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.

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.