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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
I've now completed the Biskind oeuvre. Easy Riders is by far his best book, though "Down and Dirty Pictures" is a close second, and "Seeing is Believing" actually turned me on to the most good movies (great fifties westerns and melodramas). I've still got a fat list of films I need to see based on this book, mostly Hal Ashby joints that I'm sure I will enjoy.
If you're curious about why Scorsese and Coppola are bothering to write New York Times op-eds against Marvel movies, here they are in the early 90's, trashing "Star Wars" and lazy studio executives who refused to greenlight "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now" as both of them embarked on truly epic cocaine binges and psychologically abused their actors and crew. Ah, the joys of art.
Like "Down and Dirty" with its portraits of Redford/Sundance and Weinstein/Miramax, this book basically reveals that misogyny and maverick anti-studioism, despite some of the good movies that came out of it, wasn't even good for the art. Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Friedkin, Beatty, Bogdanovich, Nicholson, Schrader, Towne, Polanski and Altman are all, every one, unredeemedly and unapologetically horrible to women and basically justify it by saying that the women are all sleeping up to further their careers just like they're sucking up to studio executives to get their challenging films made. The characterization of women in their films is then incredibly shallow and one-dimensional, while the men get to be deep and anti-heroic and challenging because they squeezed a couple of million out of Paramount to make "Mean Streets."
This might make the book seem depressing and kind of terrible to read, and if I was a woman I may basically throw it across the room and forget about it, and that's an understandable reaction. However, there is something valuable about the fact that these men were mostly interviewed in the late 80s and 90s and were completely unrepentant about their behavior. In fact, many of them seem to miss the time period when they could grope secretaries and actresses openly and call it "free love."
It helps to explain why a lot of the ideologies of the sixties and seventies are completely overrated, basically excuses from middle and upper-middle class white men about why their narcissism is justified rather than real challenges to the economic and social injustices in the U.S. The ways that many of the movies during this time actually did challenge the dominant social order were always limited by the flaws of their creators, just like the ways that most of the music and art of the sixties and seventies by difficult men misses the mark. As far as music, Joni Mitchell > Bob Dylan in this way.
Anyway, I guarantee you that Tarentino, Baumbach, Linklater, PTA, Sadfie Bros, etc. have all read and enjoyed this book, and tried, in their small ways, to do a little better than the New Hollywood generation. But if would be better if we weren't depending on these men to direct interesting movies. Time's up.
If you're curious about why Scorsese and Coppola are bothering to write New York Times op-eds against Marvel movies, here they are in the early 90's, trashing "Star Wars" and lazy studio executives who refused to greenlight "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now" as both of them embarked on truly epic cocaine binges and psychologically abused their actors and crew. Ah, the joys of art.
Like "Down and Dirty" with its portraits of Redford/Sundance and Weinstein/Miramax, this book basically reveals that misogyny and maverick anti-studioism, despite some of the good movies that came out of it, wasn't even good for the art. Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Friedkin, Beatty, Bogdanovich, Nicholson, Schrader, Towne, Polanski and Altman are all, every one, unredeemedly and unapologetically horrible to women and basically justify it by saying that the women are all sleeping up to further their careers just like they're sucking up to studio executives to get their challenging films made. The characterization of women in their films is then incredibly shallow and one-dimensional, while the men get to be deep and anti-heroic and challenging because they squeezed a couple of million out of Paramount to make "Mean Streets."
This might make the book seem depressing and kind of terrible to read, and if I was a woman I may basically throw it across the room and forget about it, and that's an understandable reaction. However, there is something valuable about the fact that these men were mostly interviewed in the late 80s and 90s and were completely unrepentant about their behavior. In fact, many of them seem to miss the time period when they could grope secretaries and actresses openly and call it "free love."
It helps to explain why a lot of the ideologies of the sixties and seventies are completely overrated, basically excuses from middle and upper-middle class white men about why their narcissism is justified rather than real challenges to the economic and social injustices in the U.S. The ways that many of the movies during this time actually did challenge the dominant social order were always limited by the flaws of their creators, just like the ways that most of the music and art of the sixties and seventies by difficult men misses the mark. As far as music, Joni Mitchell > Bob Dylan in this way.
