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Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation saved Hollywood
£4.00
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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Additional information
| Publisher | Bloomsbury, First Edition (29 Oct. 1998) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 506 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0747536309 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0747536307 |
| Dimensions | 20.3 x 25.4 x 4.7 cm |
by andykat@swipnet.se
A 400plus page book that you’ll read in less than a few days. Insightful and refreshingly candid. As a Lucas-fan and Spielberg-devotee since my teens, it’s a hard read… Buy it, read it, never forget it! (especially the bit about the Schraeder bros and the unhealthy sucking of gunbarrels… makes Travis Bickle seem like a perfectly normal guy…)
by Simon Tzu
For a brief period, the late 60s and the 70’s, a group of young directors wielded more creative power than ‘talent’ has before or since. “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is the story of their rise to prominence and the studios subsequent wresting back of this power – it is a magnificent read.
The book is like a hundred mini case studies of careers which went up, down, right and wrong and careers which seemed to go right but the final analysis may have gone the most horribly wrong of all (paging:George Lucas).
Not only does Biskind give us a taste of the period but also provide insight into the personal dramas that resulted in some of the best Hollywood films ever.
In the late 60s the big studios lost their way. Baby boomers were in their late 20s, the counter-culture was in full swing, music was far more relevant than film, and Hollywood didn’t have a clue. In this void a hip production company looking to give directors more freedom (BBS) and a drug-crazed visionary (Dennis Hopper) converged and birthed Easy Rider.
Easy Rider’s success made Columbia executives stop shaking their heads in incomprehension and start nodding their heads in incomprehension. Easy Rider created a sensibility – it legitimised BBS’s idea of freeing filmmakers from the overbearing hand of their financiers and letting them express their personal voice.
What filmmaker’s did with this freedom is the substance of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”. The cast is varied and Biskind is funny insightful and obviously passionate about cinema. As a filmmaker I found the trials and triumphs chronicled here both an inspiration and an object lesson.
The ride ended with Star Wars – or so seems to be the consensus of filmmakers who never survived into the 80s. Jaws took the first few bites out of filmmaker’s ability to make ironic, self-conscious aesthetic critiques but with the flick of a light saber Star Wars delivered the coup de grace. Friedkin likened Star War’s effect on the culture of film to that of McDonalds on eating out.
Today as we enter another period of disruption this book is incredibly pertinent and so I have to let the last quote belong to the giant of that era, Francis Ford Coppola: “We had the naive notion that it was the equipment which would give us the means of production. Of course we learned later that it wasn’t the equipment it was the money.”