Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

I like Biskind's style, actually. Fun.

Indeed

wow yeah, you pretty much hit it on the head there. haha uh, i don't have much to add to that - i think the immense readability of the book was in how all the wonderful, cartoonishly mean gossipping colluded to create a kind of saddo fractal, one that you could very easily imagine yourself having been a part of. tho PB is sort of an overbearing prick at times (haha uh, biskind not bogdanovich) (ok, both of them). also when I read it I was still in my gargantuan movie-nerd phase, which made all the off-color anecdotes about Pauline Kael somehow thrilling to me.

What is it?

You should also try The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans. More trashy seventies excess, from a different point of view.

I only saw the movie version of Evans' life. Does he acknowledge in the book that Ali MacGraw couldn't act her ass out of a paper bag?

Pauline Kael was a fine writer with dubious taste (eg, Brian De Palma = giant).

Fuck that! Poor Polly Platt.

otm, otm, otm

Fuck that! Poor Polly Platt.

otm

otm

the Miramax book is a sensational followup about the rise of modern indie film.

Hollywood Babylon, another classic as is "The Kid Stays In the Picture." Kid was also made into a very entertaining documentary with Evans tellling the story.

Also check out "High Concept" which follows Don Simpson's coke-fueled career.

The dish in "You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again" is also pretty good. As is "You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again" and it's various permutations ("Make Love" details the sexual exploits of call girls and the celebs that they sleep with.)

Care to relate? I love Wilder's best stuff, but his famed rant against "showy" camera movement points up that he was visually conservative.

Classic Era directors (and their heirs) should at least appreciate Bogdanovich and Scorsese keeping their names and work in circulation ... I don't see Michael Bay and Brett Ratner doing that.

a) kind of true, though frankly I'd say it is the making of the films in ERRB that is more interesting (and more of a focus) rather than the films themselves.

b) Very much true--but that's sort of the point of the book, that the indie film game is less renegade than it is marketed.

this book is loltastic

weird that I have never even heard of Davis' "Hearts and Minds" before

this is an extra 'sex and drugs' on the dvd of the doc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu01ftM9seE

also along similar lines is the amazing story of Heaven's Gate which is also on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdcRiPLp4oU

Hopper seems like such a monster - and with a limited amount of significant achievements to show for it too (I'm not really that fond of Easy Rider, but he's good in Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet)

x-post

and River's Edge (maybe his best role)

schrader's my favorite monster in the book

and River's Edge (maybe his best role)

― Gene Shalit in a Child's Sailor Hat (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 27 September 2010 17:48

I had forgotten about that film, Hopper is excellent in it, yes.

I picked this up in a used bookstore in Whitby a month or so ago, having meant to read it for quite a while. I enjoyed it as much as everyones else seems to have, and it's inspired me to pick up a bunch of DVDs of these guys films, a lot of which are really good, and a lot of which I haven't seen in 10-15 years. Most of the people in it come across as being really dislikeable, Warren Beatty perhaps the worst for me at least.

"Hopper seems like such a monster - and with a limited amount of significant achievements to show for it too (I'm not really that fond of Easy Rider, but he's good in Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet)"

So much great Hopper stuff. Tracks, Out of the Blue, The American Friend. He's pretty off-the-wall though obv.

yeah Out of the Blue is pretty good, forgot about that one

man the Lucas/Star Wars stuff in this book is hilarious

I really love the story about Scorsese hanging out at the beach with Spielberg etc, and how much he hated being at the beach & all of his weird hangups (details are hazy & I can't find the quote)

yeah he hated the water cuz there were "dangerous things" in it

*cue Jaws score*

also this books totally makes me feel sorry for any women working in the film industry (including friends of mine)

Aha! I love Google Books for this very reason...

It's during the time that Kidder, Depalma, Milius, Dreyfuss and all those guys were hanging out at the Nicholas Beach house that Kidder was renting in the early 70's.

Marty and Sandy would make the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway almost eveyr weekend. Sandy wasn’t crazy about going, but Marty said it was important for his career. Nicholas Beach was isolated; the only rules were the ones they made for themselves. Like, if you wanted to be cool, and of course everybody did, you had to go skinny-dipping, which was especially hard on Marty, because the cortisone he took for his asthma made his body blow up. He wouldn’t even go near the water, sat on the sand fully dressed. Spielberg, who didn’t much like the water himself would say, “Cmon, let’s go in the ocean.”
“No, no no, it’s very bad, it’s evil. There’s things out there you don’t even want to know about.”
“You afraid of jellyfish? There’s no jellyfish out there.”
“No, no, no, things with teeth.” He paused, added, “I don’t do water.”