Anyway, I guarantee you that Tarentino, Baumbach, Linklater, PTA, Sadfie Bros, etc. have all read and enjoyed this book, and tried, in their small ways, to do a little better than the New Hollywood generation. But if would be better if we weren't depending on these men to direct interesting movies. Time's up.
okay so to be a world-renowned director I have to become a egotistical drug addict first, got it
"Directors don’t have much power anymore, the executives make unheard of amounts of money, and budgets are more out of control than they ever were. And there hasn’t been a classic in ten years."
- Francis Ford Coppola
After Bonnie and Clyde opened, Stefan Kanfer defined the New Hollywood in the most perfect way: "disregard for time-honored pieties of plot, chronology, and motivation; a promiscuous jumbling together of comedy and tragedy; ditto heroes and villains; sexual boldness; and a new, ironic distance that withholds obvious moral judgments."
The history of cinema is chock-full of interesting people, tidbits, and large entities that every cinema lover should be aware of to understand why films are what they are. Biskind recounts with vividness (albeit with an unpolished touch) the story of rebellious New Hollywood. It was like a shooting star that shined brightly for a while but which ended up in a crater somewhere in the desert. It was a concept that bit itself in the leg despite the best of intentions, and "the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work—as opposed to the errant masterpiece—work that was character-, rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily." In this case, it's vital to understand the context of 70s and late 60s movies to fully grasp their ideas and potential.
New Hollywood boiled down to the ambitious goal to override the studio system and give talented people the chance to explore their ideas in a new artistic, auteurish, way, making the 70s the era of directors. It's when Biskind tries to venture to the business side does the text shrivel into mere detailed listings of budgets and how much of the cut each one involved got. He, does, however, manage to convey the feeling that the era was the time for young people to take away the power from the giants of the John Ford era and to take advantage of the executives' confusion about the changes of the social climate, and go completely berserk with their ideas (and personal lives).
Despite having a pretty varied taste in movies, it was fantastic to find out that the NH directors were inspired by (and in some cases even aspired to be) the great auteurs of the European cinema. Arthouse requires a specific kind of attention and the utmost focus of the viewer, but Scorsese et.al. injected their films with their own sense style. Perhaps not always as recognisable as Europeans' (especially Antonioni and Bergman), but slightly more approachable for the big audience (although I still can't believe Raging Bull (1980) bombed).
Not only that, but the small changes in the movie making process Biskind discusses all make sense when watching the movies (Taxi Driver (1976) etc.). Script writers ceased to be disposable and it was important for them to dive headfirst into their work, instead of considering it as a some sort of cheap job on the way to literature. Cast on the other hand was no longer comprised of polished cookie cutter people, but (apart from a few exceptions of course) average looking theatre people that lended realism to the movies. Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967) is a prime example. No one was especially looking for stars.
Biskind suggests that NH was partly about anger at authority and celebration of counterculture (like in Easy Rider (1969)). This tapped into a new audience, but unfortunately it didn't last long. Biskind's tone feels slightly derogatory, especially towards Lucas and Spielberg. He also seems to draw his own conclusions and interprets some movies in a way that it's represented as fact instead of as his own opinion. I'm not a fan of non-fiction authors who make their stances known, especially if the manner is bitter and unfairly inculpatory.
That being said, I understand what Biskind perhaps wants to say. The enthusiasm for making art gradually yielded when the studios started to recover. Spielberg and Lucas can't be the only ones to blame, but they did contribute involuntarily to the blockbuster era. Biskind makes a convincing claim that Spielberg's leanings towards conservatism and commercialism, occasional twelve-year-old-like behaviour, affinity with not crediting whoever helped him in his current movie (Rob Cohen thinks Verna Fields was responsible for the idea of showing only little of the shark in Jaws (1975) etc.), and favoring regressed adults and nostalgia for authority lead to tasteless and odourless cinema.
