Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

This is just an incredible feat of research and reconstruction. Biskind tells the story of 70s Hollywood through so many intricately pieced-together interview quotes and anecdotes, from all the main players - it's mind boggling how he did it.

However much is true, however much really happened that way, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex 'N' Drugs 'N' Rock 'N' Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind remains one of my favorite non-fiction reads. For those who hear "film history" and think Titanic, in 1967, the major American film studios were in such disarray and the counterculture seemed to be overturning conventions with such speed that a new generation of filmmakers, by and large under the age of 30, (and universally white males), briefly seized the controls. This director-driven era of American film lasted ten years and generated such groundbreaking pictures as:

Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, Mean Streets, Chinatown, Jaws, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull. Biskind, the former executive editor of Premiere magazine goes behind the scenes of each film and others to explore the creative hubris that resulted in these ever being made and the personal hubris that destroyed the careers of many involved, as well as ultimately turning control from the artisans back over to the financiers.

Some choice excerpts:

-- [Peter] Fonda's call couldn't have come at a better moment for [Dennis] Hopper. He had hit rock bottom. A wild and disheveled sometime actor, talented photographer, and pioneering collector of Pop Art, a former pal and acolyte of James Dean, whom he had met on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper had been blackballed for crossing swords with director Henry Hathaway. He was in the habit of buttonholing studio types at parties and hectoring them about the industry--it was rotting from within, it was dead--the Ancient Mariner on acid. He kept saying, "Heads are going to roll, the old order is going to fall, all you dinosaurs are going to die." He argued that Hollywood had to be run on socialist principles, that what was needed was an infusion of money channeled to young people like himself. He recalled, "I was desperate. I'd nail a producer in a corner and demand to know, 'Why am I not directing? Why am I not acting?' Who wants to deal with a maniac like that?" They smirked, moved away.

-- Now that The Last Picture Show was happening, Bogdanovich finally got around to reading the book. Peter was in a funk. He was a New York boy, what did he know from small town Texas? Polly [Platt] liked the book because it spoke to her experience growing up in the Midwest. "There were all these movies about this, but they were all fake," she says, "Everything that's in that book, the taking off of the bra, hanging it on the car mirror, the hands that were cold and the girl who would only let him touch her tits, just barely getting your hand up this girl's leg, were experiences I'd had as a young woman. There were parts of the woman's body that were completely off limits in America. These were things that it was just impossible to show in Hollywood films, whereas in European films, like Blow-Up, you saw pubic hair."

-- Most films used professional extras; the same faces would turn up again and again, looking like cookie cutouts. Francis didn't want to use professionals, because he didn't want The Godfather to look like other movies. He wanted the faces to look authentic, so he spent a lot of time casting the extras. Says [Gray] Frederickson, "That was not the way Hollywood had ever done things before, and it freaked them out. Extras were extras. To the studio, it was just time wasted." The day they shot Clemenza with the cannoli, Jack Ballard, Paramount's head of physical production, told Francis, "If you don't finish on time today, you're not gonna come to work tomorrow." Rumors flew that, indeed, Coppola was going to be fired.

-- Usually, when studio executives screen a picture, they exit without comment. After Ashley, Calley, and Wells saw The Exorcist for the first time, they just sat there, dumbfounded. Calley asked, rhetorically, "What in the fuck did we just see?" They loved it, but did not know what they had, and decided to release it in no more than thirty theaters, where it was to play exclusively for six months, a terrible release pattern for a potential blockbuster, as The Godfather had shown. Nor did Warners preview the picture. They were afraid to. Says [William] Friedkin, "If The Exorcist had previewed it would have never come out. 'Cause people would have written on the cards, 'This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jew bastard.' Those were the kind of notes we got anyway, afterward. But if we'd gotten them before, they would have died."

-- Meanwhile, [Paul] Schrader continued to write furiously. He desperately wanted to direct. "Somewhere in between how Obsession and Yakuza turned out I realized that if you were a critic or a novelist, you lived by your words," he says. "When you're a screenwriter, that didn't happen. You're half an artist. If you wanted to be in control of your own life, you had to be a filmmaker." He rewrote the Taxi Driver script, wanted it to be an American Notes from the Underground, an American Pickpocket. He read the diary of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. One night, in a New York hotel, he picked up a girl in a bar. When he got her to his room, he realized that she was "1. a hooker, 2. underage, and 3. a junkie. At the end of the night, I sent Marty [Scorsese] a note saying, 'Iris is in my room. We're having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?' A lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had the concentration span of about twenty seconds."