I don't do water.

Classic Scorsese.

Cocaine and water don't mix, guys.

...words which he'd more or less hand over to Harvey Keitel's character in Mean Streets.

RIP Arthur Penn

This thread inspired me to add the documentary to my Netflix queue, I should be getting it in the mail today.

I read this book and the Miramax book. The Miramax one was definitley weaker because of the narrow focus. I got really sick of the whole
"hey, look at what an asshole Harvey Weinstein is" angle. That point was clear from the beginning and didn't need to be repeated over and over.

yeah Arthur Penn :(

Easy Riders Raging Bulls is one of my favorite books ever. So entertaining.

The Miramax one was definitley weaker because of the narrow focus. I got really sick of the whole "hey, look at what an asshole Harvey Weinstein is" angle. That point was clear from the beginning and didn't need to be repeated over and over.

^This, plus the overemphasis on business and money. I mean, yeah I get it, that's what it was/is all about, but still.

More scandal!

Biskind's insistence that the seventies were some golden age got tiresome too.

yeah it isn't even really supported by his own citations/reviews of the 70s films covered!

Is Heaven's Gate really that bad...?

all the schrader stuff about making cat people is kinda lol but mostly sad, he falls in deep calvinist love w/ nastassja kinski, she breaks up w/ him when filming wraps, then he loses his mind she's like "calm down I sleep with all my directors no biggie", poor guy was so outta his league

had never heard of this Dorothy Stratten thing that was the real o_0 HOLY SHIT moment of this book for me

there was a whole movie made about it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_80

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/ah_love.jpg

I know and I had heard of Star 80 cuz I'm a big Fosse fan but I just never mentally connected it to Bogdanovich

"neo-gay phase"

Peter Bogdanovich wrote a book about Stratten titled The Killing of the Unicorn (1984). Four years later at age forty-nine he married Stratten's sister Louise, who was twenty. Bogdanovich had paid for Louise's private school and modeling classes following Stratten's death.[6] They divorced in 2001 after thirteen years of marriage.

o_O

I don't know if I'd marry an ascot-wearing Orson Welles groupie who called my sister a unicorn.

No, that does not seem like a wise life plan.

I am fighting the temptation to change my screename to Paul Schrader's neo-gay phase.

might wanna go with "I'd marry an ascot-wearing Orson Welles groupie who called my sister a unicorn"

paul schrader's neo-mormon phase

he was trying to marry two women after all

Dorothy Stratten's Neo-Unicorn Phase

"there was a whole movie made about it"

Admittedly Fosse was forbidden from actually using Bogdanovich's name (and omits all the insane stuff Bogdanovich did AFTERWARDS.)

fosse should've cast schrader in the bogdanovich role

star 80 is kind of a genuinely upsetting movie

just finished the book... Woody Allen seems like the elephant in the room re: this book. he's only tangentially mentioned, but then at the end there's kind of a bombshell quote from Coppola about how Allen has the career he wished he did - writing his own scripts, making the movies himself, then moving on to the next one

Star 80 is amazing, my second fav Fosse after All That Jazz.

star 80 is kind of a genuinely upsetting movie

I saw it years and years ago on cable and it was very unsettling.

using the actual murder scene as a location = waht

yeah, i mean, i think it's a successful movie in doing what it wants to do, but i don't need to see it again. nightmarish.

Scorsese OTM about the beach btw. It's for disgusting savages only.

The whole story w dorothy stratten is genuinely horrible and distressing to contemplate.

yeah I thought I was kinda inured to Hollywood excesses while reading this book. Yeah yeah sexist jerkiness, loads of drugs, ooh someone waved a gun around, etc. and then getting to the Stratten bit where Biskind matter-of-factly describes her being shot by her boyfriend, who then proceeded to fuck her corpse prior to blowing his own head off was like being hit by a freight train - I was not expecting it

eric roberts is so good in star 80

Most of the people in it come across as being really dislikeable, Warren Beatty perhaps the worst for me at least.
i don't remember warren beatty coming off in the book as being so dislikeable, but then again it's been several years since i read it. mostly i just remember the descriptions of him and robert towne being bff's and having late night telephone conversations in hushed voices

in fact, i don't know if most of the ppl in the book come across so much as dislikeable, as much as just exaggeratedly neurotic. everyone in the book seems to have huge swathes of fucked-upness in their personalities, commensurate with their level of genius.

