At this point, Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a seminal work of film journalism that's necessary reading for any fan of American art cinema. Re-reading this for the first time since film school, I was struck by how pretentious, petty, and narcissistic so many highly respected directors were during the 70s. In its descriptions of the on- and off-set behaviours of Ashby, Schrader, Coppola, Hopper, and Scorsese (to name just a few), it is a warts-and-all approach that exposes a few surface abnormalities that are truly distasteful. It never fails to be interesting, like a Hollywood Babylon for the Baby Boomers.

In terms of Biskind's commentary on the films of the era, he has some truly terrible opinions on Robocop, Apocalypse Now, Paul Schrader's 80s output, and The King of Comedy (to name a few), but overall he has keen insight into the reasons why movies like Chinatown, Bonnie & Clyde, Taxi Driver, and Easy Rider resonated with audiences in the way they did.

In my opinion, the book is prematurely elegiac for a type of collective Hollywood filmmaking that never truly existed in the 70s. For consistency, Biskind mostly elides the popular, popcorn cinema that absolutely existed while the New Hollywood directors were doing their French New Wave karaoke. However, while it does conveniently gloss over inconvenient truths in service of a narrative that the dream of the 70s died with Heaven's Gate (often ignoring the way veteran directors like DePalma, Scorsese, Schrader, and newcomers like Voerhoeven and Cronenberg worked subversively within the studio system to arguably create some of their best work in the 80s). That said, there's so much gold in here that the flaws feel like nitpicking. Check it out!

Stray Observations:

1. I will ride for Biskind's observation that the best, most consistent, New Hollywood director was Hal Ashby.
2. George Lucas is such a weiner. Throughout the book, he never fails to be self-pitying, self-righteous, pretentious, and closed off. I'm sure there were reasons people hung out with him, but they did not come through in the book.
3. In spite of its best efforts, the book doesn't make cocaine seem anything other than awesome.