-- Lucas felt he was ready to screen Star Wars. The special effects weren't finished, and George had cut in black and white dogfights from old World War II films, but you got the general idea. DePalma, Spielberg, Huyck and Katz, Cocks, and Scorsese met at the Burbank airport. It was foggy, and the flight to San Francisco was delayed. When it finally took off, Scorsese wasn't on board. He was as nervous about Star Wars as Lucas was about New York, New York. He hated flying, but Huyck and Katz thought, Well, he's really competitive, he really didn't want to see it, didn't want to know about the film. As Scorsese puts it, "You'd have the anxiety--if it's better than yours, or even if it isn't better than yours, you think it is. And your friends will tell you it is. And you believe it. For years."

-- Simply put, the success of Star Wars, coupled with the failure of New York, New York, meant that the kinds of movies Scorsese made were replaced by kinds of movies that Lucas (and Spielberg) made. As [John] Milius put it, "When I was at USC, people were flocking to Blow-Up, not going to the theaters to the jolted by a cheap amusement park ride. But [Lucas and Spielberg] showed there was twice as much money out there, and the studios couldn't resist that. No one had any idea you could get as rich as this, like ancient Rome. You can clearly blame them." And Friedkin, "Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was when like McDonald's got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we're in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole."

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has my highest recommendation for students and others discovering the key films of the era and are looking for more information about this gilded age in Hollywood. Biskind really does his work, getting superstars like Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg on the record as well as those who worked behind the scenes--like film editors Marcia Lucas and Paul Hirsch--who never became famous. There's gossip (the author has contributed to Vanity Fair) and probably a bit of exaggeration or even misrepresentation on a few fronts, but Biskind covers multiple sides of any event pretty well. None better than the test screening of Star Wars in San Francisco.

With the effects and sound finally finished, Lucas screened it again at the Northpoint, just like Graffiti. Marcia had taken a week off from New York, New York to help George. "Previews always mean recutting," Lucas said gloomily, anticipating the worst. The suits were there, Ladd and his executives. Marcia had always said, "If the audience doesn't cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn't work." From the opening shot of the majestic Imperial Starship drifting over the heads of the audience across the black vastness of space studded with stars blinking like diamonds, the place was electric. "They made the jump to hyperspace, and you could see bodies flying around the room in excitement," recalls Hirsch. "When they get to that shot where the Millennium Falcon appears at the last minute, not only did they cheer, they stood up in their seats and raised their arms like a home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. I looked over at Marcia and she gave me a look like, I guess it works, ya know? So we came out, I said to George, 'So whaddya think?' He said, 'I guess we won't recut it after all.'"

One of the more curious quotes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls comes from Terry Southern, the principal screenwriter of Easy Rider: “In my mind, the ending (of Easy Rider) was to be an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.”*

O.K.—hold on. That’s a nutty thing to say, Terry. It wasn’t “blue-collar America” that was running the military-industrial Cold War economy, conspiring to invade and destroy Vietnam and injure Americans in body and soul.

Terry, are you saying blue-collar Americans are to blame because they were drafted to fight in Uncle Sam’s war and followed orders and committed atrocities? Are you suggesting they should have instead marched against the invasion and burned down the White House—and because they didn’t, they’re “responsible” for the war?

Terry, are you proposing that the murders of drug-dealing hippies and their drunk ACLU lawyer friend by poor redneck slobs, as shown in Easy Rider, is somehow a metaphor for the Vietnam War?

Blue-collar Americans were responsible for their actions in Vietnam—but they were pawns in the rich man’s obscene military-industrial con. They were no more responsible for the war than you were, Terry Southern, sitting it out with your rich and famous celeb pals in Hollywood and New York. Hell, Terry, your crony-capitalist whoring bunch was far more responsible for the war than “blue-collar America.” Hey, Terry—why you wanna blame the victim?

