I can't write about watching Shampoo without first writing about not watching it.
When the film came out in 1975 I was just old enough to be aware of the scandalized buzz around it, but not yet old enough to follow the smart conversation. It probably didn't help that, as with so many movies of the period, a lot of my knowledge of its plot came from reading the Mad magazine parody.
It also didn't help that it was enormously popular. For 50 years I've categorized Shampoo as lightweight mainstream Hollywood fodder. So when it came up in a search for "humor" on Criterion I said "We could start it and if it's awful we'll find something else." Then we spent the next 110 minutes realizing that we'd really underestimated the film based only on what percolated through to us about it as kids.
Reflecting the speed with which culture was shifting at the time, Shampoo looks back at a bygone era that was only seven years past. Sure, I can imagine making a film in 2025 that uses the way we were in 2018 the same way Warren Beatty and Robert Towne's script uses 1968, but despite everything that's happening on a macro scale as I write this I don't think we've seen the same kinds of widespread changes in perspectives as Shampoo's view of 1968 through a 1975 lens implies.
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