Word: biskind
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Stories like this rarely make the sunny spots on Entertainment Tonight, but they fill practically every page of Down and Dirty Pictures (Simon & Schuster; 544 pages), an expose of the independent-film business by longtime show-biz journalist Peter Biskind. The book is being released just in time for the Sundance Film Festival, that hotbed of indie-film deals that starts in snowy Park City, Utah, this week. Biskind--whose last book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, chronicled how the sex-drugs-and-rock generation revolutionized 1970s cinema--has done some exploratory surgery on the underbelly of the indie-film scene...
...sees the 1970s in movies as an interregnum between the old studio system and today's blockbuster machine, when idiosyncratic directors were able to persuade the moneymen to bankroll dark, even cynical, movies like MASH and Network for a mass audience. It's a familiar thesis--see Peter Biskind's 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls--but well fleshed out with interviews with big names (Scorsese, Coppola, Altman) who rise to the always daunting challenge of explaining why their work was so darn brilliant. The best insights come from actress Julie Christie, who distills the theme of '70s movies...
...should find High Concept and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls thoroughly engrossing. Ultimately, though, both also seem as depressing as a Swedish art-house film. Simpson's fate reflects the shame heaped on his whores: his heart failed while he sat on the toilet reading a biography of Oliver Stone. Biskind's book ends with a death too: the 1988 demise of brilliant but burned-out director Hal Ashby, whose Coming Home, The Last Detail and Shampoo were touchstone films of the '70s. Other directors fared only a little better, ushering in the '80s and '90s with divorces, addictions and bankruptcy...
...known as the "New Hollywood," a community of radical directors, snarky executives and gonzo producers who emerged in the 1970s unfettered by the tight controls of the old studio system. Two wild new books by veteran entertainment journalists, Charles Fleming's High Concept (Doubleday; 294 pages; $23.95) and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Simon & Schuster; 506 pages; $25), chronicle the decadence surrounding these creative eccentrics, offering a rare glimpse at the grime that covers the tinsel...
...Simpson's infamous life-style serves as an apt metaphor for the overindulgent '80s and '90s, Biskind's book delivers what's known in screenwriting jargon as the backstory--the preamble sparked when Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider caught fire. Those avant-garde youth movies emboldened a whole new pack of hip filmmakers to make their own iconoclastic films during the '70s: M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces and Paper Moon, among others. Biskind's history lesson also has its fair share of tantalizing dope and sex lore--at times the horrible stories from former spouses...