Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1990s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1990s - Part 1

Year	Event and Significance
1990	Director Pedro Almodóvar's offbeat black comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was the last film to receive the MPAA's X-rating - however, it was released unrated, due to its depiction of forced bondage and rape.
1990	Universal Pictures' and director Philip Kaufman's adult-oriented film Henry & June prompted a change in the ratings system. It was the first film given an NC-17 rating instead of an X-rating. The name of the 'X' category was changed to a new name or ratings category - NC-17. The MPAA introduced the NC-17 (not for children 17 or under) rating to differentiate MPAA-rated 'adult-oriented' films from hard-core pornographic movies rated X. The effort basically failed because many newspapers and TV still refused the ads for NC-17 rated films and theatres wouldn't show the films. In financial terms, an NC-17 rating amounted to an implicit kiss of death. Film critic Roger Ebert criticized the new ratings - he viewed them as meaningless standards, and felt that they denigrated the artistic integrity of many films - and forced film-makers to adjust to the ratings standard. Many film producers were forced to self-release their films as unrated (to bypass the stigma), and self-promote using flyers and alternative publications. Other film-makers were forced to add PG content to basically G-rated films, in order to secure larger audiences.
1990	Garry Marshall's (and Disney's - Buena Vista/Touchstone) modern-day, unlikely fairy-tale romance Pretty Woman was an unexpected blockbuster (eventually earning $450 million worldwide). It starred rising actress Julia Roberts as a Hollywood streetwalker with a heart-of-gold turned Cinderella. This was the film that made Julia Roberts a mega-star, and signaled her rise as Hollywood's leading, most powerful (and well-paid) actress.
1990	Johnny Depp's breakout hit film was Tim Burton's fantasy romance Edward Scissorhands, co-starring then-girlfriend Winona Ryder, and featuring the final film appearance of Vincent Price as his Inventor/father.
1990	Actor Kevin Costner's directing debut of the revisionist western, Dances with Wolves was an unexpectedly huge success -- it won seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music, and Best Sound) from its twelve nominations. It was the first Best Picture-winning western since Cimarron (1930) -- sixty years earlier.
1990	Time Warner's New Line Cinema founded a specialty art house division named Fine Line Features. It would go on to produce or distribute movies such as Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), The Rapture (1991), Robert Altman's The Player (1992), Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), Hoop Dreams (1994), and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996).
1990	Rob Reiner's Misery, derived from horror meister Stephen King's 1974 novel, won an Academy Award for its lead actress Kathy Bates, the first acting Oscar awarded to a horror film since the Best Actor award given to Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931/32).
1990	Director/actor Warren Beatty's big-budget Dick Tracy, derived from Chester Gould's original comic strip and lots of 1940s B-movies, was noted as being the first 35 mm feature film made with a digital soundtrack. For authenticity, it also restricted itself to the six main printing colors from the original newspaper strip: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple, plus black and white.
1990	Martin Scorsese's mob crime classic GoodFellas, was a grittier take on Coppola's The Godfather films, and the precursor to the popular 1999 cable TV series The Sopranos.
1990	The Japanese electronics corporation Matsushita purchased MCA Universal for $6.1 billion.
1990	The first interactive entertainment on CD-ROM for adults was the game Virtual Valerie, first released by Reactor, Inc. (a Chicago-based company founded by comic artist Mike Saenz) in 1989.
1990	In between his two Terminator films (in 1984 and 1991), action star Arnold Schwarzenegger was featured in director Paul Verhoeven's excessive science-fiction film, where he solidified his persona as a muscle-bound, heavily-accented quipster (i.e.,"Consider this a divorce"). By 2003, Arnie would become California's "Governator".
1990	Disney's The Rescuers Down Under was the studio's very first, theatrically-released sequel; it was their first completely digital film that included impressive flight-aerial action sequences that used rotoscoping and multi-plane cameras -- especially in the scene of Cody (voice of (Adam Ryen) setting free and riding the magnificent golden eagle Marahute. It was the first animated feature to use computerized ink and paint (not acetate cels or paint).
1991	Disney's Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
1991	24 year-old USC film graduate John Singleton received an Oscar nomination as Best Director (the first time in this category for an African-American) for his debut film Boyz 'N the Hood. He was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. It was the first mainstream movie to deal with gang violence in America's urban ghettos.
