‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her. And if I don’t want to fuck her, she shouldn’t be in the movie’ (Don Simpson, President of Worldwide Production, Paramount Pictures, after seeing a showreel of Shelley Duvall, quoted on page 370)
Turns out lots of the senior people in the ‘New Hollywood’ of the early 1970s were know-nothing scumbags.
Also turns out the movie business is first and foremost a business i.e. even the most ‘radical’ far-out types in the late ’60s-early ’70s were concerned to make a profit – lots and lots of profit – win prizes, gain respect, engaged in extremely serious, dog-eat-dog competition with their peers and rivals. Basically, same old same old.
And it turns out that these young New Hollywood types were into awesome amounts of sex, adultery, free love, were ‘pussy addicts’, ‘pussy struck’ (p.212) and ‘pussy hounds’ (p.208), propositioning any girl who walked by, had multiple mistresses, girlfriends, even ordering up partners from modelling catalogues (a technique pioneered by Brian de Palma who recommended it to Steven Spielberg).
And that they ingested a whole heap of drugs – at first everyone smoked pot, riskier types took acid, and then in about 1971, the whole town discovered cocaine. By 1980 Hollywood was a winter wonderland of white powder. Martin Scorsese alone seems to have been a one-man pharmaceuticals factory (p.377).
None of these things are, by themselves, that much of a revelation. What makes this book such an epic read is the awesome amount of detail that Biskind goes into on all these and many other topics, and the amazing eye-witness testimony he appears to have coaxed out of everyone who was there.
Easy riders
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a big, intensely researched and hugely absorbing book, turning in at just over 500 pages of smallish print, including the index and ‘Cast of characters’.
The idea is simple. The later 1960s saw the final collapse of the Old Hollywood which had dominated from the 1920s, with its rigid studio systems, production quotas, stars under strict contracts, subject to carefully managed images and appearing in movies with, by and large, squeaky clean subject matter (Doris Day & Rock Hudson) or, if a bit more gritty (gangster movies, Westerns), nonetheless featuring clear heroes, baddies and well-upholstered love interests.
In this Old World, directors were simply hired hands who took pride in subsuming their own style to the requirements of the studio and the project (mostly – though you could still tell a Howard Hawks movie from a John Ford movie etc).
The late 1960s saw the arrival of a Completely Different Approach, with writers and directors and actors determined to tear down all the old restrictions, to portray more explicit violence and sex and controversial political and social themes in their movies, and to have a lot more say about the kinds of movies they wrote and directed. They wanted to be auteurs, not just directors but film-makers, free to convey their special visions in their own personal ways.
The new young generation of writers, directors and actors who came through at the end of the 1960s created a Golden Age of Independent Cinema in a new kind of Hollywood, which slowly adapted to more grown-up, controversial and ‘difficult’ themes.
The audiences were younger, too, and better educated, college kids who wanted to see the unsettling reality of the world they lived in – the endless carnage in Vietnam and student protests and Black Power and drugs and free love – portrayed up on the screen.
All of this is fairly well known, as is the list of New Hollywood directors:
- Robert Altman (b.1925) M*A*S*H*, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville
- Mike Nichols (b.1931) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Teach Me!, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge
- Roman Polanski (b.1933) Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess
- William Friedkin (b.1935) The French Connection, The Exorcist
- Woody Allen (b.1935) Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories
- Peter Bogdanovitch (b.1939) The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Nickelodeon
- Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939) The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now
- Brian de Palma (b.1940) Carrie, Scarface
- Martin Scorcese (b.1942) Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull
- Terence Malick (b.1943) Badlands, Days of Heaven
- George Lucas (b.1944) THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars,The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark
- John Milius (b.1944)
- Steven Spielberg (b.1946) Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The key New Hollywood actors:
- Warren Beatty, James Caan, Robert de Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Jon Voigt, Ryan O’Neal, George Segal
New Hollywood movies
And the movies themselves. In this list I’ve 1. highlighted in bold the movies Biskind treats in real detail 2. and indicated their directors. The others are included as context. And I’ve included the movies which won Best Picture Oscar for each of the years. The idea is that there a few forerunners in 67 and 68:
1967 – Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn), The Graduate (Mike Nichols), Cool Hand Luke – Best Picture Oscar: In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison)
1968 – Bullitt (Peter Yates), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski): Best Picture – Oliver! (Vernon Harris)
But 1969 was the year of the Big Breakthrough:
1969 – Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Best Picture – Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)
1970 – M*A*S*H (Robert Altman), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson), Catch-22, Little Big Man (Arthur Penn), Woodstock: Best Picture – Patton (Franklin Schaffner)
1971 – The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovitch), Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby), Dirty Harry, Klute, THX 1138 (George Lucas): Best Picture – The French Connection (William Friedkin)
1972 – The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson), Cabaret, Deliverance, Jeremiah Johnson: Best picture – The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola),
1973 – American Graffiti (George Lucas), The Exorcist (William Friedkin), The Last Detail (Hal Ashby), The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman), Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese), Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovitch), Badlands, Sleeper: Best Picture – The Sting (George Roy Hill)
1974 – Chinatown (Polanski), The Conversation (Coppola), Daisy Miller (Bogdanovitch), The Parallax View, The Taking of Pelham 123: Best picture – The Godfather part II
1975 – Nashville, Shampoo, Love and Death, Jaws, Three Days of the Condor: Best picture – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Foreman)
1976 – All The President’s Men, Bound For Glory (Hal Ashby), Marathon Man, The Omen, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Taxi Driver: Best picture – Rocky (John G. Avildson)
1977 – Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Best picture – Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
1978 – Coming Home (Ashby), Days of Heaven (Malick), Blue Collar (Schrader): Best picture – The Deer Hunter (Cimino)
1979 – Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 1941 (Spielberg): Best picture – Kramer v Kramer
1980 – Popeye, Heaven’s Gate (Cimono), American Gigolo (Schrader), Raging Bull (Scorsese), Tess, The Elephant Man: Best picture – Ordinary People
1981 – Reds (Beatty), Raiders of the Lost Ark: Best picture – Chariots of Fire
Qualities of New Hollywood movies
To summarise: the ‘New Hollywood’ was a brief historical window when a new generation of writers and directors, unfettered by Hollywood traditions, felt empowered to tackle challenging new subject matter, shot more cheaply on location (away from the technical and stylistic limitations of studios), starring attractive young actors (Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway), with more graphic treatments of violence and sex.
And a troubled, haunting tone. The best New Hollywood films capture a wistful sense of the loss of shared values and social certainties besetting late-60s America, exacerbated by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and the general disillusionment with politicians and the ‘old’.
Matching this disillusionment, many New Hollywood films specialise in an atmosphere of uncertainty – uncertainty about plots and characters and values.
