by Peter Galvin
Most critics celebrate early 70's Hollywood as 'the last great golden era when auteurs ruled the Earth - like Scorsese, Altman, Friedkin, Coppola... but, according to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a book from Hollywood biographer Peter Biskind, by decades end the dream was over, burnt out by booze, babes, and an avalanche of "snow". Is Biskind on the level, or do the accusations that he's twisted the truth in a vain attempt at self-promotion have merit? Peter Galvin talks to the man himself and finds there's no easy answer.
By the end of the '60s Hollywood was in a mess. The movie companies had lost the plot; audiences were dwindling and "entertainment" flicks like Love Story (1970) were looking increasingly irrelevant against the social ills that besieged the U.S. Civil unrest, 'Nam, the energy crisis and there were still more shakes to come... Nixon was in the White House. Into this hothouse atmosphere came a bunch of young guys who desired to tell personal stories using the old forms, like the Western, the gangster movie, the musical, the romance, the detective movie.
But unlike the Hollywood of Old this "New" Hollywood didn't send audiences out into the world with a happy ending. The movies were dark, disturbed. The stories could bend, twist in unexpected ways (Chinatown, 1974). Heroes could get it in the neck (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971) or were fucked in the head (Taxi Driver), or were biker drug dealers (Easy Rider, 1969) or just plain confused (Five Easy Pieces, 1970); and the women were not polite ("What I want is to suck his cock," says Julie Christie of Warren Beatty in Shampoo, 1975). The Godfather I & II showed the world that Hollywood could be entertaining, artistic, political and profitable. But then there was Jaws, then Star Wars and blockbuster dollars and the studios no longer wanted character driven movies with serious themes...
But, argues Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a book by former Premiere editor Peter Biskind, it is not just the conglomerates who must take the fall for the rise and rise of the "popcorn" flick.
According to Biskind's tawdry account, the cream of New Hollywood's auteurs - Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin (The Exorcist), Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) burnt themselves out on a steady diet of booze, birds, and megalomania; driving up budgets with half-baked material (Heaven's Gate, 1941, One from the Heart), only to tuck themselves in at night under a blanket of 'snow'.
In one scene from the book, Scorsese, an asthmatic pill-popper cocaine junkie watches his life flash in front of him as he bleeds from every orifice.
How did Scorsese deal with that? He makes Raging Bull (1980), about a self-destructive brute, argues Biskind. "As a group they were serious, committed, passionate about the possibility of putting their own feelings on screen in the context of popular film - it wasn't phoney - it was real because it was their lives up there," says Biskind.
And, according to Biskind the filmmakers' lives were so fucked up that no wonder the movies were so intense, so filled with confusion, angst and psychic violence.
In one of the book's crazier passages Paul Schrader, another coke fiend, who had purged his homicidal urges by writing Taxi Driver, was so blitzed on the white powder that he was offering marriage to two women at once. When his shrink complained that he was behaving like a nut, Schrader got a second opinion. He finally came to his senses after playing Russian roulette in his jacuzzi...
Soon after, Schrader's Cat People (1982) was released... and it bombed. Schrader left L.A., for New York and gave up coke. "Schrader was happy to admit to all that stuff," says Biskind from his home in Manhattan.
"Obviously it would be hypocritical of him to say that drugs didn't help him write, when it did." But he adds, "What I ended up using in the book was just the tip of the iceberg."
Biskind says that in the four hundred plus interviews he did for the book he uncovered enough sordid tales to fill several volumes; but when it comes to the details he gets coy...
"Illegal stuff, weird stuff, Don Simpson stuff," he breathes uneasily. "And I left out stuff that I thought would destroy people's lives," he says with just a hint of self-congratulation.
But for all its page turning urgency, its occasional insights into how such great movies as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Mean Streets and Jaws came to be, there is something awfully nasty at the core of Easy Riders.