1991	Jonathan Demme's Best Picture and Director win for the horror film The Silence of the Lambs was unexpected - it was the third film to win the top five awards since two other films had accomplished the same feat: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and It Happened One Night (1934). It was a five-time major Academy-Award winner, sweeping Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Director (Jonathan Demme), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). The film contained a classic representation of evil personified - the notorious, cobra-like, intelligent psychiatrist turned psychopath Hannibal Lecter (portrayed masterfully by British actor Anthony Hopkins), playing opposite dedicated, fledgling, vulnerable and rising female FBI agent-trainee/investigator Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). Foster's strong, yet restrained, vulnerable female lead role in the much talked-about film was intensified by public knowledge of her real-life associations as a victim with assassin John Hinckley and her role as child-prostitute Iris opposite Robert De Niro's portrayal of a crazed killer in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
1991	Pixar and Disney agreed to co-produce the first fully computer-generated feature film, Toy Story, released four years later.
1991	The first truly believable, naturally-moving computer-generated character was the morphing, liquid molten metal, T-1000 cyborg in James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was the first instance of a computer generated main character. Over 300 special effects shots made up 16 minutes of the film's running time.
1991	The first film in history to cost $100 million to produce was the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The film's trailer alone cost $150,000.
1992	Americans spent $12 billion to buy or rent video tapes, compared to just $4.9 billion on box office ticket sales. 76 percent of all US homes had VCRs.
1992	The first film released in Dolby Stereo Digital sound was Tim Burton's sequel to the original 1989 film, Batman Returns.
1992	The mediocre film The Bodyguard was significant for its superstar Whitney Houston (in her first major acting role) and the soundtrack -including her rendition of the 1974 Dolly Parton hit song: "I Will Always Love You"; the song sold 17 million copies and became the #1 all time Grammy-winning film soundtrack (replacing Saturday Night Fever).
1992	Writer/director Leslie Harris' authentic emotional coming-of-age drama, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., was tauted as the first film ever written, directed, and produced by an African-American woman. [The same honor may be applicable to Julie Dash's previous year's historical drama Daughters of the Dust (1991).] The low-budget independent film, Harris' directorial debut film that was shot in only a few weeks, was one of the first honest portraits of urban black female teenagers - it was also about sexual ignorance and unplanned pregnancy; the film won first-time director Leslie Harris a Special Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival.
1992	The Lawnmower Man, a breakthrough film with eight minutes of ground-breaking special effects, introduced Virtual Reality to films. It was one of the first films to record a human actor's movements in a sensor-covered body suit - a technique called Body Motion Capture. [The technique was later perfected in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), for the CGI character of Gollum.]
1992	12 year-old Macaulay Culkin was paid $8 million to star in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the largest paycheck for a child star.
1993	Steven Spielberg's influential Jurassic Park was released, and noted for its full-motion, computer-generated (CGI) dinosaurs created at George Lucas' ILM facility. The dinosaurs were very realistically-rendered and seamlessly integrated within live-action sequences. There were 14 minutes of dinosaur footage in the movie, with only four of those minutes generated by computers. DTS Digital Sound also made its theatrical debut in the film.
1993	Steven Spielberg's black and white Holocaust drama Schindler's List became a Best Picture winner in 1994 (with a total of seven Oscars from its twelve nominations), and it brought Spielberg his first long-sought-after Best Director Oscar award. Its dramatic recreation of the events of the Nazi Holocaust demonstrated the power of the medium to influence audiences and capture the reality of past history.
1993	The ground-breaking, historically-significant film Philadelphia from Jonathan Demme, starring straight actors Tom Hanks (who won his first Best Actor Oscar) and Antonio Banderas as gay lovers, was the first major studio (big-budget) film to confront the AIDS issue from a societal, medical, and political point of view. Hanks' character was an AIDS-afflicted lawyer who contracted the disease and was forced to sue his law firm over job discrimination - he was ably defended by a black lawyer (Denzel Washington).
1993	28 year-old actor Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was killed during the filming of Alex Proyas' The Crow (1994) in Wilmington, N.C., by a prop gun that fired part of a dummy bullet instead of a blank. The film was completed by rewriting the plot, using a body double, and by 'digitally-painting' Lee's face onto another actor.
1993	Walt Disney Studio Entertainment bought Miramax Films for about $80 million - now considered a bargain-basement price. Miramax soon acquired a reputation for releasing underdog, independent, adult-oriented films that won an astonishing number of Academy Awards (and nominations). Miramax's (under the Weinsteins) first Best Picture Oscar was for The English Patient (1996), soon followed by another one for Shakespeare in Love (1998), and a third for the financially-successful Chicago (2002).