The demographics are interesting. In the 1950s and into the 1960s movie-going audiences tended to be middle-aged, high school-educated i.e. not too intellectual. The Sound of Music suited them just fine. But the arrival of the New Hollywood period coincided with a marked shift in the movie-going public, which changed to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic. By the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college. Radical students. Peace, man. Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.
It was a more studenty audience ready to lap up more extreme violence and full-frontal nudity undreamed of by the Hollywood of the 1950s. The old studio heads couldn’t understand these pot-smoking hippies at all and the New Hollywood period can be seen as a hiatus while the Old Guard gave unprecedented autonomy (and money) to a bunch of new, young, wannabe directors.
In reality it only took 4 or 5 years (Martin Scorsese says the period lasted from 1971 to 1976 ‘because we were just starting out’, p.233) before a new generation of studio executives figured out new ways to cater to / exploit the new audience, new genres, subjects, and approaches to marketing and releasing movies, which would restore big money profits and revenue streams to the studios, and the era of happy-go-lucky experimentation ended (see below).
The stories
Gossip Biskind loves gossip. His book is basically a gossip fest. Donna Greenberg has a rich husband and lives in a big beach house in Malibu. She knows Julie Payne, daughter of John Payne and child actress Ann Shirley. Julie has a perfect American body. She is fierce and wild, chainsmokes and drinks, is liable to turn up at Donna’s house at one in the morning, screaming: ‘I want to use your swimming pool to have a fuck.’
There’s lots of stuff like that. If you find that kind of thing interesting or entertaining, then this is the book for you.
Wanna know about the time Dennis Hopper threatened to pull a knife on Rip Torn in a bar? Or ordered 50 nubile young women up to his apartment for an orgy he could film (p.134)? Or beat his wife, who eventually ran away with the kids, terrified he was going to kill her? Or was married for six days to a gorgeous dollybird he met on the location of his second movie – but that once he got her home he took to roaming round the house, off his face on drugs, firing live ammunition, slapping her about, and handcuffing her to the bed so she couldn’t get away… until after six days of this, at a moment when the cuffs were off, she fled?
It’s all here, plus hundreds and hundreds of other stories of the same ilk. The way Warren Beatty’s Winebago on location was besieged by nymphets and spent hours rocking up and down, day and night, as he screwed them? Studio execs lounging by the pool giving all the bikini-ed nubiles who passed by numbers out of ten, Bert Schneider trying to persuade his wife to screw all his friends so he’d feel less bad about his flings, powerful men thinking it run-of-the-mill to say things like ‘Nice tits, honey’ to every woman they met.
The hundreds of outrageous stories behind the bloated, disaster-struck production of Apocalypse Now (the drugs, the no script, Brando’s refusal to act, Martin Sheen’s heart attack, the typhoon which destroyed the set, Coppola’s nervous breakdown), the extraordinary drug intake of Martin Scorsese which almost killed him (pp.386-7), the overdose which saw Hal Ashby being stretchered off to hospital after a hard night partying with the Rolling Stones (p.353).
Sex Biskind loves this stuff and loves describing the sex lives of the directors and executives and stars. Once Peter Bogdanovitch arrives in Hollywood, he and his wife do a good job inveigling their way into the highest Old Hollywood circles.
When their friends went away, they house-sat. Like X-rated Goldilockses they went through the closets of Beverly Hills mansions trying on clothes and fucking in every bedroom. (p.115)
Yes, ‘fucking’. The book starts with everyone being foul-mouthed as you can imagine, and then goes downhill. Everyone was fucking everyone else. Well, to be more precise, pretty much every male in the book is unfaithful to whatever partner they have (wife, mistress, girlfriend). Some, like Beatty, are natural babe magnets. Others set out to systematically screw the wives and girlfriends of all their friends.
A whole lot of women are interviewed who give a lamentable collective portrait of a generation of ‘pussy addicts’. Ted Ashley, chairman of the Warner Brothers film studio from 1969 to 1980 was, according to producer Don Simpson, ‘the pussy freak of all time’ (p.82). Peter Bogdanovich casts his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in flop after flop because he is ‘pussy struck’.
Once Francis Ford Coppola made it big (very big) with The Godfather he bought a huge house with a pool in San Francisco, gave big parties, as soon as his wife went to bed, he was touching up all the nubiles in the pool. ‘It was no secret that Francis was a major pussy hound,’ says Marcia Lucas (p.208).
Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson emerge as particularly colourful characters. As Biskind puts it, ‘Bert [was] a man for whom the term ‘mindfucker’ was invented…’ (p.130) and he screwed his way through an armada of women, a highlight of whom was the beautiful actress Candice Bergen. He tried to get his wife, Judy, to sleep around too, so he wouldn’t feel so guilty about his affairs, and encouraged his friends to hit on her (p.129). He drove Candice (Candy) mad by his incessant lecturing her about life, how to behave etc, acting Svengali to her Trilby.
Bob Rafelson directed one of my all-time favourite movies, Five Easy Pieces, but is bluntly described as a ‘bully’, raving, shouting, blustering and browbeating everyone around him (p.119).
Drugs And the drugs. Obviously drugs of one sort or another had been around for a long time but mostly on a tiny marginal fringe. The success of Easy Rider made every young producer, director, actor or executive worth his salt feel like he had to be au fait with hash and pot, and the radical ones tried acid. Biskind describes some of the small independent production houses where the secretaries had the task of rolling the joints in preparation for big meetings.
Drugs were even involved in the actual production of the films. Bob Rafelson controlled the pacing of Jack Nicholson’s performance in Five Easy Pieces by managing his drug intake. He and the producer would discuss whether it was best to give Jack some hash or some grass before each scene, depending on the acting requirements (p.119).
Everyone knew Dennis Hopper would scarf down any pharmaceuticals from anywhere within reach. During his acting career, some directors never used him after lunch, when he would be trolleyed; another director sent Hopper calls sheets which included annotations suggesting which drugs he should use before which scenes (p.136).
Then cocaine came in. It went from being a secret vice to a social norm. Bowls of cocaine were laid out at the best parties. Wearing a little gold coke spoon on a necklace became a fashion statement. ‘Cokey’ becomes an adjective. The movie Personal Best is powdered with the stuff.
It was a cokey set. A production designer referred to [the movie’s writer-director] as ‘old write-a-line, snort-a-line Towne’. (p.395)
Scorsese at the Cannes Film Festival had good coke flown in from Paris for himself and his entourage. When studio executive Robert Evans flew out to visit the set of Robert Altman’s movie, Popeye, shooting in Malta in 1980, his luggage contained large consignments of coke for the director and crew, which made it embarrassing when his luggage got lost and opened by customs. Biskind tells a wild story of a panic-stricken Evans ringing studio head Don Simpson in the middle of the night, making him realise the stakes were that a senior exec and a major film could go down in a drugs scandal, and telling him to get no less a personage than Henry Kissinger on the case! (p.370).