What's the Bogdanovich connection to Star 80 / Stratten?

so did anyone read the biskind beatty bio?

"What's the Bogdanovich connection to Star 80 / Stratten?"

He's the creepy dude who dated Stratten after the Eric Roberts-guy (who then killed and raped her) and then he refused to allow his name to be used for the film Star 80 and then he wrote a creepy book about her and then he married her younger sister and had her get plastic surgery to look more like Stratten and then they divorced. So he's pretty integral to both.

I don't know if I'd marry an ascot-wearing Orson Welles groupie who called my sister a unicorn.

^^ i love this post so much

the Weinstein book's crap. what would have made half a chapter in Easy Riders is strung out for 400 pages. i could barely believe it was the same guy who wrote it.
whoever edited the thing wants shooting.

Biskind treated the Miramax book like he was shooting Sorcerer or some shit.

He's the creepy dude who dated Stratten after the Eric Roberts-guy

I guess he was played by Roger Rees in the movie? I'm struggling to remember this, as I just watched that about a year ago.

Yes it's Roger Rees in the movie.

Rees was all wrong for Bogdanovich. Rees is sort of Merchant-Ivory--the rich-guy twit he played on Cheers suited him. Bogdanovich is a voluble blowhard who sees himself as the natural heir to every cigar-chomping auteur of a previous era (ditto Toback, ditto Milius). I'm not sure who would be good for Bogdanovich.

<3 this thread. I'm going to read the book again. I need frolick in the fucked-upness of it all.

Bogdanovich...ugh. No words. As if I didn't already find him crepey enough

Schraeder making his dancer girlfriend go in for repeat abortions, the bottom falling out when he makes her abort the twins she was carrying...

Him, Bogdanovich, you look them all up on imdb, and there they still are, rich and happy and old.

If they ever did make a movie of ERRB, I'd demand a segue going from the guy who died under a gas mask full of ether to Darth Vader storming down a galactic hallway.

i'm trying to remember if the last bogdanovich movie i saw (and is likely to remain such) is the pete rose movie (can't remember what it's called but my guess is 'hustle')(what made espn stop making those tv movies? some exec move on? the last i can remember is bronx is burning) or the one about thomas ince's death.

Schraeder making his dancer girlfriend go in for repeat abortions, the bottom falling out when he makes her abort the twins she was carrying...

that was Friedkin, IIRC

You're right.

no one is right or wrong here - it's all a matter of perspective

Friedkin was pretty ott...those stories from The Exorcist of throwing Burstyn against the wall over and over again were pretty O_O....but then again he is just kind of O_O in general. "Hobbies: sadism, paranoia."

"Rees was all wrong for Bogdanovich."

I'm sure this was an intentional lawsuit avoiding choice.

Friedkin was at MoMA yesterday talking about The Exorcist. Waiting for reports.

You guys remember what Billy Wilder said about Bogdanovich, maybe it is in this book I forget.

no what

"It isn't true that Hollywood is a bitter place divided by hatred, greed and jealousy. All it takes to bring everyone together is another flop by Peter Bogdanovich. Champagne corks are popping, flags are waving. The guru has laid another egg."

that's not in the book

Anyway, whatever else you say about the guy, he is pretty entertaining when he shows up at a bookstore to read or at MoMA to introduce a film and tells stories about and imitates the voices of various famous actors and directors he has known.

he was amusing in the Sopranos. only film of his I've ever seen was Last Picture Show, which was allright. a little hard for me to understand why people made such a fuss about him.

He wears ascots and dines out on "Orson" anecdotes. Plus, his girlfriend was a unicorn.

