Book recommendation

I was reminded of EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind last weekend when I saw it sitting in a bookshelf while helping my sister move into a new house. I first read ERRG back when it first came out in hardcover because the reviews were so stellar, and because I was a big Hollywood geek at the time (I've since gotten much cooler and don't read books about Hollywood history unless really fancy directors recommend them to me personally).

I bring it up now... I read it long before I started blogging about Hollywood... (and yes I realize that pretty much anything I did before last Tuesday, was something I did before I started blogging about Hollywood... so shutit!) because it reminded me of a Hollywood observation that's been rolling around in my head ever since I said the following, to a colleague, 5 or 6 years ago...

"Man, I miss those days in Hollywood when you could get rich just walking behind Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, picking up the dollars bills that fell out of their pockets."

Nowadays, the studios are owned by corporate giants and so the basic concepts behind why movies get made or don't have been radically altered. Does a company like Time Warner or Viacom get excited when a 20 million dollar movie makes 40 million dollars? Not really... that's like 5 minutes of gross income on light bulbs for GE. Corporations want big potential franchise movies that result in HUGE grosses, follwed by fast food kid's meal tie-ins, big toy sales, massive DVD runs with the potential for "Special Edition" re-releases years later, big Pay-Per-View sales, gargantuan network TV license sales, and, if all goes well, a new ride at DisneyLand. They want PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and SPIDERMAN, not LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE or RUSHMORE... which is why you can't get anyone to read that script about a troubled poet in Soho slowing dying of AIDS you've been rewriting for ten years.

Now I'm not making any judgements here because movies like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and RUSHMORE still get made, they just don't get made by the studios anymore. I'm just interested in pointing out how different things are now from the way they were when Hollywood was controlled by the artists, who often only had to convince one guy (a Frank Yablans or Robert Evans) that a movie was a good idea, rather than navigate a massive corporate strategy full of words like "product pipeline" and "ancillary markets."

I remember being struck by Biskind's story of Steven Spielberg lounging around an artist colony in Malibu trading "points" on JAWS for snippets of dialogue from John Milius and Margot Kidder. Can't do THAT anymore. If you're lucky enough to even GET points, and few are, they're pre-negotiated within an inch of their lives well in advance.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like a "things were much better when..." screed, which I don't want it to be. Things are as they are and that's the way it is. Besides, the only way we could ever get back to the 70's version of Hollywood would be if the bottom completely fell out of the movie business and all the big money left town... and no one wants that.

Long story short, pick up a copy of EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS... it's a great Hollywood history lesson and a fun read.