1993	Director Martha Coolidge's Lost in Yonkers was the first feature film entirely edited on an Avid Media (or Film) Composer system. This was the first non-linear editing system to allow viewing at a film's required "real-time"-viewing rate of 24 frames per second. By converting film into digital bits, film could now be electronically edited on a computer.
1993	To create the special effects for his own films, James Cameron launched an innovative, state of the art, visual effects digital production studio, called Digital Domain, with partners IBM, character creator Stan Winston, and former ILM chief Scott Ross.
1993	Unknown 23 year-old director Robert Rodriguez filmed the low-budget, Spanish-language action thriller El Mariachi for only $7,000 in about two weeks. The independent film, released by Columbia Pictures in Spanish with subtitles, became an unexpected hit at the Sundance Film Festival, went on to gross $2 million, and led to two sequels (Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)) and other low-budget efforts by other directors (i.e., Clerks (1994)). It was one of the cheapest films ever released by a studio.
1993	Beverly Hills madam Heidi Fleiss, responsible for arranging high-class hookers for Hollywood celebrities (i.e., Charlie Sheen, among others), was arraigned for narcotics possession (cocaine), and pandering. She served time in prison for tax evasion, money laundering, and attempted pandering. In 1996, a BBC documentary titled Hollywood Madam was released, and in January of 2003, Heidi Fleiss sold her life story to Paramount Pictures.
1993	Considered one of the major box-office flops of the 90s (and of all time) with an eventual budget of almost $100 million and box-office of only $10 million, Cutthroat Island was also apparently the first Hollywood film to combine two different anamorphic widescreen film processes: Technovision for the earlier Malta sequences (doubling as 1600s Jamaica), and Panavision for the latter sequences filmed in Thailand (the setting of Cutthroat Island itself).
1993	Actress Kim Basinger was sued by the producers of Boxing Helena (1993), $7,421,694 for breach of contract and $1.5 million for acting in bad faith, although the case was reversed during an appeal.
1994	Turner Broadcasting merged with New Line Cinema and soon was successful with two blockbusters starring popular comedian Jim Carrey: The Mask (1994) and the slapstick Dumb and Dumber (1994). Superstar Carrey had an earlier third popular hit in the same calendar year: Warners' Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994).
1994	Turner Classic Movies (TCM), a 24-hour commercial-free network for programming classic films (mostly from the combined Turner and Warner Bros. library of film greats), was launched.
1994	Writer/director James Cameron's True Lies (1994), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Bond-like secret agent, was a spy-adventure packed with special effects, thrills, co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, and an exciting jet and car chase over the Florida Keys. It was the first movie with a budget to exceed $100 million, although it eventually grossed $365 million.
1994	Three of the most powerful, influential and successful individuals in modern Hollywood -- director/producer Steven Spielberg, the recently-departed Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film and music industry mogul David Geffen -- formed the film studio DreamWorks SKG. (The SKG stood for the first letter of their last names.) It was the first new major studio in more than 50 years.
1994	The almost three-hour documentary Hoop Dreams followed the aspirations of two African-American high school students (from Chicago, Illinois) who dreamed to be professional basketball players. Because the exceptional film was not nominated in the category of Best Documentary Feature by the Academy, changes were made in the nominating procedure for future years. It was also the all-time top-grossing documentary film (until Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002)).
1994	Disney's first Broadway musical was Beauty and the Beast, based on its film version of Beauty and the Beast (1991).
1994	Disney became the first studio to gross more than $1 billion at the box office domestically in a single year, mostly due to the release of The Lion King. It was the highest-grossing traditionally (hand-drawn) animated feature film in the US at the time - and in history. It was later surpassed at the box-office by Disney/Pixar's computer-animated Finding Nemo (2003). The Lion King was Disney's first film based upon an in-house original story, rather than upon a well-known children's narrative. Its Hamlet-like story was beautifully animated, enhanced by a Hans Zimmer score, and contained songs by composer Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice.
1994	Disney's successful animated The Lion King was among the first feature animations featuring many major stars' voices for its characters. (Previously, there was only one big voice-name, such as Robin Williams as the Genie in Aladdin (1992), or there were unknowns who lent their voices to the characters.) With box-office receipts of over $312 million, this film spurred a boom in animation production and merchandising, and other animation production studios besides Disney entered the picture.