Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contains numerous clips and behind the scenes footage of most of the main films of the era. The whole thing looks quite slick, presented by Trio in a letterboxed 1:85:1 ratio.
On the other hand, the documentary's music is a bit problematic. Apparently unable to or unwilling to pay for the rights to "Brown Sugar" and "Satisfaction" by the Stones, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls repeats thinly disguised instrumental knockoffs of these two songs once or twice too often in its soundtrack. (And using P.F. Sloan's godawful 1965 song "Eve of Destruction" under 1970s protest and Vietnam footage is the film's one particularly appalling choice of actual period music.) William H. Macy is certainly a reasonable choice to narrate the film, and does a decent job, but he's so anonymous in his presentation that any competent narrator could have done just as good a job.
Still, those flaws aside, this is a well made, and most enjoyable film. It doesn't answer all of the questions of the era, but it's not a 512-page book, either.
The film industry has always, and will always be about making money--it has to be to survive, when each film budget begins in the seven figure range, and these days, budgets of over a hundred million are the norm. But in the 1970s, it was possible to make films that were both profitable and artistically satisfying. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is well worth watching--and reading--to learn more about what made that era unique.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
Interestingly, when people talk about the 1970s, it always tends to focus on those young renegades Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and Scorsese. No question they are important, but any survey of big 1970s auteur names is incomplete without Robert Altman. He was older, of course, but from about 1970 to 1975 he made a string of masterpieces that were fresher and as interesting -- if not more so -- as those of his contemporaries. MASH, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville
and several others near-successes in-between -- it amounts to a near incomparable winning streak, artistically if not always commercially. And he continues to turn out great work, albeit very much in what Pauline Kael termed a "one-off, one-on" way.
2 - Ed Driscoll
Rodney,
You're absolutely right--arguably, Altman did his best work in the 1970s. The Easy Riders book had plenty of details about him, but there were less in the film (although they mentioned MASH, McCabe and Nashville, perhaps because they couldn't secure an interview with him, unlike some of his contemporaries.
Ed
3 - Rodney Welch
Ed,
I hope to see the film sometime. I read the Biskind book when it came out and more or less liked it -- it had lots of great, great information, and I got to the point where I was reading it aloud to my film buddies. So many great stories -- like that one where Warren Beatty wanted another take for some scene on McCabe, and a flustered Altman eventually went to bed and left Beatty there with a cameraman to do as many takes as he wanted. And -- another story -- it certainly deflated the myth of Spielberg the wunderkind a bit, given the editing work of Verna Fields on Jaws.
One complaint about the book, though, was that it was too gossipy, in a kind of ugly way -- there were personal details about the people involved that I really didn't care to know.