Review: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Still, increasingly conservative though Friedkin sounded, The French Connection was far from a conventional picture. He was comfortable with the documentary idiom and used it, giving the film a loose, handheld feel that anticipated Hill Street Blues by a decade. Often, he wouldn't bother to block a scene, just told the cameraman to follow the actors. Moreover, the moral landscape of the film was dark, complicated, and European. "In those days, Coppola and I and other guys, we'd sit around and talk about which way film was heading," he recalls. "You know, Godard or Fellini, documentary and street reality, or formalism and works of the imagination. They were not, it seemed to me, diametrically opposed. I had seen Z by Costa-Gavras. It made me realize you could take an actual story and make it as exciting as good fiction. I thought, I know how to do that. Fuck, that's like introducing documentary technique. It was a big influence on The French Connection."

Jaws

How Steven Spielberg's Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich's bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.

"Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They're no longer interested."

PETER BOGDANOVICH

Nashville
Sylbert's distribution of Altman's 'Nashville' and Kael's screening invitation led to a delayed release, highlighting the film's critical acclaim and its eventual box office underperformance, which was attributed to the lack of blockbuster appeal.

One of the first things Sylbert did was pick up Altman's Nashville for distribution. Kael created something of a scandal by accepting the director's invitation to a screening of the rough cut, reviewing the picture off that screening, thereby jumping the release date - and all the other reviewers - by months. It was a typical Kael move, calculated to prevent Paramount from recutting the movie and to goad the studio into putting some marketing muscle behind it. Her piece was full of the excitement of discovering a great work. She called it "an orgy for movie-lovers," and wrote, “I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness." Nashville was Altman's best film, and the studio had high hopes for it. With its large, ensemble cast of character actors, wandering narrative, and refusal of genre, it was an echt New Hollywood creation. Its failure to perform at the box office, despite the blitz of good press, was not only another indication that the passions that animated the first half of the decade were on the wane, it also underlined the limits of Kael's power. When Altman was asked why it hadn't done better, he said, "Because we didn't have King Kong or a shark."

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