Easy Riders,
Raging Bull:
Hollywood
in the Seventies
Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls:
Hollywood depends on the suspension of disbelief; the pictures produced there depend on it, and the industry that produces them seems to depend on it as well. Consider the Titanic phenomenon. Was it really the “Best Film” of 1997? Was it worth the $200 million it reportedly cost to make? Does it offer proof that the fabled cutthroat business of Hollywood really produces worthwhile movies? Peter Biskind does not believe it, and he says so bluntly in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. In the book's introduction, he complains that modern Hollywood fare is, for the most part, “unrelievedly awful.” In the last chapter, he singles out Titanic as “ridiculous.”
And in between, he sets out to tell the tale of a better time, before the current mania for blockbusters. To put it simply, he is talking about the 1970s, a period when some truly startling films were coming out of Hollywood. Many were interesting simply for their formal qualities. But some, particularly when judged by today's standards, were also astonishing in their willingness to be intelligent, challenging, and downright cynical. The Graduate to Midnight Cowboy to Network to Nashville to The Parallax View to Marathon Man to Dog Day Afternoon: As the cliché goes, they don't make 'em like that anymore, at least not in Hollywood.
The short version of how this anomalous moment came to pass is pretty straightforward. The old studio system, stripped of its oligopoly power by the Supreme Court and caught flat-footed by the growing popularity of television, had fallen into financial trouble and general disarray by the 1960s. Several majors were bought up by conglomerates, adding another layer of confusion to what had once been a fairly rigid system. At the same time, European film and technological advances were inspiring and enabling a new level of experimentation among certain American filmmakers. And in the background, of course, the country at large was going through one of the most dramatic periods in its cultural history. So, the narrative goes, some brave movie-makers managed to ram some brave product through the Hollywood machine while no one was paying enough attention to stop them.
What Biskind seems to want to add to this familiar version of events are two things: a lot more drama, and a lot more salacious detail. First, the drama. “The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system,” Biskind declares, “or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing fillmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.” He even goes so far as to call Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper “the Vietcong of Beverly Hills.”
Now that's dramatic. But supporting this version of the '70s “golden age” requires some pretty questionable simplifications of film history. What André Bazin in 1957 called “the genius of the system” is here dismissed as an assembly line that offered directors like Howard Hawks no room to express themselves. (Film scholar Thomas Schatz borrowed Bazin's phrase for the title of his far more thoughtful 1988 book on classical studio styles.) Moreover, the old studio model was long gone by the late 1960s, and even if some of the suits in the executive suites were as clueless as Biskind suggests, they were already allowing films like Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate into the theaters.
Still, it's true that after Bonnie and Clydes was released in 1967, edgy and idiosyncratci films seemed to pour out of Hollywood. Biskind reels off a primary cannon of 44 examples (or 43, since he lists Carnal Knowledgeå twice), then throws in offerings from European directors, and old-timers who could now do better work. In all, he lists 76 movies by directors from Woody Allen to Sergio Leone. He also throws in a few younger people working within the system, bit players like Peter Guber, who was “rising fast through the ranks of Columbia” when Easy Rider came along in 1969 and threw the old guard into a tizzy, empowering young hotshots like him to help get films like The Last Detail made.
* * * * *
Though Biskind narrows this cast as he thickens his plot, it remains unweildly and, ultimately, undermines his "revolutionary" theory. By suggesting this is the story of a generation that started out wanting to democratize filmmaking, it's easy to pin the blame on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for selling out and creating the blockbuster films that went on to ruin everything. A more likely, but messier, scenario is that as the studios were willing to back riskier projects because they were desparate, and they simply gave chances to a lot of people-Spielberg, Altman, Polanski-who were never fellow travelers of any sort. Meanwhile, the conventional blockbuster never really went away: some of the most popular films of the early 1970s were Love Story, Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno.
Most important, apart from Francis Ford Coppola, hardly anyone in the book professes to the utopion motives of creating a new system for making and distributing better movies; instead, everyone seems to want an Oscars and a bigger budgets for the next picture. How revolutionary is that? As for the motives of those young guns within the studios, what Biskind does not mention about Peter Guber is that he went on to champion such films as Last Action Hero during a disastrous run as top executive of Sony Pictures, a period chronicled the 1996 book Hit & Run, by reporters Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters.
Biskind's take seems to be that everyone's motives started out pure, and were simply corrupted later on; the revolutionaries blew it all by doing too much coke or cheating on their spouses all the time or simply getting greedy. And this brings us to the salacious details, which turn out to be the book's primary strength-or at least its primary selling point. In fact, the deeper you get into Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the more it becomes obvious that Biskind is never going to reconcile the book's subtitle ( “How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood ”) with his stated opinion that Hollywood today is a wasteland. Instead, his whole “revolution” thesis ends up seeming like an excuse to roll out a lot of outrageous stories about famous people; this is less Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema, more Julia Phillips' You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.
This is fun and entertaining at times, but overall it's pretty unfortunate. The one thing that Biskind, a Premiere editor and author of two other movie books, appears to have going for him is access, and much of his book is drawn from his interviews with principals with whom he at least seems to be on familiar terms. What he did not add to his many pithy and surprisingly acrimonious quotes concerning the self-destructive behavior of “Marty” Scorsese, “Bob” Altman, “Candy” Bergen, et al, is any particular insight or context about how the films actually got made under what seem to be remarkable circumstances.
