Book also skips over that central and climactic work of independent-minded American cinema of the mid-’70s, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a product of the counterculture if ever there was one, but apparently not scandalous enough in its production to attract Biskind’s interest. Macy, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls features vintage clips of Coppola, Scorsese, Beatty, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, and Pauline Kael. Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and Clint Eastwood scarcely exist, and Michael Ritchie, whose “Downhill Racer,” “The Candidate” and “Smile” rate among the top achievements of the New Hollywood under discussion, isn’t even named. But it also reveals its mercenary and yellow-journalist instincts in its blatant avoidance of major figures who made contributions to film of equal importance to those mentioned here, but who were evidently not sensational enough in their private lives to warrant attention. No matter what, megalomania was the order of the day once success hit, and just about everyone considered himself above conventional morality.Īppropriately, the book resembles a tantalizing drug itself, so chock-full of borderline-libelous tidbits that it’s hard to put down. With only a couple of exceptions, the number of mentions individuals rate in the index is in direct proportion to the amount of drugs they did, and yet, in Biskind’s scurrilous approach, you can’t win: Either you’re exposed as having been dangerously drugged out, like Hopper, Schneider, Rafelson, Coppola, Scorsese, Schrader, Altman, Ashby, Towne, Evans and Nicholson at various periods, or you were too square for words, like Bogdanovich, Lucas and Spielberg. William Friedkin, probably, followed closely by Dennis Hopper, Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson and, frankly, just about their whole BBS Films’ crowd, who indulged in a kind of boys’ club business, political and sexual arrogance that wouldn’t be possible today. With all the extracurricular activity and stoned days and nights, it’s a wonder any work got done at all during those years.īiskind, a respected author and magazine People want to know who comes off worst. On the one hand, it chronicles the doings of the famed Movie Brat directors more thoroughly than any previous single tome, with the intention of celebrating their adventurous work on the other, it is obsessed with their bad behavior, drug-taking, sexual escapades, backstabbing and all-around excesses.
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