Rating: 
Summary: Scandal Sheet
Review: Considering Biskind was, according to his bio, an editor at both Premiere and American Film, this book is disappointingly short on intelligent film analysis and grossly long on sexual histories, drug exploits, and mean gossip. The aesthetic dimension is virtually ignored other than general remarks about critical reception of the various films discussed, but the behavior of the directors (on and off set) is plumbed. Everyone comes out looking very ugly. So what? If you're looking for gossip and a few interesting anecdotes, this is for you. Good film or cultural history it ain't. The chronology is confusing, the narrative very loose, the spirit truly Hollywood scandal sheet. Too bad, because it could have been much more intelligent given the author's obvious access to sources. The author's focus makes him seem every bit as repellent as the directors he sketches.
Rating: 
Summary: A real hatchet job and an ugly book...
Review: While this book details the lives and careers of some of the hottest Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s it does so with a very sharp hatchet. Basically, to sum up Biskind's book, all of these directors--Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola, Altman, Lucas--are ugly people who only made good films accidentally, fearing they would be fired the whole time they made them. This book is completely shameless and absolutely embarassing to read. It is a disgrace to everyone it purports to tell the story of. Biskind picks the most crash-and-burn directors and really goes to work.
Rating: 
Summary: GIVE A THING A NAME AND IT WILL HAPPEN
Review: This book is a masterpiece! Peter Biskind is a formidable storyteller. This book is fun to read, it is intelligent. I can recommend this book even to the people who are not interested in books about Hollywood and the movies. This book reads like a series of short.stories, which in the end result in a great novel. Very intelligent, very funny, thrilling-Biskind is a genius.
Rating:
Summary: FASCINATING BUT DEPRESSING
Review: As an actor who's too late to have been part of the great decade in American filmmaking - the 70's, this book is fascinating to see the stories behind all the great films of this decade.However, it's also a real downer because it seems everyone involved in these great films is either a jerk or lucky or both. Nobody seems to have any talent or integrity, and you might say well, hey, it's Hollywood, what did you expect? Well, my guess is there's probably more integrity and talent in Hollywood than this book suggests. It portrays Paul Schrader as a social outcast who can't get laid, Martin Scorsese as a scared little boy from New York, Dennis Hopper as a coked-up wife-beater etc., and while there may be some truth to this, there's also the other side of them - the talented artist side, which for better or worse, Biskind avoids exploring.
Rating:
Summary: A nasty, mean-spirited piece of work
Review: If, as Peter Biskind contends, the generation of Hollywood directors who became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s is perhaps the most dynamic in film history, he does little to illustrate his thesis. Instead, he takes the easy route and records 436 pages of gossip, rumor, innuendo, calumny and character assassination. He seems to have uncovered every stone and plumbed all depths to detail any illegal substance that each of the directors has ever consumed, every embarrassing or humiliating sexual liaison, and every example of pompous, self-aggrandizing behavior in which they've ever engaged. It isn't so much that I doubt the veracity of Biskind's tales, but the book seems ridiculously skewed. If we are to belive the writer, neither Martin Scorsese nor Francis Ford Coppola, nor George Lucas nor Steven Spielberg, nor Peter Bogdanovich nor Robert Altman, has ever done an unselfish deed or even said a kind word to another human being, has ever treated any colleague or loved one with anything but sadism. They have only one side - the ugly one. Imagine, reader, someone coming up with a portrait of you based on only the very worst, most embarrassing moments of your life, the mistakes you have made, and you will get a pretty good idea of how Biskind paints these directors. It is a nasty, mean-spirited piece of work. Biskind does everything he can to belittle their accomplishments, even going so far as to indicate that some of their greatest films - such as "The Godfather" and "Jaws" - were somehow accidents, completed by sheer luck, despite the rank ineptitude of the filmmakers. This is all very suspect coming from a man whose greatest achievement in life is an editorial position on a gushy, gossipy fan magazine. It would appear that he has nothing but hatred for his subjects. One wonders why; I suspect it is jealousy. I gave the book one star because, in fact, it is hard to put down. However, it's like one of those gargantuan bags of popcorn you can buy in movie theatres. When you are finished with it you will have the commensurate problems of malnutrition and digestion.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining but pretentious!
