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Amazon.co.uk Review
Biskind did 100s of interviews with people who make the President look accessible: Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Geffen, Beatty, Kael, Towne, Altman. He also spoke with countless spurned spouses and burned partners, alleged victims of assault by knife, pistol and bodily fluids. Rather more responsible than some of his sources, Biskind always carefully notes the denials as well as the astounding stories he has compiled. He tells you about Scorsese running naked down Mulholland Drive after his girlfriend, crying, "Don't leave me!"; grave robbing on the set of Apocalypse Now; Faye Dunaway apparently flinging urine in Roman Polanski's face while filming Chinatown; Michael O'Donoghue's LSD-fueled swan dive onto a patio; Coppola's mad plan for a 10-hour film of Goethe's Elective Affinities in 3-D; the ocean suicide attempt Hal "Captain Wacky" Ashby gave up when he couldn't find a swimsuit that pleased him; countless dalliances with porn stars; Russian roulette games and psychotherapy sessions in hot tubs. But he also soberly gives both sides ample chance to testify.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is also more than a fistful of dazzling anecdotes. Methodically, as thrillingly as a movie attorney, Biskind builds the case that Hollywood was revived by wild ones who then betrayed their own dreams, slit their own throats and destroyed an art form by producing that mindless, inhuman modern behemoth, the blockbuster.
When Spielberg was making the first true blockbuster, Jaws, he sneaked Lucas in one day when nobody was around, got him to put his head in the shark's mechanical mouth and closed the shark's mouth on him. The gizmo broke and got stuck but the two young men somehow extricated Lucas's head and hightailed it like Tom and Huck. As Peter Biskind's scathing, funny, wise book demonstrates, they only thought they had escaped. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com
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This is, quite simply, the best, most interesting book about film ever written. The book provides a (largely) chronological account of film making in the 1970s – a wonderfully fertile period where ‘New Hollywood’ attempted, and for a while succeeded, in making the director king.
The book is an amazing concoction of sharp analysis about film and filmmaking mixed with scurrilous gossip and titbits about the major players. Quite how he persuaded all these film legends to speak to him with such candour remains a mystery; I suspect few will do so again. Amongst the cast of characters are directors Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, George Lucas and his wife Marcia Lucas, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg and Robert Towne; actors Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepherd and Jack Nicholson covering landmark films such as The Godfather I & II, Taxi Driver, Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist and The Last Picture Show.
Biskind writes beautifully, handling a huge topic with an enormous cast of characters deftly. He is assisted by the fact that many of the players and the films are already well-known to the reader but he has a wonderful talent for the one-line character profile (often a one-line character assassination) and he chooses his quotes well. If you are interested in film, and particularly if you share Biskind’s view that the 1970s was a golden era of film, then you will probably enjoy this book. There are a couple of caveats: he plays a little fast and loose with the facts and he loves gossip. He is hard on his subjects: few escape unscathed and some are characterised as positively evil.
An excellent book, worth reading if you can tolerate some of your heroes being tarnished.
With 30 years as a hollywood journo under his belt,Peter Biskind is ideally placed to re-examine the '70s in Hollywood,a period which produced a rich and satisfying body of work,while consigning almost all of it's creators into drug induced career burnout.The only real survivors,Spielberg and Lucas,were the ones who gave up on indie cinema and embraced the mainstram with open arms,giving birth to the modern summer blockbuster in the process,whilst other more edgier talents such as Scorcese,were forced to start again at the bottom.
The scandal in this book is deliciously juicy and spares us little or no detail,but it's matched with a fine sense of history and what seems to be genuine regret in Biskinds eyes that the single most exciting and creative period in recent Hollywood history was burned out in less than a decade,as the '80s saw the rise of the uber producers like Joel Silver and Don Simpson.
This is the fall of the Roman Empire,Hollywood style.Without doubt the finest book ever written about Tinseltown.Lap it up,because it could be 20 years before we see another period so rich,or another book so good.
Biskind's book suggests that the downfall of the 70s "auteur" style of direction was that Scorcese et al tried to make films of great artistry without paying sufficient attention to the financial demands of the business in which they worked - and this point is well made by the book being framed by the success of Easy Riders at the beginning of the decade and the financial disaster of Heaven's Gate in 1980. Given that we are seeing an increase at present in the number of mainstream movies that are also self-consciously "artistic" (such as American Beauty, Traffic, etc), the relevance of this books to filmmaking today is huge. But Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, could be read and enjoyed by anyone. It's a pity that this book is never likely to be adapted for cinema itself - since it gives a portrayal of the rise and fall of a group of 70s filmmakers that has the narrative pace, style and drama to make a great movie. Strongly recommended.
If you know nothing of 70's movies this is a must read! Read more
On the one hand, Biskind holds up the 70s auteur as the only American filmmaker worth taking seriously and on the other, proceeds to tear each... Read more
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