Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 512 pages
- Published by: Simon & Schuster; 1st Touchstone Ed edition April 4, 1999
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0684857081
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0684857084
-
Book Dimensions:
8 x 5.5 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 1.1 pounds
Product Review
Not only is Peter Biskind's
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls the best book in recent memory on turn-of-the-'70s film, it is beyond question the best book we'll ever get on the subject. Why? Because once the big names who spilled the beans to Biskind find out that other people spilled an equally piquant quantity of beans, nobody will dare speak to another writer with such candor, humor, and venom again.
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
A former executive editor of Premiere on 1970s Hollywood.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
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.
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