With the subtitle "How the sex, drugs & rock'n'roll generation saved Hollywood" this is just exactly what it sounds like. A story of a decade full of cocaine, power and failed promises. And quite a bit about movies as well. The book follows in dept the rise and fall of the so called "new Hollywood", i.e the generation of filmmakers (Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Warren Beatty etc) who came out of the '60s and more or less revolutionized the film factory at the beginning of the '70s. They did so by becoming their own producers, thus gaining full control of their art, and subsequently also became the first directing superstars. It was the decade of the "auteurs". Although they didn't always write their own scripts. Many of their most acclaimed landmarks were based on books (Godfather, The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, The French Connection etc). But what mattered was that the filmmakers turned the material into their own in terms of style and innovation. By, for instance, introducing improvisation, loose-knit narratives, overlapping sound and dialogue, ensemble acting and, of course, total one-man dictatorship during shooting.

"I know I'm a total asshole, a prick, but I'm on a five year plan to become a really nice guy." [William Friedkin]

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has been called the best book ever written about the subject. That's up to each and everyone who reads it to decide, but it's definitely a book full of hilarious, amusing and plain scary stories of chaos and megalomania on set on some of movie's all time greats. Like the story of how Coppola nearly left his sanity behind at the Philippines during Apocalypse Now. Or how William (Billy to his friends, the few he has) Friedkin took his filmcrew through a tropical as well as verbal hell during the shooting of Sorcerer in the Dominician Republic. Or how Dennis Hopper got so paranoid and stoned during the post-production of Easy Rider that he locked himself up in the editing room for months and came out with an four and a half hours long edit complete with all credits upside down. And how suddenly a little film about a maneating shark changed everything forever. Everyone that matters, and many that don't, has been interviewed and everyone calls everyone a pompous, pretentious asshole. It's an extremely fascinating book, especially the last two chapters about the crash & burn at the early '80s (or "We blew it" as Peter Fonda had it). It's not just for movie nerds but for everyone even the slightest interested in the American entertainment business and popular culture. All this and the quite sad story of the man who used to be Peter Bogdanovich. Now there's a book in itself.