It’s the kind of book that makes you want to see films you’d not heard of and revisit the sorts of films they used to show late on Sunday nights on BBC2. This book is one I tried to read a bit at a time and landed up skipping sleep to finish. As Captain America said at the end of Easy Rider, “we blew it”.īut as another of that generation’s spokesmen put it, it was a long, strange trip. It wasn’t so much that the money-men were able to find ways to force the arty-hippy-low-budget film-makers out, more that the latter camp imploded through their own egos, quixotic gambles and what Frank Zappa called ‘cocaine decisions’. But by 1975 the studios were back in control, spawning a new form of blockbuster by co-opting those very outsiders. For a while it looked as if intelligent, heartfelt films from the margins were going to change everything and make film as personal an art-form as the novel. Meanwhile smaller producers, run by writers, directors or even actors seemed to be delivering the goods with micro-budget oddities. They’d spent absurd amounts on what they thought would be sure-fire smashes (especially overblown musicals – someone seriously thought that Thoroughly Modern Millie would be what Variety used to call a socko-boffo). The most exciting period of US cinema history is between 19, when the bosses of the old studios realised that they had no clue what audiences wanted any more and the old censorship regime, the Hayes Code, was finally abandoned.

Easy riders raging bulls review