Thursday, February 21, 2013

Five top books on making movies

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on making movies:
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
by Peter Biskind

Peter Biskind's long, strange trip of interviews with the flower children who comprised the "New Hollywood" auteur youth movement in American motion pictures -- spanning from the late 1960s until the studio system’s return to power in the early '80s -- proved a powder keg upon publication. Either a debauched masterpiece or the greatest tabloid ever written, Easy Riders is utterly intimate, insightful, and scathingly honest about the films and chaotic lives of everyone from perennial mainstays Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Jack Nicholson to the era’s eccentric geniuses Hal Ashby, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture). Despite showing Hollywood’s finest at their best and worst, Biskind proves a thoughtful, dignified curator with a flair for capturing great scenes and an ardor for these artists who forever changed film culture.
Read about the other books on the list.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is on Leo Braudy's list of the five best books on Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue