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Books : Music, Stage & Screen : Film : Biographies : Film Directors
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Not only is Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls the best book in recent memory on turn-of-the-70s film, it is beyond question the best book there'll ever be on the subject. Why? Because once the big names who spilled the beans to Biskind find out that other people spilled an equally piquant quantity of beans, nobody will dare speak to another writer with such candor, humour and venom again.Biskind did 100s of interviews with people who make the President look accessible: Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Geffen, Beatty, Kael, Towne, Altman. He also spoke with countless spurned spouses and burned partners, alleged victims of assault by knife, pistol and bodily fluids. Rather more responsible than some of his sources, Biskind always carefully notes the denials as well as the astounding stories he has compiled. He tells you about Scorsese running naked down Mulholland Drive after his girlfriend, crying, "Don't leave me!"; grave robbing on the set of Apocalypse Now; Faye Dunaway apparently flinging urine in Roman Polanski's face while filming Chinatown; Michael O'Donoghue's LSD-fueled swan dive onto a patio; Coppola's mad plan for a 10-hour film of Goethe's Elective Affinities in 3-D; the ocean suicide attempt Hal "Captain Wacky" Ashby gave up when he couldn't find a swimsuit that pleased him; countless dalliances with porn stars; Russian roulette games and psychotherapy sessions in hot tubs. But he also soberly gives both sides ample chance to testify.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is also more than a fistful of dazzling anecdotes. Methodically, as thrillingly as a movie attorney, Biskind builds the case that Hollywood was revived by wild ones who then betrayed their own dreams, slit their own throats and destroyed an art form by producing that mindless, inhuman modern behemoth, the blockbuster.
When Spielberg was making the first true blockbuster, Jaws, he sneaked Lucas in one day when nobody was around, got him to put his head in the shark's mechanical mouth and closed the shark's mouth on him. The gizmo broke and got stuck but the two young men somehow extricated Lucas's head and hightailed it like Tom and Huck. As Peter Biskind's scathing, funny, wise book demonstrates, they only thought they had escaped. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com
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Hollywood's relationship with Tim Burton has always been a little uneasy. A fiercely individual artist working within the constraints of the studio system, Burton has made some incredibly successful films--notably the 1989 blockbuster Batman and its first sequel--but the industry just doesn't know what to make of him. In the Foreword to this book, Burton favourite Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow) observes that "I have never seen someone so obviously out of place fit right in. His way."Taking the form of an extended interview, Burton on Burton allows the director space to discuss his films, and to digress where this seems illuminating; it also includes an impressive selection of film stills and Burton's drawings. Mark Salisbury does not so much question Burton, as guide the director through his own career, commenting where necessary but managing never to seem intrusive. Burton discusses his childhood and his often unhappy time at Disney ("I would sit in the closet a lot of the time and not come out"), before moving on to offer a fascinating insight into his idiosyncratic body of work.
Burton comes across as a man in love with "the joy of creating", but one who is refreshingly lacking in pretensions. He describes himself as a "commercial director", taking the financial investment which is put into his films very seriously, and saying of his work that "I'm very wary of analysing it too intellectually." At the same time, he has a genuine enthusiasm for cinema, discussing his influences--which range from Godzilla to Fellini--but stressing that he never aims for a literal homage to a favourite film. The director's enthusiasm is infectious. This an essential volume for Burton's fans, and an entertaining read for anyone else--it's hard not to like a director who (discussing Mars Attacks) declares that "It seemed like a good idea to just blow away celebrities with ray-guns." --John Oates
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You know David Lynch as the director of terminally weird movies such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, as well as the bizarre and highly influential television series Twin Peaks. But did you know that it was Mel Brooks who gave him his first big break? That the idea for Blue Velvet grew out of a fantasy Lynch had about sneaking into a private room and learning the secret to a murder mystery? That Twin Peaks came about because co-creator Mark Frost was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe?In Lynch on Lynch, a 250-page interview book, editor Chris Rodley does a superb job of getting Lynch to talk at length about the high and low points of his life and career. Their conversation covers his early work as a painter through the making of his major films of the 1980s, the fiasco of Dune ("It is what it is"), and the recent and very obscure Lost Highway ("I just loved this title").
Lynch is particularly interesting when he talks about the creative process: "I don't want to give the impression that I sit around thinking up horrible things. I get all kinds of different ideas and feelings. If I'm lucky, they start organizing themselves into a story--then maybe some ideas come along that are too eerie, too violent, or too funny, and they don't fit that story. So you write them down and save them for two or three projects down the road. There's nowhere you can't go in a film--if you think of it, you can go there." Lynch on Lynch is a treat for Lynch fans of all shapes, sizes and fetishes.
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