Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Read online

  FILM & TV

  Biskind’s devourable book is that rarity, a Hollywood exposé that you can read mouth agape, slurping up scandal and titillation so fast you’re in danger of choking-without feeling ashamed of yourself.”

  —Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World

  When the low-budget biker movie Easy Rider shocked Hollywood with its success in 1969, a new Hollywood era was born. This was an age when talented young filmmakers such as Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg, along with a new breed of actors, including De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson, became the powerful figures who would make such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls follows the wild ride that was Hollywood in the ‘70s-an unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (both onscreen and off) and a climate where innovation and experimentation reigned supreme. Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood’s last golden age.

  MARTIN SCORSESE ON DRUGS: “I did a lot of drugs because I wanted to do a lot, I wanted to push all the way to the very very end, and see if Icould die.”

  DENNIS HOPPER ON EASY RIDER: “The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere.”

  GEORGEL UCAS ON STAR WARS: “Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see them? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault.”

  “Biskind is a magician at prying revealing yarns and juicy quotes out of his subjects And the resulting scenarios are deliciously tawdry... moments of real intelligence and grace.”

  —Brian Gunn, San Francisco Chronicle

  PETER BISKIND is the former executive editor of Premiere and former editor in chief of American Film. He is the author of two previous books, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties and The Godfather Companion. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

  COVER DESIGN BY MICHAEL ACCORDINO

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  ALSO BY PETER BISKIND

  Down and Dirty Pictures:

  Miramax, Sundance, and the

  Rise of Independent Film

  The Godfather Companion

  Seeing Is Believing: Or, How Hollywood

  Taught Us to Stop Worrying and

  Love the Fifties

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Peter Biskind

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Karolina Harris

  Photo Research by Natalie Goldstein

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  9 10 8

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the

  hardcover edition as follows:

  Biskind, Peter.

  Easy riders, raging bulls: how the sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll

  generation saved Hollywood/Peter Biskind.

  p. cm.

  Filmography: p.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—

  Biography. 2. Motion pictures—United States—History. I. Title.

  PN1998.2.B56 1998

  791.43 ‘0233’ 092273–dc21

  [B] 98-2919 CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80996-0

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2661-5

  ISBN-10: 0-684-80996-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85708-4 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-85708-1 (Pbk)

  Acknowledgments

  HOLLYWOOD is a town of fabulators. The people who dwell there create fictions for a living, fictions that refuse tidily to confine themselves to the screen, but spill over into the daily lives of the men and women who regard themselves as stars in the movies of their own lives. Although this book tells readers altogether more than they may wish to know about the Hollywood of the ’70s, I do not flatter myself that I have arrived at “the truth.” At the end of this long, twisted road I am once again struck with the force of the old maxim, the more you know, the more you know what you don’t know. This is particularly true in the case of Hollywood, where despite the reams of memos and contracts that now gather dust on the shelves of university libraries, very little of what really matters is committed to paper, so that an endeavor of this sort is dependent on memory—in this case of an era twenty or thirty years in the past. Not only is the terrain distant, but in this period memory has been enfeebled by booze and drugs.

  In a town where credit grabbing is an art form, to say that memory is self-serving is to say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Moreover, defect of memory is a shield that enables people to go to work in the morning, protecting them from the unspeakable behavior that is taken for granted there. As director Paul Schrader puts it, “In this business, you’ve got to have a selective memory. Otherwise, it’s too painful.” Kurosawa’s Rashomon remains one of the truest movies about the movies and the people who make them.

  In this maze of mirrors, lucky is the chronicler who does not lose his or her way in the infinity of reflections. So despite the wealth of bizarre and lurid detail to come, be assured that this book merely scratches the surface. The elusive “truth” is stranger still.

  Many, many people in Hollywood were anxious to have the story of this decade told. As producer Harry Gittes puts it, “I want my children to know what I did.” These were the best years of their lives, the years they did their finest work, and they were more than generous with their time and encouragement, always willing to make the phone calls that paved the way for yet more interviews. They know who they are, and I am infinitely grateful to all of them.

  In addition, I wish to acknowledge the generous help and support of the current and previous staffs of Premiere magazine, where I happily worked while researching and writing this book, particularly the founding editor-in-chief, Susan Lyne, for giving me the freedom I needed, as well as Chris Connelly, for teaching me the importance of the National Enquirer, Corie Brown, Nancy Griffin, Cyndi Stivers, Rachel Abramowitz, Terri Minsky, Deborah Pines, Kristen O’Neil, Bruce Bibby, John Clark, Marc Malkin, Sean Smith, and the current editor, Jim Meigs. Many more helped me with research and transcribing, and among them I would like to thank John Housley, Josh Rottenberg, and Susanna Sonnenberg.

