Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock-N-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

Hollywood in the '70s is to young filmmakers as Paris in the '20s is to young fiction writers. Grad school students who daydream about sitting at an outdoor café sharing their stories with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, et al., will find their counterparts in digital camera-wielding directors who fantasize about a corporate-run Hollywood that miraculously handed the keys to the kingdom to a group of filmmaking mavericks: Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, and their ilk. This was the era, much romanticized today, when a movie didn't have to rake in $100 million in ten days to be considered successful, and didn't have to feature computer-generated effects to attract mass audiences.

Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls documents the '70s generation that changed the face of American film — for better and for worse. The era actually began in 1969, when Dennis Hopper directed Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. The dinosaurs in suits who still ran the studios were perplexed by their inability to connect with young audiences; large-scale flops like Hello Dolly only underlined the disparity between the people who made the movies and the audiences who paid to see them. Fast on the heels of Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider's phenomenal success showed a mostly bewildered Hollywood how to connect with the counter-culture youth who were "tuning in, turning on, and dropping out." The old guard was out and the new guard came roaring in.

Here, for the first time, American filmmakers were telling small, personal stories with unappealing, realistic anti-heroes, often with a downbeat tone and unhappy endings. And the studios were distributing and sometimes financing them! And audiences were making them hits! Never before would a director wield such autonomy in Hollywood… and never again.

The signs of the downfall were apparent to anyone paying close attention. (Biskind cannily notes that the new era had hardly begun when the dark side of the counter-culture came to light in the form of the Manson "family" killings.) Financed by the success of the Monkees (no, really), Easy Rider was a tumultuous production during which Hopper and Fonda repeatedly clashed (Fonda even hired bodyguards to accompany him on the set) and Dennis Hopper proved time and again that he was — how do I put this nicely? — completely out of his fucking mind. (Drunken orgies and violent mood-swings are but a few of his milder quirks.) Drug-addled, megalomaniacal, and surrounded by acolytes who inflated his already bursting ego, Hopper was out of control; the least of his indiscretions was pulling a knife on Rip Torn in an infamous encounter. He became a cultural icon, his face splashed across the cover of Time magazine, and the media anointed him the voice of his generation. His follow-up, The Last Movie, was a chaotic, disastrous production whose resounding failure exiled Hopper from Hollywood for almost twenty years.

Biskind finds the fatal flaw for each of his subjects. Usually it comes down to a potent combination of the following: vanity, drugs, and/or sex. Consider Peter Bogdanovich, who struck gold three times with The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon; embarked on an affair with actress/model Cybill Shepard; and proceeded to demolish his career with a pair of ill-conceived vehicles for Shepard, the modestly panned Daisy Miller and the notorious bomb At Long Last Love.

The documentation of bad behavior is thorough and tireless. Martin Scorsese was so coked out one night that he chased after his girlfriend, completely naked, down Mulholland Drive. Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver and director of Blue Collar, slept with a loaded Smith & Wesson .38 on his bedside table and had a tendency to wave it around when he spoke, "to make a point." Chinatown producer Robert Evans became so paranoid from drug abuse that he refused to leave his home and conducted production meetings for Paramount from his bed.

As the likes of Francis Coppola, Hal Ashby, and Robert Altman fashioned themselves after the auteur theory propogated by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema, they came to believe their own press and take themselves too seriously. They weren't mere "movie directors," they were auteurs, generals, gods. Both Coppola and William Friedkin followed blockbuster hits (The Godfather and its sequel for Coppola, The French Connection and The Exorcist for Friedkin) with ambitious films whose productions resembled small-scale wars. Coppola's Apocalypse Now was moderately successful and received mixed reviews but has since become a classic. Friedkin's Sorcerer was a bomb in every respect and signaled the downfall of his career; he's now a for-hire director on action fare like The Hunted.

The most sobering aspect of Biskind's book is the "Where-Are-They-Now?" game. With few exceptions — Scorsese and Altman come to mind — none of these directors made vital and important films past 1981, the last year Biskind writes about. While the directors themselves can be blamed for their spectacular collapse in the latter half of the decade, amidst drugs and sex scandals and inflated budgets (and egos), the industry also turned against them.

The blame for that rests primarily on the shoulders of the two least likely auteurs: a couple of nerdy, antisocial boys in the ill-fitting bodies of grown men, named Stephen and George. While their contemporaries studied the French New Wave and the iconoclastic films of Bergman, Cassavettes, and Godard, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas grew up on TV and Hollywood fare, and saw the world in a Technicolor glow. After failed attempts to fit in with the Zeitgeist in their first films (The Sugarland Express and THX: 1138, respectively), they abandoned small-scale, personal filmmaking for the behemoths of Jaws and Star Wars, and the modern-day blockbuster was born.

The '70s generation's ideals live on, in somewhat diminished form, in the modern independent film scene, where vital, personal films are still being made. For those of us who aspire to make our own such films, Biskind's book is an irresistible read and a cautionary tale writ large. I can't be certain what film-illiterate readers would think of it, but I was unable to put the damn thing down; I had to pace myself for fear of finishing it too soon. Biskind writes with sharp candor and a novelist's sense of pace and conflict.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is by turns exhilarating, astonishing, depressing, and hilarious. While Biskind's dramatic instincts lead him to focus on the more out-of-control films, leaving a false impression that every production was a runaway train lucky to pull into the station in one piece, the context of the work gives it a greater significance than salacious gossip. Biskind vividly captures the hopes, dreams, and highs — and yes, the follies — of the first truly independent film generation.

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