Easy Riders Raging Bulls

Peter Biskind chronicles the rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s, featuring such "movie brat" directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. But he also refers to such older directors as Stanley Kubrick.

It’s written in a chatty and easy-to-read style and is full of useful tidbits of information about Kubrick and especially his new backers at Warner Brothers.

This book is the absolute classic of the genre. Biskind goes deep inside the studios, production companies, meetings, and parties where the ‘70s cinema happened. Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas, Altman, Bogdanovich, and so many more are all there.

What makes this book great is it’s more than sexy behind-the-scenes gossip. Biskind chronicles arguably the most important decade in Hollywood history, when film transformed from cheap, broadly appealing entertainment to auteur-driven cinema.

Biskind takes us right inside the boardrooms, movie shoots, and parties, oh, so many parties, that produced one of the biggest change movements in American cinematic history, the auteur wave of the 1970s. 

From the shocking success of Easy Rider through the tsunami of modern classics such as The Godfather, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, as well as crowd-pleasers like Jaws, Biskind tells the story of how the likes of Scorcese and Coppola, DeNiro and Pacino, and other giants of modern film came to be.

Biskind was among the first to prove that Hollywood history could be… show more.

Just before and during the same period that SNL was raging on the East Coast, rising directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas were rewriting the rules of Hollywood. Biskind’s history of the New Hollywood of the Seventies, which starts with 1969’s biker classic Easy Rider, is jammed with juicy stories of sex, drugs, and film canisters. But it also makes you appreciate anew the way movies like  Chinatown, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Star Wars made going to the local movie theater a newly thrilling and surprising experience. 

The Hollywood dream factory has always been composed of varying parts art, business, glamour, and sleaze, and very few of the thousands of books written about it have captured that recipe so vividly and well as Peter Biskind's definitive history of the filmmaking generation that gave us such movies as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Jaws, and Star Wars. In telling the stories of the life and times of such rebels as Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and the actors, executives, and women… show more.