Peter Bart draws parallels between YouTube filmmakers like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons and the maverick directors of the 1960s.
Hollywood is reading some unusually optimistic signals this week. Box office numbers are climbing, fresh capital is materializing from tech giants and sovereign funds, and newly emboldened studios are greenlighting projects at a pace not seen in years. Some industry observers are even drawing comparisons to the creative explosion of the 1960s, when a generation of hungry young filmmakers upended the studio system and changed cinema forever.
Veteran producer and journalist Peter Bart is one of those observers, and his analysis cuts deeper than surface-level nostalgia. In a recent column for Deadline, Bart traces the parallels between today’s YouTube-bred filmmakers and the scrappy independents who made Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The French Connection possible, while also flagging the crucial differences that make this moment entirely its own.
The 1960s Studio Collapse That Made Mavericks Possible
To understand the comparison, it helps to remember just how broken Hollywood was in the mid-1960s. Warner Bros., Fox, Columbia, and United Artists were all effectively on the block. MGM was selling off its back lot, its props, even its wardrobe. Icons like Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck were selling out or retiring. Studio release schedules had grown torpid, churning out prestige fare like A Man for All Seasons and The Alamo while audiences drifted to television.
Into that vacuum stepped an informal network of advocates Bart calls “rabbis,” a loose coalition of film-obsessed managers, producers, and neophyte executives who kept ambitious projects alive through sheer persistence. They’d meet at Musso and Frank Grill, trade intelligence over martinis, and champion films no studio wanted to touch. Ted Tanen pushed American Graffiti at Universal. David Picker shepherded the X-rated Midnight Cowboy to United Artists. John Calley fought for A Clockwork Orange at Warner Bros. Bart himself left The New York Times to join Bob Evans at Paramount, where together they overcame internal resistance to greenlight Rosemary’s Baby and Love Story.
Sometimes the filmmakers themselves had to become their own rabbis. Billy Friedkin had a New York cop story that no studio wanted, partly because it had the wrong title: The French Connection. He eventually coaxed $17 million out of Fox after Richard Zanuck, the soon-to-be-fired son of Darryl, told him it was all the money they had left.
YouTube as the New Audition Stage
What those 1960s mavericks did not have was YouTube. Today’s most exciting young filmmakers do, and the results are rewriting industry assumptions about how talent gets discovered and projects get made.
Curry Barker built an audience on YouTube before landing his feature Obsession. Kane Parsons did the same with Backrooms, turning a viral internet mythology into a full-scale cinematic project. Both represent a new pipeline for Gen Z filmmakers who no longer need a “rabbi” in the traditional sense because the platform itself provides the proof of concept studios once demanded from insiders.
The most striking example may be The Amazing Digital Circus: Last Act, a YouTube series whose eighth episode is now playing in roughly 2,300 theaters. Its pilot alone racked up 440 million views on the platform. Producer Ray Nutt puts it plainly: “everybody’s learning what Gen Zers are liking.”
History Rhymes, But Doesn’t Repeat
Bart is careful not to oversell the comparison. The 1960s studio crisis was structural, born of financial collapse, leadership vacuum, and a genuinely broken system. Today’s Hollywood is dealing with its own disruptions, but the studios themselves are neither broke nor leaderless. The Oracle money, Amazon capital, and Abu Dhabi funding flowing into the industry right now represent a very different kind of chaos than what produced Easy Rider.
Still, the underlying dynamic Bart identifies is real: generational energy keeps finding its way into cinema, with or without institutional support. The “rabbis” of the 1960s were a workaround for a broken system. YouTube is a workaround too, just a more scalable one. Whether today’s studio management stays receptive to what Gen Z audiences are clearly responding to, or eventually grows as inert as its predecessors, remains the open question.
For now, the signals from Obsession, Backrooms, and The Amazing Digital Circus: Last Act suggest the workaround is working.
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