Business All this sex and drugs stuff is initially entertaining, but after a hundred pages has got a bit oppressive. More interesting is the insight into the movie business as a business. We are told about umpteen ‘business meetings’ where decisions are made about greenlighting numerous projects, or where Old Hollywood executives are persuaded to fund risky experimental new ventures, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studios. That said, they’re not like the meetings I used to go to at government departments, which go on for one, two or three hours with an agenda, minutes and action logs. In Biskind’s hands most of these ‘meetings’ quickly turn into shouting matches, where executives and directors shout and swear at each other.
It wasn’t exactly a meeting, but it gives you a flavour of the business relationships to learn that whenever super-producer Robert Evans phoned Francis Ford Coppola with yet more criticism about the Godfather project, Coppola invariably ended up yelling obscenities, slamming the phone down, and kept a hammer nearby so he could smash the phone to pieces (p.153). After which a secretary replaced it with a new one.
When producer Stanley Jaffe, at a pre-production meeting for The Godfather, was so insistent that Marlon Brando wouldn’t be in the movie that he slammed his fist on the table, Coppola feigned having an epileptic fit, and fell to the floor in spasms, to convey just how imbecilic the suggestion was (p.153).
Money And there’s a lot of talk about money, about how much a project will cost, how much the studio will put in, the shape of the deal i.e. will director and stars get cash up front or a percentage of the profits, and how those profits could be calculated differently, taking into account all kinds of overheads, what John Landis calls ‘numbers and deals and phone calls’ (p.245).
Warner Bros exec John Calley pays $125,000 up-front to direct the screwball comedy, What’s Up, Doc? Brando gets $50,000 for appearing in The Godfather while Coppola only got $110,000 (plus 6% of the take, which ended up making him a multi-millionaire). Robert Towne was paid $250,000 to write Chinatown plus 5% of the gross. Lots and lots and lots of financial detail like that.
The process So, putting to one side the sex and drugs gossip, it’s interesting to get really embedded into the way the whole system worked: the way producers, directors, actors and execs were constantly having business meetings and/or social gatherings, hanging out in bars, discussing books or plays which have the potential to become movies, discussing who would be right to develop it, to turn it into a treatment or a script, who to offer the parts to, and the complexity of schedules and commitments, which meant your first choice of director or star actor or whoever, were continually being changed, adjusted, projects dropped, projects revived and so on. Like spinning plates. Like moving between multiple stages where multiple producers, directors, writers and actors are all spinning multiple systems of plates, an awful lot of which crashed and shattered, often very expensively.
And Biskind seems to have staggering access to it all. He seems to have carried out interviews and garnered eye-witness accounts from everyone present at all the key moments, parties, meetings, phone calls and sets. Some critics have complained that Biskind distorted evidence and stories and accounts in order to fit his wildly cynical and jaded narrative, but he indicates where accounts conflict and anyway, who cares? The point is rarely in the detail, it’s in the overall atmosphere of grotesquely appalling behaviour at every level, in every way.
As a small example of how it works – legendary cinéaste and would-be director Peter Bogdanovitch – before he’d directed anything – and his wife production designer Polly Platt, were sent by a magazine to write a feature about the making of what turned out to be John Ford’s last movie, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn. They got friendly with young actor Sal Mineo, the only person on the set their age. Sal gave Polly a dog-eared copy of a trashy paperback titled The Last Picture Show and said it would make a good movie and he’d love to be in it.
Thus began the long process which led to the eventual production of the movie, The Last Picture Show, released in 1971, one of the defining movies of the New Hollywood, Bogdanovitch’s first and arguably greatest film. During filming he fell in love with the female lead, Cybill Shepherd, aged 20 at the time, and left his wife who – the book emphasises – had played a key role in not only adapting the book, but even on set, helping to direct it. Biskind describes in excruciating detail the torment Polly went through as she helped her husband with every aspect of the day’s filming, only to go back to their apartment alone as he spent every night with pneumatic young Cybill.
None of which stops The Last Picture Show being a masterpiece and one of my favourite movies.
So from the hundreds of examples in the book, you get a good sense of the very extended series of accidents, insights, conversations, commissions, scripts, hirings and firings which are all involved in the convoluted processes which lead up to the production of any movie.
Networks And you get a good sense of the extended network or matrix which all this takes place in. Parties mattered. As a small example, Peter Fonda’s agent, Sue Mengers, had parties where people hooked up and did deals: Ann-Margret met director Mike Nichols and got a part in Carnal Knowledge; Burt Reynolds met director Alan Pakula and got a part in Starting Over; Lauren Hutton got chatting to director Paul Schrader and got a part in American Gigolo (p.132).
The socialising was important. Anything could happen at tonight’s party, someone could tip you off to the script going round, or that so-and-so’s looking for a director or actor for some project they’re considering… and it could be the Big Break. You never knew.
‘I went to every party, talked to everybody I could to get a picture made. I looked at people in terms of whether they could help me.’ (Scorsese, quoted page 238)
So this is why personal relationships really mattered. This is where the gossip comes in. Information about who was up and who was down, who was friends with who or had fallen out with who, who was looking to take revenge or sabotage someone else – all this was potentially vital business information as it made the landscape of opportunities much clearer.
That said, almost all the friendships, marriages and relationships in the book sooner or later turn sour, and often toxic. Because of the nature of the business.
Beatty and Towne had been friends since the ’60s. They were as close as two men could be, but it is hard to maintain friendships in Hollywood where the stakes are so high, where there are vast disparities of money and power, where the lines between affection and business are blurred, and people never know whether their success is earned or accidental. Enough is never enough, and the poison of envy eats away at the fibre of friendships. (p.305)
Types of director
The dark, yellowy feel of The Godfather derives almost entirely from the Director of Photography, Gordon Willis. I was surprised to read Biskin stating that Francis Ford Coppola’s strengths were not really visual – he was good at story-telling, writing dialogue and getting on with actors. Willis gave The Godfather that unparalleled look.
Obviously there are different kinds of directors, but I hadn’t quite realised just how different. Whereas Coppola loved actors and working with them, Polanski hated them and behaved like a dictator, like Napoleon. ‘Who gives a fuck about your motivation, your paycheck is your motivation, just say the fucking words’, he shouted at Faye Dunaway on the set of Chinatown (p.189). On on occasion she was sitting in a car holding a coffee cup while Polanski yelled at her, until she finally flung it in his face, at which point he realised it was full of pee. Hers, or co-star Jack Nicholson’s, sitting grinning next to her?
