Peter Biskind

This down-and-dirty romp through Hollywood in the 1970s introduces the young filmmakers--Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Altman, and Beatty--and recreates an era that transformed American culture forever.

Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse. Candid, penetrating and controversial, Down and Dirty Pictures is a must read for anyone interested in the film world.

We are now lucky enough to be living through the era of so-called Peak TV, in which television, in its various formats, has seized the entertainment mantle from movies and dominates our leisure time. How and why this happened is the subject of this book.Instead of focusing on one service, like HBO, Pandora’s Box asks, “What did HBO do besides give us The Sopranos?” The answer: It gave us a revolution. Biskind bites off a big chunk of entertainment history, following HBO from its birth to maturity, moving on to the basic cablers like FX and AMC, and ending with the streamers and their wars, pitting Netflix against Amazon Prime Video, Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple TV, and Paramount.Since the creative and business sides of TV are thoroughly entwined, Biskind examines both, and the interplay between them. Through frank and shockingly intimate interviews with creators and executives, Pandora’s Box investigates the dynamic interplay of commerce and art through the lens the game-changing shows they aired—not only old warhorses like The Sopranos, but recent shows like The White Lotus, Succession, and Yellow- (both -stone and -jackets)—as windows into the byzantine practices of the players as they use money and guile to destroy their competitors. With its long view and short takes—riveting snapshots of behind-the-scenes mischief—Pandora’s Box is the only book you’ll need to read to understand what’s on your small screen and how it got there.

Hardcover Biography

Seeing is Believing is a provocative, shrewd and 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 concentrates on the films everybody saw but nobody really looked at, classics such as Giant, Rebel Without a Cause, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and shows us how movies that appear politically innocent in fact bear an ideological burden. As we see organization men and rugged individualists, housewives, and career women, cops and docs, 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 time in action.

A Sunday Times (London), Best Book of 2018“A thoughtful, entertaining, and occasionally profound critical study of the texts that entertain, move and, sometimes, shape us.”― The Spectator (London)“A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism.”― Ruth Reichl“You'll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn't.”― Steven SoderberghA bestselling cultural journalist shows how pop culture prepared Americans to embrace extreme politics Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump's victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography―everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture―from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight , X-Men , and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24 ―and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics. Where once centrist institutions and their agents―cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and "experts" of every stripe―were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today's movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances―an apocalypse of one sort or another―that require extreme behavior to deal with, behavior such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment. In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.

Peter Biskind authored two of the most talked about and read books of the last decade—Easy Riders, Raging How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood and its bestselling sequel Down and Dirty 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.

A compilation of trivia about the "Godfather" movies presents behind-the-scenes anecdotes, quizzes, facts, quotes, and film stills from all three films

In The Eve of Destruction Peter Biskind reveals the ideological battles behind the violent and seemingly mindless escapism of 21st century popular cultureWondering why we're constantly inundated with zombies, vampires, witches, aliens from outer space, extras from the Book of Revelation, and a Pandora's box of other supernatural creatures? Drawing on shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones , films like Avatar and World War Z , and various other dystopian, and supernatural fantasies, cultural critic Peter Biskind explains why these formerly disreputable subjects have suddenly become mainstream, minting money and creating a vast fan base.Rather than dismissing these fictions as the worst that mass culture has to offer Biskind reveals them as battlefields on which clashing ideologies struggle for advantage. Right assails left, left bashes right, and both gang up on the center. Biskind shows how the grand, bipartisan accord that defined post-war society broke down over successive decades, hammered first from the left by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and then from the right by the Reagan Revolution, 9/11, and later the Tea Party. Where once we had consensus, we now have polarization. Extremism, which used to be a vice, has become a virtue-and a hallmark of our popular culture, even as it tears our political system to shreds.

El espectacular éxito de Easy Rider en 1969, una película de moteros de escaso presupuesto, marcó el inicio de una nueva era en Hollywood. Una generación de jóvenes directores, Martin Scorsese, Francis F. Coppola y Steven Spielberg entre otros, comenzaron a filmar con actores aún poco conocidos, como Robert De Niro, Al Pacino y Jack Nicholson, y en pocos años se convirtieron en los nuevos y poderosos señores de Hollywood, artífices de clásicos modernos como El padrino, Chinatown, Taxi Driver y Tiburón.Basado en cientos de entrevistas con los propios directores, pero también con productores, estrellas, agentes, guionistas, ejecutivos de los estudios, esposas y ex esposas, el libro de Peter Biskind narra día a día la epopeya de los jóvenes lobos de Hollywood, la génesis de sus películas y sus luchas contra el establishment.Moteros tranquilos, toros salvajes es la espléndida crónica de ese viaje alucinante que fue Hollywood en los años setenta, la historia apasionante y verídica de la última gran edad de oro del cine americano, una exaltada celebración de la creatividad y la experimentación, pero también del sexo, las drogas y el rock and roll.

edicion 2006, diseño de Julio Vivas, traduccion de Daniel Najmias, 684 paginas, tapa blanda, buen estado

In this The Return of The Cat People / Kurosawa on Kurosawa / Dialogue with Lawrence Kasdan / Dos Documentary Have a Future?

In this John Milius's Theater of Carnage / Carol Television's Queen of Losers Juices up Annie / The Las Word on Cannes / The Battle of the Airwaves