  Michael Giltz fact-checked the book, and Natalie Goldstein researched the photographs. Sara Bershtel, Ron Yerxa, John Richardson, Howard Karren, and Susan Lyne read the lengthy manuscript and gave me invaluable editorial help, and in this regard I would particularly like to thank Lisa Chase and Susie Linfield. George Hodgman made this book happen when he was at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew gave it her blessing, and Bob Bender, along with his assistant, Johanna Li, helped it
to see the light of day. My agent, Kris Dahl, guided me through the shoals of writing and editing.

  Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Elizabeth Hess, and daughter, Kate, for their unfailing patience and support.

  For Betsy and Kate

  Contents

  Introduction: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

  Chapter One: Before the Revolution

  Chapter Two: “Who Made Us Right?”

  Chapter Three: Exile on Main Street

  Chapter Four: The Moviegoer

  Chapter Five: The Man Who Would Be King

  Chapter Six: Like a Rolling Stone

  Chapter Seven: Sympathy for the Devil

  Chapter Eight: The Gospel According to St. Martin

  Chapter Nine: The Revenge of the Nerd

  Chapter Ten: Citizen Cain

  Chapter Eleven: Star Bucks

  Chapter Twelve: Coming Apart

  Chapter Thirteen: The Eve of Destruction

  Chapter Fourteen: “We Blew It”

  Cast of Characters

  Selected Filmography of Directors (1967–1982)

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Credits

  Introduction:

  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

  “Some friends of mine were saying the ’70s was the last Golden Age. I said, ‘How can you say that?’ They replied, ‘Well, you had all these great directors making picture after picture. You had Altman, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas....’”

  —MARTIN SCORSESE

  February 9, 1971, 6:01 in the morning. A scattering of cars, headlights glowing fuzzily in the predawn gloom, had just begun to navigate the freeways as the first commuters sleepily sipped coffee out of Styrofoam cups and listened to the early morning news. A high of 71 degrees was expected. The Manson trial, now in the penalty phase, was still titillating the city of Los Angeles. Suddenly, the ground started to shake violently, not like the rolling, almost soothing motion of previous earthquakes. This was an abrupt heaving and falling that was terrifying in its intensity and duration, threatening to go on forever. For many, the 6.5 quake felt like the Big One. Manson’s girls would claim later that Charlie himself had brought it down on the sinners tormenting him.

  Over in Burbank, Martin Scorsese was jolted out of bed. He had just gotten a big break, an editing job at Warner Bros., and had arrived from New York a few weeks earlier. Marty was staying at the Toluca Motel, across the street from the lot. Dreaming of rare books when he heard a rumble, he imagined he was in the subway. “I jumped out of bed, looked out the window,” he recalls. “Everything was shaking. Lightning was slashing across the sky—it was the electric wires from the telephone poles, falling down. It was terrifying. I thought, I gotta get outta here. By the time I pulled on my cowboy boots, got my money and the key to the motel room, and made it to the door, it was over. I went to the Copper Penny, and while I was having coffee, there was a big aftershock. I got up to run, and a guy looked at me and said, ‘Where are you going to go?’ I said, ‘You’re right. I’m stuck.’”

  For Scorsese, there was nowhere to run. He had followed his dream to Hollywood, and if it was going to be a bumpier ride than he had imagined, he either had to stick it out or go back to New York, make industrials, live in the old neighborhood and eat cannoli, always knowing that he hadn’t had the stomach for what it took to make it in the movies.

  Before the dust settled, sixty-five souls had perished in the quake. None of the people who populate this book was among them. Their injuries would be self-inflicted.

  FOR OUR PURPOSES, the earthquake of 1971 was supererogatory, unnecessary, gilding the lily, as Hollywood has always been wont to do. The real earthquake, the cultural convulsion that upended the film industry, began a decade earlier, when the tectonic plates beneath the back lots began to shift, shattering the verities of the Cold War—the universal fear of the Soviet Union, the paranoia of the Red Scare, the menace of the bomb—freeing a new generation of filmmakers frozen in the ice of ’50s conformity. Then came, pell-mell, a series of premonitory shocks—the civil rights movement, the Beatles, the pill, Vietnam, and drugs—that combined to shake the studios badly, and send the demographic wave that was the baby boom crashing down about them.