Review: While I enjoyed Peter Biskind's insight on Hollywood in the 70s, I found his theme of how the era's excesses deginerated into the blockbuster era of the 80s and 90s pretentious. I also noticed that he tends to criticize and generalize (in a negative fashion) Hollywood film eras other than the 1970s. Why can't people admit that movies are first and foremost a source of entertainment? Just about every Hollywood era from the silent period of the 1910s and 20s, through the so-called "Golden Age" of the 30s and 40s, the studio system's decline of the 50s and 60s, the "New Hollywood" period of the late 60s and 70s, to the present Blockbuster Age, has produced lousy, mediocre and great films. It's too bad that people like Biskind and others who advocate certain periods in Hollywood cannot see this.
Rating: 
Summary: As messy and fascinating as the movie decade it covers
Review: Biskind is not a terribly coherent writer; this book could've used some serious editing, or at the very least, a few more drafts before being published. This book also doesn't seem to have much point; it was like Biskind was trying to discover what he wanted to write about as he went along. Is it an expose? A commentary? A bunch items of gossip strung together? All of the above? I vote for that last, but more or less by default. Though I don't share Biskind's passion for many of the movies he considers masterpieces, I give him credit for not allowing his obvious (and, if even half the stories reported here are true, well-earned) contempt for the directors and actors he writes about to cloud his admiration for their films. Also, his descriptions of Amy Irving, Peter Bogdanovich, and especially Dennis Hopper showed me that the gut dislike I've always felt for them wasn't baseless after all. It has become commonplace to blame George Lucas (and to a lesser extent, Steven Spielberg) for "wrecking" the very revolution in movies which gave them birth by producing "Jaws" and "Star Wars," which turned studios into money machines. While there is probably some truth to that, it fails to put the "movie revolution" of the 1970s in its proper context. All throughout movie history there have been a few true masterpieces, but by and large movies have been so much junk, and studios have ALWAYS been more interested in making money than in turning out quality products. The 1970s were an aberration, and I don't think it is overly cynical to think the trend of quality movies would have died anyway, though maybe not as quickly. The excesses of the gifted directors Biskind discusses seems to me to be a powerful argument for that. Blast Spielberg and Lucas all you want; they at least kept their wits (and their mutual friendship) about them, eschewing the appalling behavior of their fellow movie revolutionaries.
Rating:
Summary: Ode to a great time in movies
Review: Hollywood produced some great movies in the 70s. Nowadays, most of its production seems aimed at the lowest common denominator, with occasional hints of what used to be from the independents and in studio prestige projects. Biskind's excellent and eminently readable study shows just how that situation came about, how visionary directors like Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and Ashby were either shunted off into the sidelines (often through their own doing) or forced to sell out to the system. A perfect introduction to the modern state of Hollywood.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, buy it: it's a blast
Review: The storm of creativity that blew through Hollywood in the seventies is brilliantly chronicled here, as is the the wreckage it caused in the lives of those who were a part of it. If you want the full, messy, vicious story of how the madness of Hopper, the megalomania of Coppola, the hubris of Bogdanovich and Friedkin and the populist genius of Lucas and Spielberg helped create the brief flowering of a Directors' Cinema in America, Biskind tells it in awesome detail, occasionally stepping aside from his rich narrative to pass acute judgement on the gifts and failings of the legendary filmmakers and the works they left. An epic piece of writing and a fascinating read, full of insights into the destructive nature of the creative process in Hollywood. A massive, brilliant book. I've just finished it, and I wish I hadn't.
Rating:
Summary: Raging bulls easy riders
Review: This has to be the worst book I have read in years, do not beleive the cover reviewers as they have clearly not read the whole book.
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