New Hollywood Got Me 30 Years Late

I'm in the middle of reading Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. While Biskind isn't known for his scientific accuracy, his account of the rise and fall of New Hollywood at the end of the 1960ies and during the 1970ies is brimming with interesting facts and gossip about the lifes and work of people like Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich or Paul Schrader.

Biskind sees New Hollywood as the seminal era in filmmaking, with the studio system that preceded it as just as bad as the blockbuster era that started with Jaws and Star Wars and ended the creative madness that abounded in the 1970ies. Beginning with Easy Rider and spanning movies like The Godfather, The French Connection, M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver or What's Up, Doc? Biskind tells the story of an age where directors emancipated themselves from the studios and tried to follow their own creative vision rather than stay on the safe side and make as much money as possible. Ironically, New Hollywood layed the foundations for the blockbuster era, where movies started to get more and more expensive and had to appeal to a very broad audience, often at the cost of story and creativity.

Biskind's view of New Hollywood is a bit skewed, his appreciation for the good films produced there seems to make him forget that the 70ies produced as much crap as any other decade in hollywood. Nevertheless his enthusiasm for the masterworks of the era is infectious and I've decided to (re)watch some of the movies (as they are available to me) he raves about.

The first few I'll be watching include:

• The French Connection (William Friedkin)
• Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
• Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
• M*A*S*H (Robert Altman)

I'd really like to get my hands on some of the more obscure movies Biskind mentions, especially Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie should be interesting to watch in its madness just from a "what the fuck?" perspective. But I doubt I'll ever be able to lay hands on this one, since a DVD version seems to be out of the question.