Easy Rider director and actor Dennis Hopper is quoted: “When we were making the movie, we could feel the whole country burning up—Negroes, hippies, students. . . . At the start of the movie, Peter [Fonda] and I do a very American thing—we commit a crime, we go for the easy money. That’s one of the big problems with the country right now: everybody’s going for the easy money. Not just obvious simple crimes, but big corporations committing corporate crimes.”

Hold on just a minute, Dennis Hopper—are you saying you used nominally antiwar, peace-loving hippies as surrogates for the big, evil corporations? What? Am I understanding that correctly? Well, that just blows my mind.

Easy Rider, obviously, did no favors for hippies and the antiwar movement with its portrayal of dope-running, dope-taking, numbskull hippies draping themselves in the stars-n-stripes and roaring around on flashy motorcycles, acting all arrogant and jackassy. And the movie’s portrayal of “ordinary American rednecks” set a gold standard for making such folk seem ignorant, idiotic and sinister—a mass media tradition that hit another peak in Deliverance and has only matured over the decades.

Well—it’s interesting, isn’t it? One suspects that Southern and Hopper are perhaps giving away too much of the “hidden hand” plan. “Coincidence researchers” are likely to regard Easy Rider as just one piece of a much broader setup: Easy Rider was still in theaters, reverberating through American culture, when the Charlie Manson murder case exploded across the world’s media in August 1969, shortly before the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

From the viewpoint of the gangsters who rule America and the rest of the world, something had to be done to kill off, once and for all, the antiwar movement and any other resistance to their way of running things. What better way than to transform hippies from flower-hugging antiwar protesters into arrogant, murderous, Nazi dopeheads? If you wanted to further drive a wedge between already traumatized Americans, this would be a good way to do it.

(Another insight into the operation is this quote from Nixon confidante and top Watergate henchman John Erlichman, quoted in Harper’s magazine in 2016: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”)

The summer before, at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention, police fought antiwar protesters in the streets, leaving hundreds injured. And in the months before that, the nation had seen two of its major “left” leaders, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, gunned down in suspicious circumstances, to say the least. Those assassinations followed the murders of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. By the time the shooting was over, four of the leading “left” American leaders had been removed from the scene in less than five years. All four of those famous murders, of course, are still unsolved. The authorities have never seemed too interested in getting to the bottom of what really happened. Odd to see that—in America of all places, the valiant do-gooding nation attacked for no reason on 9/11/2001—the greatest democracy that ever existed!

And, lest we forget—during the same era, there’s good evidence the CIA was behind the marketing and distribution of LSD to young people, to damage their brains and cause general chaos amongst their families and friends. And federal agents were busy conducting the government’s COINTELPRO program to infiltrate, surveil and disrupt antiwar and other antiauthority groups (a program that no doubt continues to this day under some other name).

Assassinations, cultural domination, drugging, spying, provocation: Talk about taking the fight to your opponents—the American people—and crippling them for generations! Kerpow, suckers!

With the war-protesting hippies successfully neutralized, demonized and suspected by a substantial proportion of Americans, the Hollywood psychological operation moved on to films that would drive the country toward “trickle-down economics,” dumb it down further, and deepen public support for the military-industrial complex. Anybody with eyes can see that this “psy-op” has been a wild success. It continues to manufacture consent for the funneling of billions of public funds to military-surveillance budgets, enabling military-industrial profits to soar to new levels of all-time grotesqueness.

Biskind on The Godfather: “Despite Coppola’s school boy Marxism (he always equated the mob with capitalism), The Godfatherlooked forward to the conservative family values of the Reagan era. . . . In its emphasis on generational reconciliation, on ethnicity, and on the Mafia as, in effect, a privatized government of organized vigilantes that performs functions the government can’t or won’t, it foreshadows the Reagan right’s attack on the Washington establishment in the next decade.”

Screenwriter Robert Towne, who did uncredited work on The Godfather: “Here was this role model of a family that stuck together, who’d die for one another. . . . It was really kind of reactionary in that sense—a perverse expression of a desirable and lost cultural tradition.”

Former U.S. Information Agency contractor George Lucas on American Graffiti: “Before American Graffiti, I was working on basically negative movies—Apocalypse Now and THX, both very angry. We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost. . . . I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962.”

