Immensely frustrating, for a lot of reasons. It's not at all clear what the thesis of this book is. The subtitle is "How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-N-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood" and yet the book ends with the living members of that generation bemoaning the fall of Hollywood and how no one will ever make good movies again. Also, the trajectory the book outlined seemed fairly clear to me:
1. Hollywood is in decline because of the bloated studio system
2. A new generation shows up, turns everything on its head, and makes some really good movies. The way movies are made, and the supporting business models, change.
3. But these men are assholes, and the success goes to their heads and they start mistreating everyone both personally and professionally, and they are all on too many drugs to make good movies anymore
4. The studios take back control, only now they're shittier than they were before

I felt like, if there was a thesis in there, it was that the excesses of the 70s directors ruined everything. Biskind talks about it all the time. It's the last line of Easy Rider! Maybe he just had no control over the subtitle of the book?? But I couldn't shake the cognitive dissonance; the whole time I was reading it was like, how exactly are any of these people 'saving Hollywood'? Especially given that I recently finished Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood it read more like "here the ground was laid for the abuse and excess we're currently dealing with."

Also -- I knew this was going to happen but it didn't make me happy about it -- the number of men who treated the women in their lives like trash and then whined that "I couldn't help it! It just happened! It was all out of my control!!" was infuriating. You made your choices, assholes.

what being an auteur does to an mfer...

Be prepared to laugh your azz off at this roller coaster ride through Hollywood's last golden decade, 1967-1977. A personal note: I met one of the key players in this decade of decadence, Bert Schneider, who co-produced such masterpieces as EASY RIDER, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, and FIVE EASY PIECES and whose obituary called him "a drug-fueled egomaniac" (not with me, he wasn't). All the juicy details are here: from Marty Scorcese chartering a plane to bring him cocaine in France to Bert lamenting the 1992 LA riots had left his house untouched. These weirdoes, freaks and hairies made the greatest films of my generation.

Such a quick style, with so many insane stories tossed off so quickly that it often feels like he’s joking. The book benefits from the hindsight of the 25 years since publication; some of the supposed winners and losers have shifted drastically. Nicholson, the victorious kingmaker of New Hollywood now stews alone in his reclusive mansion; Scorsese, framed as merely a survivor of the era, is now considered one of the most vital figures in cinema history. Biskind’s total disdain for George Lucas and Spielberg is understandable( if a bit harsh) given the way blockbusters mutated Hollywood forever, but thankfully he sees that it was much more the fault of the studios than it was of the directors. Despite the New Hollywood focus, I’d love to have a bit more contextualization in the larger film landscape — this is also the era that gave us the defining works of Kubrick, the start of Ridley Scott and David Lynch, and a big era for the much-mentioned but never discussed Woody Allen. He did accurately predict that Schrader just needed some more time to make his masterpiece though, so shout out to Paul for the last laugh.

God was this interesting. Acknowledging a lot of the boom was certainly embellished and I don’t love how much of it went into who-slept-with-who, ERRB was full of strong, incisive writing and punchy scenes with rich characters. Biskind is able to intertwine amazing two-paragraph stories into a wider narrative of the rise and fall of a Hollywood revolution, all while mirroring the transformation of a nation.

To my shame, I am a great lover of celebrity gossip. This book allowed me to indulge in that passion whilst still retaining literary respectability on the bus. Basically it's several hundred pages of celebrity gossip from the late Sixties to the mid Eighties in the context of how it shaped the New Hollywood movement in the film industry. The New Hollywood movement being when directors and writers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader started making 'difficult' films, films with drugs and violence and unhappy endings, films that critics and film students now love to gush over. The book tells the story of how Taxi Driver, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The Godfather and their ilk were made, and how they changed both Hollywood and the world outside of it. To be honest, I don't really like any of the films covered in Easy Riders except for Star Wars (and Lucas and Spielberg are covered here as the exceptions rather than the rule), I'm more of a Hollywood's Golden Era kind of gal. But I do find the film industry and the people in it fascinating so it didn't really impede my enjoyment. Actually, since most the people involved with New Hollywood sound awful maybe its better their films don't hold a special place in my heart. The book seems to be largely pulled together from extensive interviews Biskind has done with actors, producers, writers and directors so it does come across as very authoritative and it's pretty hilarious that many of them having conflicting accounts of what went on (there are quite a lot of instances of 'X says this never happened' after a quote from Y). One thing that niggled was that although there are copious references to drug taking and bad behaviour, there's probably a lot of sexual assault stuff that got left out (James Toback's name pops up now and then and we all know what people are saying about him now) so it's not entirely warts and all. Still, I do think it's an absolute must-read for anyone mad on films.

