The Books of My Life: Easy Riders Raging Bulls

"Love is the leech sucking you up/Love is the Vampire drunk on your blood...", Concrete Blonde, "The Beast"

Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs 'n Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) is a muckraking exposé of 1970s Hollywood. Based on oral histories Biskind exposes the megalomania, egomania, narcissism, backstabbing, misogyny, and drug abuse of those rebel directors, writers, actors, and producers like Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, and Steven Spielberg, who vowed to change Hollywood for the better from within and from without in the 1970s.  Ironically, as Biskind makes clear, these rebels did change Hollywood but only for a brief time. In the end these rebels ended up, according to Biskind, helping to revive the old Hollywood of producers and actors and helped to bring into being the new Hollywood, reflective of what was happening economically in America at large, of high level bureaucrats, mid-level bureaucrats, and mega blockbuster movies. They helped bring into being, in other words, a Hollywood that pursued mega profit over art.

  

There were a number of things that ran through my mind as I read Easy Riders Raging Bulls. I thought that Easy Riders Raging Bulls should undermine the romantically grounded criticism of auteurists and anti-auteurists auteurists alike but that it won't since both approaches are primarily text centred and, as such, averse to exploring the broader production and cultural contexts that Biskind's book explores and both approaches see the autuers or anti-auteurs they are studying in romantic hagiographic hues. I found Biskind's exploration of the close polemical and apologetic ties between the rebel auteurs and critics like Pauline Kael fascinating since it shows that criticism is largely grounded in a kind of romanticism. It seemed to me that Francis Ford Coppola's 1988 film Tucker can be "read" as a romance about his own artistic failure in a Hollywood of corporate suits who don't care about innovation and what is better for consumers.

Not everyone, by the way, has praised Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls. Some critics have condemned the book for its gossipy muckraking, a cliched and formulaic criticism of exposés at this point. Others have noted that many of Biskind's oral histories were done with those who might be taking revenge on their subjects for a variety of reasons and thus should be taken with more than a healty grain of skepticism. Other critics have noted that Biskind's book is characterised by errors of fact. Joseph McBride in his New York Times review of the books, for instance, notes that Biskind asserted that ''up to 1975, no picture cost more than $15 million'', In reality, however, the epic film Cleopatra cost $44 million to make in early-1960's while the eight-hour Russian War and Peace (1966-67) cost around $96 million to make. Regardless of these criticisms I still recommend Easy Riders Raging Bulls if only as a means to deromanticise the views of the American movie making business many have.