Hal Ashby, by contrast again, was immensely easy-going with his actors, one of the greatest ‘non-directors’ of all time according to Nicholson, but the downside was scenes often lacked bite and intensity so that the script got washed out (p.179).
Robert Altman created a ‘wonderful atmosphere’ on his sets, where he worked alongside the actors to get at the ‘truth’ of a scene (p.215). But he also ‘fucked everybody over’, limited other people’s pay but made sure he got the full rate, sacked crew members arbitrarily and was, of course, a womanising s.o.b.
William Friedkin was a very technical kind of director, very involved with the lenses and the technical effects, but he didn’t like actors, he went on record as saying he’d rather direct tree stumps (p.218). And we hear about the time he permanently injured Ellen Birstyn’s spine, during a special effect for The Exorcist.
And Terrence Malick (Badlands) was so notoriously indecisive that he took two years (!) to edit Days of Heaven (finally released in 1978), after which he retired from the business for decades.
One of the best bits of the book, I thought, was the one-page biographies of all the key directors.
- Hal Ashby was raised on a farm and one day found his dad in the barn who’d put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger; he never recovered, bottled it up, but it came out in titanic rages.
- Coppola was stricken with polio when he was eight-years-old, and spent a year in bed, all friends and most family forbidden from visiting him, lonely and isolated, a sense of loneliness and victimhood he carried into adult life.
- Scorsese was a short, skinny, sickly momma’s boy with allergies to everything and bad asthma, ‘filled with phobias and anxieties’ (p.238). He was timid, bordering on cowardly, hated confrontation, always smiling. But he bottled up the rage from being a short skinny kid in a rough neighbourhood – he was a wall puncher, a phone thrower (p.239) – and projected his anger into his films – which is why I’ve never liked them (p.227).
He was not very confrontational. Which is one of the reasons I think he gets so confrontational in the films, he’s just letting all that out. All the stuff he can’t do in his day-to-day life. (Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver)
- William Friedkin grew up in a tough neighbourhood of Chicago and was arrested for armed robbery (!). After the success of French Connection and The Exorcist, he thought he was a genius and behaved intolerably to everyone, many enemies being thrilled when his next movie, Sorcerer, shot on location in the Dominican Republic, was a catastrophe.
- Paul Schrader’s upbringing was one of religious terror and beatings by his pious mother and father. The God-fearing upbringing of screenwriter Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, with its parental beatings and hellfire terrors, is itself the stuff of fiction (or nightmares). His obsession with suicide, with always having a loaded gun by his bedside, the fantasies of mass violence, all this was to spill onto the screen in the script of Taxi Driver.
- Steven Spielberg was the nemesis of the counter-culture, immune to politics, never took drugs, shared his parents’ values, wanted to do good business and entertain.
- George Lucas very similar, brought up in provincial nowheresville by philistine parents, small, frail and ill (he had diabetes cf. Scorsese’s asthma and Coppola’s polio). On his arrival in LA he initially thought he wanted to be a rebel like the swaggering cool dudes, de Palma and John Milius and Paul Schrader – till he had a eureka moment when he realised he wanted to make people happy, he wanted to entertain them – which led to the good-time American Graffiti (1974) and then the epoch-making, childish simplicities of Star Wars.
Lucas and Spielberg were in the vanguard of the counterattack by small-town and suburban values that were to reclaim Hollywood as their own. (p.343)
This is partly because it sheds light on the individuals. But also because they’re one of the few places where you get a bit of depth and variety, and an insight into other lives, other American settings and contexts, outside the pussy-grabbing, dope-smoking, egomaniac film world.
The end of an era
The very same ‘film school brats’ who helped to pioneer the new age, unwittingly brought about its demise.
The air of artistic freedom which had come in with Easy Rider (1969) began to reverse itself when the commercial success of Jaws (1975) and then the epic Star Wars (1977) led the studios to realise the potential of a new kind of blockbuster, whose profits could be amplified by careful control of production, marketing and merchandising. Slowly that heady air of half-amateur experimentalism and freedom of subject and tone drained away.
Films like Alien (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) incorporated all the technical innovations pioneered in the previous decade, but had somehow morphed them into a slick new professional look. The moral and stylistic ambivalences of the best New Hollywood movies of the very early 70s had been turned into slick product which went on, as we all know, to become highly profitable franchises, complete with TV spinoffs and a world of merchandising.
Alongside the invention of a new type of blockbuster, went a further change in the demographic of people consuming movies. If 60s radicals had applauded the change in demographic from middle-aged to student-aged audiences, they were not so happy when this downward trend continued towards actual children.
By the mid-1970s 50% of the American movie-going public was aged 12–20. The thing about actual children is they tend to be as socially conservative as their parents, and so the downward trend in the age of the movie-going public was accompanied by a move away from the brief political radicalism of the early 70s towards a reborn conservatism of subjects and approach.
George Lucas understood this extremely well. He is quoted as saying American Graffiti was targeted at 16-year-olds, Star Wars at ten to 12-year-olds (p.318) and that is the basically childish demographic where most movies have stuck ever since.
The Indiana Jones series, like the never-ending Star Wars series, are, basically, films for children, and they were the future, the grandparents of today’s endless X-Men and Marvel Superhero franchises.
Film critic Pauline Kael realised this at the time and wrote essays warning about the trend towards juvenile feelgood movies, not least in an essay titled ‘Fear of Movies’ (p.342). Biskind quotes Spielberg himself as saying he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind entirely to conjure up that child’s sense of wonder, and goes on to point out how the movie’s protagonist abandons his adult responsibilities to his wife and son, regresses to childhood enshtusiasms and then, by entering the alien mothership, effectively goes right back to the womb, relinquishing all adult worries.
It’s hard to think of a more infantilising vision. (p.363)
Biskind’s analyses
Biskind provides fascinating accounts of the random conceptions and lengthy travails of all the key movies of the 1970s, accounts which are drenched, as I’ve said in gossip about personalities, sex and drugs, along with the intricate wheeler-dealing between directors, stars agents and studio executives, that more often than not continued right the way through the shooting, editing and preview stage of the films, sometimes even after they’d been officially released.
But at the point where the narrative reaches the actual release of each of the signature movies of the movement, he also subjects the key movies to interesting ‘criticism’ and ‘analysis’.
Thus he as a very insightful (to me, at any rate) page about The Exorcist which he sees entirely as ‘a male nightmare of female puberty’, drenched in fear of emergent female sexuality, which is why the movie can be seen as a conspiracy of all the male characters to torture and torment the pubescent girl, Regan, back to her pre-sexual innocence (p.223).
