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

by Peter Biskind

Overview

In 1969, a low-budget biker movie, Easy Rider, shocked Hollywood with its stunning success. An unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (onscreen and off), Easy Rider heralded a heady decade in which a rebellious wave of talented young filmmakers invigorated the movie industry. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind takes us on the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s, an era that produced such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Jaws.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and how, along the way, some of its executives helped smuggle Huey Newton out of the country; how director Hal Ashby was busted for drugs and thrown in jail in Toronto; why Martin Scorsese attended the Academy Awards with an FBI escort when Taxi Driver was nominated; how George Lucas, gripped by anxiety, compulsively cut off his own hair while writing Star Wars, how a modest house on Nicholas Beach occupied by actresses Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt became the unofficial headquarters for the New Hollywood; how Billy Friedkin tried to humiliate Paramount boss Barry Diller; and how screenwriter/director Paul Schrader played Russian roulette in his hot tub. It was a time when an "anything goes" experimentation prevailed both on the screen and off.

After the success of Easy Rider, young film-school graduates suddenly found themselves in demand, and directors such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese became powerful figures. Even the new generation of film stars -- Nicholson, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino, and Dunaway -- seemed a breed apart from the traditional Hollywood actors. Ironically, the renaissance would come to an end with Jaws and Star Wars, hugely successful films that would create a blockbuster mentality and crush innovation.

Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood's last golden age. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and about the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn.

By turns hilarious and shocking, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the ultimate behind-the-scenes account of Hollywood at work and play.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439126615
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	12/13/2011
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	279,190
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Peter Biskind is the author of five previous books, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. He is a contributor to Vanity Fair and was formerly the executive editor of Premiere magazine. He lives with his family in Columbia County, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

"Some friends of mine were saying the '70s was the last Golden Age. I said, 'How can you say that?' They replied, 'Well, you had all these great directors making picture after picture. You had Altman, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas....'"
Martin Scorsese

February 9, 1971, 6:01 in the morning. A scattering of cars, headlights glowing fuzzily in the predawn gloom, had just begun to navigate the freeways as the first commuters sleepily sipped coffee out of Styrofoam cups and listened to the early morning news. A high of 71 degrees was expected. The Manson trial, now in the penalty phase, was still titillating the city of Los Angeles. Suddenly, the ground started to shake violently, not like the rolling, almost soothing motion of previous earthquakes. This was an abrupt heaving and falling that was terrifying in its intensity and duration, threatening to go on forever. For many, the 6.5 quake felt like the Big One. Manson's girls would claim later that Charlie himself had brought it down on the sinners tormenting him.

Over in Burbank, Martin Scorsese was jolted out of bed. He had just gotten a big break, an editing job at Warner Bros., and had arrived from New York a few weeks earlier. Marty was staying at the Toluca Motel, across the street from the lot. Dreaming of rare books when he heard a rumble, he imagined he was in the subway. "I jumped out of bed, looked out the window," he recalls. "Everything was shaking. Lightning was slashing across the sky -- it was the electric wires from the telephone poles, falling down. It was terrifying. I thought, I gotta get outta here. By the time I pulled on my cowboy boots, got myat least half a decade behind the other popular arts. So it was some time before the acrid odor of cannabis and tear gas wafted over the pools of Beverly Hills and the sounds of shouting reached the studio gates. But when flower power finally hit in the late '60s, it hit hard. As America burned, Hells Angels gunned their bikes down Sunset Boulevard, while girls danced topless in the street to the music of the Doors booming from the clubs that lined the Strip. "It was like the ground was in flames and tulips were coming up at the same time," recalls Peter Guber, then a trainee at Columbia and later head of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was one long party. Everything old was bad, everything new was good. Nothing was sacred; everything was up for grabs. It was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style.

By the late '60s and early '70s, if you were young, ambitious, and talented, there was no better place on earth to be than Hollywood. The buzz around movies attracted the best and the brightest of the boomers to the film schools. Everybody wanted to get in on the act. Norman Mailer wanted to make movies more than he wanted to write novels; Andy Warhol wanted to make movies more than he wanted to reproduce Campbell's soup cans. Rock stars like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles couldn't wait to get in front of and, in Dylan's case, behind the camera. As Steven Spielberg puts it, "The '70s was the first time that a kind of age restriction was lifted, and young people were allowed to come rushing in with all of their naïveté and their wisdom and all of the privileges of youth. It was just an avalanche of brave new ideas, which is why the '70s was such a watershed."

In 1967, two movies, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, sent tremors through the industry. Others followed in quick succession: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby in 1968, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider in 1969, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces in 1970, The French Connection, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Picture Show, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971, and The Godfather in 1972. Before anyone realized it, there was a movement -- instantly dubbed the New Hollywood in the press -- led by a new generation of directors. This was to be a directors' decade if ever there was one. Directors as a group enjoyed more power, prestige, and wealth than they ever had before. The great directors of the studio era, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, regarded themselves as nothing more than hired help (over-) paid to manufacture entertainment, storytellers who shunned self-conscious style lest it interfere with the business at hand. New Hollywood directors, on the other hand, were unembarrassed -- in many cases rightly so -- to assume the mantle of the artist, nor did they shrink from developing personal styles that distinguished their work from that of other directors.