This one's a good 15 years old and has been on my 70s-film-education reading list for some time. It's likely the most popular and perhaps well-regarded of all 1970s film histories as well, though let's be right up front about the fact that this is more a gossip book than a serious work of hardcore film criticism. Peter Biskind has (had?) been a longtime player at Premiere Magazine and must have spent a good chunk of the 1990s interviewing the surviving members of the American auteur pack and many of the writers, executives and wives who supported them. He certainly grabbed as much salacious content as must have been out there, as the book is full of drugs, sex, booze and megalomania. It's also a fairly well-done rise-and-fall story of "The New Hollywood", and in its way, it tells the story in a much more entertaining manner than a mountain's worth of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris essays ever could.

Biskind triggers the rise of the personal American cinema and the deification of the director with the machinations that brought both Arthur Penn's "Bonnie & Clyde" and Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper/Terry Southern's "Easy Rider" to the screen. Both barely got made, and both were assumed to be trash cinema that would quickly vanish even by most of the people who worked on them. Biskind trains the early part of the book on the executives who arrived in Hollywood and, with some cunning and lies and much foresight, found ways to get unusual, European-style cinema made by the larger American studios. It's clear that Euro films were a revelation for many and had been since the early 1960s. The directors we now associate with the wonders of 1970s filmmaking – Scorcese, Friedkin, Altman, Cassavetes et al – were already well-schooled in their Italian, French, Swedish and Japanese predecessors, and had been marinating in their films in student film clubs and art houses for quite some time before the studio system allowed them to try their hand at their own versions.

The excitement with which audiences greeted the loosening of scripts and mores on film is captured very well here. The system had a hard time adjusting to the new director-led cinema, but the directors had strong allies in film critics like Kael, who wielded considerable power with her reviews in this time before the web, home video and cable TV. After "Easy Rider" and "Bonnie & Clyde" showed that real money could be made catering to the new film audience of twentysomethings weaned in the wild 1960s, the floodgates opened, and experimental, political, character-based and raw, emotional cinema could be made and funded.

Robert Altman could make a film that mocked the Vietnam war while the war was still being fought ("MASH") and reap both critical and audience acclaim, setting him up to make classics like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", "Nashville" and "3 Women". Martin Scorcese could ride the critical acclaim from "Mean Streets" to make dark and disturbing hits like "Taxi Driver" and later, "Raging Bull". Dennis Hopper, of all people (he's portrayed as an absolute psychotic moron), could get money to make his unwatchable "The Last Movie".

The book definitely has its share of dolts and dupes and deadbeats. Bert Schneider, a producer and studio champion of many important 70s works like "Five Easy Pieces", "Easy Rider" and "The Last Detail", was the ultimate Hollywood left-wing creep, shepherding Huey Newton around the world and cheating on his wife with anything that moved. Director Paul Schrader (directed "Blue Collar"; wrote "Taxi Driver") was a suicidal, schizophrenic drug machine. William Friedkin was a egomaniac bully and blowhard. Peter Bogdonovich gets raked over the coals by many for his massive ego and the personal lives he ruined, with loads of schadenfreude dished out once he bombed with films like "At Long Last Love". Francis Ford Coppola is a central character in the book, also coming off as a first-class jerk totally lacking in adult self-control. Robert Evans is made to be a idiotic boob of legendary proportions. I could go on. Biskind certainly did.

"EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS" skimps on portrayals of actors, training its eye on the directors and writers for the most part. Some of them – Robert Towne is a great example, who gets a ton of play in the book – are fascinating studies of 70s excess and sometimes harnessed, sometimes lost talent. The book has a hard time coherently and consistently extolling a what-did-it-all-mean theme. When it comes, it comes in fits and starts; there's a great passage in which George Lucas convincingly argues that films like his "Star Wars" made so much money and opportunity for the film industry that it paved the way for the 1990s boom in great American independent cinema. Then someone like Altman comes in and almost convincingly argues that everything died in 1979, and that film has been running on fumes since then.

Biskind had a really hard time ending the book, and for some reason chooses the depressing death of relatively minor (comparitively speaking) director Hal Ashby ("Shampoo", "Coming Home") as the end point for the narrative. I have no idea why. He had plenty of opportunities to crash the narrative on the slick rocks of the 1980s, widely acknowledged as the worst decade ever for good film, but misses the mark except for a few asides here and there. My other complaint is just how much energy he expends to details who was sleeping with whom and when. After about 100 pages it was clear that in Hollywood at this time, getting laid was about the easiest thing in the world, even for looks-challenged, nerdish directors and writers who were married to their longtime sweethearts. Once established, it just gets boring after that. The drug tales are pretty great, though. Robert Evans in particular was just a wreck, as readers/viewers of "The Kid Stays In The Picture" already know.

The book certainly re-nurtured in me a desire to see every great American film of the 70s, starting right now. After more than three decades of close study, I still have some major gaps in my resume that I need to close, including "Night Moves", "Images", "The Parallax View" and "The King of Marvin Gardens". I'd certainly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this era of film, as it's a terrific if sometimes infuriating supplement to true academic "film school" writing (much of which is dreadful, which is why I avoid most of it). Read it and watch the long version of "A Decade Under The Influence", and I'll bet you'll have that Netflix queue tipping hard toward 1974 in a matter of hours.

n  There's no worse career move in Hollywood than dying.n

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is an account of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s and, to be honest, I think it deserves 5 stars simply owing to the sheer amount of research and information that is crammed into the 440 pages of the book (the last 70 pages are just the index/references). It took me a good 5 months to slowly make my way through it not because it's difficult to read but because I wanted to prolong the journey and to digest it all properly.

