Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll Generation saved Hollywood - Hardcover

Biskind, Peter

4.13

8,561 ratings by Goodreads

9780747536307: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll Generation saved Hollywood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747536309 ISBN 13: 9780747536307

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1998

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Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors, as well as producers, stars, studio executives, spouses and girlfriends, this is the full story of the crazy world the directors ruled. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn.

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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 candour, humour, 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-fuelled 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, Amazon.com

Review:

'If there is a better book about the inside of the film industry I'd like to see it' Sunday Times 'Biskind has delivered what will become the seminal account of one of the strangest, most exciting decades in American cinema history' Empire 'Thrilling history of the New Hollywood of the 1970s a must-read insider account of the film business' Independent 'Without question, the non-fiction book of the year that just happens to be brimming with snippets of very juicy gossip' The Times

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