The first wave, comprised of white men born in the mid-to late '30s (occasionally earlier), included Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, Warren Beatty, Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Robert Benton, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, Alan Pakula, Paul Mazursky, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, and Richard Lester. The second wave was made up of the early boomers, born during and (mostly) after World War II, the fil m school generation, the so-called movie brats. This group included Scorsese, Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, and Terrence Malick.

When all was said and done, these directors created a body of work that included, in addition to the titles mentioned above, The Last Detail; Nashville; Faces; Shampoo; A Clockwork Orange; Reds; Paper Moon; The Exorcist; The Godfather, Part II; Mean Streets; Badlands; The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Raging Bull; Apocalypse Now; Jaws; Cabaret; Klute; Carnal Knowledge; American Graffiti; Days of Heaven; Blue Collar; All That Jazz; Annie Hall; Manhattan; Carrie; All the President's Men; Coming Home; and Star Wars. So rich was the soil of this decade that it even produced a compelling body of secondary work, then regarded as aesthetically or commercially wanting, that nevertheless has considerable merit, including Scarecrow; Payday; Night Moves; The King of Marvin Gardens; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; Straight Time; Diary of a Mad Housewife; Silent Running; Bad Company; Tracks; Performance; The Wind and the Lion; and many of the films of Cassavetes. The revolution also facilitated ready access to Hollywood and/or studio distribution for Brits like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), John Boorman (Deliverance), Ken Russell (Women in Love), and Nicholas Roeg (Don't Look Now). And Europeans like Milos Forman, who made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Roman Polanski, who made Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown; Bernardo Bertolucci, who made Last Tango in Paris and 1900; Louis Malle, who made Pretty Baby and Atlantic City; and Sergio Leone, who made The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. As well as veterans like Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and John Huston, who suddenly found the freedom to do some of their best work, pictures like Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Man Who Would Be King, and Fat City. It brought out the best in journeyman directors like Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, who respectively made They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon; and allowed an actor such as Clint Eastwood to develop a body of work as a director.

The new power of directors was legitimized by its own ideology, "auteurism." The auteur theory was an invention of French critics who maintained that directors are to movies what poets are to poems. The leading American proponent of the auteur theory, was Andrew Sarris, who wrote for the Village Voice, and used this pulpit to promote the then novel idea that the director is the sole author of his work, regardless of whatever contribution the writers, producers, or actors may make. He ranked directors in hierarchies, which had an instant appeal for the passionate young cineastes who now knew that John Ford was better than William Wyler, and why. Recalls Benton, "Reading Sarris was like listening to Radio Free Europe."

The young directors employed a new group of actors -- Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Harvey Keitel, and Elliott Gould -- who banished the vanilla features of the Tabs and the Troys, and instead brought to the screen a gritty new realism and ethnicity. And the women -- Barbra Streisand , Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Jill Clayburgh, Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon, Diane Keaton -- were a far cry from the pert, snub-nosed Doris Days of the '50s. Most of these new faces were schooled in the Method by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, or trained by the other celebrated New York teachers: Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, or Uta Hagen. In fact, a lot of the energy that animated the New Hollywood came from New York; the '70s was the decade when New York swallowed Hollywood, when Hollywood was Gothamized.

By this time it has become a cliché to insist that this was, by any measure, a remarkable era, the likes of which we will very probably never see again. Every age gone by is lit up by a retrospective glow of nostalgia, and the specialness of the '70s was by no means evident at the time. As Scorsese puts it, "We were just guys who wanted to make movies, and we knew we could be cut down any second by these people at the studios." Certainly this period had its share of schlock. But Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno to one side, the '70s was truly a golden age, "the last great time," in the words of Peter Bart, who was vice president of production at Paramount until mid-decade, "for pictures that expanded the idea of what could be done with movies." It was the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work -- as opposed to the errant masterpiece -- work that was character-, rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily. These were often films without heroes, without roman ce, without -- in the lexicon of sports, which has colonized Hollywood -- anyone to "root for." In a culture inured even to the shock of the new, in which today's news is tomorrow's history to be forgotten entirely or recycled in some unimaginably debased form, '70s movies retain their power to unsettle; time has not dulled their edge, and they are as provocative now as they were the day they were released. Just think of Regan stabbing her crotch with a crucifix in The Exorcist or Travis Bickle blowing his way through the ending of Taxi Driver, fingertips flying in all directions. The thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven's Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it.

And it wasn't only the landmark movies that made the late '60s and '70s unique. This was a time when film culture permeated American life in a way that it never had before and never has since. In the words of Susan Sontag, "It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself." Film was no less than a secular religion.