Moreover, Biskind is not impressive as a writer, a journalist, or a scholar. Though the book was supposedly years in the making, it's written in the style of a rush-job treatment, full of breathless quasi-sentences like “Altman was a Democrat, supported Adlai Stevenson” or “Beatty happened to read it, thought about playing the lead.” And in the quest for sexy anecdotes, he routinely shrugs off the lack of corroboration, the denial, even the flat-out contradiction. Throughout the book, he'll tell one wild tale or another, which will be followed by a footnote or a parenthetical along the lines of “Geffen says this never happened” or “Puzo says this meeting never took place.” Elsewhere, when there's an important turning point that can't be captured in a sound bite, he simply glosses over the explanation that ought to be central to a book like this. George Lucas “asked [20th Century Fox] to commit $8.15 million to a project in a despised genre, without [star] names, without a presold book,” Biskind reports. “Miraculously, the board agreed.” Why? How did Lucas convince them? Who knows?
* * * * *
One particularly flagrant example of slipshod reporting centers on Dennis Hopper. Biskind has Hopper splitting up with his then-wife Brook Hayword as she drove him to the airport to catch a plane for New Orleans, where he would shoot the famous Easy Rider cemetery sequence. “That was it, I never saw her again,” Biskind quotes Hopper saying. A few pages later, he has Hopper returning home to screen the New Orleans footage-with Hayword. Judging from the unsatisfying “Notes” at he end of the book, Biskind's information about the screening came from an April 1997 interview with Hayword; Hopper's comment came from an interview in three months after that. Did Hopper deny that Hayword was at the screening? Does he not remember? Again: Who knows? Biskind makes no effort to reconcile the two versions of events, and simply moves on.
This is especially annoying because, really, the dissolution of Hopper's marriage is irrelevant to the story Biskind ought to be telling. By invariably opting to smear in more dirt, Biskind ends up oversimplifying and missing the subtleties that could have made Easy Riders, Raging Bulls not only entertaining, but illuminating. This is true throughout, but as a case in point, it's worth taking a close look at Biskind's ham-handed portrayal of how The Godfather came to be both a watershed financial success for Paramount and a triumph in filmmaking.
* * * * *
Paramount was on hard times when Gulf + Western took it over in 1966, but by 1970 it had a major hit with the formulaic Love Story, and hoped to have another with The Godfather. G+W was presided over by Austrian-born Charles Bluhdorn, a man who Biskind portrays as a coarse boob with funny accent, yelling things like “I don't vant a crazy guy!” and “Dat's terr-iff-ic!” (The most memorable use of this device on Biskind's part has Bluhdorn pronouncing Finian's Rainbow, an early Coppola film, as “Phhinian's fucking Rainbow.” That's right: Bluhdorn pronounced “Finian” with a “ph.”). Apparently with a straight face, Biskind goes on to quote an unnamed executive making the ludicrous assertion that Bluhdorn “bought Paramount 'cause he figured it was an easy way to get laid.”
Bluhdorn installed “failed actor” Robert Evans as head of production, “possibly ... because he didn't care very much what happened to the studio, which accounted for no more than five percent of Gulf + Western's revenues.” Then again, maybe there was some other reason, since Biskind told us a few pages earlier that Bluhdorn “took a very personal interest in the studio.” In any case, it fell to Evans-who seems to have known what he was doing, since he was the one to “call the shots ”on Love Story -to convince a young Francis Ford Coppola to direct an adaptation of The Godfather , a novel more notable for its impressive sales figures than its merit as literature. Though Coppola resisted such a commercial project at first, the chance to relieve his rather burdensome debts convinced him to accept. Again without any hint that he might disagree, Biskind notes Evans' opinion that Coppola couldn't “get a cartoon made in this town” before The Godfather, so Evans expected to push him around on casting decisions. And yet, “such was the sense of entitlement enjoyed by the directors of this generation, that Evans was unable to impose his whim even on someone as powerless as Coppola.”
Really? How can that be? Again, Biskind moves on without exploring the question-although he does, in another passage, assert that Coppola convinced the studio's top executives reluctantly to accept Brando as the Don after the filmmaker “appeared to have an epileptic fit” during a meeting with them. (The “Notes” offers no clue as to who his source for this unlikely incident might be.) Later Biskind mentions in passing that Coppola had just won a screenwriting Oscar for Patton. Maybe that had something to do with how he got his way.
Biskind's description of the six-month shoot and subsequent release goes on in the same way: a string of quotes and anecdotes that offer mild titillation and no insight whatsoever. He makes no mention of how the film was marketed, apart from saying that “the buzz ... was fierce.” He is vague and cursory in his treatment of one of the most significant things about The Godfather's release: Paramount managed to get it shown in what was, at the time, a much larger than normal number of first-run theaters. And his explanation of Paramount's unusually lucrative arrangement with exhibitors is so elliptical that it makes no sense at all.
What a waste. Here and throughout
the book it's clear that these are larger-than-life characters, and many
of them do seem to have been completely out of control both personally
and professionally. But instead of turning that material into a great
tale, he settled for gossip laced with mostly conventional observations
and easy cop-outs. Good fun, I guess, if you're willing to suspend your
disbelief, but he could have done so much more. “Paramount was a
loony bin of big personalities, egos, and tempers,” Biskind writes
in his section on The Godfather. "The studio worker bees used to
refer to [the top executives] as 'The Manson family.' It was amazing any
pictures got made at all, but they were smart and they all loved movies.”
Yes, it is amazing that any pictures got made at all, not just at Paramount
but throughout the whole sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll drenched film industry
of the 1970s. I wonder how it happened? Somebody ought to write a book
about that.
This review appeared in the June 8,1998 issue of The Nation.
