Rating: 
Summary: I asked Coppola about it
Review: I was at the Niebaum-Coppola winery in Napa, CA in Spring, 2002; and Frances Ford Coppola was there receiving visitors in the wine bar. Most of the people were Midwesterners who wanted to sit on his lap and get a picture, or some similarly innane thing. I know that this would be my chance ot test him on this book. I sauntered up to him and asked him about the book, and asked if it was true. He gasped and said that it was all lies. He said that Biskind was a jerk and he "...merely took the one vice each of us had and blew it out of proportion." Thus, Coppola seemed to affirm the validity of the tales in Biskinds book. I have a tremendous admiration and respect for FFC, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to rib him a bit.
Rating: 
Summary: A great decade of filmmaking, or nasty, spiteful gossip?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A great decade of filmmaking, or nasty, spiteful gossip?
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: fun but annoying
Review: It's hard not to enjoy a book chock full of nasty gossip about famous people, but by the time you reach the end of Biskind's book, you may be as tired of the author as you are of the self-indulgent directors he profiles. The book is undeniably fun to read -- after all, who doesn't enjoy watching smug hippies with more pretension than talent self-destruct? But Biskind's writing is slap-dash at best. He often changes from last to first names even when referring to minor figures, causing the reader to return to earlier paragraphs to figure out exactly who is taking drugs with whom. Or who is sleeping with whom. Or backstabbing. Or stealing writing credits. Or attending Ho Chi Minh rallies. Etc. Biskind is almost as bad a film critic as he is a writer. He can't seem to tell the difference between truly dreadful films like Easy Rider and Shampoo (which deserve to be remembered, if at all, as cultural artifacts) from genuine achievements like The Last Picture Show or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He simply loves them all. All except Star Wars and Jaws, that is. In fact, Spielberg and Lucas come in for lots of gratuitous criticism simply for being more interested in telling stories than deconstructing genre -- or experimenting with drugs or smuggling Huey Newton into Cuba. In the end, Biskind never does resolve his fervor for the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll generation's work and politics from the undeniable evidence that their self-indulgence was ultimately ruinous. But there are so few books about film and the film industry that make for good popular reading, you simply have to make the best of what you get. We'll just have to wait for a book where the skill of the author is up to the fascinating subject.
Rating:
Summary: SHOW BIZ IS NOT BUSINESS
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Energizing and Electric View of Film in the '70s and Today
Review: Peter Biskind has created a tell-all of the '70s Hollywood scene that, while certainly not the gospel truth (as most recollections have been dated by time, drugs and venom), is about as juicy a portrait of the "last golden age of film" as we're likely to see. The principal actors, writers, directors, producers and executives are all portrayed, none sainted nor scandalized, but shown as flawed and incomplete people striving to create perfect cinema. Biased as it is in its depiction of the '70s as the last great age of Hollywood before Lucas, Spielberg and the film school whiz kids broke box office records and forced film to become a billion-dollar business, "Easy Riders" is written with passion for its material and conviction in its opinions. While it can be argued that film has always been a business, it's generally noted that the "Jaws" and "Star Wars" blockbuster era has eroded the quality of filmmaking in favor of "high concept," lowbrow films that appeal to the widest demographic and lend themselves easily to sequels, cross-marketing and franchise-building. Gone are the days when the studios seemed to care about the stories they were telling as much as the profits they could see, once those numbers were driven into the heretofore-unseen stratosphere of $100 million and above. For those who long for a day when films seemed to be "about" something, when a band of filmmakers defied the studios to create dark, gritty pictures that hit the audience harder than they'd been hit before; for people who get a kick out of the backstabbing, lies and deceit inherent in any real-life soap opera -- which Hollywood excels at second only to Capitol Hill, but with more attractive people -- or for those who love film in general, this book is a must-read.
Rating:
Summary: A Slice of Life
Review: Six years and 80-some reviews later, there's no need to repeat many of the points made previously. Two important aspects, however, have been generally overlooked. Personalities aside, the book presents an excellent insight into the shifting power relations between film producers, both independent and studio-based, and film directors, craftsmen traditionally subservient to the producers and money end of production. For a brief period, as Biskind's book shows, these relations were totally muddied or in some cases reversed. Thus, a degree of artistic freedom opened up for a number of aspiring auteurs (Hopper, Altman, Friedkin, Coppola, et.al.), beyond the imagination of such illustrious predecessors as Hawks, Welles, Ford, et. al. In that sense, the book should be of special interest to movie historians, especially those interested in the business side of the industry. Moreover, this shift reflects larger dynamics working their way through the culture as a whole from roughly 1966 to 1975, the insurgent period triggered by the Vietnam war. This alone should be of interest to the broader category of cultural historians. Though the cross-cutting between personalities does get confusing, the interplay among producers like Bert Schneider and directors like Dennis Hopper or between Bob Evans and Francis Ford Coppola provides a real feel of what it was like to be part of the shift and of the New Hollywood.
The book also raises the interesting question of how wisdom relates to art. One respected definition of wisdom associates the idea with knowing one's limits and respecting them. Folly occurs when this sense of limits is ignored, resulting in either individual or collective excess and eventual destruction. On the other hand, art often demands that limits be challenged in pursuit of inspiration, personal muse, or some such artistic vision. Drugs, including alcohol, are often looked at as a way of breaking down personal limits. Thus, in simplified form, a basic tension exists between the requirements of wisdom and those of art. Biskind's book offers some pretty clear object lessons on what happens to artistic ambition once all notion of personal limitation is cast aside. Dennis Hopper is merely the clearest, but not the only example. Towne, Bogdanovich, Coppola, and others face a loss of perspective either temporarily or permanently. Egoism takes over, and it becomes no longer possible to separate the demands of vision from those of rampant self-importance. Our culture tends to romanticize the "crazy" artist, but not the "wise" one who is usually much less colorful but understands the value of intelligent restraint. In this respect, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" presents a cautionary tale to those who would blindly follow the former.
