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| Easy Riders Raging Bulls,
Peter Biskind |
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| Books,
David Dear,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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Plotting a delicate course between the art and the gossip, Peter Biskind gives us an entertaining account of the Seventies movie brats. Taking as its starting points Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider, it goes on to describe how the likes of Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdanovich and Scorsese tried to create a New Hollywood by breaking out of the established studio system.
The book moves along swiftly, skipping between the various projects every few pages and although the huge cast of company executives, agents and producers squabbling behind the scenes can become bewildering, the anecdotes keep things entertaining. This doesn’t mean the book is merely a salacious retelling of tabloid gossip - more than any previous generation of film makers, their lifestyles shaped their movies.
Coppola put his cast and crew through their own hell for Apocalypse Now, Scorsese only felt able to tackle Raging Bull when he’d hit a self-destructive low to rank with Jake La Motta’s, and Paul Schrader comes across as disturbingly similar to his creation Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
A refreshing antidote to the slavish adoration of directors most movie books serve up, the people involved become as fascinating as any of their characters. Rather than damaging the genius of a lot of their work, instead it allows you to view it in a new light. I couldn’t help feeling too, that their story would make a pretty good movie in itself. It has all the qualities that they liked; difficult, unpleasant characters, drugs and violence, and most importantly for them, an unhappy ending.
Bloomsbury
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