There were a lot of things I was surprised missing from the book. A passing mention of "Midnight Cowboy". Hardly anything about Dustin Hoffman. I expected to read at least a paragraph about how Dirty Harry went from being some weird sort of Frank Sinatra detective movie to this really nihilistic Clint Eastwood film where dead teenagers were pulled nude out of manhole covers. The lack of Woody Allen is noticeable, and there's not much said about "Heaven's Gate" ruining UA. I mean, when it comes to movies that influence the 70s, should "Shampoo" really be so prominently mentioned?

I guess the book could only be so long.

http://img.youtube.com/vi/sdz4dCMGbbw/3.jpg
"...and then I fucked a unicorn!"

There were a lot of things I was surprised missing from the book.

Peckinpah! all this stuff about Altman (who had a similar rep) and Bonnie & Clyde, but nary a mention of the Wild Bunch...

Pleasant Plains, I think he needed a hero and that hero was... Hal Ashby.

Peckinpah, definitely.

I definitely learned more about the making of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" than I ever thought I would.

Still haven't read Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution, which seems to be a companion piece.

he eulogizes Ashby at the end but I don't think he's portrayed as particularly heroic - he's just as cruel, drug-addled, and mysogynistic as most of the other guys in the book

he definitely comes across as the purest spirit

xxpost

You really should read 'Pictures at a Revolution', the focus is narrower than ERRB but does a better job of demonstrating the changes of that era in the Hollywood and wider cultural context. Plus the stories about Rex Harrison's wife are funnier than anything in ERRB.

I dunno maybe you guys read a different book than I did - one where he didn't randomly lash out at his friends, do tons of drugs, emotionally abuse his girlfriends, and run up budgets in the editing room while producing crap

He is set up like some sort of hero, with that line (I'm paraphrasing) from Bruce Dern, "What Hollywood did to Hal Ashby was unforgivable."

i don't remember altman being portrayed as a huge jerk in ERRB. what was the dirt on him?

You really should read 'Pictures at a Revolution',

wow, that sounds good

pictures at a revolution is waaaaaay less catty than easy riders. it's good, though.

i don't remember altman being portrayed as a huge jerk in ERRB

drunkard, credit hog (conflicts w/Beatty & Towne over writing credits iirc), anti-union/made everyone work for scale, horribly sexist

the whole thing about altman's muffled soundtrack/tinting of the film stock for mccabe and mrs. miller (i think that's in easy riders) and beatty's freakout is funny.

Hal Ashby, um, died before the rest of them, making him easy to set up as some kind of tragic figure, despite any of the behavior mentioned by Shakey. Also, any book about film has to have a director and a movie or two to rescue from neglect, oblivion, etc. - it's part of the formula.

everyone SHOULD work for scale imo

like, what's wrong with that - o no he made big movie stars take pay cuts

just finished the book... Woody Allen seems like the elephant in the room re: this book. he's only tangentially mentioned, but then at the end there's kind of a bombshell quote from Coppola about how Allen has the career he wished he did - writing his own scripts, making the movies himself, then moving on to the next one

― Gene Shalit in a Child's Sailor Hat (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, September 29, 2010 8:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

nah, he doesn't really fit -- new york-based, for one thing. it isn't just about filmmakers from the 1970s.

but here is a long quote from kent jones p angry review:

Any director lacking the ability to hoist
himself into the limelight is nowhere to be seen. Where are the Euro-emigre one-shots like Antonioni,
Varda, Demy, and Troell, or the intriguing career of Ivan Passer? Milos Forman seems like a natural for
Biskind ... oh, I forgot, he doesn't pass self-destructive muster. Where are the older filmmakers like
Aldrich or Huston, whose creativity was rekindled by the new frankness available to them? Where is
Don Siegel, the most ferociously creative right-wing pulp artist of the era? And where on earth is Paul
Mazursky? No matter what one thinks of his films today, he was central to the Seventies. (Perhaps he's
been omitted so that Biskind can work without acknowledgment from his tightly-woundEastern-Jewscoming-
undone-inCalifornia template for the sections on Rafelson and Bert Schneider.) Where is Monte
Hellman, one of the most brilliant filmmakers of the time (surely the nightmare of having the entire
script of Two Lane Blacktop printed in Esquire and declared the film of the year before it was even released is worth a line
or two)? And why does Sam Peckinpah, who had sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and talent to burn, get so little
play? I suppose the answer is that Marshall Fine and David Weddle beat Biskind to it with their recent
biographies - so much for a definitive history of the era. De Palma, Carpenter, Milius, Ritchie, Hill ... the
roll of those who rate either a brief mention or nothing at all is endless, although if they've read the book
they're probably overjoyed: "Gee, my last picture may have bombed, but at least I won't go down in
history as a spoiled, neurotic shithead who got a tragic comeuppance!"

