But the signal achievement of this archaeological dig of a book is that Biskind also cares about what went right - the movies. For the rest of us, though, this book is one hell of an elixir - salty with flavorsome gossip, sour with the aftertaste of misspent careers, intoxicating with one revelation after another, and bitter with decades-old grudges (the late producer Don Simpson on Robert Altman: ”A true fraud…a pompous, pretentious a–hole…a f-ing drunken disaster” Altman on Simpson: ”I’m only sorry that he didn’t live longer and suffer more”).īiskind knows that what derailed so many of these careers is worth mourning, beyond its lurid car-wreck fascination his research is so scrupulous and instructive and his passion for movies so unquestionable that his clear contempt for the excesses of the men he writes about makes sense - after all, they trashed their own gifts. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Peter Biskind’s great, scathing, news-packed history of the ways in which the finest directors of that fine film decade, the 1970s, had it and then lost it, is going to shatter anyone who still believes that unforgettable movies emerge, fully realized, from the storyboards and barked orders of artistic geniuses. And the others were bastards, manipulators, egomaniacs who never met a woman they couldn’t (try to) seduce or a drug that couldn’t seduce them. Lonely mouth-breathers who sat in the back of the classroom.
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