It may not be Spielberg's fault that after Jaws the studios were hungry for equally lucrative profits, but he chose to be part of the establishment. "Us" turning into an all-inclusive everyman instead of the counterculture kids is not necessarily only a bad thing, but it gave way to diluted family fares. Biskind says that Lucas had wanted a wholesome (Jesus Christ I hate that word) tone for Star Wars (1977), claimed it was a Disney movie, favoured happy endings along with straightforward storytelling and accessible two-dimensional characters. I agree with Biskind regarding Lucas and Spielberg bringing back small-town and suburban values. Lucas even said that "Words are great in the theater, but that’s not movies". Chilling.
Can you imagine what Apocalypse Now (1979) would have looked like if it had been directed by Lucas like it was initially intended? Pauline Kael said it well: "Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art — of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theater. So we’ve been getting a new cultural puritanism — people go to the innocuous hoping for the charming, or they settle for imported sobriety, and the press is full of snide references to Coppola’s huge film in progress... [They were] infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection." Friedkin compares the change with McDonald's getting hold of the nation. Lucas claims that he and Spielberg "understood what people liked to go see", but that just smells calculating as hell, not to mention that his claim that he destroyed the Hollywood film industry by making films more intelligent is just complete and utter bullshit. He even "believed that the most important parts of a film are the first five minutes and the last twenty. Everything in between is filler, and if there is enough action, no one will notice that the characters aren’t particularly complex, or that the acting is wooden".
The NH era was in a lot of ways wild, in good and in bad. The BBS offices smelled of pot, most were in a democratic mood and ready to help in friends' movies, everyone wanted to go to Peru to work with The Last Movie (1971) so that they could smuggle drugs back to L. A., Hopper's drug problem caused the directors to make notes in the script what kind he could take in each scene, there were some directors with huge egos and some (like Coppola) were simply megalomaniac crazies, women (who often contributed in some way to their men's films) had to cope with their men acting like assholes and thinking the open relationships of the 70s gave permission for cheating (Bert Schneider to Candice Bergen: "I’m sorry it’s so threatening to you, Bergen, but you have to understand that I’m a love object for every woman who walks into my office.... Start dealing with that. It’s time you began growing up."), on the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) the actors were provided with pot as a kind of takeaway so that they wouldn't have to go to the street etc.
We can all agree, though, that most films that resulted from this mayhem are good, and distinguishable as 70s and late 60s films. Biskind says that after their recovery, studio executives are now mostly businessmen who are interested about commercialism and money. Were now in a situation where it's difficult to brief an idea that doesn't promise huge profits. Indie movies do find their audience, but compared to the blockbusters, their market is much smaller. Star salaries are higher than ever. New faces are easier to be pushed around, and when one of the greats got an opportunity to make a comeback, they resorted to a mainstream film and failed.
Altman is not optimistic: "You get tired painting your pictures and going down to the street corner and selling them for a dollar. You get the occasional Fargo, but you’ve still got to make them for nothing, and you get nothing back. It’s disastrous for the film industry, disastrous for film art".
Who knows what will happen in the future. It's clear that we need all kinds of movies, and everyone has their own taste. I still wish there were more brave filmmakers who would get the opportunity to showcase their talents, no matter how wacky their ideas might be, and maintain their distinctive style through the years. I also wish that the movie business would slow down their hunger for money and would actually stop and smell the flowers, and see the talent out there.
Fortunately, these days we have our moments as well. With the explosive Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) Miller succeeded in lighting the screen on fire. It was magical and different. Ripped my guts out with its energy and beauty, and that's what I'm personally looking for in a movie. Godard showed that anything is possible, and even Lucas said that "Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck".
- Francis Ford Coppola
After Bonnie and Clyde opened, Stefan Kanfer defined the New Hollywood in the most perfect way: "disregard for time-honored pieties of plot, chronology, and motivation; a promiscuous jumbling together of comedy and tragedy; ditto heroes and villains; sexual boldness; and a new, ironic distance that withholds obvious moral judgments."
The history of cinema is chock-full of interesting people, tidbits, and large entities that every cinema lover should be aware of to understand why films are what they are. Biskind recounts with vividness (albeit with an unpolished touch) the story of rebellious New Hollywood. It was like a shooting star that shined brightly for a while but which ended up in a crater somewhere in the desert. It was a concept that bit itself in the leg despite the best of intentions, and "the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work—as opposed to the errant masterpiece—work that was character-, rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily." In this case, it's vital to understand the context of 70s and late 60s movies to fully grasp their ideas and potential.