I agree he doesn't fit into the same geographic/social world of most of the other people in the book, but being so focused on the idea of the Director-as-Auteur, Allen is kinda more emblematic of that idea than anybody else from the era, really.

Monte Hellman IS mentioned fwiw

like, what's wrong with that - o no he made big movie stars take pay cuts

personally I dunno if there's anything wrong with it cuz I don't really understand a lot about the economics of movie-making, but it wasn't just the movie stars he underpaid, it was the labor (cf. some conflict with the Teamsters union where Altman published their payscales in a newspaper in order to intimidate them into calling off a strike)

yeah, but easy riders seems a little more interested in where the 60s counterculture intersected w/ hollywood, right? woody allen wasn't exactly a counterculture kind of guy. xpost

Just found this, seems to be an interesting attempt to critically redeem Ashby: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/ashby.html. Mentions ERRB somewhat dismissively in a footnote.

I don't see the point in criticising books like this for what they miss out. I think Biskind made some smart decisions about how to keep the narrative rolling and what to focus on. If he threw in all the people Kent Jones mentions the book would be 1000+ pages and shapeless. Maybe the publicity called ERRB "definitive" but I doubt Biskind would claim that. I read it like I read Jeff Chang's history of hip hop - enjoy what's in, don't bitch about what isn't. I guess the way to avoid that criticism is to take the Mark Harris route and pick a particular batch of movies from one particular year.

need another book like this or 'high concept'

woody allen wasn't exactly a counterculture kind of guy

unlike Lucas and Spielberg...??

I seem to remember High Concept was appallingly written and got by on copious amounts of coke, hookers and mania.

that's the one!

I liked Biskind's book a lot, Mark Harris's even more. I don't know that I took Biskind's to be completely trustworthy, but when I think about the American films of that period--the great ones, and the ones that spun out of control--I felt like he captured the general wildness and unpredictability of the decade well. Finding out unseemly stuff about many of the participants hasn't affected my feelings about the films one way or the other. Harris's book--chronologically, they're almost a perfect match--does find a more measured tone, and I think is better for it. Biskind took something I already loved and dove in; Harris brought a story to life that hinged in part on Doctor Dolittle and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and that was much harder to do.

it wasn't 'well written' -- basically like a nonfiction brett easton ellis, kind of affectless cataloguing of completely awful behaviour.

xpost

must read the harris. have it here. biskind constructs a great narrative and tells some great stories, but i think he is not so good on the films themselves. that's not a big failing because we already know the films are great.

'constructs a great narrative at book length and tells some funny anecdotes along the way'

yeah kinda agree with history mayne re: Biskind's take on the movies - apart from his bit on the Exorcist I didn't really find any of them particularly insightful

Is Final Cut: The Making of Heaven's Gate too obvious a recommendation? I've just finished it, and it's one of the best movie books I've ever read: a full-blown disaster narrated by an insider (one of the producers) who happens to write like a dream and have a sharp sense of humour. The fact that Steven Bach is implicated in the failure means that there's real pain and honesty rather than just gossip and schadenfreude. But in the background you also get lots of great details about UA's other pictures (including Annie Hall and Manhattan) and a vivid sense of how it must feel for a producer or a studio exec to watch a film they've piloted and realise that it's a classic. Also the inverse: how hard it is to halt a problematic movie once it's started rolling. Plus there's a great villain: Cimino sounds utterly reprehensible.

I have never been able to sit through the entirety of the Deerhunter - Cimino is another one whose rep I find inexplicable

For anyone who wants some of the same ground covered with a much sharper critical eye, and way more sociopolitical context, than Biskind I'd also recommend Jay Hoberman's The Dream Life, which runs from 1960-75 but really lifts off around Bonnie and Clyde. It's full of great little bits of research that lead you to look deeper into weird corners of Hollywood. I ended up writing a long feature on the making of Myra Breckinridge just because Hoberman made it sound so nuts.

by all means read Final Cut but it's too long.

it wasn't 'well written' -- basically like a nonfiction brett easton ellis, kind of affectless cataloguing of completely awful behaviour.