Biskind is good on how the unique visual look of The Godfather owes everything to director of photographer Gordon Willis (pp.156-157) but he goes on to give an insightful interpretation of how the movie as a whole, despite its status as the masterpiece of the New Hollywood’s leading figure, Coppola, is in fact a profoundly conservative if not reactionary movie, in its psychological and cultural tendency – promoting the huge importance of family and loyalty at a time when the counter-culture was busy trying to undermine The Family as a bourgeois, sexist construct (p.164).
To bring this out Biskind usefully contrasts the scene where Michael and the Don acknowledge their love for each other with the comparable scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicolson’s character completely fails to communicate with his stroke-bound father.
The Godfather embodies a type of blockbuster sentimentality which points towards the neo-conservative values of the Reagan era, whereas Five Easy Pieces embodies the low-key, on-location, moral and psychological ambiguity and frustration which was the signature note of the New Hollywood. Which is why, although I can acknowledge that The Godfather is a masterpiece, I prefer the low-key, realistic ‘truths’ and perplexities of Five Easy Pieces more.
On another level, Biskind discusses the role of genres. He details the struggles Coppola had to get the movie made, not least the scepticism of every studio exec that gangster movies were passé, and so brings out how its unexpected success marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of old genres in a new blockbuster style.
This reinvention of worn-out genres would turn out to be the modus operandi of Spielberg and Lucas, reinventing scarey (Jaws), science fiction (Star Wars) and adventure (Indiana Jones) in the new blockbuster idiom.
Biskind neatly calls their achievement ‘genre gentrification’, and that captures the way a rough, edgy, arty neighbourhood (New Hollywood) ended up being taken over by smooth-talking young urban professionals (Spielberg, Lucas) and how the tired old Hollywood genres were made over, given a technological lick of paint, and resold at vast profits (p.342).
When you read Biskind’s very useful potted biographies of Spielberg and Lucas, what comes over is what utterly conventional personalities they are, coming from bland provincial backgrounds, completely lacking in political edge, timid and unworldly, who knew about life mainly from TV, who arrived in the Sodom and Gomorrah of 70s Hollywood but didn’t sleep around and didn’t take drugs, just wanted to make movies.
Their lack of rock’n’roll behaviour should have warned all the other bullshitting blowhards of the movement (de Palma and Schrader and Friedkin and Rafelson spring to mind) that here was something new, and quiet and understated, which was going to steal the carpet from under their feet.
Biskind sees this triumph of the homely, the popular, the regular guy and the mass popcorn-eating audience embodied in the story of Jaws itself. In it the rough, tough, right-wing macho man Quint gets eaten. ‘The intellectual Jew of the left’ (Biskind’s words, p.279), despite all his college talk, is ineffectual and runs (or swims) away. It is the unreflective, unflashy, everyman cop, Brody, who saves the day. The movie’s representative of precisely the kind of ‘familymanregularguy’ who Spielberg would aim his following movies at (with such dazzling success).
Politics and society
I warmed to lots of Biskind’s analyses because he relates the movies to their social, cultural and political context, which is much the same way as I think and write about art and literature in this blog.
1969 was the high point of the Vietnam War, protests against the war, and the hippy counter-culture, Woodstock etc. Easy Rider provided images, characters and a popular soundtrack which crystallised that cultural moment. But by spring 1975 it was over. In fact the Paris Peace Accords ended the war in January 1973 and by March 1973 all US forces had been withdrawn. There followed two more years of conflict before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army in April 1975, but the entire raison d’etre of the anti-war movement evaporated in 1973. Alongside it, the enmity of all right-thinking left-wingers and liberals to Richard Nixon’s presidency were vindicated when Nixon resigned in August 1974, rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.
So by 1974 the main bogeyman and the central issue of the counterculture had both disappeared, depriving the movement of its focal points and energy. Instead, America had a whole new set of worries. The country was stricken with an energy crisis from the autumn of 1973 which brought to a juddering halt the run of economic growth which had fuelled increasing affluence ever since the end of the Second World War.
A huge middle ground of public opinion, which had been prepared to let the hippies get away with the benefit of the doubt, who had let themselves be persuaded that America was an evil imperialist power or had dabbled with pot, now found themselves unemployed and scrabbling for work.
George Lucas is quoted several times as saying ordinary people were fed up of being told by New Hollywood directors that they were wicked racist imperialist pigs exploiting the workers. They wanted to see movies which would leave them feeling happier as they walked out the cinema than when they went in, not wretched and depressed (pp.363)
Hence American Graffiti, a feelgood movie deliberately set in the early 60s before the whole shitstorm of Vietnam and the counterculture kicked in. And then Star Wars, the ultimate in apolitical escapism, set in a universe long ago and far away, where the good guys wear white and the bad guys dress in black.
You can hear it in the rock music, too. In 1969 hipsters listened to the hairy ugly dudes in Steppenwolf, singing their signature track Born To Be Wild which runs through Easy Rider, ‘head out on the highway, lookin’ for adventure’. Young film studio executives were taking pot, even acid, experimenting with open marriages and free love.
Just four years later (in 1973) The Eagles released Tequila Sunrise, laden with slick worldweariness, and the young studio execs were now wearing carefully ironed jeans and cheesecloth shirts, everyone was snorting cocaine and looking for the next Godfather.
By the late 70s Bert Schneider, the buccaneering executive behind BBS Productions which funded a lot of the early New Hollywood productions, now felt tired and old. The BBS building on La Brea, once the headquarters of everything hip and happening, now felt like a dilapidated old ‘head’ shop, covered in yellowing posters from the hippy era, relics from a different age (p.299).
When Barry Diller, who came from heading TV channel ABC arrived as new CEO of Paramount, he sacked a lot of the old staff and installed a young Michael Eisner as President.
When Eisner came in as president, the atmosphere at Paramount changed completely. They wanted to do what they had done at the [TV] network, manufacture product aimed at your knees. (Richard Sylbert, Head of Production at Paramount at the time, quoted on p.297)
Biskind explains that it was the ‘TV regime’ at Paramount that ‘helped to put the New Hollywood in its grave’ (p.397).
New ways of doing business
The era of experimentation came to an end when Hollywood discovered new ways of making big, big money from blockbusters. Frankly, I didn’t understand the minutiae of the new ways of funding projects which Biskind describes, but I did understand the three other key elements which were ‘new’:
1. Breaks Previously movies had been released in a relatively limited number of cinemas round the country, and in waves or ‘breaks’ – alpha cinemas first, then, when the first wave of popularity had passed, in beta cinemas – all in a bid to stretch out a movie’s paying life. With Godfather, the studio opened it across a much larger number of cinemas right at the start – and made a ton of money (total box office something like $280 million). Having seen this work so well, Universal Pictures copied the tactic with Jaws – its first weekend it opened in 409 cinemas and made a huge profit – the total take ended up being $470 million. So mass openings right across the country became part of a new ‘blockbuster’ strategy.
