From Hopper to Penn, Altman to Kidder, Kovacs to Zsigmond, the losses just keep piling up. Hearing how De Palma, Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas and Spielberg got their break is fascinating stuff, but as the years go by, (this was made in 2003), the amount of casualties that have since passed away since this was made can be felt every time I revisit this. This documentary however, well it has most of the same talking heads that Biskind apparently interviewed, and most of them stick to the same stories they'd initially dismissed when the book was published back in 1998. The book has been dismissed by almost everyone who Biskind interviewed, with some of them furious at what they saw was his agenda to make some of them look like dicks. It wasn't overnight, but hearing how a little band of nerds started to eat away at the studio powers-that-be was revolutionary in itself. Is this what kids wanted to see? Was the cinema audience changing? And what did the studios have up their sleeves to combat the desertion of cinema goers content to sit and watch television? Well not a lot really, it was only when profits dropped that changes had to be made, and that was the tiny opening that a raft of filmmakers saw as their chance. Studios hadn't learned from financial disasters like Cleopatra, which almost buried 20th Century Fox with an inflated budget that just kept growing. They had the pulse of a new generation, and it was only a matter of time before one of them, or all of them, would break through and make it big.ġ960's and 1970's Hollywood is a fascinating time in terms of new beginnings.
With a new cinematic audience that were looking for broader strokes when it came to sex, violence, and political awareness within movies, these new rebels had ideas above their station, imagination, with a fearless determination to make movies they themselves wanted to see. If truth be told, as much as I loved the book, hearing first hand from the people that were there when "New Hollywood" began to take control as the Studio System started to be curtailed by television, was a joy to watch. Peter Biskind's book was a bit of a revelation for me, filling in many holes in what I thought I knew about Hollywood and the players that shaped my watching habits when I fully indulged into the medium of cinema. I think I was one of the few that had seen this documentary before I'd read the book? I soon remedied that after picking up a copy and digesting it over the space of a few days holidaying with the missus.
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