Books about Biskind from Amazon.com

Peter Biskind authored two of the most talked about and read books of the last decade—Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood and its bestselling sequel Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. Gods and Monsters chronicles the cause and courses of Hollywood over the last three decades—the super freaks, lowlifes, charlatans and occasional geniuses who have left their bite mark on American culture, as refracted through the trajectory of Peter Biskind's career. The ghosts of McCarthyism and the blacklist haunt Gods and Monsters as do the casualties of the counterculture and the New Hollywood—the story of Sue Menges, the '70s "super-agent" whose career went mysteriously south, is extraordinarily poignant, as is the example of Terence Malick, whose light shone so brightly in the same period but then disappeared until 1997's The Thin Red Line. But at the heart of the book are the likes of Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford and Quentin Tarantino and uber-producers Don Simpson and Harvey Weinstein and their excess lifestyles, all of whom Biskind portrays in great Dickensian detail, charting how they have had a simultaneously strangulating and liberating effect on the industry.

Seeing is Believing is a provocative, shrewd, witty look at the Hollywood fifties movies we all love-or love to hate-and the thousand subtle ways they reflect the political tensions of the decade. Peter Biskind, former executive editor of Premiere, is one of our most astute cultural critics. Here he concentrates on the films everybody saw but nobody really looked at--classics like Giant, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers--and shows us how movies that appear to be politically innocent in fact carry an ideological burden. As we see organization men and rugged individualists, housewives and career women, cops and doctors, teen angels and teenage werewolves fight it out across the screen from suburbia to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we understand that we have been watching one long dispute about how to be a man, a woman, an American--the conflicts of the period in action.

A work of brilliant analysis and meticulous conception, Seeing Is Believing offers fascinating insights into how to read films of any era.

From the Marx Brothers to Mickey Mouse, from Charlie Chaplin to Austin Powers, The Nation magazine's coverage of cinema has reflected the critical, dissenting spirit that has animated the 135-year old radical weekly but also the wonder that this new mass medium unleashed. A 1913 editorial opined, "Robert Burn's famous prayer has been answered. The gift has been given us too see ourselves as others see us". The Nation has been a magnet for the best, most provocative and contrary writing about cinema. In 1915 the magazine protested Birth of Nation's release and yet in the 1940s James Agee, the magazine's chief film critic, sung its praises and disputed that it was racist. Other contributors lamented the dubious moral effect cinema had on the masses while Sergei Eisenstein, in a 1927 article, celebrated the physiological and psychological impact of his film Battleship Potemkin. The magazine was there during the first furious labor struggles in Hollywood and was one of the few voices protesting the McCarthyite witch hunt in Hollywood. Throughout its coverage it has been concerned with questions of censorship and free speech as well as the monopolistic power of Hollywood, and its influence on the wider political discourse. Contributors include: Sergei Eisenstein, James Agee, Manny Farber, Katha Politt, Dalton Trumbo, Richard Condon, Terry Southern, Robert Sklar, Susan Sontag, Diana DiPrima, Edward Said, Peter Biskind, Arthur Miller, Marcel Ophuls, Ring Lardner, Jules Feiffer, and Terrence Rafferty.