'70's Movies - Anyone Read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls?

Cafe Society
1

Has anyone else out there read Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls?

This book was fascinating, hilarious, insightful and all of that other good stuff you look for in a book. If you are the least bit interested in trying to understand how Hollywood moved from the old studio system through the 70’s Directors are Gods phase and back to a more studio-driven approach, this is the book for you. Or if you just wanna know how those amazing movies from the 60’s and 70’s - Easy Rider, the Godfather, the Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars - got made and the personalities behind them, then this is the book for you. All in all, the characters are well drawn, and the things they do are despicable and fascinating.

Have you read it? What did you think?

2

bump

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

3

I’m only posting so you have more responses than any thread I start.

RealLife SoundBite: “Axl Rose? Who the hell is that fat, old queen?”

4

Don’t want to leave you hanging so I’ll chip in.

Yes, I have read “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls” and found it intensely interesting. Also, you might like to know that HBO is putting together a documentary based on the book.

Just out of curiosity, were you around WordMan when these movies first came out?

5

First of all, thank you gatopescado for your Pity Post - Heaven forbid that this thread be allowed to wither all by its lonesome!

As for your post NDP - I didn’t know that HBO was putting out a movie/miniseries/documentary/whatever, but given what they did with the Late Night Wars, I can easily see where this book would be great. The characters are larger than life, consumed with themselves, and do the most amazing, awful, wonderful things. It is a version of the ancient Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”

As to the other part of your question, I was a kid in the 70’s - one of the first movies I saw just with my dad was “Jaws” - I saved the ticket stub for years. I saw Star Wars on its first or second weekend out (at the little Laurel Theatre in San Carlos, CA) and loved it so much that I called my mom to say I’d be late, then hid in the theatre bathroom so I could sneak back in and see it again - I was a classic charter member Star Wars Geek for years after that. Enjoyed Close Encounters, and saw “What’s Up Doc” about 20 times - for some reason it was shown in the school auditorium on rainy days a lot.

I didn’t see the Exorcist, the Godfather movies, Apocalyse Now, Raging Bull or any of the adult movies until much later…

6

I’ve read the book. I was around when those movies came out. I was born in 1952, so I was already an adult when most of them came out.

I thought it was interesting that the person who Biskind seemed to think of as the slimiest person in Hollywood was Amy Irving.

7

I read the book as well and thought it fascinating. I’m glad that he recognized that the three things that killed literate, adult American cinema in the 1970’s were drugs, megalomania, and Star Wars.

8

Paul Schrader, writer of such films as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Hardcore, is a fellow almnus of Calvin College, a fairly conservative college, expecially 30 years ago. No one really talks about him there.