmmaker Romain Gary,
- New York, 8 September: Nation-wide release of Ken Annakin's The Fifth Musketeer, featuring a star-studded cast that includes Sylvia Kristel, Ursula Adress, Beau Bridges, Cornel Wilde, Ian McShane, Lloyd Bridges, José Ferrer, Olivia De Havilland and Rex Harrison. In this variation on Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, King Louis XIV (Beau Bridges) has without his knowledge a twin brother, Philippe, but when he is told, he immediately locks him up in the Bastille. The king wants to increase his popularity and stages an assassination against himself where Philippe is dressed as King Louis. But Philippe manages to escape the assassination and everybody believes him to be the real king. The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff adds a touch of class to this otherwise ordinary Austrian-West German production with some moody, misty shots of fields at dawn, gardens at sunset and fireworks. Unfortunately, it's rather a sad film that features several stellar actors near the ends of their careers.
 Hamburg, 22 September:  Not since the 1920s has the German cinema known so much feverish creative activity as it has in recent years. Heading the list of top directors are Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. Fifty-seven years after F. W. Murnau, Herzog has resuscitated the Dracula myth with Nosferatu the Vampire, in which Klaus Kinski, the director's favorite actor, hypnotically plays the title role. The prolific Fassbinder has delivered two films this year, The Third Generation, about a group of terrorists, and The Marriage of Maria Braun, which retraces the history of postwar Germany through the portrait of a formidable woman, played by Hanna Schygulla.
  Wenders has moved into the world of film noir with The American Friend, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith thriller Ripley's Game. Shot partly in English, it stars Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, with appearanced by Hollywood directors Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. The international success of many of these films, especially Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun and Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), has undoubtedly contributed to the rebirth of the German cinema. And a dozen West German directors, including Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz and Alexander Kluge, have contributed to the recent film Germany in Autumn, revealing the extent of the talent available.
| - New York, 30 September: Lauren Bacall has published a book about her private life and career titled Lauren Bacall, by Myself.
- Los Angeles, 2 October: Universal and Disney Pictures have lost their court case against Sony-Betamax. The court has decided that the use of a video recorder for personal use does not constitute a breach of copyright laws.
- New York, 5 October:
 Opening of Blake Edwards' film, 10, and the revelation of the sexy Bo Derek, who co-stars with Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews. The film looks set to make Ravel's "Bolero" the hottest music of the moment. But Edwards, who wrote, produced and directed the comedy, is reportedly furious with Orion studios over the visual advertising they chose to promote the film. The poster in question, which the director classifies as "sexist and vulgar," shows Dudley Moore swinging from a chain around the neck of an extremely well-endowed woman.
- Columbia, 23 October: Monty Pyton's The Life of Brian has been short lived in this South Carolina city. Ecclesiastical outrage over the British comedy group's satirical movie has forced a cancelation after the first evening's showing. However, the withdrawal of the film is causing an even greater upheaval as citizen groups level charges of censorship and prior restraint at Senator Strom Thurmond, the politician instrumental in the film's suspension.
 - Paris, 31 October: Two years have passed since Roman Polanski skipped bail after being found guilty of having sex with a minor, and he remains a fugitive from American justice. His latest film, Tess, adapted from Thomas Hardy's Wessex novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, has been filmed in France, since residency in Britain would have led to his extradition to the United States. This moody, haunding film stars the staggeringly beautiful Nastassja Kinski in the title role as the farm girl who is misused by the aristocrat for whom she works and who is then caught in a marriage where her initial happiness soon turns to grief. Fans of the novel may feel unpersuaded by Polanski's effort to marry Hardy's vision with his own fascination with psychosexual impulses toward survival, but the film is an often stunning thing to see. Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth died during filming, and his work was completed by Ghislain Cloquet. The daughter of German character star Klaus Kinski, Nastassja made her film debut in 1975 with a small role as a juggler in Wim Wenders' Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement). Her sensitive, intelligent performance in Tess lingers in the memory.