Biskind on The Exorcist (written by William Peter Blatty, former head of the Policy Branch of the U.S. Air Force’s Psychological Warfare Division): “It presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture – almost all celibate priests – unite to abuse and torture Regan . . . in their efforts to return her to a presexual innocence. . . . The Exorcist turned its back on the liberal therapeutic framework of the postwar period. (The psychiatrist in the movie is just befuddled, clearly inadequate to the task, and Burstyn has no choice but to call on the Church.) . . . Like The Godfather, The Exorcist looked ahead to the coming Manichean revolution of the right, to Reagan nattering about the godless Evil Empire. Satan is the bad dad who takes up residence in the household of the divorced MacNeil in the stead of the absent father-husband. Families who pray together and stay together don’t have unseemly encounters with the devil.”

Biskind on Jaws: “Although Jaws deftly uses the Us/Them formula deployed by films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and M*A*S*H, ‘Us’ is no longer narrowly and tendentiously defined as the hip counterculture, but is expansive and inclusive, a new community comprised of just about everyone—all food, so far as the shark is concerned. It transcended the political and demographic divisions between the Easy Rider counterculture audience and Nixon’s Towering Inferno middle-Americans.”

Biskind on Taxi Driver: “By darkening and deglamorizing Bonnie and Clyde, by putting Bickle and Betsy into a sleazy, contemporary, urban environment and frustrating the love affair altogether, Scorsese and Schrader stripped the Depression-era outlaws of their aura of populist romance and turned their story into one of simple brutality redeemed only by Schrader’s Calvinist fascination with the cleansing violence of the Manson figure. Taxi Driver was a picture completely in keeping with the new centrist administration of Jimmy Carter, who turned his back on the left wing of his party, the McGovernites. . . . The only part of Bonnie and Clyde that survived was the violence.”

Biskind reports that Brian De Palma savaged an early screening of Star Wars like a “crazed dog,” saying the film was a disaster. De Palma is quoted: “You gotta drop the Jedi Bendu shit, nobody’s gonna know what you’re talking about.” Only Spielberg seemed to understand the genius of Star Wars, saying “George, it’s great. It’s gonna make $100 million.”

To sum up: Add in Dirty Harry, Rocky and Apocalypse Now, and the floodgates had been opened by the end of the 1970s for an endless stream of puerile, inane, hyper-violent, rah-rah movies like Top Gun, Commando, Aliens, the Mad Max, Rambo, Death Wish and Lethal Weapon series, De Palma’s Scarface, Die Hard, Stripes and many others (according to Wikipedia, the Stripes filmmakers “were involved in a detailed negotiation with the Department of Defense to make the film conducive to the recruiting needs of the military, in exchange for subsidies in the form of free labor and location and equipment access.”)

Biskind gives George Lucas an opportunity to rebut charges that “Star Wars ruined American movies” by ushering in an era of simplistic “blockbuster” conservative propaganda films that rarely challenged the viewer and usually offered generous support for the status quo and military spending/recruitment.

Lucas: “Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see these popcorn pictures when they’re not good? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault. I just understood what people like to go see, and Steven [Spielberg] has too.” Lucas goes on to argue that blockbusters subsidize serious smaller films. He makes the curious claim that theater owners built multiplexes to show “art films.”

Indeed, Lucas credits himself with helping pave the way to a “really thriving American art film industry,” saying: “So in a way, I did destroy the Hollywood film industry, only I destroyed it by making films more intelligent, not by making film infantile.”

This is rejected by almost everybody who claims to know something about Hollywood movies.

Scorsese: “They’re not subsidizing everything else. They (blockbusters) are it. That’s all. The person who has something to say in a movie has got to make a picture for $50. They’re smothering everything.”

Director Robert Altman: “It’s become one big amusement park. It’s the death of film.”

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls draws to close with director John Boorman’s tale of going to see Brandon Tartikoff, the head of Paramount. Boorman says Tartikoff told him: “Tell me what the 30-second TV commercial is (for the proposed film).” When Boorman said his idea couldn’t be boiled down in that way, Tartikoff replied, “Then I can’t make the picture. How am I going to sell it?”

