Synopses & Reviews
Peter Biskind authored two of the most talked about and read books of the last decade
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood and its bestselling sequel
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film.
Gods and Monsters chronicles the cause and courses of Hollywood over the last three decades the super freaks, lowlifes, charlatans and occasional geniuses who have left their bite mark on American culture, as refracted through the trajectory of Peter Biskinds career.
The ghosts of McCarthyism and the blacklist haunt Gods and Monsters as do the casualties of the counterculture and the New Hollywood the story of Sue Menges, the 70s 'super-agent' whose career went mysteriously south, is extraordinarily poignant, as is the example of Terence Malick, whose light shone so brightly in the same period but then disappeared until 1997s The Thin Red Line.
But at the heart of the book are the likes of Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford and Quentin Tarantino and uber-producers Don Simpson and Harvey Weinstein and their excess lifestyles, all of whom Biskind portrays in great Dickensian detail, charting how they have had a simultaneously strangulating and liberating effect on the industry.
Review
"An impressive appreciation of cinema's highs and lows, but you'll still wish Biskind could simply go back to writing about movies again instead of indulging in all this glossy gossip." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[O]nly a few [pieces] suggest what he would ultimately do in best-sellers like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls....The rest of these pages are filled with much more scholarly (read: boring) stuff....[O]nly for true Biskind believers. (Grade: C)" Entertainment Weekly
Synopsis
Peter Biskind chronicles the cause and courses of Hollywood over the last three decades, the superfreaks, lowlifes, charlatans and occasional geniuses who have left their bite mark on American culture.
About the Author
Peter Biskind is the author of several books, including Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock Roll Generation Saved Hollywood; and Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. He was editor-in-chief of American Film and the executive editor of Premiere. He is currently a contributing writer to Vanity Fair.
Table of Contents
The politics of power in On the Waterfront 2
War of the worlds 26
Tightass and cocksucker : sexual politics in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 39
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid 45
Machismo and Hollywood's working class 53
Blue collar blues : proletarian cinema from Hollywood 75
Holocaust fever 79
"Come back to the mill, Nick honey" : The Deer Hunter misses the target 86
A balance of error? PBS's Vietnam: waist-deep in the big muddy 92
American film criticism (postwar) 100
The last crusade 115
The weather underground, take one 150
In Latin America they shoot filmmakers 183
Promised land : on Sundance 189
Any which way he can 212
Chameleon man 228
Slouching toward Hollywood 235
The making of "Blatherlands": an imaginary conversation between Sissy Spacek and Terrence Malick 250
The runaway genius 255
Punchin' Judy 278
The man who minted style 289
When Sue was queen 315
Good night, dark prince 348