New Hollywood boiled down to the ambitious goal to override the studio system and give talented people the chance to explore their ideas in a new artistic, auteurish, way, making the 70s the era of directors. It's when Biskind tries to venture to the business side does the text shrivel into mere detailed listings of budgets and how much of the cut each one involved got. He, does, however, manage to convey the feeling that the era was the time for young people to take away the power from the giants of the John Ford era and to take advantage of the executives' confusion about the changes of the social climate, and go completely berserk with their ideas (and personal lives).
Despite having a pretty varied taste in movies, it was fantastic to find out that the NH directors were inspired by (and in some cases even aspired to be) the great auteurs of the European cinema. Arthouse requires a specific kind of attention and the utmost focus of the viewer, but Scorsese et.al. injected their films with their own sense style. Perhaps not always as recognisable as Europeans' (especially Antonioni and Bergman), but slightly more approachable for the big audience (although I still can't believe Raging Bull (1980) bombed).
Not only that, but the small changes in the movie making process Biskind discusses all make sense when watching the movies (Taxi Driver (1976) etc.). Script writers ceased to be disposable and it was important for them to dive headfirst into their work, instead of considering it as a some sort of cheap job on the way to literature. Cast on the other hand was no longer comprised of polished cookie cutter people, but (apart from a few exceptions of course) average looking theatre people that lended realism to the movies. Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967) is a prime example. No one was especially looking for stars.
Biskind suggests that NH was partly about anger at authority and celebration of counterculture (like in Easy Rider (1969)). This tapped into a new audience, but unfortunately it didn't last long. Biskind's tone feels slightly derogatory, especially towards Lucas and Spielberg. He also seems to draw his own conclusions and interprets some movies in a way that it's represented as fact instead of as his own opinion. I'm not a fan of non-fiction authors who make their stances known, especially if the manner is bitter and unfairly inculpatory.
That being said, I understand what Biskind perhaps wants to say. The enthusiasm for making art gradually yielded when the studios started to recover. Spielberg and Lucas can't be the only ones to blame, but they did contribute involuntarily to the blockbuster era. Biskind makes a convincing claim that Spielberg's leanings towards conservatism and commercialism, occasional twelve-year-old-like behaviour, affinity with not crediting whoever helped him in his current movie (Rob Cohen thinks Verna Fields was responsible for the idea of showing only little of the shark in Jaws (1975) etc.), and favoring regressed adults and nostalgia for authority lead to tasteless and odourless cinema.
It may not be Spielberg's fault that after Jaws the studios were hungry for equally lucrative profits, but he chose to be part of the establishment. "Us" turning into an all-inclusive everyman instead of the counterculture kids is not necessarily only a bad thing, but it gave way to diluted family fares. Biskind says that Lucas had wanted a wholesome (Jesus Christ I hate that word) tone for Star Wars (1977), claimed it was a Disney movie, favoured happy endings along with straightforward storytelling and accessible two-dimensional characters. I agree with Biskind regarding Lucas and Spielberg bringing back small-town and suburban values. Lucas even said that "Words are great in the theater, but that’s not movies". Chilling.
Can you imagine what Apocalypse Now (1979) would have looked like if it had been directed by Lucas like it was initially intended? Pauline Kael said it well: "Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art — of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theater. So we’ve been getting a new cultural puritanism — people go to the innocuous hoping for the charming, or they settle for imported sobriety, and the press is full of snide references to Coppola’s huge film in progress... [They were] infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection." Friedkin compares the change with McDonald's getting hold of the nation. Lucas claims that he and Spielberg "understood what people liked to go see", but that just smells calculating as hell, not to mention that his claim that he destroyed the Hollywood film industry by making films more intelligent is just complete and utter bullshit. He even "believed that the most important parts of a film are the first five minutes and the last twenty. Everything in between is filler, and if there is enough action, no one will notice that the characters aren’t particularly complex, or that the acting is wooden".