Other gems in the book include Dennis Hopper’s claim that he simply waltzed into the courthouse in L.A. and spoke to Charles Manson, who wanted Hopper to play him in a movie (exactly—because anyone can just walk into supposedly heavily guarded courthouse and have a chat with an accused mass murdering cult leader. Or is Hopper just underlining that something continues to smell horrendously fishy about the whole Manson tale?)

Biskind makes the case that the artistic sensibility of cinematographer Gordon Willis was at least as responsible as Coppola for the success of The Godfather. He also shows how editor Verna Fields rescued Jaws from the cock-up that the young Steven Spielberg was making of that ultimately tremendous film.

Biskind reports that George Lucas was out of his depth and losing control of the crew during the production of Star Wars. The crew reportedly openly made fun of Lucas’ taciturn demeanor and the story, with a cameraman calling Chewbacca a “dawg.” Lucas reportedly gave points to uncredited Star Wars writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, stars Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and sound man Ben Burtt to ensure their support for completing the movie.

Biskind also delivers a full-body tarring and feathering of Exorcist director William Friedkin, who is portrayed as a dictatorial figure who abused actors, was quick to go on a rant, and prevailed on his girlfriends to get multiple abortions. Actress Ellen Burstyn claims to have had chronic back trouble after she was jerked to the floor by a rig tied around her midriff during the filming of The Exorcist. Friedkin moved in his camera to capture her very real pain. Friedkin also used a real priest, Father William O’Malley, for the scene in which Father Karras receives absolution. When O’Malley, who was not a professional actor, failed to provide the drama required by Friedkin, the director “belted him across the face with his open hand.” O’Malley said: “When I did the next take, my hand was shaking. Sheer adrenalin.” Friedkin put it up on the silver screen.

Roger Corman supposedly offered Scorsese $150,000 to make Mean Streets a blaxploitation movie in the mold of Shaft. Scorsese is portrayed as an insecure, petulant, frightened addict man-child, “popping ‘ludes and drinking Dom Perignon in the cutting room.”

Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader is depicted dressing up in combat boots and an army surplus jacket (like Travis Bickle in the film), and writing with a handgun on the table next to his typewriter. Biskind lets loose with tales about Schrader going fashionably gay, becoming a cokehead, and having an affair with Nastassja Kinski on the set of Cat People. After Kinski (who’s quoted as saying, “I always fuck my directors”) dumped him, a “furious” Schrader refused to speak to her and, on at least one occasion, “directed her by proxy from his limousine.”

In what’s got to be some kind ultimate diva behavior, Biskind reports that during the filming of Chinatown Faye Dunaway refused to flush her trailer toilet, instead calling in a teamster to do it for her. Dunaway is also said to have thrown a cup of pee in Roman Polanski’s face after the director refused to take a break in filming to let her use the toilet. Polanski: “You cunt, that’s piss!” Dunaway: “Yes, you little putz.”

This is a satisfyingly dark, nasty and illuminating book. It matters little what Biskind “got right” or “got wrong” in terms of the blur of coke, violence and blowjobs (and he’s been called a “lying, conniving bastard who tried to make me look bad,” or variations thereof, by some of the big-timers profiled in this book). It offers a glimpse of the monsters and madmen whose visions continue to pollute and enliven our collective dreams and nightmares. It’s juicy, gripping entertainment in its own right. Biskind has mined a load of diamonds that dazzle and disgust.


* Biskind says Southern said this to him in 1994, shortly before Southern’s death.

I suppose this book might be compared to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for its revelations and its exposé of darker aspects and distasteful facts of Hollywood, as Sinclair did with the meatpacking industry. So if you don’t want to see how the cinematic sausage is made, avoid it.

But only the naive will be scandalized by the “news” that the players in Hollywood (a state of mind, not a state...or town...or even on the map in any legit form) partake of drugs and treat sex like a commodity to be traded, or that backstabbing is their favorite hobby and money is their god.

The value in ER,RB is finding out how some of America’s best directors fought their way to success, “against all odds” as, over time, thousands of advertising blurbs have screamed. Especially the story of tic-ridden, neurotic and superstitious Marty Scorsese, low-born and disadvantaged, should give hope to any schlemiel who has a dream and some ambition.

