The view here is that Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll Generation Changed Hollywood, is easily the most influential history of the film industry of modern times, and realistically any time. Most any book about film and the people behind it is a page turner, but Biskind’s account of late ‘60s, early 1970s Hollywood would belong on any list of “unputdownable” books about entertainment.
Biskind’s stories about Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Hal Ashby, Roman Polanski, Robert Towne, Bob Rafelson, and Bert Schneider (and so many more) was a window into a particularly creative time in Hollywood during which some wildly interesting people made some remarkable films. Actor Scott Caan, whose father James was prominently featured in the Biskind book thanks to The Godfather, memorably said he hoped his crowd of entertainment heirs would recreate the wild and fecund atmosphere of the ‘70s. It seems they didn’t, because if they did they would be canceled today. Yes, women were love objects in the Hollywood of the “Me Decade,” and the men, most notably Bert Schneider, viewed themselves as love objects too.
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