2. TV promotion Conventional wisdom throughout the 1960s was that television was the rival, the competitor, which was slaying the film industry, taking ads away from the screen, but much more importantly, allowing people to slump on their sofas after dinner and watch high-grade entertainment without having to schlepp through bad weather and wait in line to get into a movie which may, or may not, be any good.
It was a business strategy breakthrough when marketing departments realised that heavy investment in TV commercials could make a massive difference to box office. Seems obvious to us now, nearly 50 years later, but it was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time. Thus Universal spent $700,000, an unprecedented amount, on half-minute ads during prime time TV slots to promote Jaws and the results were spectacular.
Jaws change the business forever, as the studios discovered the value of wide breaks – the number of theatres would rise to one thousand, two thousand, and more by the next decade – and massive TV advertising, both of which increased the costs of marketing and distribution, diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. As costs mounted, the willingness to take risks diminished proportionately. Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws. (p.278)
3. Merchandising The third aspect of the ‘blockbuster revolution’ was merchandising. There’d always been book tie-ins and cheap trinkets, but they had never been commercially important. Once again it was Jaws that began the process, with toys and t-shirts, but Star Wars which took it to a whole new level. What’s fascinating to learn is that George Lucas knew this from the start.
Until Star Wars, merchandising was a relatively trivial cash centre. Lucas understood its importance (p.320)
Lucas was fascinated by money, studied the bottom line, analysed the sources of profit and realised from the start the immense potential of Star Wars merchandising. After all, from the get-go he conceived it as a movie for kids, and you sell kids toys, right? He aimed to make ‘the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make’ (p.321), and recoup the money on the toys.
Star Wars drove home the lesson of Jaws, that kids and young adults would come back again and again to a movie without stars… It woke up the studios to the potential of merchandising, showed that the sale of books, T-shirts, and action figures could be a significant profit centre. Star Wars‘s merchandising efforts, instead of merely promoting the movie, as had been the case in the past, took on a life of their own and sucked up well over $3 billion in licensing fees as of the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy in 1997, adding an incentive to replace complex characters with simple figures that could be turned into toys. (p.341)
Taken together, massive ‘breaks’, TV advertising and mass merchandising (combined with the more obvious element of ‘popular’, mass-audience-pleasing subject matter) provide a good working definition of the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon and are, quite clearly, the exact opposite of the low-budget, improvised, ambiguous art movies that New Hollywood directors got to make in their brief window of opportunity.
Which is why critics and insiders date the New Hollywood era from 1969’s Easy Rider, which seemed to blow the film world right open, to 1975’s Jaws when the window for interesting art movies began to close, and then 1977, when Star Wars slammed it shut.
Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and soul of Hollywood. It created the big budget, comic-book mentality. (Screenwriter Paul Schrader, p.316)
Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars is like when MacDonalds got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. (Director William Friedkin, p.344)
Dennis Jakob coined the term ‘twerp cinema’ for the movies of Lucas and Spielberg.
No-one knows
One of the most fascinating things about the book, is no-one knows when a movie is going to be a hit or a flop. I found it riveting to read about the disasters which plagued the production of Jaws, I had no idea it was such a screwup all the way through the filming and editing, and right up to the last minute Spielberg and a lot of the suits thought it was a disaster. Even more amazingly, Lucas was at moments suicidal about Star Wars which he thought was a piece of junk, incoherent twaddle, and so did many of his friends and family!
It’s fascinating to see just how contingent so many of the films were. Nobody knew, not even the makers, whether they would, by the time of the final edit and the final sound mix, be Oscar winners or humiliating failures.
This helps explain the relentless anxiety, the uncertainty, paranoia and angst of the leading directors. As the budgets got bigger, the pressure on them, and the producers and studio execs, became unbearable. Here’s one snapshot from hundreds:
Scorsese went into Raging Bull twisted into a knot of bitterness, defiance and self-doubt. He was overwhelmed by a sense of fatality… Scorsese was edgy and irritable as ever, prone to sudden outbursts of anger… Scorsese had such a severe anxiety attack on the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo that he couldn’t catch his breath and was convinced he was having a coronary… (pp.391-2)
One consequence was the drugs, which were easily available and were the easiest way to escape the crushing anxiety of each day. But it also explains the prevalence of adoring groupies and yes-men which Biskin describes the uber-directors as surrounding themselves with (Friedkin, Ashby, Bogdanovich, but especially Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese). Because the closed-shop of adulatory groupies was like the drugs – a vital prop, a psychological survival strategy for men who came under immense pressure, not only to deliver big budget hits, but from their own inner demons telling them they ought to have been making the artistic masterpieces they’d come into the business dreaming about.
It was a recipe for endless malaise, anxiety, anger, frustration and depression. And masses of drugs. And the terrible treatment of women.
Jews in Hollywood
I don’t particularly care whether there are or have been lots of Jews in senior positions in Hollywood. It’s well known that some of the most prominent executives who set up the first studios in the 1920s were Jews who’d moved out from New York (Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg), but a lot weren’t. Similarly, a number of key players in the New Hollywood movement were Jewish… and a lot weren’t.