The take-off point of this story of young Hollywood (i.e., independents and rebels) assaulting the bastions built and maintained -- to the point of collapse -- by the old guard of Warner, et al in the front office and Hawks, Ford, Cukor, et al directing their pictures is obvious from the title. The beginning of the revolution is Easy Rider, that barely coherent film by hippies Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, two rather unsavory products of the ‘60s. That film also provided Jack Nicholson’s breakthrough performance and his first major exposure after a series of Roger Corman exploitation quickies.

Once the stage is set for “The New Hollywood” by the success of Easy Rider, eventually the trinity of George Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg are installed in the filmic firmament, with Star Wars, The Godfather, and Jaws, respectively. Intermingled with stories of these game-changing blockbusters and the upsides and downsides of the directors' successes are the details of the difficulties facing Hollywood as a whole, including the poor treatment of women, the danger of inflated egos, drug use, and the hit or miss aspects of gauging audience's taste as they hunt for the next blockbuster. Meanwhile a conflicted Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), who can't decide if he wants to be an auteur or popular director as he snorts a fortune of coke, and the oblivious Peter (“I can do no wrong!”) Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) find their own personal hells it would take them years to exit.

In the end, like Bogdanovich, director Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) was hailed as a genius based on one film and given carte blanche on his next, the notorious Heaven’s Gate. Now known primarily as one of the biggest flops of all time, its spectacular failure led to the collapse of United Artists, as well as the end of the new “director’s Hollywood” that characterized the ‘70s and a return to the discipline of the studio system of filmmaking. For the new, young directors who thought they could do it all, this was the endgame.

Other writers and directors like Paul Schrader and Robert Towne make appearances in ER,RB, as do producers (Barry Diller, et al), and various agents and moneymen, including the colorful producer of The Cotton Club and long-time Hollywood player and “bad boy” Robert Evans. (His continued existence after all he’s put himself through continues to defy logic. For his own take on things read his The Kid Stays in the Picture.)

Meanwhile, the only director/star who comes out of this tale possessing what resembles common sense is Warren Beatty, who the author goes to great pains to paint as an annoying perfectionist. But in general, his sins appear to be of much lower degree (his womanizing notwithstanding) than the others. While they were falling apart he kept himself together and spent his time learning to play the game, getting the job done without the personal angst, self-destruction and B.S. others brought to the table. And although his looks got him his start, he wound up being much more than just a pretty face.

Those interested in the nuts and bolts of the industry -- as well as the flesh and fantasy of Hollywood -- should find ER,RB a rewarding read.

Biskind's book disappointed me tremendously. The author dwelled on bad behavior instead of providing key insights into film making. It lacked social and historical context (just passing mentions of Vietnam and the Manson killings, etc.), despite the fact that the author must have done a tremendous amount of research. Granted, a good portion of the players here are not admirable on a personal level, and some may even be irredeemable … but the book never demonstrated, for me, a respect for the artistic process that resulted in ground breaking cinema.

Casts a wide enough net to get a general sense of the era but it's a house of cards built on a lot of he said she said. Hard to take anything at face value. The main thing that sticks with me is that Biskind spends a lot of time setting this era as some grand tragedy that these talented directors and writers and producers were too self-involved and self-destructive to take down the Hollywood establishment. Then within the last five pages he asks himself: "Could another group of directors have done it differently, broken the back of studio power, created little islands of self-sufficiency that would have supported them in the work they wanted to do? Could a hundred flowers ever have bloomed? Probably not." What was the point of all that hand-wringing then?
They found themselves entering the industry when Hollywood was at a weak point largely because of the growing popularity of television. They enjoyed their freedom for a few years, but the studios took it back. It seems myopic to implicate individual films like Jaws or Star Wars—which Biskind does—for issues that are obviously structural. The establishment was always going to find a way to wrest back control. It probably didn't matter all that much whether individual films went over-budget or tanked or succeeded with audiences or with critics. The studios have always been able to kill any movie to justify whatever whim they feel like. It's as simple as refusing to spend enough on marketing to manufacture a "failed" film. What counter has any individual filmmaker ever had to that? Not much.

Peter Biskind's chronicle of 1970s Hollywood Easy Riders, Raging Bulls remains a classic. It tells the story of the "movie brats" and their failed attempt to take over Hollywood. Few details are spared in an assortment of raw portraits of all the major players including Coppola, De Palma, Friedkin, Scorsese and many others.