"He attempted to exploit the era for the most salacious personal conduct of its most prominent figures who have some sort of public profile today," says Beverly Walker, a prominent figure in the New Hollywood, who worked for BBS (the tiny company that made Jack Nicholson a star and brought you Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces).
And, says Walker; Biskind did this to alter his own image as the hagiographic/publicity spin smith of Premiere, a toady who always writes in the service of the Hollywood "establishment".
And a glance at the book reveals there's something in Walker's politics - The Big Three of the era, Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg get an almighty kicking.
Coppola is a cheat, an egomaniac and a borderline nutcase. Lucas doesn't appreciate his friends (or his wife). Spielberg is infantile (one scene has him playing with a toy helicopter on the floor of his office, as he rewrites Jaws).
"Look there is an undue reverence accorded these filmmakers," says Biskind of the Big Three. "And the myth is that they did it on their own."
Walker, who once dated Paul Schrader, says she felt used by Biskind, for her insider take on the era ("I was there and he wasn't," she says) and claims the book is inaccurate, mean spirited and a "total distortion of a great era."
"He left out many important people - like Tom Laughlin" (the now forgotten auteur/star of Billy Jack, a remarkable project, in the context of Hollywood mavericks because Laughlin actually owned the negative and released the film himself).
"I mean where's John Cassavetes in the book?" queries Walker.
"Oh, yeah, the worst you can say about John was that he was a drunk," snorts Walker.
But Walker reserves her greatest ire for the way she feels Biskind has mistreated history. "The whole drug thing is a gross distortion with a few exceptions. Spielberg and Coppola didn't use coke... He didn't even deal with the filmmaking part, which after all, is why the goddamned book was published!" she says.
And Walker believes that Biskind trawled through old feuds and disgruntled ex-wives to get to the dirt - hardly creditable sources given the project - an accusation that Biskind freely admits to.
"Despite the auteur theory it was a lot of the collaborations that made these movies work," he says citing Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich. "Bogdanovich never made a good movie after he split up with Polly," (instead argues Biskind he tried to turn the modest talents of his lover Cybill Shepherd into the stuff of stardom only to crash and burn with a series of bombs like At Long Last Love and Daisy Miller).
"The portrait of my marriage to Peter in the book is accurate in so far as events, but, the perception that you are left with - that Peter was unfair or unfeeling is wrong," says Polly Platt, from her L.A. office, where she now works as a producer (Broadcast News). "And Biskind says I "co-directed" The Last Picture Show - I did not!"
What hurts the most is that she feels sorry for Bogdanovich -and her compassion isn't in the book.
But the book's biggest flaw, according to most critics is that Biskind is rather kind to the powerful agents and conglomerates.
Easy Riders, glosses over the complex subtleties of the era and the way the conglomerates used the excesses of certain figures as an excuse to stop making "serious" films.
"The era ended because these guys scared the shit out of the studios - and Biskind makes out that they ate each other up," says Walker.
Not quite transcending its flaws as a definitive social history, Easy Riders is a gripping read; a kind of high class of Hollywood scandal sheet...
And Biskind sniffs at his critics, claiming that there's bound to be inaccuracies and the fact that the book gives voice to hidden agendas supports his very approach.
"Look, these people (Coppola, et. al) want to control their own lives, and they want to be seen in the best possible light - and I spent many, many pages talking about the corporations and the rise of the blockbuster mentality... And nobody has sued", he says.
What Biskind doesn't say is that under U.S. libel laws it's almost impossible to sue - mostly because you have to show malice and damages. And, according to one source, Marty Scorsese, Robert Towne, and Francis Coppola all tried.
But in amidst the controversy about history, and credibility it's possible to miss the point: the films.
"It really hurt me to write some of those things," says Biskind.
But for those who were there what really hurts is that Biskind missed the story and played out the gossip. Perhaps the only way to tell the story of the '70s is from the point of view of an insider, which means another book. Not such a bad thing.
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link directly to this feature at http://efilmcritic.com/feature.php?feature=98
originally posted: 09/15/99 00:46:41
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