- New York, 7 November: Entertainer and singer Bette Midler has her first starring role on screen in Mark Rydell's The Rose, which is being released today. Alan Bates, Frederic Forrest and Harry Dean Stanton co-star.
- Paris, 14 November:
 Joseph Losey's film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni was the brainchild of Daniel Toscan du Plantier, a producer at Gaumont who wants to steer his company twoards more cultural films. Losey, however, insisted that the film would not be merely a reproduction of a theatrical event, with static action and reduced decor. He, therefore, shot the opera in and around handsome Palladian villas in northern Italy, getting his singers to move through the settings as naturally as possible. For example, Don Ottavio's two arias have him being rowed along in a boat and walking over sleeping peasants. Then, during the "Catalogue" aria, a parade of nubile young women is displayed for Don Giovanni's delight. Losey and his co-scenarist, the well-named Frantz Salieri, have introduced a young man in black as a silent attendant on the libertine, and the climax has Giovanni tumbling into a glass-blower's vat rather than journeying to the depths of Hell. The work, conducted by Loren Maazel, is superbly sung by, among others, Ruggero Raimondi (Giovanni), Kiri Te Kanawa (Elvira), Edda Moser (Anna) and José Van Dam (Leporello).
 - Warsaw, 16 November: Krzysztof Kieslowski's Amator (Camera Buff) all starts when Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr) buys a little 8mm movie camera to film his new-born baby. Like a true enthusiast, Filip enters into the spirit of his new hobby, filming everything that moves and working on the material on a small editing suite. When he is commissioned by his boss to film a reception being held to commemorate the companyÕs 25th anniversary, he becomes aware of the pressures of outside expectations and even censorship. His film, however, gets entered into an amateur film festival and wins third prize (second prize really since none were judged good enough to win first prize!), and he soon finds himself caught up in the world of TV and film-making, helped by an attractive film producer. Suddenly he finds that his new hobby isn't compatible with the responsibilities of bringing up a small child, nor is it compatible with the wishes of his employer. -- dvdtimes.co
- Stockholm, 29 November: It now looks likely that Ingmar Bergman, Sweden's leading director of films and theater, may be returning to his native land after three-and-a-half years of self-imposed exile. The Swedish government is apparently taking steps to remedy the scandalous situation whereby Bergman, accused of owing back taxes, was treated quite disgracefully by the tax authorities. During his years in Munich, Bergman directed The Serpent's Egg (in English, 1977) as well as a British/Norwegian co-production Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) (1978).
- New York, 8 December:
 Throughout the 1970s, the "Star Trek" television series created by Gene Roddenberry was kept alive in the form of endless repeats of its 79 episodes demanded by its fanatical fans, dubbed "Trekkies." And now their heroes have been translated from the small screen to the big screen in Star Trek - The Motion Picture, directed by none other than Robert Wise. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and their colleagues on the starship Enterprise find themselves defending the Earth in the 23rd century against an alien that has assumed the form of new crew member Persis Khambatta, who sets some kind of film first by appearing as a bald leading lady -- an interesting counterpoint to the assorted toupees worn by the aging stalwarts on the Enterprise's flight deck. It is reported that Paramount has lavished $40 million on the picture, approximately eight times the original budget. For those operating on the new frontier of special effects, the cost of putting a spaceship on the screen is beginning to rival building the real thing. Some of the intimacy of the teleseries has been lost, although the thoughtul plot attempts to play on the series' great strength in dealing with ideas rather than action.
 - Hollywood, 18 December: The uncertainties of the movie business and the basic insecurity of the Hollywood studios lie behind the recent musical chairs played by many of the leading production executives during the past year. When, for example, a production chief is considered a "hot property," normal business considerations no longer apply. Thus, although it is not too clear to what extent David Begelman was responsible for the modest recovery of Columbia in the mid-1970s, the studio made every effort to keep him on, even after he admitted he had embezzled money from the company. And now, a relatively short time since his departure from Columbia (in February 1978), he has been hired by MGM as their new studio head. Similarly, when Alan Hirschfield was dismissed by Columbia six months after Begelman, he soon found a new home as the boss of 20th Century-Fox, replacing Alan Ladd Jr., who had resigned in June 1979 along with his two vice-presidents Gareth Wigan and Jay Kanter. As the team that had been most responsible for the revival of Fox in the Seventies, they too were certain not to remain unemployed for long, and it was only a few months before they were able to announce the formation of a new independent production company. The Ladd Co., with financial backing from Warner Bros. as part of a deal to distribute their films, was obviously following in the footsteps of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, who departed from United Artists to found Orion Pictures a year or so earlier.
