A Trashy but Entertaining Look at the 70s Film Generation (
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Rating
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30 /50 )
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a director-to-diretor, movie-to-movie account of the New Hollywood generation of the 70s. What is so amazing about this book is how well its author Peter Biskind has researched and structured it. Sadly much of the books potential is ruined with the blatant gossip and repetitive style. The book begins by talking about how the films Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider really started the New Hollywood generation by putting their movies in demand. The book continues to talk about such films as MASH, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Chinatown, Jaws, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and many others in great detail. It also gives a lot of gritty and often sex and drug oriented gossip on some of your favorite filmmakers including Coppola, Beatty, Lucas, Scorsese, Spielberg, Bogdonavich, Friedkin, and Altman, which is entertaining and often compelling for the first 100 pages, but then it becomes disgusting. The redeeming qualities of the book are that it explains the process of how each of these films were made, and the small bios on the different filmmakers it gives. This book couldve been written much better, and its sad to see the true knowlegde that the writer possesses of the industry and the era, be presented in such a self-indulgent and lude way. I suppose that this book book does appeal to a lot of people , but not to me, even as a bonafide movie-buff.
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