But it does appear to matter to at least some of the characters themselves, and it palpably matters to Biskind. He consistently note a person’s Jewishness, and quotes their own remarks about their Jewishness:
- [Robert] Towne’s melancholic, hangdog expression and pale, feverish eyes, along with the Talmudic slope of his shoulders gave him a rabbinical cast he would never entirely shake. (p.30)
- [Robert Towne] was a born kibitzer. (p.50)
- [For The Graduate, director Mike] Nichols turned the [originally Gentile] families into Beverly Hills Jews and gave the part to Dustin Hoffman. (p.34)
- [Bob Rafelson] was handsome in the Jewish way, a shock of dark brown hair over a high forehead, rosebud lips frozen in a permanent pout under a fighter’s battered nose. (p.53)
- Director Henry Jaglom remembers [Bert Schneider] from Camp Kohut, for Jewish kids, in Oxford Maine…(p.55)
- Bert and his princess Judy [Feinberg] were truly Jewish royalty. (p.56)
- ‘These were people who didn’t feel authentic,’ says Toby [Carr]. ‘Artists suffer and upper-middle-class Jewish boys from New York didn’t feel they had…’ (p.58)
- Evans, according to his number two, Peter Bart, ‘idolised gangsters, but he was fascinated by Jewish gangsters – Bugsy Siegel – not Italian ones’. (p.142)
- Evans and Bart screened mob movies, realised they had all been written and directed by Jews (p.142)
- Everyone who worked for [Charlie Bludhorn] was certain he was Jewish, but if so he took great pains to conceal it. (p.144)
- Bart recalls, ‘We were in London together, going out for dinner. I picked Frank [Yablans] up in his room. He was finished dressing, looking at himself in the mirror, and he said, “You know, I’m a really ugly man, I’m a homely fat Jewish man.”‘ (p.145)
- [Robert Towne and Roman Polanski bickering over Chinatown] ‘What’s her name?’ ‘No, it can’t be that, it’s too Jewish.’ ‘Who says it’s Jewish?’ (p.166)
- [Transamerica bought the struggling studio United Artists.] ‘There was a lot of resentment because UA had had twelve, fifteen years of success, then the Jews had taken the goys for a fortune…’ (p.214)
- According to Jennifer Nairn-Smith, ‘William [Friedkin] denied his whole background…He hated being Jewish. Think Yiddish, dress British.’ (p.220)
- Says Friedkin, ‘If The Exorcist had previewed it would never have come out ’cause people would have written on their cards, “This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jewish bastard.”‘. (p.222)
- [Verna Fields] was a large, warm lady with short brown hair and half glasses, hung on a string, perched on the tip of her nose. She was like a Jewish aunt, except that instead of talking gefilte fish recipes, she talked editing. (p.237)
- Spielberg’s mother opened a kosher dairy restaurant in Beverly Hills, but her son avoided it. He disliked his stepfather, who was an Orthodox Jew.Some of his more Jewish-identified friends regarded him as a self-hating Jew. (p.331)
- ‘Can you imagine Walt Disney turning over in his grave, just thinking about opening his doors to do business with a Jew!’ (p.371)
And Biskind also sprinkles the text with Jewish or Yiddish vocabulary. I had to look up terms like:
- meshuggah (craziness, or a crazy person)
- a macher = big shot, important person (p.39)
- a gonif = a thief or dishonest person or scoundrel (p.101)
- tsuris = aggravating troubles (p.111)
- zoftig = [of a woman] a full, rounded figure, plump (p.132)
- a pisher = a neophyte, somebody new to a job (p.152)
- a mensch = a person of integrity and honour
- a nebbish = pitiful, ineffectual man (p.239)
- a shiksa = a Gentile woman, often blonde and bosomy
- kibitzing = chatting informally (p.284)
- shtick = a person’s routine, talent or area of interest (p.287)
- mishegoss = craziness; senseless behaviour or activity (p.319)
- alter cockers = older generation, granddads (p.413)
Why does Biskind dwell on the Jewish origins of his characters, and litter the text with Yiddish idioms? I don’t know and I don’t much care, but I found it a persistent and intriguing aspect of the book.
And it added piquancy to one of the promotional quotes on the back cover, from the critic of the Spectator magazine who described Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as having ‘the most dislikeable cast of characters since William S. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’.
That’s a brilliantly insulting quote, but it’s given added – and, I assume, unwitting – undertones by the Jewish flavour of a lot of the text.
Women in Hollywood
1. Husbands dumping their wives
- Director William Friedkin lived as man and wife with partner Jennifer Nairns-Smith for three years until she announced she was pregnant. When she had the baby, in November 1976, he dumped her (p.311)
- Martin Scorsese had a relationship with writer Julia Cameron and got her pregnant. During the filming of his musical New York, New York Scorsese started an affair with star Lisa Minnelli. When Cameron had his baby, he dumped her (p.326)
Just a few flagrant examples of the way these powerful, egotistical men treated their women. And the hundreds of examples of the everyday sexist attitudes of all the men on display are far too many to quote.
#metoo
This book was published in 1998, almost twenty years before the outing of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in the #metoo social media campaign.
What puzzled me about #metoo was that it seemed to come as a shock and a surprise to so many people. Hadn’t they read this book – which catalogues the appalling way most women were treated by powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1970s (and into the 1980s)? Or its sequel, Down and Dirty Pictures, published in 2004, which chronicles the appalling behaviour of, yes, the exact same Harvey Weinstein? Or any of the hundreds of other exposés of Hollywood’s ‘dark underbelly’? Wasn’t the exploitation of a lot of the women who worked there a core part of most people’s vague impression of Hollywood?
When I was a kid I read books about the silent movie starts which chronicled the ‘scandalous’ sexual behaviour of the likes of Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks and the outrageous incident of Fatty Arbuckle and the wine bottle. When I was only 12 or 13 I read David Niven’s memoirs of Hollywood, which revolved around sex, especially when he shared a house with Errol Flynn.
From hundreds of references, articles, jokes, on TV, in novels and biographies, I acquired a solid impression of Hollywood as a Sodom and Gomorrah of know-nothing executives ranting, of preening stars making impossible demands, and dictatorial directors reducing their leading ladies to tears; of wild parties, booze and drugs and shameful, disgraceful behaviour.
And a key part of this lurid mythology was the widespread cliché about ‘the casting couch’ and how generations of leading ladies had had to screw or give blow jobs to all manner of directors and execs in order to get jobs. Hadn’t people read about the sexual humiliations Marilyn Monroe had to put herself through before she ended up killing herself, stories which have been repeated in umpteen documentaries and sensationalising biographies.
My point being, I thought that the sexual harassment and abuse of women in Hollywood was common knowledge and one of the most basic aspects of anyone’s mental image of Tinseltown.
‘In Hollywood men put enormous pressure on women to fuck them, even if it’s only once. It’s like the dog that pisses on the lamppost, even if it’s only once. They want that kind of connection and then maybe they can relax.’ (Actress Beverley Walker, quoted on p.234)
It seems that the #metoo revelations about Harvey Weinstein took place when a handful of brave women decided to finally stand up to the climate of fear which Weinstein and others like him were able to exert over Hollywood’s female population. And it struck such a nerve because it turned out that millions of women in not just film but all kinds of other industries, and not just in America, but around the world, had had to, and were continuing to have to, put up with outrageously exploitative, bullying behaviour from men in power.
All well and good. I wholeheartedly support the #metoo movement and all its goals. I’m just bemused by the way so much of this information was already out there. It suggests something about books like Biskind’s – that they can be bestsellers, widely read and reviewed and yet… somehow, not change anything.
It points towards the difference between static channels like books, and even magazine or newspaper reports – and the much more dynamic medium of twitter, where what are, in essence, the same kind of accusations, could go viral very quickly and create momentum, create a movement.
There’s a lot more to be said on these issues, #metoo and the (in)effectiveness of books to change anything, but I thought it was worth recording a few thoughts here.
3. Strong women
Meanwhile, Biskind does make the point that not all the women are downtrodden wives and bimbo girlfriends; that there were some very strong, achieveful women in the Hollywood of the time. One of the most striking gossip-type facts to emerge was the important role played by their partners in both Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Rafelson’s early successes.