Finally, the dream of the New Hollywood transcended individual movies. At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination. The avatars of the movement were "filmmakers," not "directors" or "editors" or "cinematographers"; they tried to break down the hierarchies that traditionally dominated the technical crafts. Indeed '70s people were the original "hyphenates," starting as writers, like Schrader, or editors, like Ashby, or actors, like Beatty, then moving into directing without necessarily giving up their original vocation.

The New Hollywood lasted barely a decade, but in addition to bequeathing a body of landmark films, it has a lot to teach us about the way Hollywood is run now, why today's pictures, with a few happy exceptions, are so unrelievedly awful, why Hollywood is in a perpetual state of crisis and self-loathing.

If this book had been written during the '70s, it would have focused exclusively on directors. It would have been a book about the art of the director, how director Y made X shot with Z lens because he was crafting a homage to Citizen Kane or The Searchers. Many excellent studies and innumerable biographies with exactly this approach already exist. If this book had been written in the '80s, when executives and producers became media darlings, it would have been about the film business. But written in the '90s, it tries to look at both sides of the equation, the business and the art, or more precisely, the businessman and the artist. This is a book about the people who made the movies of the '70s, and who more often than not destroyed themselves in the process. It tries to explain why the New Hollywood happened, and why it ended.

Copyright © 1998 by Peter Biskind

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Knockin' on Heaven's Door	13
1	Before the Revolution	23
2	"Who Made Us Right?"	52
3	Exile on Main Street	81
4	The Moviegoer	110
5	The Man Who Would Be King	141
6	Like a Rolling Stone	169
7	Sympathy for the Devil	197
8	The Gospel According to St. Martin	225
9	The Revenge of the Nerd	255
10	Citizen Cain	286
11	Star Bucks	316
12	Coming Apart	346
13	The Eve of Destruction	376
14	"We Blew It"	408
	Cast of Characters	441
	Selected Filmography of Directors (1967-1982)	447
	Notes	449
	Index	483
	Photo Credits	507

Editorial Reviews

The talented wave of young directors responsible for such modern classics as Easy Rider, Chinatown, The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, The Last Picture Show, and Taxi Driver often lived more like rock-'n'-roll stars than movie directors, indulging in extravagant boozing, drug use, and casual sex. Peter Biskind revisits those rowdy days in his book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

bn.com

The former executive editor of Premiere offers a juicy and supremely entertaining overview of the birth of new Hollywood in the 1970s (producing films like Nashville, Chinatown, Harold & Maude, Jaws, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, TheGodfather and Star Wars), which was wonderfully creative but short-lived. The artists celebrated sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll onscreen and off, which partially explains why so many high-flying careers crashed. Dick Hill's invigorating narration is so animated that he seems to be enjoying the sordid and funny mixture of gossip and history as much as any listener. The combination of Biskind's shrewdly written definitive history and Hill's unflagging energy makes this a great way to spend 24 hours. A Simon & Schuster paperback. (Dec.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A former executive editor of Premiere on 1970s Hollywood.

Library Journal

One hell of an elixir -- salty with flavorsome gossip, sour with the aftertaste of misspent careers, intoxicating with one revelation after another...an 'A.'

Entertainment Weekly

Thouthful, gossipy, and altogether mesmerizing.
— The New York Times

Janet Maslin

Masterly told....Devourable....A Hollywood expose that you can read -- mouth agape.

Washington Post Book World

The most discussed reading material in Hollywood.

The New York Times

The author "knows where the bodies are buried...and his eye for telling detail turns up enough fresh insights to keep the book engrossing."
— The New York Times Book Review

Joseph McBride

Mark Harris Entertainment Weekly Peter Biskind's great, scathing, news-packed history...is one hell of an elixir — salty with flavorsome gossip, sour with the aftertaste of misspent careers, intoxicating with one revelation after another,...an "A."

Dennis Drabelle The Washington Post Book World Biskind's devourable book is that rarity, a Hollywood exposé that you can read mouth agape, slurping up scandal and titillation so fast you're in danger of choking — without feeling ashamed of yourself.

Brian Gunn San Francisco Chronicle Biskind is a magician at prying revealing yarns and juicy quotes out of his subjects. And the resulting scenarios are deliciously tawdry...moments of real intelligence and grace.

From the Publisher

Dick Hill manages to remain enthusiastically engaged without becoming salacious as he reveals who slept with whom, who took too many drugs, and who was a vindictive bully in the Hollywood scene of the late '60s and '70s. At that time, the old studio system was upended, becoming the bailiwick of AUTEUR directors. Peter Biskind turns over some smut-encrusted rocks to get the dirt on directors Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and others. His approach is pure tabloid, revealing the secrets, insecurities, and excesses of the men and women who made some of the great ground-breaking films of the period, such as CHINATOWN, HAROLD AND MAUDE, THE GODFATHER. Hill deserves high marks for his expert reading of another wallow in Hollywood's dark side. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2008 - AudioFile