Peter Biskind's 1998 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" has long been held up as the pre-eminent chronicle of the New Hollywood era, when the declining studio system temporarily ceded power to a group of young upstart filmmakers, who would invigorate American filmmaking in the late '60s and '70s. It follows the ups and downs of roughly fifteen filmmakers, and profiles many of the producers, actors, writers, and editors in their spheres. And their endless parade of wives, girlfriends, and paramours.
The book is about the making of films, and structured around the creation of various films, but rarely has much to say about the films themselves. The focus of the book is on the filmmakers, on their relationships and their friendships. Biskind often seems obsessed with the minutiae of their lives - what real estate they bought, what cars they drove, what drugs they were doing, and so much gossip about their love lives. Few of the profiled producers and directors come off well. Biskind characterizes them collectively as a gang of talented, enthusiastic young revolutionaries who were all corrupted or compromised eventually by fame, money, and power. Individually, they were all their own special brand of brilliant maniac - Dennis Hopper was a violent madman, William Friedkin was a cold monster, Peter Bogdanovich was an obnoxious egomaniac, Hal Ashby was a paranoid eccentric, and Francis Ford Coppola was a self-styled mogul with delusions of grandeur. Everyone was horrible to their wives and partners. Keep in mind, however, that a good chunk of Biskind's interviews were with those wives and partners, as well as the many, many enemies that everyone accumulated by the end of the 70s.
While Biskind romanticizes the New Hollywood era to some extent, I found the book very effective at puncturing the enduring myth of the '70s being this wonderful Nirvana for American filmmaking. The hard-won independence and the power always came at a price, and the vast majority of the directors involved couldn't handle it, often self-destructing like Hopper and Bogdanovich after only a few films. Budgets always ballooned. Egos always took over. Loyalties were always destroyed by squabbles over money. The survivors of the era, like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, were outliers who learned to get along with the blockbuster-obsessed studios in the '80s. The only filmmaker who established real lasting independence was George Lucas, who famously couldn't do anything with it except to make more "Star Wars" pictures. Nearly everyone else met with irrelevance, decline, and sometimes truly tragic ends.
I appreciated the book for putting many of the films I grew up admiring in a more thoughtful cultural context. Part of the success of "The Godfather" was due to its experimental wide release pattern, then unheard of for a studio film. "Star Wars" was mocked by the other New Hollywood directors - except Steven Spielberg. "The Conversation," and "Raging Bull" were critical favorites, but financial disappointments. I still don't like or understand "Shampoo," but I think I have a better idea of what people think it is. I got the most out of the material about BBS, Raybert, the Director's Company - production entities that only seemed to exist for a minute - and all the bombs that nobody talks about - "The Last Movie," "Daisy Miller," "New York, New York," and "Sorcerer." And it's good to have any kind of retrospective of Robert Evans that isn't coming from Robert Evans.
The "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" documentary, produced by the BBC in 2003, and directed by Kenneth Bowser, is a different animal. It hits many of the major themes of the Biskind book, and covers most of the same material, but a two hour documentary can't be what a 400 page book is, obviously. The documentary is structured very differently, with new material devoted to Roger Corman, Sam Peckinpah, and "Midnight Cowboy." There's almost nothing about the directors' personal lives, and the salacious details and gossip are mostly gone. Instead, this is a more film-focused, well-rounded history of the New Hollywood era - in short what I expected that the book was going to be.
There's also a much more nostalgic tone, likely owing to the interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader, Dennis Hopper, John Milius, Polly Platt, Cybil Shepherd, Gloria Katz, Peter Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss, and Peter Bart. It uses a ton of movie clips and old promotional footage, and it's fun seeing Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt talk about their Malibu Beach house, the nexus of the movie brats during the early 70s. The only quibble I have with it is that the emphasis is on the successes of New Hollywood to a much greater extent than failures. Only the last half hour of the documentary says much about the decline, while Biskind gave it much more attention.
As much as Biskind made his subject seem like terrible, self-indulgent addicts and abusers, in the end he also makes them very poignant figures. The book closes with the bleak death and funeral of Hal Ashby. The documentary closes with the release of "Raging Bull," described as New Hollywood's "one last scream of primal defiance."
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