GoldbergBlog

Easy Riders, Raging OMFG

I haven’t been able to tear myself away from Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”.  I probably should have read it years ago but after reading “Down and Dirty Pictures”, I felt that not only would I not gleam a lot of new information from “Easy Riders” but that Biskind’s over-indulgence in gossip would make it a less-than-worthwhile read.

Just for those who don’t know, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is about the rise and fall of Hollywood’s Second Golden Age and how directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Ashby, drugged out and narcissistic as they could be, challenged and transformed what American movies could be before studio supremacy returned once more with the coming of blockbusters “Jaws” and “Star Wars”.

But it does provide me with what I want which is the how and why behind great motion pictures.  However, as predicted it provide the gossip in no short order.  It’s undoubtedly juicy but at times I feel like I don’t really care that Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving had a rocky relationship and I don’t need another paragraph of Biskind’s dimestore psychoanalysis.

But then I get to a passage like this:

“Probably loaded on booze and ‘ludes, Snider blew Stratten’s head off with the shotgun, and then placed her prostrate on an exercise bench (later referred to in the press as a “bondage machine”) and had sex with her corpse.”

WORTH IT.

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