I just spent the last 72 hours reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a sprawling, obsessively detailed account of Hollywood in the 60s and the 70s. The time then, as Bob Dylan so famously put it, was a'changing. Sexual revolution, pot, and Vietnam were looming in the horizon and an entire generation of artists were hellbent in changing Hollywood. Elsewhere, Nouvelle Vague was happening and the French, with its auteur theory, was about to change the face of cinema. Indeed, it was heady time to be a filmmaker and American filmmakers, with Francis Ford Coppola in the forefront, were staging an invasion of the film studios. And surprisingly they succeeded, albeit very briefly.
It was certainly a rare moment in American cinema when the film director reigned supreme: Coppola, Bogdanovich, Beatty, Friedkin, etc. were treated like gods and not surprisingly, ruled like demons. With so much sex, drugs, and megalomania going on during that time, one wonders how the filmmakers made any film at al…