Content area
Full Text
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Peter Biskind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
By the late 1960s, Hollywood appeared to be at the end of its reel. The major studios, still mired in the big-budget mentality that was a reaction to the threat of television a decade earlier, were gambling more and more money on bigger and bigger productions-- many of which, failing to connect with a changing movie audience, flopped miserably. At the same time, attendance in general was sliding; by 1967, average weekly movie attendance had dwindled to below half of early-1960s levels.
Into that creative and commercial malaise leapt a new breed of filmmaker. The startling success of Easy Rider ( 1969), following 1967's surprise hits The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, showed Hollywood's old guard that, although they had lost touch with their audience, there were some filmmakers who hadn't. Young, brash, and talented, with imaginations stoked by film school training, a liberated lifestyle, and, above all, a passion for movie making, the New Hollywood was welcomed in by the old Hollywood, whose leaders, though bewildered by the new breed's unconventional ways, were smart enough to let the kids take a shot at saving their industry. And, as film writer Peter Biskind painstakingly notes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, they did save it, and even, for...