As a film student, I'd like to pretend that this book counts as "studying" for me when, in fact, the purpose it serves is in making me feel much better about myself by showing just how clueless all of today's famous directors were when they were starting out and just how many of these acclaimed masterpieces (The Godfather, Jaws, etc.) had completely disaster sets due to the fact that nobody knew what they were doing. I cannot explain the joy it gave me to read that Steven Spielberg was, actually, a complete mess while shooting Jaws. Also, they had to bring in someone to sleep with him to help him cope with the stress which brings me to my second note which is that I knew old Hollywood was super sexist and horrible but to see it all written down like that as though it's completely normal was ... illuminating.

However, I'm not sure how interesting this would be to someone unfamiliar with these films and these characters. Personally, I'm a sucker for success stories and films/books about making films and so I was genuinely tearing up at times whenever the writer "foreshadowed" Star Wars or used phrases like "the man who would be king" (Francis Ford Coppola). If you're not a fan of these things, then you probably don't want to read something that is literally overflowing with information about two whole decades' worth of films and the countless different people associate with them (the index alone is 23 pages).

I really enjoyed it though and I think I'll be reading the writer's other books on the 50s and the 80s as well. The book is filled with crazy stories and, to wrap this up, I'll leave you with my favorite anecdote and the fact that, during the filming of Apocalypse Now, there was no expense Coppola would say no to, which is why the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and his camera crew would have pasta flown in from Italy to the Philippines all throughout the long film shoot. Yes, in a story filled with drugs and murder, this pasta story is my favorite fun fact, thank you very much.

The upshot of this book's negative reviews seems to be that it is too full of gossip. I'm trying to imagine someone who buys a book about the film industry and is surprised, much less disappointed, by encountering gossip.

According to Biskind, the great party house in the early '70s was the little A-frame Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt rented for $400 a month on Nicholas Beach near Malibu. Nowadays Kidder says that Biskind exaggerated its debauchery, that it was really a pretty mellow scene. I find this revelation terribly disappointing—I need my illusions. I am even more distressed to learn that Salt went on to write the screenplay for Eat, Pray, Love.

Truly the best era of Hollywood for films. It’s good to know the best films ever made were directed by egomaniacal degenerate drug addicts.
I’d say the book is interesting but like if you don’t have an interest in it then it won’t be. It’s kind of like if you don’t like something you probably won’t like it. If you can get your head around that statement without losing considerable IQ. Not that iq means everything though it really doesn’t. Knowledge is a burden or something there’s probably some quote like that. You may say this took me far too long to read but I swear the writing is smaller than the fine print on a chocolate bar. I had to use a magnifying glass for the book. They don’t mention that in the blurb but it’s the sad truth. I think the publishers partnered with magnifying glass companies to preform an elaborate scam and boost sales. Of course I cannot prove it but I know it’s true. I’ll find proof or go crazy trying. I think we know which one will happen. Although the very thought of trying such a thing does prove I’m already insane. Can someone get more insane? I wonder like where’s the threshold when you pass for insane because it’s hardly a reliable science. It kind of is but you can’t check inside someone’s skull and see a number which tells you a persons sanity. So you never really know tbh. There’s probably an exact definition of insanity that makes me sounds stupid for saying this stuff. I’m very sane though. i promise. Anyway back to the book (got a little sidetracked there sorry) the book is good a lot of details which can be a small bit boring but it does really immerse you in what the time was like. I’m not talking about describing the colour and texture of pizza I mean like of small things happening. The best thing to come out of this book is a long list of films I need to watch. I also say films now because I’m a snob. Soon I’ll just call them “pictures” and when that happens I’ll have truly lost all hope. I will no longer be myself, it’ll be someone else, a fragment of who I once was. Please kill this person as I do not want to live without control of myself. The doctors say I could start saying pictures anytime within the next 2 weeks. So yes. If you’ve read all of this I’m really in awe. Your patience for my rambling is truly amazing. Here’s a key for a reward

Is this a perfect book? No.
Is this an accurate and balanced account of the lives of the primary cast of New Hollywood? Probably not.
Do I agree with Biskind's thesis that commercial cinema by the likes of Spielberg and Lucas 'killed' New Hollywood? No.

Is this an entertaining read? Hell, yes.

An interesting window into 1970s Hollywood, but also a very mucky one. This book is so stuffed with names and dates and unimportant details that really don't contribute to any characterization, narrative, or message. It's difficult to explore an entire factual decade of moviemaking, writers, producers, and directors without a lot of structure or story construction. Names, dates, and events blur together, making it hard to make sense of a lot of the era. However, the sections that focus entirely on single productions provide nice little vignettes that give insight into filmmakers and their most influential movies.