  Because movies are expensive and time-consuming to make, Hollywood is always the last to know, the slowest to respond, and in those years it was at least half a decade behind the other popular arts. So it was some time before the acrid odor of cannabis and tear gas wafted over the pools of Beverly Hills and the sounds of shouting reached the studio gates. But when flower power finally hit in the late ’60s, it hit hard. As America burned, Hells Angels gunned their bikes down Sunset Boulevard, while girls danced topless in the street to the music of the Doors booming from the clubs that lined the Strip. “It was like the ground was in flames and tulips were coming up at the same time,” recalls Peter Guber, then a trainee at Columbia and later head of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was one long party. Everything old was bad, everything new was good. Nothing was sacred; everything was up for grabs. It was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style.

  By the late ’60s and early ’70s, if you were young, ambitious, and talented, there was no better place on earth to be than Hollywood. The buzz around movies attracted the best and the brightest of the boomers to the film schools. Everybody wanted to get in on the act. Norman Mailer wanted to make movies more than he wanted to write novels; Andy Warhol wanted to make movies more than he wanted to reproduce Campbell’s soup cans. Rock stars like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles couldn’t wait to get in front of and, in Dylan’s case, behind the camera. As Steven Spielberg puts it, “The ’70s was the first time that a kind of age restriction was lifted, and young people were allowed to come rushing in with all of their naïveté and their wisdom and all of the privileges of youth. It was just an avalanche of brave new ideas, which is why the ’70s was such a watershed.”

  In 1967, two movies, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, sent tremors through the industry. Others followed in quick succession: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider in 1969, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces in 1970, The French Connection, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Picture Show, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971, and The Godfather in 1972. Before anyone realized it, there was a movement—instantly dubbed the New Hollywood in the press—led by a new generation of directors. This was to be a directors’ decade if ever there was one. Directors as a group enjoyed more power, prestige, and wealth than they ever had before. The great directors of the studio era, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, regarded themselves as nothing more than hired help (over-) paid to manufacture entertainment, storytellers who shunned self-conscious style lest it interfere with the business at hand. New Hollywood directors, on the other hand, were unembarrassed—in many cases rightly so—to assume the mantle of the artist, nor did they shrink from developing personal styles that distinguished their work from that of other directors.

  The first wave, comprised of white men born in the mid- to late ’30s (occasionally earlier), included Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, Warren Beatty, Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Robert Benton, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, Alan Pakula, Paul Mazursky, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, and Richard Lester. The second wave was made up of the early boomers, born during and (mostly) after World War II, the film school generation, the so-called movie brats. This group included Scorsese, Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, and Terrence Malick.

  When all was said and done, these directors created a body of work that included, in addition to the titles mentioned above, The Last Detail; Nashville; Faces; Shampoo; A Clockwork Orange; Reds; Paper Moon; The Exorcist; The Godfather, Part II; Mean Streets; Badlands; The Conversation; Taxi Driver; Raging Bull; Apocalypse Now; Jaws; Cabaret; Klute; Carnal Knowledge; American Graffiti; Days of Heaven; Blue Collar; All That Jazz; Annie H
all; Manhattan; Carrie; All the President’s Men; Coming Home; and Star Wars. So rich was the soil of this decade that it even produced a compelling body of secondary work, then regarded as aesthetically or commercially wanting, that nevertheless has considerable merit, including Scarecrow; Payday; Night Moves; The King of Marvin Gardens; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; Straight Time; Diary of a Mad Housewife; Silent Running; Bad Company; Tracks; Performance; The Wind and the Lion; and many of the films of Cassavetes. The revolution also facilitated ready access to Hollywood and/or studio distribution for Brits like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), John Boorman (Deliverance), Ken Russell (Women in Love), and Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now). And Europeans like Milos Forman, who made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Roman Polanski, who made Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown; Bernardo Bertolucci, who made Last Tango in Paris and 1900; Louis Malle, who made Pretty Baby and Atlantic City; and Sergio Leone, who made The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. As well as veterans like Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and John Huston, who suddenly found the freedom to do some of their best work, pictures like Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Man Who Would Be King, and Fat City. It brought out the best in journeyman directors like Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, who respectively made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon; and allowed an actor such as Clint Eastwood to develop a body of work as a director.

  The new power of directors was legitimized by its own ideology, “auteurism.” The auteur theory was an invention of French critics who maintained that directors are to movies what poets are to poems. The leading American proponent of the auteur theory was Andrew Sarris, who wrote for the Village Voice, and used this pulpit to promote the then novel idea that the director is the sole author of his work, regardless of whatever contribution the writers, producers, or actors may make. He ranked directors in hierarchies, which had an instant appeal for the passionate young cineastes who now knew that John Ford was better than William Wyler, and why. Recalls Benton, “Reading Sarris was like listening to Radio Free Europe.”