The NH era was in a lot of ways wild, in good and in bad. The BBS offices smelled of pot, most were in a democratic mood and ready to help in friends' movies, everyone wanted to go to Peru to work with The Last Movie (1971) so that they could smuggle drugs back to L. A., Hopper's drug problem caused the directors to make notes in the script what kind he could take in each scene, there were some directors with huge egos and some (like Coppola) were simply megalomaniac crazies, women (who often contributed in some way to their men's films) had to cope with their men acting like assholes and thinking the open relationships of the 70s gave permission for cheating (Bert Schneider to Candice Bergen: "I’m sorry it’s so threatening to you, Bergen, but you have to understand that I’m a love object for every woman who walks into my office.... Start dealing with that. It’s time you began growing up."), on the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) the actors were provided with pot as a kind of takeaway so that they wouldn't have to go to the street etc.
We can all agree, though, that most films that resulted from this mayhem are good, and distinguishable as 70s and late 60s films. Biskind says that after their recovery, studio executives are now mostly businessmen who are interested about commercialism and money. Were now in a situation where it's difficult to brief an idea that doesn't promise huge profits. Indie movies do find their audience, but compared to the blockbusters, their market is much smaller. Star salaries are higher than ever. New faces are easier to be pushed around, and when one of the greats got an opportunity to make a comeback, they resorted to a mainstream film and failed.
Altman is not optimistic: "You get tired painting your pictures and going down to the street corner and selling them for a dollar. You get the occasional Fargo, but you’ve still got to make them for nothing, and you get nothing back. It’s disastrous for the film industry, disastrous for film art".
Who knows what will happen in the future. It's clear that we need all kinds of movies, and everyone has their own taste. I still wish there were more brave filmmakers who would get the opportunity to showcase their talents, no matter how wacky their ideas might be, and maintain their distinctive style through the years. I also wish that the movie business would slow down their hunger for money and would actually stop and smell the flowers, and see the talent out there.
Fortunately, these days we have our moments as well. With the explosive Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) Miller succeeded in lighting the screen on fire. It was magical and different. Ripped my guts out with its energy and beauty, and that's what I'm personally looking for in a movie. Godard showed that anything is possible, and even Lucas said that "Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck".
dark
emotional
funny
informative
sad
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
A tad gossipy, but essential reading for any cinephile.
funny
informative
medium-paced
dark
funny
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Spoiler alert: cocaine.
This book had a really interesting subject: namely, the New Hollywood movement of the late 60s and early 70s. For the aspect of telling the story of the rise of directors as auteurs, hoping to wrestle control from the studios, and their ultimate failure, it couldn’t have been more of a success.
And god is it fabulously researched and excitingly told, with an array of exciting characters.
However, I did get a little bored of some of the parts where it focused on the life and role of numerous producers; I would have liked almost entire focus on the directors and the art of making these movies. As well as this, the rampant misogyny of a lot of the people is hard to read at times, and barely anyone comes off good in this.
It was at its best towards the last 1/3, when the end of the 70s brought control back to the producers and studios, and why we’re where we are with films now. It did a great job of showing the impact of Jaws and Star Wars especially; whilst great films, they eventually let to the idea of huge finance on film promotion and thus killed the idea of limited releases, allowing a film to build hype naturally, due to actually being brilliant.
And god is it fabulously researched and excitingly told, with an array of exciting characters.
However, I did get a little bored of some of the parts where it focused on the life and role of numerous producers; I would have liked almost entire focus on the directors and the art of making these movies. As well as this, the rampant misogyny of a lot of the people is hard to read at times, and barely anyone comes off good in this.
It was at its best towards the last 1/3, when the end of the 70s brought control back to the producers and studios, and why we’re where we are with films now. It did a great job of showing the impact of Jaws and Star Wars especially; whilst great films, they eventually let to the idea of huge finance on film promotion and thus killed the idea of limited releases, allowing a film to build hype naturally, due to actually being brilliant.
Fascinating look at New Hollywood directors of the 70s with loads of candid stories of craziness from key players. Dennis Hopper comes across as absolutely psycho, with Coppola and Scorcese not far behind. Charts how Lucas and particularly Spielberg's more mainstream, commercial approach led to the disaster that American movie industry became in the 80s.