Biskind paints a colorful picture of the era. By the mid 60s, studios were still making big budget musicals with zero appeal to anyone under thirty. The release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 marked a shift in the zeitgeist. Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the film glamorized the Great Depression outlaws and made law enforcement officials the villains. Old guard critics voiced outrage at the film's violence. But young people identified with the anti-establishment message as well as the gritty realism.

Two years later Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider romanticized the 60s counterculture. The narrative of two hippies on a motorcycle odyssey across America accompanied by a rock and roll soundtrack took the anti-establishment message even further. Hopper himself personified the era's contradictions: a fierce creative energy combined with a dangerous and sometimes drug fueled grandiosity, a grandiosity unique to the time period. Here's a quote from Hopper shortly after Easy Rider:

I want to make movies about us. We're a new kind of human being. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last ten centuries. We want to make little, personal, honest movies . . . The studio is a thing of the past (75).

Even more than Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola actually tried to destroy the studio system. In the late 1960s, Coppola created Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, as an alternative to the Hollywood system, a place for experimental filmmakers to work (including his protege George Lucas). Meanwhile, he kept a foot in the studio system as a screenwriter and occasional director. In 1971, Paramount offered him the chance to adapt Mario Puzo's crime novel The Godfather. And the rest is history. When The Godfather Part II earned him the Oscar, Coppola pursued his dream project, Apocalypse Now.

He spent three years making the film. Shot on location in the Philippines, the production went way over budget with all sorts of behind the scenes conflict (as captured in the documentary Heart of Darkness). Biskind describes Coppola's descent into megalomania. One day during post-production he locked his editors in a screening room and pontificated for hours about his plans to revolutionize cinema. Apocalypse Now left Coppola in deep debt and he spent the next decade as a director for hire, at one point he told a friend, "What are you worried about? I owe 50 million dollars!!"

Meanwhile George Lucas changed the film industry in 1977 with Star Wars. Known for making experimental films at UCLA, Lucas won accolades for his innovative use of sound and editing. When his first feature THX-1138 flopped with audiences he followed it up with the nostalgic and popular American Graffiti. Then he wrote a space opera based on Flash Gordon serials. Quiet and introverted, Lucas barely survived the hectic shoot in London and the lengthy post-production process. Against all odds, Star Wars broke box office records and became a cultural phenomenon. Ever since then, studios threw their money at special effect extravaganzas.

Biskind saves most of his vitriol for Steven Spielberg, who's portrayed as a geeky opportunist interested in making money with special effects driven movies. In the 1980s, Spielberg built an empire in Hollywood while his old buddies from the 70s languished in the new blockbuster driven system.

Here I don't agree at all, in time Spielberg has proven himself a great director with a number of historically relevant including Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Any fan of Spielberg will recognize special effects only work well with a strong character driven story, Jaws being an example.

As the 80s beckoned, excess and hubris brought down the new Hollywood. Of course many other factors go into this, namely, another shift in the zeitgeist with the election of Ronald Reagan. Audience tastes changed as well. Movies were marketed for the mall going suburban masses.

The end finally came when Michael Cimino's historical epic Heaven's Gate nearly bankrupted United Artists. From then on, directors lost their freedom and Hollywood, according to Biskind, reverted back to making crowd pleasing, but irrelevant junk.

Unfortunately, women are for the most part left out of the narrative, revealing deeply ingrained sexism of the time. Few know Lucas's first wife Marcia edited many of the iconic films of the 70s such as Taxi Driver and Carrie, and that she literally saved Star Wars from being an incoherent mess. After they divorced in 1983 no one hired her. As a result, she's been mostly erased from the history.

Easy Rider, Raging Bulls never gets boring. Although Biskind makes some dubious conclusions and indulges in mean spirited gossip, it will get you thinking about where movies have been and where they are going.

Enticingly salacious, I should have gone with my intuition and instead read more Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. The author is a sleaze artist and instead of a critical approach to the New Hollywood of the 1970s, Biskind gives us hit pieces on Warren Beatty and Dennis Hopper. Regarding cinema history I guess I am an acolyte of Mark Cousins and I see the Bauble as an integral part of the business if not the art form.