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. 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. 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. The buzz around movies attracted the best and the brightest of the boomers to the film schools. No Better Place than Hollywoodīy the late ’60s and early ’70s, if you were young, ambitious, and talented, there was no better place on earth to be than Hollywood. It was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style. Nothing was sacred everything was up for grabs. Everything old was bad, everything new was good. “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. 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. 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.īut when flower power finally hit in the late ’60s, it hit hard. (…) 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.īecause 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. View, across hands held together, the front line of demonstrators during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963. The social setting is key in this story, so Biskind sets it up quickly.
How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood is first class. So I take my responsibility by including it in this section, but I do so confidently: If you want to know how most of the key American films of the 70s were made, you visit Peter Biskind’s book. We are not technically dealing with a “Making Of” book here, but this marvellous piece of work tells more about the making of many important films than some “Making Of” books do. This must be THE book about American movies from the 60s to the 80s. How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.
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