On December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Free Concert in California, a young Black man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels, the motorcycle club hired to provide security. The show was the closing concert of the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour and drew between 250,000 and 300,000 people. Many attendees had taken LSD from a tainted batch, and the bikers injured several fans and knocked out Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane. The Grateful Dead cancelled their set after seeing the violence. The stabbing was filmed and appears in the documentary Gimme Shelter. The attacker was arrested in 1970 and found not guilty after claiming self-defense.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.