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Re-cut versions of films such as Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist as well as the burgeoning DVD industry have also played their part, introducing a new generation to these directors’ works. “Sometimes you’ve got to go away to come back,” says McCarthy. “They’re respected as older statesmen now, because people have realised that the Seventies was the last golden age of American cinema.”As Peter Bart, Vice President of production at Paramount during the Seventies, says: “These guys were trying to create alchemy.” Most of the time they succeeded. Think: the Godfather films, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Polanski’s Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Altman’s Nashville, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out and Ashby’s Being There to name but a few.And then it all went haywire. “All but the most tenacious and disciplined directors of the Seventies who had managed to walk the tightrope between art and commerce, fell to their death in the Eighties,” wrote Peter Biskind in Easy Riders Raging Bulls. Stephen Spielberg was the one director who managed this tightrope act, and his sustained level of success now looks like an anomaly in itself.

Most of his peers veered off either too far in one direction or too far in the other. A frequent undoing was the so-called vanity project, a deeply personal take on a given genre Coppola met his Waterloo with Apocalypse Now. Maybe if it had been hailed as the masterpiece back then that it is now Coppola would still be matching stride for stride with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. But it wasn’t and the seemingly indestructible Coppola was chastened.He wasn’t the only one: Cimino was never forgiven for making the muddledHeaven’s Gate; Friedkin was ridiculed for pretentiously remaking Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la Peur as The Sorcerer; Scorsese made a hash of New York, New York.

Meanwhile, Polanski sank Pirates, and Altman made Popeye, in what was one of the most stunning mismatches in movie history These failures struck hard, such was their novelty value Film-makers had rarely been given so much money before. With Heaven’s Gate Cimino managed to single-handedly bankrupt an entire studio – United Artists. It was the signal to disappear, do something else, and lie low for a while. Coppola went and grew grapes at his Napa vineyard; Bogdanovich went bankrupt twice, came up with the infamous line “Remember me? I used to be Peter Bogdanovich”, then moved back to acting; Altman disappeared until The Player brought new-found recognition, Cimino too dropped out of view only to return with a first novel, Big Jane; and Friedkin almost went the way of Ashby after suffering a heart attack, before turning to opera.All now, though, seem to have re-focused on film, and not just studio fodder, but projects close to the heart. The gambling instincts which made the 1970s such an exhilarating decade for film lovers look like they are finally getting a dust down Long live the revival..

Imagine a cross between Richard Pryor and the kind of revivalist preacher found in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, and you’ll come close to the essence of the Reverend Noel Jones, the extraordinarily charismatic figure at the heart of Sophie Fiennes’s new documentary, Hoover Street Revival, a hit at last week’s Locarno Festival and now on its way to Edinburgh. Jones’s sermons combine humour, metaphysics, acute social observation and practical advice on how to survive in one of the toughest ghettos in Los Angeles He is revered by his congregation. “I thought I would never become a church-going person until I heard him speak… the man is dynamite,” says a street kid who claims that his life was turned around by Jones (the brother of the singer and one-time Bond star, Grace Jones). “He makes you feel the spirit!” enthuses another churchgoer, who reveals that her husband is currently behind bars, “doing 25 years to life”.