It’s not just catchy wordplay: “riders” and “bulls”-hey, I get it! The two films it references are bookends of a sort, arguably the first and last triumphs (Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider commercially and culturally, Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull artistically) of the period of American commercial cinema that Biskind recounts. A persistently dishy, multitiered tale of often hubristic behavior on the part of the filmmakers associated with the New Hollywood-Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Cimino, and others-the book is cannily titled.
Perhaps the best-known chronicle of this era of filmmaking is Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998). What was the “New Hollywood”? And is it a useful category or superficial shorthand? It’s arguably easy enough to make a case for the former: certainly, the history of American cinema now has the films and the directors to support the assertion that a strong current of visionary, personal filmmaking ran through the output of the dying studio system starting in the late 1960s, and ending after the memorable box-office debacle of Michael Cimino’s critically drubbed epic Heaven’s Gate (1980).
0 kommentar(er)