Bogdanovich’s wife, Polly Platt, was a production designer but all accounts have her intimately involved with the actual directing of his masterpiece, The Last Picture Show, sitting beside his director’s chair, discussing shots. He dumped her to begin his infatuated affair with Cybill Shepherd, and never made such a good film again.
Similarly, Bob Rafelson’s wife, Toby Rafelson was also a production designer, and had a big impact on his early masterpiece, Five Easy Pieces. After his womanising and drug-taking drove her away, Rafelson never made a good movie again (a point made by actress Ellen Burstyn, quoted on page 273).
There were also a number of notable women film editors.
Verna Fields edited Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc? but really made her reputation co-editing American Graffiti and then almost single-handedly saving Jaws, whose rushes were an epic mess (and for which she won an Oscar).
Marcia Lucas, George’s wife, also had an editing role on American Graffiti,then cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, New York New York and – seismically – Star Wars.
(It’s worth noting that Woody Allen – who doesn’t feature much in the book, being neither a New Hollywood rebel or a New Blockbuster mogul – has always used woman editors, Susan E. Morse 1977-98, Alisa Lepselter from then to the present.)
I don’t want to just repeat the outrageous attitude of most of the men in the Hollywood of that era, but also want to put on record the achievement of strong, talented women who managed to survive and thrive in it.
A craft, not an art
I use the term ‘movies’ throughout this blog to describe the way American films are, ultimately, products of American hyper-consumer capitalism and not works of art.
I myself have worked as a television producer/director, directing about a dozen commercial videos, and have also hired and employed very talented TV directors for a period of six years (1994 to 2000). I’ve worked very closely with producers, directors and editors (in television).
Granted, TV is not the same as film. But these experience are the basis of my opinion that film is a craft and not an art. Some people in these areas really are amazing, genius craftsmen and women. But, in my opinion, to call it an ‘art form’ is ludicrous – specially when you read scene after scene of blustering, know-nothing executives shouting and yelling about who or what they insist is in the movie, when you read how many ‘great’ movies were in fact bodged and botched and stitched together out of ramshackle compromises, deals, bankruptcies, disagreements, technical and logistical disasters.
As a small example, I was struck by the fact that producer Philip D’Antoni told William Friedkin, director of 1971’s The French Connection, that part of what had made Steve McQueen’s 1968 classic, Bullitt, so great was the epic car chase, so he should put a car chase into Connection. So Friedkin did (p.204). It’s a great car chase, a really brilliant car chase. But it’s not ‘art’.
Similarly, I hadn’t realised that the actual filming of Jaws had been such an epic catastrophe, taking three times as long, and costing three times as much, as budgeted. The script wasn’t finished when they began filming, so many of the scenes were improvised in the evening in Spielberg’s hotel room, with the scriptwriter, Carl Gottlieb, jotting down the best bits – and then filming these ad-libbed scenes the next day.
They made three giant plastic model sharks, but one sank and the others looked terrible, and so it was only because of the accidental fact of their ridiculous look and impact in the early filming that led Spielberg (or others, depends whose story you believe) to completely rethink the script and re-edit the movie so that the shark rarely appears until the end – thus you don’t see it in the first half of the film, which, combined with the brilliant music by John Williams, makes its unseen menace infinitely more threatening and scarey.
Most of the movies described here involved similar amounts of chaos, bad planning, script crises, changes of mind or emphasis, random elements chucked in at the last minute, the studio insisting on reshoots or re-editing the whole thing, and so on and so on.
That’s not art. It’s a shambles. It comes as a shock to learn that Spielberg, at one point, suggested that, at the climax of Jaws, after Chief Brody has blown up the shark and been reunited with Dreyfuss and as they paddle towards the shore, that, in a black joke, they see a fleet of shark’s fins appear on the horizon heading towards them!
‘Art’ is an excuse
Here’s another way of thinking about the ‘Is film an art?’ question.
It’s an excuse. A lot of these people behaved appallingly, not so much the obvious sexism and getting drunk and hitting people, but the shouting at everyone, the bullying coercive behaviour, the exploitation of young women, ripping everyone off, sacking people arbitrarily, using people’s life stories without crediting them, using their ideas, scripts and stories without credit, stabbing their business partners in the back – the book is an awesome catalogue of despicable behaviour.
And their justification? “It’s art. I’m making great art. I am a great artist.”
So all this ‘art’ talk can easily be reinterpreted as an excuse to justify monstrous egotism and abusive behaviour. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contains more than enough examples of the jaw-dropping egotism, selfishness and the brutal mistreatment of women by some of cinema’s greatest ‘artists’ to wither and kill your opinions of them forever.
(It also kills your respect for ‘film critics’, people employed to suck up to monsters and overlook their abusive behaviour in the name of promoting their ‘art’ — and for ‘film studies’ academics, trying to persuade their students that these hugely compromised products of consumer capitalism are some kind of ‘art form’. Films can be very well crafted – having produced and directed broadcast TV I understand that very well, and how you can take to pieces all aspects of a script, of the techniques of direction, framing, lighting, editing and sound mixing a movie, yes. But that doesn’t make Jaws or Star Wars, let alone Rocky or Finding Nemo or Home Alone 2, works of art. They’re just very well-crafted products designed to be consumed by a mass audience and as nakedly intended to generate profits for their investors as MacDonalds chicken nuggets or a Samsung Galaxy.)
Pictures, not movies
I use the term ‘movies’ to indicate the blunt fact that movies’ are products of American hyper-capitalism, and deliberately don’t talk about ‘film’ or ‘films’ as this is what pretentious ‘film studies’ people say when they start talking about auteurs and ‘artistic vision’.
So it was interesting to realise that everyone in this book, including Biskind, refers to movies as ‘pictures’ – as in the title of the memoirs of über-producer, Robert Evans, The Kid Stays In The Picture, or the obvious fact that the Academy Award each year goes to ‘Best Picture’. Everyone in the business, including Biskind, seems to call them ‘pictures’, not films or movies. Pictures.
And that reminds me of a story which Oscar-winning producer Sam Spiegel tells in his autobiography about an earlier era, about the time when director Elia Kazan had made his first Hollywood movie, and the studio liked it but, after the screening, a studio executive took Kazan aside and told him he had to change his name to something less ethnic. ‘How about Cézanne?’
Kazan was appalled. ‘But Cézanne was a great artist, I couldn’t possibly compete.’
‘Nah,’ says the executive. ‘You make one good picture, everyone’ll forget the other guy.’
Credit
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind was published in 1998 in America by Simon & Schuster. All references are to the 1999 Bloomsbury paperback edition.
