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.
My thoughts on Easy Riders, Raging Bulls can be summarized by two comparisons:1. Game Change: Both books let gossip get in the way of solid storytelling. Game Change would give paragraphs of great accounts of political strategy (which is right in my wheelhouse) then get sidetracked with anecdotes of how Elizabeth Edwards is a bitch, John Edwards is a dandy, and what Hilary Clinton wore at a particular campaign event. Not all of it was completely useless, and some of it was quite fun, but it cheapened the value of the work in my mind. Biskind's use of gossip is a bit more justifiable. One of the main themes of the book is the hubristic rise and fall of a generation of filmakers that rose to prominence in the '70s. Tales of personal degradation fit into this. And after all, it is Hollywood. And if you want to read a tabloid-like account of Tinsel Town in the '70s, I can recommend this. But I was expecting, and Biskind tries to deliver, something different. Which brings us to the second comparison....2. Pictures at a Revolution: This comparison is unfair, Pictures is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, but the comparison begs to be made. The two books cover many of the same themes and feature many of the same figures and films. And Pictures at a Revolution is better in every single way. Pictures isn't just about how movies changed, its about how very root understandings of American culture changed and the effect the two revolutions had on each other. It's a great story and a hella good read. Mark Harris gives well-known celebrities like Warren Beatty, Sidney Poitier, Mike Nichols and Rex Harrison into complex, and (sometimes) sympathetic characters. In contrast, Biskind's portraits resemble stereotypical caricatures. Beatty likes to fuck alot. Gee, that Altman guy sure is surely. Wow, Francis Ford Coppola is a prima donna. Who would've thought George Lucas was so antisocial?Like Game Change this information can be intriguing and often fun.But it gets in the way of the movies. Biskind doesn't do a great job of providing film analysis. I think good writing about film should be like a great commentary track on DVDs. Yeah, I like amusing anecdotes, but I want to hear about the film. Harris writes about the movies, Biskind writes about people who makes the movies and the fucked up shit they do. But this is supposed to be a review of Easy Rider, Raging Bull, so back on topic. Two things in it's defense in light of the comparison: (1) Biskind doesn't share identical goals with Mark Harris; and (2) and Easy Rider, Ring Bull's scope is (kinda) broader than Pictures.' Biskind succeeds at certain levels. He tells an entertaining story about a group of young, extremely creative people whoe were given the power to create and how they eventually self-imploded. But he doesn't saying much of any significance about the films of the '70s, which is why I picked up the book in the first place.
What do You think about Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1999)?
This book is interesting, but incredibly problematic as well. It takes three approaches when discussing the films, filmmakers, and filmmaking business of the 1970s: the art, the business, and the personal. Unfortunately, far too much time is spent on the personal. I don't care who was sleeping with who or who was jealous of who or any of that nonsense, unless it somehow affected the business or the art.What's more, Biskind's agenda here seems to be to make these filmmakers - Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Ashby, Altman, and others -- all look like spoiled lunatics. And while I'm sure there's some truth to the anecdotes Biskind relates, if everyone in the business was as emotionally arrested and immature as Biskind makes them out to be, there's no way any of these people would have been able to literally feed themselves, much less make great art. I don't know if Biskind is suffering from the jealousy he accuses his subjects of embodying and so is trying to tear them down, or if he's just trying to humanize his subjects and make them more relatable, but either way, it makes for a whiny, indulgent book.There are interesting stories here, when Biskind sticks to the business and the art side of things, and for someone like me, who was relatively unfamiliar with this period in American film history, the book was a good general primer on this time and these films & filmmakers. A good starting point, in other words. I'm now more equipped than I was to (a) seek out some of these films, and (b) read the essays and critiques of the films and this era that have no doubt been written by more mature, serious-minded writers than Peter Biskind.
—Matthew Bowers
An interesting read, however it was different book than I was expecting. It has been a few years since I have read "Down & Dirty Pictures," by Biskind, and forgot about my gripes with that book, which is really all my fault.The worst parts of the book read like TMZ from the seventies, in which you find out who banged who, who did what drug, and why this person is an asshole. I understand the fascination of that, but I was hoping to read more about the actual films that were created. When this occurs, I found myself really loving the book, because I never knew the weird history of "Easy Rider," (or to that extent, the history of BBS despite owning the boxset of their films), or that George Lucas could have directed Apocalypse Now!, just to name two examples. Also, Woody Allen is curiously absent from this book. I understand why he wasn't a focus, mostly because he doesn't really fit into the narrative that Biskind was trying to create (New Hollywood ate itself, and only a few directors survived once they learned to play nice with the studios), but he would have been a great counterpoint to New Hollywood.
—Jacob
An insider look at Hollywood and film-making in the 1970's, with a particular emphasis on the major directors and producers of the era, it's a vicious and nasty piece of work. The major players are directors like Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Altman, Friedkin, Ashby, Rafelson, and more. Warren Beatty, Hopper, Nicholson, Bob Evans, Bert Schneider are also major players and the books spares none of them.It's particularly interesting to follow the reactions of these guys as they claw their way out of the old school studio systems of Hollywood to get to make their own pictures their own way and produce what they felt were great works of art and tried to collect critical raves. With success came greater power and control and was met with a raging indulgence in excess, resulting in the destruction of much of what they fought for.Drugs and sex are strewn all over this book, along with raging paranoia, mental illness, massive egotism, and incredibly bad behavior by some pretty crappy people. Some of them seem to have realized their failures and flaws, others not so much. The stench of arrogance and egotism still reeks off a lot of these guys (it's almost entirely a book about men; there were almost no female directors, writers or producers back then), especially when they talk about film today.It's a fascinating book. I'm not sure Biskind really understood just exactly what his book uncovered here; he seems too comfortable accepting the belief that the studios seized power back from the directors and "artists" after seeing the money available from blockbusters in a natural reaction to the opportunity and pushing them out to put control back at the top. It's not wrong exactly, but after illustrating how the raging egotism, drug abuse, paranoia, etc. from some of these guys crashed movie after movie with cost overruns and inability to overcome their personal demons to complete the work, it seems clear that the studios also took control back from the directors because most of these guys couldn't handle the responsibility of having that level of power and control.These guys destroyed themselves for the most part, leaving behind a legacy of occasionally brilliant film-making and wasted opportunities and talent.
—Josh
