Ultimately the conclusion it comes to is a little silly, but is this ever a fascinating beach/train/fluff read. Dark, dishy, and does it ever deliver.

Film directors are an egotistical, egocentric, pretentious, and self-destructive lot, as this book points out over and over and over and over and over and over again. But in a way, it’s not Biskind’s fault. These people are really this way.

Biskind brings his electric prose to the coke-fuelled 70s, this time illuminating how the “brats” (Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma) got away with their antics. A great and gripping read.

¡¡Estupendo!!

This fascinating, compulsively readable book documents the brief but glorious era (late 60’s through the mid-70’s) where personal filmmaking flourished in America, trumping the dictates of studio-dominated product for a time, resulting in great movies like Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather pts 1 & 2, The Conversation, Chinatown, The Last Detail, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, and so many others. The period was so artistically rich it became known as Hollywood’s second golden era. Peter Biskind’s autopsy of this auteur-driven period is quite gruesome, especially when he’s exhaustively detailing the monstrous excesses of its star directors, among them Francis Ford Coppola (an apparently bipolar megalomaniac), Peter Bogdanovich (insufferable twerp), George Lucas (emotionally cold and sterile), and William Friedkin (sociopathic sonofabitch). In the end as we all know, the studios took back control and the 80's happened (shudder), while the majority of the directors, save Spielberg and Scorcese, unable to resist the excesses of the era as well as the demands of their unleashed egos, mostly self-destructed. I really have to read Biskind’s book about the Independent Studios of the 90’s now.

First of all, this book is not really what it purports to be - an account of the golden age of American movies in the '70s and how the coming of the blockbuster ended that. Instead, it's more of a Hollywood Babylon-type tale of excess, of young men getting rich and famous too fast and burning out in a cloud of self-indulgence.

Not much time is spent on his actual thesis. Instead, some lip service is paid to that, but more energy goes in to recounting what a complete bunch of assholes most of these guys are. If they don't start that way, they end up that way after tasting success. Drugs, drinking, affairs, mistreating the women in their lives, mistreating their friends, mistreating their employees - not one likable person among them. And although Biskind tries to push his idea that the blockbuster killed the auteur, we see most of these directors make one or two early masterpieces, and then start making crap.

The text itself can be a slog - he'll talk about one movie, then talk about another, then jump back to the first one so it can be confusing. It's a long book with lots of people in it that I early on ceased caring about. When I forgot who someone was, I just shrugged and continued on, because one seemed much like another. It could be much shorter. We don't necessarily need to know all the grizzly details of Dorothy Stratten's murder. With better editing, we could have had a better book, one where Biskind might have made a convincing argument. Instead, my takeaway is that the '70s were a time when the inmates were running the asylum and they occasionally struck gold, but more often, they wasted a bunch of money on satisfying their egos.

A decent book, probably better if you bought the whole '70s as a lost golden age of movie-making. I've seen a number of the movies praised, and although I thought they were good, when I stop to think about it, I don't know that they were so much better than stuff from other eras. I think it's just cool to say that they were, and to crap on everything more recent. But there are still lots of interesting independent movies being made, you just have to look for them. So read it if you feel smug about the '70s, or want to read an account of a bunch of young would-be artists flushing their talents down the toilet. This should be right up your alley.

Maybe the best book I’ve read relating to film?

Was messy, insightful, depressing and inspiring. It’s what these types of books should strive to be. So many great stories told in this book. In the end my favorite characters were William friedkin and George Lucas.

I stole this from a buddies bookshelf for a read on a plane ride back home. I think it might be a college textbook, but I'm not all that sure. Ir-regardless, it is an excellent account of the film industry revolution during the 60's and 70's. It focuses more on the directors and not the actors, which is good because most of the decent directors of that time were completely out of their minds. I find that I use this book ( yeah, I kept it) as a source of reference up to several times a week and have stoked some pretty serious arguments with film-heads due to my new found knowledge of the industry. If you want to know what a pain in the ass it was for Coppola to make " Apocalypse Now", or find trivial and pointless facts ( "Harold and Maude" was written by a pool cleaner) cool, or just like to know the back story of some of the best films ever, dig up a copy of this ( Or steal it from Adam Bailey).

Raucous, kaleidoscopic portrait of New Hollywood in the ‘70s, when a fresh generation of ambitious young directors obliterated the studio system. Biskind’s narrative is familiar to any film buff: in his telling, the young auteurs (Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman etc.) that took over Hollywood were heroes, eschewing conventional tastes, embracing artistic techniques more commonly found in European art cinema than Hollywood programmers and following their own outsized egos. Their collective talents produced an endless string of masterpieces (The Godfather, The Last Picture Show, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, etc. etc. etc.), propelling movies to a height never before reached and never again matched. That is, until their own excesses (drugs, sex, greed and rampant megalomania) caught up with them, while Steven Spielberg and George Lucas whetted the public’s appetite for mindless blockbusters with Jaws and Star Wars. By the early ‘80s, the Golden Age of Film passed, replaced with an endless parade of bloated schlock and focus-grouped mediocrities worse than what came before. “We are the children of Lucas,” Biskind sadly concludes, “not Coppola.”

