Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [2003] [DVD]

Anyone who has read Peter Biskind's seminal book on what he describes as the 'sex, drugs and rock and roll generation who saved Hollywood,' namely the era which lasted from the late Sixties untill roughly the late Seventies in American film and which is considered to be by many the last golden age of Hollywood, will likely come away from this Documentary film adaptation of the book with mixed feelings.

The documentary gives the viewer the bare outline one who has read the book is familiar with:-

A) The death of the old studio system sometime in the Sixties whose demise was hastened by such ill-considered mega-flops as Cleopatra, Paint Your Wagon and Hello Dolly.

(B) The rise of a burgeoning and untapped youth market eager to see things they could identify with on screen.

(C) The Trojan Horse of the 'Roger Corman Film School' i.e 'King of the B-Movies' Producer/Director Roger Corman who firstly tapped into the hitherto untapped youth market, with B-Movies like The Trip and The Wild Angels, and secondly opened the doors to the untried and untested Film school graduates and harbingers of the 'New Hollywood' Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese and Peter Bogdanovich amongst many others.

D) The rise of the 'movie brats' influenced as they were by the French and Italian 'new wave' brought a much more more realistic approach to story-telling that was evident in European cinema at that time (complete with it's attendant moral and sexual ambiguities) to American film for the very first time.

E) The shift in style and in cultural outlook helped to foster a climate of freedom and creativity which allowed the 'New Hollywood' to flourish and produce such great films as The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Mash, Harold and Maude, Network, Deliverance, All the Presidents Men, Dog Day Afternoon and a host of other films which a mere ten years previously would never have been made.

F) The Fall. Starting with Jaws and continued by Star Wars in the mid to late Seventies the era of the Blockbuster is shown as destroying this last era of innocence in Hollywood as commerce and the studio exec's reassert creative control.

All very well and good you might say but why only the three stars? churlish though it might appear it feels as though something is missing, the story is condensed and in the process something is lost.

My recomendation is firstly read the book but secondly watch Ted Demme's excellent documentary 'A Decade under the Influence' which covers this era by primarily focusing on the films rather than (as is the case in this documenary) by focusing too heavily on the personalities involved and their associated drug problems.

In 1998 Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was published. This galloping, gossipy bestseller traced the highs and lows, tragedies and triumphs during the sex-and-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll generation's revolutionary (?) assault on Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s. Like Adventures in the Screen Trade and You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, it has come to be seen by some as one of the definitive books about modern American cinema. I can understand why - it has an epic tale to tell: the story of Hollywood in the decade when directors dictated the agenda; before studios settled on a formula for routine blockbusters in the style of Jaws and Star Wars, after the death of the old studio system, in the 1960s, following big-budget flops, such as Cleopatra and Paint Your Wagon.

Documentary maker Kenneth Bowser has provided an understated, broadly chronological summation of that book, which is narrated earnestly by American actor William H. Macy. It is divided into chapter headings and shifts logically between subjects in a pacey fashion. This is accomplished by fluid switches between talking heads and relevant clips from films under discussion, in a fashion that has drawn understandable comparisons with another documentary about Hollywood, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Does it work? I have to admit to mixed feelings about this adaptation. Some of the archival footage - including Roman Polanski's harrowing and emotional press conference following Sharon Tate's murder - is undoubtedly fascinating. Interviews with the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Dreyfuss, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Margot Kidder, and Cybill Shepherd elicit occasional insights. Personal backstories, such as outlaw director Sam Peckinpah's hard-drinking and heavy drug consumption, and director John Schlesinger's decision to come-out while making the gay-themed Midnight Cowboy, are handled with sensitivity (with Bowser clearly taking less vicarious pleasure in chronicling chaotic lifestyles than Biskind did).

In fairness, Biskind's sprawling book struck a reasonable balance between personal stories with film appreciation, and evoking a strong sense of the cultural and social milieu around that creative explosion. How well does this documentary condense that in its short running time of 2 hours? The answer is that it does it with great difficulty. The result is many glib generalisations and questionable omissions. How else could you explain, contextualise and criticise seminal films such as All the Presidents Men, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, Harold and Maude, Mash, Mean Streets, Network, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, The Godfather, The Graduate, The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch, amongst plenty of others, in so short a period of time? The result is more than a faint waft of hagiography hangs in the air. I would have liked to see some critical voices take to task this unqualified account of a time when movie brats, lotharios and neurotics apparently took over the movie business. I can't help but feel that this documentary would have had been better at double, triple or even quadruple the length in which it is seen. This cut just feels like a surface gloss on the work's subject: the New Hollywood era between counter-cultural biker movie Easy Rider and boxing biography Raging Bull. *

Unfortunately, it is also glaringly obvious that only a handful of the period's major filmmakers and stars have agreed to take part (despite what the slightly disingenuous title credit appears to suggest). Hollywood icons such as Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, and Martin Scorsese aren't interviewed contemporaneously by Bowser - leaving you feeling throughout that you're only getting half the story. Instead, much of the anecdotal material is relayed by secondary participants, who are only slightly unfairly characterised by one Amazon reviewer as, "the third assistant cameraman, the consulting script associate and the tea boy".

This film starts with a bunch of young upstarts taking over American cinema, saying that the older generation of film makers are out of touch, they then spend the 70s making some decent films (and some terrible ones) while getting as high as kites, they peak and on the way down, some of them die (boo-hoo, another coke fiend bites the dust) and they, in turn, get rolled over by the next generation of film makers and start whining about how they're still relevant. And people say Americans don't understand irony!
This film is okay for about half an hour but by then you realise that they're not going to talk to the people that matter (Scorcese etc.), instead you get a bunch of other people talking about them, the third assistant cameraman, the consulting script associate and the tea boy. Who cares?
All this is set to awful muzak, there's a song that sound a bit like The Byrds but it's not, there's one that sounds a bit like The Kinks but it's not, ditto Iron Butterflly and Bob Dylan.
The cherry on the cake of this sleeping tablet was no mention of 'Apocalypse Now' and, if any film personifies the hippies dream crumbling in their hands like an old chocolate chip cookie, surely it's that and not the likes of Dennis Hopper's 'The Last Movie'.