A quiet revolution in the studios

A book with the words ‘mavericks’ and ‘Hollywood’ in the subtitle should be a lot more exciting than this. After all, the movie business has been traditionally populated by monstrous egos with access to huge funds — a recipe for drama if ever there were one. Memoirs such as Bob Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, or Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again have described the film business we suspect is going on behind closed doors. The marvellous Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind confirmed that in the 1970s everyone in the movies had big sunglasses and a runaway coke habit — as well as prodigious talent. That book examines the ‘revolution’ that occurred between the late 1960s and late 1970s, when the old studio system was overthrown and directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese became celebrated auteurs. Of course the box-office magicians, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, made their first smash hits in the 1970s.