Gods and Monsters: Thirty Years of Writing on Film and Culture from One of America's Most Incisive Writers

Peter Biskind

ISBN 10: 1560255455 / ISBN 13: 9781560255451

Published by Nation Books, 2004

About this Item

1st printing. 362pp. Inscribed & signed on title page by Peter Biskind. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in As New condition. "Here is Hollywood over the last three decades--the super freaks, lowlifes, charlatans and occasional geniuses who have left their bite marks on American culture, as refracted through the trajectory of Peter Biskind's career. Biskind began as a radical journalist and film critic, excavating the likes of Rocky and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot for their hidden political subtexts in small lefty rags. Now he can legitimately describe himself--as he does in his autobiographical introduction to this book--as a 'recovering celebrity journalist.' []The ghosts of McCarthyism and the blacklist haunt GODS AND MONSTERS as do the casualties of the counterculture and the New Hollywood. The story of Sue Mengers, the '70s 'super-agent' whose career went mysteriously south, is extraordinarily poignant, as is the example of Terrence Malick, whose light shone so brightly in the same period but then disappeared until 1997's The Thin Red Line. But at the heart of the book are the likes of Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford and Quentin Tarantino and uber-producers Don Simpson and Harvey Weinstein and their excess lifestyles, all of whom Biskind portrays in great Dickensian detail, charting how they have had a simultaneously strangulating and liberating effect on the industry." [publisher copy] "Of late the author of books on the movie industry, Biskind began his career in the 1960s, writing about the intersection of politics and cinema for small leftist journals. Hollywood's move away from substance in the 1980s and, presumably, the need to make a living led him to profiling celebrities for glossies like Vanity Fair and Premiere. His early work is represented in this collection by thoughtful essays on topics including anticommunism in director Elia Kazan's work, the espousal of anti-individualism in '50s sf movies, and the portrayal of blue-collar America in '70s films. Later entries, sketching such powerful Hollywood figures as directors Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, producer Don Simpson, and agents Charlie Feldman and Sue Mengers, are less distinctive but highly engaging. If these pieces collectively lack the impact of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, which many consider definitive on '70s New American Cinema and '90s indie powerhouse Miramax, respectively, they constitute a less straightforward depiction of the now three-decades-long decline of American cinema."--Gordon Flagg, Booklist. "Biskind is a magician at prying revealing yarns and juicy quotes out of his subjects . . . the resulting scenarios are deliciously tawdry."--San Francisco Chronicle. Pristine paperback w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding w/no creases in spine.

Seller Inventory # RUB3142

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Gods and Monsters: Thirty Years of Writing on Film and Culture from One of America's Most Incisive Writers
• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560255455
• ISBN 13: 9781560255451
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

The author of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood explores Hollywood since the 1970s, from the odd career of legendary director Terrence Malick to the latest work of Quentin Tarentino. Original.

Product Description

Gods and Monsters Biskind chronicles the cause and courses of Hollywood over the last three decades--the superfreaks, lowlifes, charlatans, and occasional geniuses who have left their bite mark on American culture.