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Biskind did hundreds 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Warren Beatty may well have been the first man to kiss Jack Warner's feet, certainly the last. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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5.0 out of 5 stars
SHOW BIZ IS NOT BUSINESS,
By
This review is from: Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Paperback)
Like Bob Evans' "The Kid Stars In the Picture", "Swimming With Sharks", and Bob Altman's "The Player", Peter Biskind's book is one of the best and most exemplary works describing this crazy "business" called Hollywood.It is very, very engaging and informative. What the book centers on are two things, mainly, which is the growth of new talent coming out of the four big film schools of the 1960s (USC, UCLA, NYU, Columbia) and the development of the blockbuster, which eventually degraded character development as the staple of winning screen formula. Descriptions of parties at Margo Kidder's Malibu beach pad are awesome. Here all the young Turks gathered - Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Paul Schraeder, Francis Ford Coppola, Marty Scorsese, etc. These SC, UCLA and NYU minds formulated "The Godfather", "Star Wars", "Apocalypse", "Taxi Driver", "Jaws" and so many others. While the sex and drugs got out of hand at Margo's, John Milius would repair to the beach and fire his weapon. Considered the best and the brightest of all of them coming out of SC, Milius was the lone conservative, who tried to stay clean. He would write great movies like "Dirty Harry" and "Apocalypse", and direct "Red Dawn" and "The Wind and the Lion". His stuff is just fantastic, but he never went on to the fame of his contemporaries. Eventually, blockbusters like "Jaws" and "Star Wars" contributed to the so-called "cartoonization" of Hollywood. The comparison of psychology, dialogue, structure and symbolism as seen in "Marathon Man" and "Chinatown" are replaced by graphics, as seen in "Star Wars", or by a giant mechanized shark. The end of the era is the failure of "Heaven's Gate", which brings down its studio and leads eventually to the rise of independent films. This book tells the story of the integral American art form in all its glory and ugliness.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A great decade of filmmaking, or nasty, spiteful gossip?,
By Cranky Pants (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Paperback)
I'm very puzzled by the purpose and intent of this book. The author seems to have a genuine appreciation for the revolution in extraordinary, personal filmmaking in American film in the 1970s. Yet the book itself is filled with the nastiest, pettiest, disgusting portrayals of the remarkable filmmakers, writers, actors, and cinematographers who made those films. The basis of the entire book appears to be extensive interviews with hundreds of people in the industry -- all of whom have personal vendettas and scores to settle (because they are all ex-husbands, ex-wives, ex-lovers, or bitter competitors). The result is that the portrayal of every director, producer, filmmaker, and actor is that of a loathsome, arrogant, egotistical, infantile monster. Personally, it was no pleasure for me to see Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Terry Malick, and dozens of others presented as inhuman, venal, insane, and vicious. Some of the gossip is no doubt true, and I imagine the world of producing and making movies is quite unpleasant. But there is no balance, or insight, to counter the ugly gossip that Biskind exclusively relies upon. Most surprisingly of all, there is no appreciation of the greatness, the sensitivity, the richness of the films that were made. At the very least, the book would have been much more fascinating if Biskind demonstrated how out of all the Hollywood self-indulgence, back-biting, arrogance, and egotism arose the sensitive, powerful, complex, humane, and moving, and often funny works of art, like The Godfather films, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Chinatown, Cabaret, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Days of Heaven, Five Easy Pieces, Bonnie & Clyde, Reds, The Last Picture Show, and The Deer Hunter. There is virtually no discussion about how, despite the ways in which the people who worked on these films appeared to be out of control, half-insane on drugs, climbing over each other's backs, betraying friends, lovers, husbands and wives, the end result was films of great beauty. Nor is there any sense of what any of the subjects of the book brought to the films they made, or what special talents or visions they may have had. The subject matter, and the unrelenting gossip and nasty stories, make for very engaging reading, I'll admit -- but I wanted to take a shower when I had finished the book. This is NOT the book that the filmmakers of the nineteen-seventies deserve.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gossipy look at 70's Hollywood,
By Justin Harris (Kansai, Japan) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Paperback)
While Easy Riders/Raging Bulls is a very interesting book, and does tend to keep you turning the next page, it may not appeal to everyone. Someone looking for an in-depth analysis of the film industry in the 70`s may be a little disappointed. Biskind`s main point is that a new group of directors temporarily destroyed, or at least disrupted, the Hollywood studio system of the previous decades, and were able to make a handful of classic movies in the process. They then basically handed the power back to the studios in the 80`s due to overblown egos and budgets to match. There does tend to be a lot of gossip-like material in it and the detail sometimes verges on lurid.. So, if you want to know the various girlfriends of some director, look no further. A little more technical information here and there might have been nice to sate the film student readership. However, that`s not what this book is about. It really is a good indication of the atmosphere of Hollywood in the 70`s and does show up some of these big names to be quite un-likeable characters. And that is quite an understatement. You may find yourself never wanting to watch some of these directors' movies again, based only on their personalities.
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