Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock‘N’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
June 2004 Reviewed by: Marc Mickelson Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls documents an important and fruitful decade in the history of American filmmaking: from the collapse of the old studio system in the mid '60s to the birth of the blockbuster in the mid '70s and the idea of making movies as big business. Its thesis is that Hollywood was saved by a new breed of actor and director whose grounding in a grittier kind of realism informed his or her artistic vision. Masterpieces such as Midnight Cowboy, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist were products of this new era, which had its roots in foreign films. Directors such as Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg made their early movies; Dennis Hopper (who also directed), Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Richard Dreyfuss, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn, and Robert De Niro began their acting careers. There was sex, drugs, and a general feeling, fueled by the freedom of the '60s, that anything goes, and for a while it did -- leading to some important movies.

If this sounds a mite academic, it is. But Easy Riders, Raging Bulls does a very good job of putting many faces on the era and its driving forces, unraveling its argument through interviews with more than 40 people who lived and worked through the period of time it documents. Bogdanovich, Hopper, Dreyfuss, Shepherd, and Burstyn all talk at length about their professional and personal experiences, and these interviews are interspersed with still photos, clips, and interviews with other actors, directors, studio executives, and production personnel. These people compose a dream team of Hollywood glitterati, and that many of them are now instrumental in running the movie industry only proves how significant it was that their careers began almost simultaneously.

The second disc of this two-DVD set is packed with almost two hours of extra materials, including video essays on various directors, namely Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Sam Peckinpah. These biographies are also told through interviews, and in some ways they are more entertaining than the film, full of interesting personal anecdotes as they are. These firsthand accounts deepen understanding of the era and give a candid look at people we know for creating characters other than themselves.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is, in fact, the film adaptation of Peter Biskind's best-selling book by the same name. The movie covers an enormous amount of ground in terms of time as well as moviemaking history, and I suspect that such a broad scope would be more easily covered in a book. What are the six degrees of separation between Bonnie and Clyde and Jaws? Easy Riders, Raging Bulls attempts to make the connection. It is an ambitious movie, and it mostly succeeds.

I do have a beef, though. The movie romanticizes the decade it covers a little too much, portraying the art of filmmaking as an invention of the mid '60s. As much of a cultural icon as the movie Easy Rider is, it's not Citizen Kane. There were, of course, visionary directors before Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and the host of others whose films are discussed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Just the same, this documentary is an entertaining overview of Hollywood during a very fertile and fascinating period. I learned more than a few things from it.

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