Krishna
The tinsel town holds an unending fascination for many and indeed supports a huge celebrity gossip industry. Take a book about the 70’s revolution of Hollywood where some rebels came over to Hollywood as rank outsiders and turned the culture upside down, making daring movies, creating new paradigms and managing to change the entire tastes of the nation. And imagine this is written by a person who had a ringside seat of the action, a columnist who saw it all up close.
Add to it the “I will tell it like it is” kind of writing, the book must be a page turner and interesting, right? You would think that it is impossible to botch it up even if you tried.
Peter Biskind succeeds brilliantly in turning this book into a book that you cannot wait to stop reading!
The prose is very boring, a long series of indiscriminate sex and drugs, and totally boring narration. It is about the Hollywood greats doped out most of the time and chasing women constantly and behaving like totally spoilt brats, behaving irresponsibly.
Even the above sounds more interesting than the presentation. It is a whole series of events and names, with no coherent description or concept of a story. It is interesting to read for a bit, with big names like Martin Scorcese, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Jack Nicholson and Francis Cuppola exposed as egomaniacal and psychotically paranoid characters but gets totally boring after a while, when it is repeated ad nauseum.
It is funny how the author worships the iconoclastic movie making which succeeded due to the public tastes as the genius of the individuals (Evans, Blagonovich and other has beens) and when the public taste changed again, and these people were unable to even anticipate let alone exploit it, moans about the fact that the art of the movie is “gone forever” and that ‘Spielberg and Lucas destroyed all creativity in Hollywood’. It is almost pathetic to hear him regret the rise of Reagan and Bush.
Now, I am not a Republican supporter of supporter of any particular politician but it is amusing to see the author so left wing that he bemoans anything remotely smacking of right wing thought. And besides, when the public tastes favoured the brats who made ‘different’ movies and threw out the established names in the seventies, it was magical, thrilling, pure genius. When the same thing happened to these guys, who were established names in the eighties, due to yet another change in the public tastes, it suddenly becomes sad and pathetic and “spoilt”. The author’s adoration for the select few who could not stand the test of time, as well as their unbridled hedonistic lifestyle mars the book. making it an adulatory one sided portrayal as opposed to a balanced view that I was expecting.
The narration lets the book down badly even in this one sided portrayal and if you think back at the end of the book about what kind of message/ news/ story you remember, it reads like a jumble of old time newspaper coverage by a fairly unimaginative writer of excesses of the movie personalities and the ego trip and the tussle they had with each other, none of which stand out as a consistent storyline.
I would give it a 2/10
— Krishna