Gods and monsters
Subtitle: thirty years of writing on film and culture from one of America's most incisive writers
By: Peter Biskind
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 362
ISBN-13: 9781560255451
Subjects: Motion pictures; Motion picture industry; Culture in motion pictures; Reviews; Film
Description: "Here is Hollywood over the last three decades - the superfreaks, lowlifes, charlatans, and the occasional geniuses who have left their bite marks on American culture, as refracted through the trajectory of Peter Biskind's career. Biskind began as a radical journalist and film critic, excavating the likes of Rocky and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot for their hidden political subtexts in small lefty rags. Now he can legitimately describe himself - as he does in his autobiographical introduction to this book - as a "recovering celebrity journalist."" "The ghosts of McCarthyism and the blacklist haunt Gods and Monsters as do the casualties of the counterculture and the New Hollywood. At the heart of the book are the likes of Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Terrence Malick, Sue Mengers, and uber-producer Don Simpson, all of whom Biskind portrays in great Dickensian detail, charting how they have had a simultaneously strangulating and liberating effect on the industry."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: title: Between the frames; title: The politics of power in On the waterfront --; title: War of the worlds --; title: Tightass and cocksucker : sexual politics in Thunderbolt and lightfoot --; title: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid --; title: Machismo and Hollywood's working class  -- (with Barbara Ehrenreich); title: Blue collar blues : proletarian cinema from Hollywood --; title: Holocaust fever --; title: "Come back to the mill, Nick Honey" : The deer hunter misses the target --; title: A balance of error? ; PBS's Vietnam : waist-deep in the Big muddy --; title: American film criticism (postwar) --; title: The last crusade -- -- Reports; title: The Weather Underground, take one  -- (with Marc N. Weiss); title: In Latin America they shoot filmmakers --; title: Promised land : on Sundance -- -- Auteurs; title: Any which way he can --; title: Chameleon Man --; title: Slouching toward Hollywood --; title: The making of "Blatherlands" : an imaginary conversation between Sissy Spacek and Terrence Malick  -- (with Michael Silverman); title: The runaway genius --; title: Punchin' Judy --; title: The man who minted style --; title: When Sue was queen --; title: Good night, dark prince.