I agree. Mark Harris' book is superior (false dichotomy though; they just happen to be about American directors who came of aesthetic age in the late sixties).

Wasn't HM referring to High Concept re: the affectless cataloguing? Biskind has more zip than that.

I love Final Cut's length and detail. You get a sense of how long the production dragged on - you end up wanting to punch Cimino yourself - but Bach's such a great narrator that I never got bored. I'm quite geeky about good making-of books though.

Hoberman's book is very good; the only thing that lost me a bit was when he'd go into great detail about The Alamo or Major Dundee or a couple of other films I hadn't seen. (The Chase, too, which I've since seen.) The Dream Life actually makes a really good companion to Perstein's two books about Goldwater and Nixon.

i dunno about 'the dream life'. i'd recommend it, it's kind of nuts. the world is sort of stranger and less strange than he makes out imo. hmm. i'm sort of pissed at his review of 'carlos' which ran the usual script -- something something media representation suffusing reality, which is wrong about the film, and a bit 'postmodern' anyway.

His approach is similar to Marcus' in The Shape of Things.

'Picture' by Lillian Ross is a dry and entertaining account of John Huston making the disastrous Red Badge of Courage - def the founding text of the 'Final Cut'/'Devil's Candy' school

'The Keys to the Kingdom' ('The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else') by Kim Masters is a really juicy account of 80s Hollywood corporate ghastliness - it's better written and researched than 'High Concept'. Bill Murray comes out of it v badly :-(

Yes, I like Picture, though it's nowhere near as juicy as the later books in that style. Just read Disney Wars so not sure I can take any more Eisner.

xpost. I found Hoberman way more enjoyable than that Marcus book. I agree with clemenza's Nixonland comparison - they both tackle the key events with real relish and brio. Even if he shoots off on tangents he still has a basic chronological narrative to return to, whereas Marcus is just stream-of-consciousness, jumping around all over the place, even moreso than usual. I enjoyed lots of the prose but found it hard to give a shit about whatever his central argument might be (if indeed there is one besides: "America - weird, huh?").

Oh, I'm not defending the Marcus book; most of it he cribbed from earlier essays.

Need to read the Masters book on Eisner. You can't be a Floridian and not be fascinated by Disney.

Yeah, reads that way. And boy, does he overrate Sheryl Lee's acting ability.

my favourite para from The Dream Life:

(Jodorowsky) not only wrote, directed, and scored EL TOPO, but also appeared on screen in virtually every scene as a character none too subtly identified with Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and the Magnificent Seven. Later, the filmmaker revealed that EL TOPO had been shot in sequence and that he'd worn throughout special under shorts with holes for his testicles and a green circle stiched around his anus "to make sure I wouldn't act like John Wayne".

roflz

He should have painted his balls red and put rings on them obviously.

the hoberman book is an entirely different beat than er,rb; huge fave of mine. i like the biskind books i read and maybe got more out of the miramax book (in the sense that it wasn't alot of stories i'd kinda already heard or had an inkling of), but they're fun gossip books w/ a little overview of the big picture in question. i'd probably compare them more to books like please kill me, the beautiful fall, or even boys will be boys in that it captures a window of greatness w/ a little before and after context w/ the meat being gossip or good stories. light on analysis, heavy on dirt. really though i don't think er,rb is in those books class either. still fun galore though but i couldn't imagine approaching it was an attempt at history.

Thanks to this thread, I rented Star 80, the only Fosse film I haven't seen. Any advice?

(Eric Roberts looks like Midge Ure in some shots, btw)

I have been meaning to read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for a long time and am finally getting to it. God, it is such a riot! Just read a bit where George Lucas is spouting Marxist rhetoric and could not stop laughing.

I can't remember what the first line was in Lucas' Star Wars outline, but it did keep cracking me up.