Biskind's book may not be a perfect document of the time, but it does remain a highly suggestive one.
Rating: 
Summary: We blew it Billy
Review: This appropriately titled expose`places both the praise and blame for the glorious Hollywood renaissance on the brilliant, creative and fearless but ultimately selfish, self absorbed, debauched and decadent 60's generation that burned themselves out before they really could build a lasting empire. To quote Peter Fonda's drug addled psuedo-anti-hero in the beautifully misshapen but stunningly and ironically prophetic "Easy Rider": "We blew it Billy". Biskind does much to certainly promote the cult of the most overrated generation in history. But he does so by articulating and defending his point in a fast paced entertaining manner. Filling his pages with gleefully geeky tidbits of juicy bad behavior, Biskind edifys his position by balancing praise with vicious criticism. He calls the players all on the carpet and takes them to task for burning out in their own pathetic yet arrogant fires of ego-centric excess while managing to celebrate their true works of ground breaking film art. Biskind appropriately bookends his journey with the equally self centered and no less destructive Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's brilliant film "Raging Bull". Biskind makes a fascinating point that Wyatt and Jake form a symbollic summation of a decade that could have been. "Easy Riders and Ragin Bulls" pulls few punches and makes for an excellent summer read for anyone interested in Hollywood History.
Rating:
Summary: Scandalously fascinating insight into 70s Hollywood....
Review: This book is a terrific read: an amazingly revealing insight into the workings of the Hollywood machine and a convincing explanation of why the film industry is the way it is today. Fascinating for any film fan but truly essential for those particularly interested in Coppola, Scorcese, Altman and the other enfants terribles of the 70s. I learned more than I ever thought I would about the strange habits, curious peccadilloes and psychological frailties of these legendary directors and producers. Seminal figures such as Dennis Hopper, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich and Scorsese all come across as frighteningly deranged, emphasising the fine line that separates genius from insanity - and many of these characters clearly ended up on the wrong side of the divide. One of Biskind's great strengths is that he seeks to portray all sides of the story, and it's hard not to believe the majority of what is reported simply for the fact that if wasn't true you can bet your life that lawsuits would have stopped publication in its tracks. The spirit of the times engendered by the rise of the anti-Vietnam, hippy counterculture, generated a climate where a new form of creativity was allowed to enter the mainstream for the first time. This produced a fabulous glut of films - Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, The Deerhunter, Star Wars, MASH and dozens of others. Biskind's belief is that the rise of the super director destroyed this astounding period in Hollywood history - egos and pay checks became so over inflated that eventually the studios realised that they had to seize back control. As a result the industry more or less stopped producing original pictures and opted for the safe bet of formulaic blockbusters which were more likely to draw big crowds - through excessive marketing and merchandising campaigns and extravagant special effects. Biskind's style is compelling and the anectdotal evidence at times hilarious, at others horrific (Peter Bogdanovich's fall from grace is particularly gruesome). 'Easy Riders Raging Bulls' must be one of the best books yet written about Hollywood and one of the best non-fiction books I have read in many years.
Rating:
Summary: Film History the way it should be written
Review: This isn't one of those dry film school books about cinema movements in the larger context of society. Peter Biskind's EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS is a nonstop race through the lives of the young and prominent 1970s filmmakers. Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Bogdanovich, among others are targeted for the often hilarious and sometimes biting look at their early lives. He spares no one.
It's interesting to see Spielberg portrayed as a self-conscious young filmmaker who got a lot of help on JAWS that he no longer discusses. Biskind says that it's become legend that Spielberg had so much trouble with the shark mechanism that he kept it out of the film until the third act. Biskind reports that Spielberg actually shot a lot of shark footage for the whole movie and it was editor, Verna Fields that left it on the floor because she thought it looked ridiculous. Spielberg didn't have enough power back then to collaborate with an editor and the Studio trusted her and not him to bring the movie together. Spielberg was so sure he had a flop before the release that he was trying to get the job directing "The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings."
Jaws is just one example of how the Biskind reminds the reader film is a collaborative medium. Auteur theories and movie reviewers want to heap praise and blame on the director, but so much of what is seen in a movie is the result of someone else.
For example, Today's discussion about the great DeNiro-Scorsese collaborations weren't designed the way people are led to believe. It was Robert DeNiro that brought RAGING BULL to Scorsese and begged him to direct it. Marty couldn't see a movie there and showed no interest. It wasn't until a script was written that Marty came aboard.
Taxi Driver was written by Paul Scharader and didn't much want Marty to direct it, but eventually relented when the studio stepped in. Further, Marty wanted Kietel for the lead not DeNiro, but the studio insisted on Bobby who was becoming a hot property after the GODFATHER Part II.
The book is also full of Warren Beatty's charm with Studio Heads, Peter Bogdanovich's meteoric rise and fall, Coppola's megalomania, Roman Polanski's ego and Jack Nicholson's sudden stardom. In short, the book is a no apologies look at the people we now consider film legends and has beens.
|