All this activity, and the continual jockeying for position, reflects the film industry's recovery in general during the past few years -- improved attendance and box office finally reversing the long postwar decline, and a rapid growth in the video and cable TV markets that is set to continue well into the foreseeable future. The value to film production companies and owners of a backlog of old movies is obvious. This clearly looks like a new period of opportunity for the industry, and it is not surprising that there are many who wish to be a part of this growth and to reap the benefits.
- New York, 19 December:
 Kramer vs. Kramer is a small movie carrying some heavyweight casting. Dustin Hoffman is the successful Madison Avenue man whose wife walks out on him and their six-year-old son Justin Henry. Meryl Streep is the spouse in question, and in her hands the character emerges in the divorce proceedings as elegant, aloof and more than a little dangerous. The film, however, belongs to Hoffman, who has been waiting for over 10 years for a role as meaty as the one that launched his career in The Graduate (1967). The tug of love is deftly handled by former screenwriter Robert Benton, who co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde and What's Up, Doc? before moving behind the camera in 1977 with an oddball Western, Bad Company. Anticipating a hit, Columbia is rushing the picture out to qualify for the Oscars®.
 - New York, 20 December: In 1971, Jerzy Kosinski published his short novel Being There. Soon afterwards he received a telegram from its lead character, Chance the Gardener: "Available in my garden or outside of it." A telephone number followed and when Kosinski dialed it Peter Sellers answered. For years afterwards, Sellers would try to get this film made. "That's me!" he would tell people of the Chance character. He hawked the idea of a film to whomever he could find. Finally, in 1979, with the clout he had gained from the "Pink Panther" series, he was able to fulfill his dream. Sellers gives a performance of unusual restraint in Hal Ashby's Being There, playing an innocent, childlike man catapulted by chance into the cynical world of wealth and politics. Chauncey Gardiner ("Chance") is a strange blank whose aphoristic utterances, gleaned from watching TV, earn him an extraordinary celebrity. With strong supporting performance from Jack Warden, Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas, Being There is an effective, pointed satire on the American obsession with fame.
- New York, 20 December:
 Bob Fosse's fourth movie, All That Jazz is, like its three predecessors, Sweet Charity (1969), Cabaret (1972) and Lenny (1974), set in the world of show business. However, Joe Gideon, the hero played by Roy Scheider, has a great deal in common with Fosse himself. Gideon is a workaholic womanizing director of Broadway musicals, has marital problems, and is the victim of a serious heart attack. Last year, the thrice-married Fosse was hospitalized with a heart condition. He recently declared, "Death fascinates me more than most things." All That Jazz is a cynical two-hour razzle-dazzle production, in which Gideon does not survive his meeting with Death. However, while accepting the picture's autobiographical elements, Fosse, at 52, does not claim it as his last testament, and still has a lot more shows in him.
 - Palm Springs, 22 December: Darryl F. Zanuck, the last of the big-name producers in the American movie industry, has died. Zanuck started his career as a gagman for Warner Bros. before becoming a scriptwriter and, by the end of the 1920s, a producer. In 1933 he created his own company, 20th Century which merged with Fox two years later to become 20th Century-Fox. Zanuck reigned as absolute master of the studio until 1956 when he decided to go independent. He return to Fox as head of production in 1962 and saved the studio from ruin.
- Hollywood, 22 December: Disney has announced plans for its first co-production. The film is Popeye and the co-producer is Paramount.
- Los Angeles, 23 December: When asked which French director they would most like to work with, ten young actors out of ten answered François Truffaut.
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4 January - London, England,