^^^yep. comedy gold

i've been reading Star, Biskind's Warren Beatty biog, and some of the writing is like a parody of bad fan mag/gossip site stuff, liked one of james ellroy's 'confidential' interludes - eg 'Bonnie and Clyde opened in New York on Sunday, August 13, at the Murray Hill and the Forum, when flower children were still celebrating the Summer of Love and blacks were burn-baby-burning the inner cities of Detroit and Newark.' Or: 'Later, Beatty would reportedly say that she [Jane Fonda] gave the best blow job in L.A., due to her ability to virtually unhinge her lower jaw, like a python that swallows prey much larger than itself. Coming from him, for whom blow jobs were routine as breathing, this was high praise indeed.'

i mean, i'm a trufan of the whole 'new brat'/new american cinema era and even i'm sick of reading yet another account of how Bonnie and Clyde broke the mould, ushered in a new era, triumphed over the old studio system blahdiblah - let's have some other creation myths, puh-leeze

J. Hoberman has a new book out now (officially next month) called Army of Phantoms which deals with American cinema vis-à-vis the Cold War. It looks like something of a prequel to The Dream Life, with some overlap.

I love the idea expressed upthread to read Rick Perlstein's Goldwater/Nixon books together with The Dream Life. All of these books smartly explore the counter-counterculture, which is crucial to understanding the 1960s, early '70s.

I am watching a bunch of movies from the early era of the Biskind book. "The Last Movie" was not as bad as I was hoping it would be. :/

I read a different book on Beatty by an English writer--Beatty, Nicholson, Hopper, and Brando. Bad Boys, or something like that. It was kind of corny too. I guess writers who take on Beatty assume you're going to be shocked by the degree to which he womanized. If you've spent your life as rock/hip-hop/whatever fan, abberant behaviour's kind of the norm.

i've been reading Star, Biskind's Warren Beatty biog, and some of the writing is like a parody of bad fan mag/gossip site stuff,

Biskind is an abysmal stylist, a psychologist of depressing banality, and – not a word I throw around often – a misogynist to boot. He lets these gross quotes by Beatty acolytes regarding Kael's mixed review of Reds stand without comment.

All of these books smartly explore the counter-counterculture, which is crucial to understanding the 1960s, early '70s.

Exactly! I'm fascinated by the Middle America backash because it gets so little play in the standard histories of the period.

clemenza had reservations, but I loved Nixon at the Movies.

I agree about Biskind's abysmal style and as entertaining as I found ERRB its success set an unfortunate precedent for pop culture histories - gotta get that dirt/gossip no matter how trivial/irrelevant.

i've read 'seeing is believing', which is dry as fuck. wouldn't bother. it's kind of like hoberman only without the frankfurt school wank overlay/jokes.

ER,RB paints a picture of a Hollywood where there is Bodgonovich and Coppola and Hopper etc. on one side, and the "Airport" films on the other. It seems disingenuous at best.

Mark Harris' book was such a nice antidote.

I do have to give Nixon at the Movies another try--Marcus loved it too. I actually just bought a copy of a magazine called Filmint that has Nixon on the cover and a related article inside. (Tried to grab a cover image of their site, but they still have the previous issue up.)

googled it

Was it an omen? Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913.

not encouraging! one of these facts is false

a Hollywood where there is Bodgonovich and Coppola and Hopper etc. on one side, and the "Airport" films on the

Uh, I'm not in favor of overly romanticizing things, but they basically were.

Uh, I'm not in favor of overly romanticizing things, but they basically were.

There are all sorts of movies in the middle from that period.

not sure if i agree the book says everything else was shit. it just doesn't deal with it. for the sake of contrast it begins, as it must, by saying bonnie and clyde and easy rider 'changed everything'. just as it ends by saying .heaven's gate did the same. which, you know -- that's how you write a book. not, 'in some respects, b&c changed everything', which is less interesting.

Heaven forbid a writer try to be fair and thorough instead of just supporting his oversimplified thesis.

I agree with the lots-in-the-middle view of the decade. There are just so many examples. Interesting, bombastic films like The Gambler; lightweight stuff that's better than you'd ever expect, like Rafferty & the Gold Dust Twins; small, forgotten films like Made for Each Other. They're not art, they're not mindless junk. They're in the middle.

it's a narrative account of a pretty tightly defined group of people tho, not a general survey of the_seventies

but Airport was not 'in the middle'! Such potboilers were warmed-over hash even then.

Actually found a scene from Made for Each Other:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCU_CxbJdsA&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

I love Renee Taylor's pronunciation of "charisma." Wish I could find Paul Sorvino with the knife.

but Airport was not 'in the middle'!

