July
5
Beatty Meets Swarthmore's Biskind
Tim Appelo (Swarthmore '78) interviews Peter Biskind (Swarthmore '62) who in turn interviewed my boss Peter Bart (Swarthmore '54) in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which seems to be the last Hollywood book to have sold many copies. It was dishy, thanks to the wives of the directors, basically.
I was disturbed to hear that Mark Harris's well-reviewed 1967 cultural-history-in-a-bottle, Pictures at a Revolution, didn't sell well. Being smart and well-written and informative doesn't seem to be enough these days. The section on Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde is the best of the five Oscar contenders Harris covers.
Dish is the quotient that pushes a movie book into popularity, methinks.
Biskind is suffering in book limbo as he uses all the patience required to get to the end of his long-in-the-works Beatty bio. (Here's a 2006 excerpt in Vanity Fair.) It will be worth waiting for--as long as it isn't too reverent. Yes, the recent AFI lifetime achievement honoree (the show airs on USA Network July 8) is a top Hollywood talent, a writer-actor-producer-director renowned for his painstaking perfectionism. Shampoo, Reds, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Heaven Can Wait, Bulworth and Bonnie and Clyde will stand the test of time. Not a bad record at all.
But when I finally read Biskind's book about this legendary womanizer-turned-family-man, all I ask is for a little bit of dish.
[Hat tip: 2 Blowhards]
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Hmmm. I had thought Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures" had sold well, but I don't know what I base that on. Maybe because I actually read it, unlike so many other film books on the market?
The Harris news is too bad. His book is fantastic. I thought I "knew it all" already and so approached the book tentatively, but it's a great read, full of details I've never heard and with a compelling thesis about how movies were changing at that time.
Posted by: Christian | July 09, 2008 at 12:56 PM