It’s amazingly readable, absorbing in its portraiture of the Sixties generation as an army of megalomaniacs fighting each other to make their marks. Like a high school gossip, Biskind relishes the era’s lurid details: Dennis Hopper’s psychotic behavior, from threatening Rip Torn with a knife to shooting at his romantic partners; Robert Evans, the mob-friendly producer devoured by drugs and self-doubt; Warren Beatty, the egotistical star shepherding his films through doubting producers and meddling directors; screenwriter Robert Towne, who penned masterpieces like The Last Detail and Chinatown while burning through cash, pills (both as a user and a hypochondriac) and studio good will; John Milius and Paul Schrader bonding over their shared gun fetish; Francis Ford Coppola’s descent into madness making Apocalypse Now; Faye Dunaway splashing urine on Roman Polanski while filming Chinatown; the antics of critic-arbiter Pauline Kael; and so on. Few appear sympathetic: most take drugs, publicly misbehave, and mistreat their wives, girlfriends and stars; many flirt with radical politics (producer Bert Schneider helps Huey Newton escape to Cuba and reads a telegram from the North Vietnamese government at the 1975 Oscars); all, it seems, double-cross each other over failed projects, bad business deals, romantic rivalries or simple spite. A good many self-destruct through overproduced flops, reducing them to hackwork or retirement.

For all its tabloid splashiness and arresting detail, Biskind’s book is more mythology than history. Many of those chronicled, unsurprisingly, have objected to his portrayal; New Hollywood seems like a gallery of inhuman monsters redeemed only by talent (though, in fairness, it’s hard to spin the behavior of Hopper, or Roman Polanski, or others positively). Still, the increased freedom of ‘70s Hollywood, and the gulf between Before and After, are grossly overstated. Why is The Godfather high art when Jaws is merely well-crafted trash, when both are adaptations of trashy bestsellers elevated by their director’s talent? And for every Nashville or The Conversation, there's a Billy Jack or King of Marvin Gardens, where auteurism curdled into inscrutable self-indulgence. Biskind’s implication that New Hollywood burned out isn’t universally true: Spielberg, of course, emerged from unscathed; Dennis Hopper worked steadily until his death, albeit as an actor rather than director; Robert Altman enjoyed a long career while Martin Scorsese continues to make acclaimed films, forty years after Raging Bull. And old-fashioned studio films continued through the ‘70s, as the success of Airport, The Towering Inferno and similar monstrosities demonstrated. Biskind relates anecdotes but rarely stops to breathe, passes judgments but almost never analyzes. The result is a book that’s great fun to read, but often hard to take seriously.

Fantastic portrait of the best dozen years of American film and the insane circumstances that created them. Essential reading for any aspiring film dork. One part cultural anthropology, one part film criticism, one part gossip rag. Sample Dennis Hopper shenanigans (in the early 80s):

"Still convinced the mob was on his tail, he pulled a 'geographic,' ending up in L.A. shooting coke and heroin, and then on to Mexico, where he had an acting gig. Suffering from DTs and hallucinations, he stripped off his clothes and disappeared into the jungle. After he punched a Mexican detective, the film company put him on a flight back to the States. As he was boarding, however, he became convinced that two of his former directors, Coppola and Wim Wenders, were filming him from the plane. Somehow he crawled out onto the wing while the plane was still on the ground..."

É um trabalho de pesquisa e entrevista colossal, mas o autor tem um tom bem limitado quando resolve comentar as coisas com sua opinião pessoal, especialmente se tratando da qualidade dos filmes citados, em que diabos de zona além da imaginação ele vive para negar que Apocalypse Now seja uma obra-prima absoluta?!? Ou ainda compactuar com a ideia de Heaven's Gate foi mesmo um fracasso inclusive artístico quando na realidade é uma das grandes obras do Cimino?
Apesar de seus conceitos equivocados sobre qualidade fílmica e tom mais preocupado em obter fofocas sensacionalistas para incrementar seu livro, não deixa de ser um puta livro interessante de ler, mas que pouco trata de cinema afinal.

The book had the potential to be awesome and interesting and really informative. A lot of amazing movies were made in the 1970's. A lot of interesting things happened in Hollywood as to how movies were made, and the balances of power. Picking up this book, that is what it alludes to be about. It will talk about the New Hollywood directors - Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, etc etc, and what they did to movies, how they challenged the studio system, how they made some of their most famous movies.

When it's put like that, it sounds like a must read. A backstage look at Hollywood and it's going's on at the time that Easy Rider, The Godfather, Jaws and Star Wars were being made.

That's what the book sets itself up to be, but that is not what it is about at all. If you want to know how these movies got made, you probably need another book. It starts off with grand ambitions but quickly devolves into badly structured and poorly written tabloid fodder about who was doing the most coke (spoiler: everyone but Spielberg) or who was fucking people who weren't their significant others (spoiler: everyone). Now I'm all for a little gossip flavor, but that's literally all this book is. The matters of actual substance in terms of how these movies got made and how they affected the industry play second fiddle to the "drama" the author makes a big deal of revealing. He is so interested in the naughty activities of 1970's Hollywood that he seems to have forgotten what he set out to do and focuses all his attention on tattle-telling.

On top of the drivel he is producing in terms of material, the structure of the book is ridiculously atrocious. As in, the only way it could be worse is if sentences started in the middle of each other. It seems as if it might be intended as chronological order, but each chapter zips all around in time. A typical chapter starts off talking about one subject, jumps to talking about something else - which may or may not be happening at the same time, jumps back to the first subject, then to a third subject which may or may not be related to anything already mentioned in this chapter, jumps back to subject one, then subject three, then subject two, then three, then one, then an entirely new subject which goes on until the end of the chapter. Trying to follow the author's train of thought is like trying to follow a dog's train of thought in a park full of squirrels. Between the abrupt subject changes, and the tabloid take on the era, it's hard to pick up the actual information about the movies.

Since I'm sure there have to be better written books about the same subject matter, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. Unless you happen to have masochistic tendencies.