I didn't say it was in the middle! I mean, clearly that is the archetypal old Hollywood idea: a bunch of celebrities in an artless film.

I was watching that film on CBS when the NYC blackout hit and knocked it off the air in '77.

xp

surprised you weren't listening to the mets!

I have never been a 162-game obsessive, esp when they had just traded Seaver.

I like how you even remember what network you were watching

yes, it was easier when there were only 3.

Sorry--indulge me one more bit of nostalgia from the middle, albeit the upper end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j6cIA8h7Qk

Great cover, too.

Cybill was such a stunner.

i def was an obsessive, i was listening to the little clock radio in my parents' kitchen iirc. my parents were watching baretta i think
xps

just finished down and dirty pictures. it was a fun, gossipy read, but i would have liked more, much more actually, on the actual work, the nature of indie filmmaking, stuff about the FILMS or the people behind and in front of the camera, rather than quite so much about the execs and guys behind the scenes. im sure the filmmakers are a quieter bunch (except tarantino of course) so not as gossip friendly, but all the office politics stuff got a bit boring after a while and i was losing track of who was who and whether i wanted to care or not. is there a book that does justice to the 90s indie scene? (that isnt dull and bfi-academic)

felt like part of the pointof d&dp was how much more to the fore the execs were in independent pictures compared to 70's

His book on the 50's is a boring one-note thesis

yeah i got that the execs dominated supposedly indie film, in the 90s at least, but still...

i got the 50s one just cos i liked the cover.

i got the 50's one just cos i liked the other two.

i really enjoyed his warren beatty biog

Biskind has no patience for women though, or at least shares the casual machismo of his heroes.

Love this book but am dismayed by the number of occasions of "so-and-so denies such-and-such ever took place". (As opposed to so-and-so merely disputing the mere details of how such-and-such occurred.)

And yeah, I cut Lucas and Spielberg a bit more slack than Biskind does. After all, it's not as though they INTENDED to create the most-popular-movie-to-that-time. (And who's to say that you or I wouldn't have done the same after learning how much $ we could earn via merchandising)

(Liked D&DP too [to a lesser extent] but can't seem to find my remaindered copy, which this thread would've otherwise sent me back to, just to check on a few things)

Love ERRB but yeah Biskind doesn't seem to have respect for anyone whose goal wasn't to get laid the most or fuck up their lives the most. He's blatantly living through these people vicariously.

Very much related to Biskind's book: just started Brian Kellow's (author of the Kael book, which I liked fine and still don't get the complaints) Can I Go Now?, a biography of Sue Mengers. Looking around online, I see there's a film coming out with Jennifer Lawrence (not based on Kellow's book, I don't think) that was involved in a big bidding war between streaming services.

HD version of tge documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqVzFEeMVOQ

Read this last year with some difficulty, the unrelenting depraved antics of the various manchildren was rough going

HD version of tge documentary

someone re-edited it from scratch? is the narration a rip?

I finished Biskind's Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV a couple of days ago. It basically covers cable and then streaming TV since a few years before The Sopranos--"prestige" TV.

It's been so long since I read Easy Riders--right when it came out, so 25 years ago--that I don't remember specifically what I liked about it. I think it was more generally that someone wrote a book about the decade and the films that influenced me so much. If I read it today, my guess is that I'd find the emphasis on drugs and lifestyle a little tedious. I don't know.

I was with Pandora's Box for a while, but at a certain point, where it was just a never-ending litany of executives and writers and showrunners hopping from HBO to Netflix to Disney, I couldn't keep track of the names (stopped even trying) and didn't care. And no matter who it was, Biskind would make sure to track down at least one quote about how horrible the person was. He got across his point about what a swamp TV is today, and how networks and streamers are converging--meet the new boss, etc.--but what started as a book about what made The Sopranos so great and so different ended up being a book about money and mass confusion. Accurate, no doubt, but not of interest to me.

Yeah, I thought Pandora's Box was quite a bad book, and I loved Easy Riders Raging Bulls. I've struggled with Biskind's other books, tbh - I don't think he's ever had another subject, or file of source material, to compare to this one.

I read the Sundance-era book too--which I think predates everything coming out about Weinstein (can't remember exactly how he was portrayed).

I didn't finish that one. It was a bit of a slog iirc. The TV is actually bad, imo.