Kudos to the author for giving so much attention to the often forgotten Hal Ashby, but others that emerged from the live TV dramas of the 1950s are barely mentioned (e.g.

But more than that, there is no more than token mention of the groundbreaking Hollywood filmmaking of the post-war era that set the stage for the 'New Hollywood' and the independent cinema that emerged from the ashes of Heaven's Gate. To draw a straight line from the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde through the ruinous Heaven's Gate is a mistake, because there is one line that goes up to Jaws and Star Wars and another that emerges from the indelible impact of the commercial success of those two blockbusters - that impact is not overlooked, but neither is it treated as the watershed it truly was. In addition to overlooking the impact of audiences and lionizing some questionable characters who often stumbled into their success, the history of 1970s cinema as presented here is myopic. Yet the analysis never looks at the vagaries of public tastes, opinions and reactions as the overriding determinant of what works and what doesn't, sometimes in the short term, sometimes in the long run (Raging Bull, for example, was a critical and commercial flop upon its initial release, only to become an enduring classic over the course of time).

By contrast, there were many labors of love, pet projects and can't-miss efforts that failed. So many of these now-classic films were made under protest or fraught with production problems or in some cases just total accidents. (Although to be fair, quite a number of directors, including Coppolla, Spielberg, Altman, and others, have accused the author of everything from skewing these stories, to half-truths, to outright lies, so take it with a grain of salt.) The analysis from the point of view of film history left me feeling like something was missing - the audience.

That alone is worth the price of admission. There is loads of juicy gossip about the directors, actors and other Hollywood figures who made them. This book is chock full of great inside baseball on the making of many of the great classic movies of the late 1960s and 1970s - the Godfather series, Bonnie & Clyde, Scorsese's classics, Robert Altman, etc.

Easy riders raging bulls book