“Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood”
Written by Peter Biskind
(Touchstone, 1998, trade paperback)
By Steve Hakeman
Here’s one for anybody with even a passing interest in the film industry and the “Hollywood lifestyle.” But be forewarned: “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is not for the feint of heart. Covering that explosive period of creativity marked by the release of “ Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967 and running through 1980 and the cataclysmic debacle of “Heaven’s Gate,” author Biskind throws in enough drug- and sex-drenched detail to grab and hold the attention of the most tabloid-minded reader (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you).
But hey, it’s Chinatown, know what I mean? (I don’t.) The personalities and the films themselves form the throbbing heart of ER,RB, but it’s the drugs and sex that keep it churning like a summer potboiler. It’s the story of a bunch of guys—sorry, but women were pretty much relegated to the singular role of sexual object in the Hollywood of the 70s, same as now—dubbed collectively as “The New Hollywood,” inasmuch as they harbored a deep-seated loathing of the studio system (”The Old Hollywood”) and anyone connected with it.
Wafting onto the scene like the smell of napalm in the morning, they were convinced they could save the world with nothing more than a camera and a can of film. Their names: Coppola, Beatty, Altman, Rafelson, Bogdanovich, Towne, Ashby, Friedkin, Lucas, Spielberg, Schrader, Scorsese. Their films reverberate today like anthems: “Easy Rider,” “M*A*S*H,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Five Easy Pieces,” the first two “Godfathers,” “Chinatown,” “The French Connection,” “Mean Streets,” “Jaws,” “Nashville,” “Star Wars,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Raging Bull.”
And oh, how very close they came. A better subtitle for the book would have been “How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood and Then Blew It.” Chronicling the rise of the director from hired-gun to self-styled preeminent creative force in the Hollywood hierarchy—at the time nothing short of a revolution—ER,RB soon becomes a cautionary tale, though the term “cautionary” actually diminishes the horrific pain and suffering recounted by Biskind ad nauseam. One reads with dismay how monstrous ego, unchecked ambition and massive amounts of drugs and alcohol derailed and in some cases destroyed one promising career after another. (Perhaps most disturbing, from a writer’s perspective, is the contempt screenwriters were held in the New Hollywood. It was a golden age for Hollywood’s directors, somewhat less for its scribes.) In fact, the litany of excess, at first grimly fascinating, becomes mind-numbing before Biskind finally pulls the plug on page 439.
At decade’s end, the unbounded promise heralded by the New Hollywood had already been replaced, cruelly and paradoxically, by a Hollywood familiar to us today—money-drenched, corporate oriented and ruled by accountants with “blockbuster” mentalities. It is supreme irony that the indulgences of these self-proclaimed auteurs, whose stated manifesto was the destruction of the studio system, arguably hastened the ascendancy of Corporate Hollywood.
I can practically guarantee you’ll find yourself both repelled and drawn to the Hollywood portrayed in ER,RB. Repelled by an industry that survives largely by devouring its own. Yet drawn to the heady environment of creativity and revolt absent in much of today’s filmmaking. And of course there’s the money. Not that we’d ever sell our souls like these guys did.
Nobody ever does.