But Spielberg and Lucas did slam the blockbuster nails into the coffin. To be fair, the movie lays a lot of the claim for that at the fact that so many of the New Hollywood auteurs flamed out or had badly recieved films. That said, Spielberg and Lucas come off the worst in the book, so I can see them not wanting to be part of a movie that was going to blame their blockbusters for being the end of the artistic aims of Hollywood.

Many of the subjects from the book - including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Altman and William Friedkin - declined interviews. Kenneth Bowser directed this - and several documentaries on another of my pop culture obsessions that had a brief period (s) of greatness followed by mediocrity, Saturday Night Live - and it’s the perfect companion to the book, building on the stories there by featuring interviews with most of the people who survived, like Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, John Schlesinger, Johnathan Demme, John Milius, Karen Black, Cybill Shepherd, Francis Ford Coppola and more. Every few years, I re-read the Peter Biskind book that this documentary was based on, if only to make myself more depressed as time goes on over the fact that the New Hollywood that changed cinema faded so quickly and was replaced by whatever we have now.

Easy riders raging bulls documentary