Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.

AuthorOliver, Charles

Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, by Peter Biskind, New York: Simon & Schuster, 506 pages, $25.00

At a 1970 Hollywood party, a stoned Dennis Hopper turned to George Cukor - a gentleman of the old, studio school of moviemaking and the director of such classics as Adam's Rib and My Fair Lady - and muttered, "We're going to bury you. We're gonna take over. You're finished."

It was the then-new Hollywood confronting the old. And while many of Hopper's young peers were mortified by his behavior, most of them shared his sentiments. They thought that they - and the edgy, personal films they made - were the wave of the future. But their future has now come and gone. Today, Dennis Hopper appears frequently on TV talk shows, plugging such edge-less extravaganzas as Waterworld. Hopper the talk-show guest wears expensive suits and is apt to speak of the joys of golf and of voting Republican.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is Peter Biskind's examination of the group of young and youngish filmmakers who challenged the studio system in the 1970s, briefly held the world in their hands, and were eventually felled by their own excesses and by the fickle tastes of movie audiences. His tale ends with the re-emergence, more or less, of the studio system these movie mavericks thought they would destroy.

A former editor at Premiere and American Film magazines, Biskind has a keen eye for detail and a gift for storytelling. But while his book spins many interesting tales about the people of the film community, it fails to address the cultural and economic forces that have shaped their industry over the last 35 years. In a previous book, Seeing Is Believing, Biskind laid out an intricate, though decidedly leftist, explanation of the cultural forces that shaped '50s films. This book isn't quite so ambitious. His best explanation for why the quirky films preferred by the 1960s film crowd gave way to big action spectacles is this quote from director William Friedkin, who made such '70s touchstones as The French Connection and The Exorcist: "Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald's got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared."

Biskind starts his tale in the mid-1960s, when the big studios were in the grip of a gerontocracy. Jack Warner, in his 70s, was running Warner Bros. Darryl F. Zanuck, well into his 60s, was head of 20th Century-Fox. At Paramount, founder...

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