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Reporting on a world as image-conscious and self-dramatizing as Hollywood is like trying to build a house on quicksand. Movie people are gossip-driven, and they're also professional dissimulators, so it's never hard for a movie journalist to turn up delicious anecdotes. (Hollywood exists in part to feed our appetite for them.) But even if you find five people to confirm a story, you can usually only feel certain that what you've found is five people who have been amused by the same rumor.

This basic fact about movie-biz reporting isn't a problem with Fleming's book, which you read as you do the National Enquirer. Clad in a gaudy silver jacket, it isn't likely to be mistaken for history. Biskind's book is, and is likely to become, a standard source for discussions of '70s movies. So it's disappointing that he's often less scrupulous than he might be about passing along implausibly juicy tales. When a concerned party takes issue, Biskind does, to his credit, include the denial, usually in parentheses. He doesn't, of course, exclude the tale.

The few examples where I have first-hand knowledge of events recounted by Biskind suggest that his book should not be taken as gospel. For example, Biskind relates that Scorsese and his screenwriter friend Mardik Martin agree that the main problem they had with their botched "New York, New York" was the Earl Mac Rauch script they started with, which was supposedly unfinished and a mess in other ways too. Alas, not true. Years ago, I read that original script. It was a gem, and not just finished, but tightly structured and pungently written. And Biskind misspells "Mac Rauch."

But even if only half of what these books relate is true, the wildlife on display is still pleasingly horrifying. Both books deliver memorable quotations, the best of them apparently generated at extreme moments of showbiz humiliation and exasperation. One source, describing the Simpson/Bruckheimer negotiating style, says, "It's not 'good cop, bad cop.' It's 'bad cop, worse cop.'" Remembering the night his two-timing wife, Ali MacGraw, accompanied him to a party for his greatest triumph, "The Godfather," the ineffably embarrassing Robert Evans recalls sadly: "She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen's cock."

As fans of movie history well know, most of the men who manage to become filmmakers conform to the same template: part monster, part charmer, part alpha-male wannabe and (sometimes) part artist. The genuine charisma is overwhelmed in the long run by the need to be a big shot, whether artistic or commercial; Schrader confesses to Biskind that he screwed his own brother Leonard out of screen credits. Movie-book readers will also recognize another pattern: For all the heterosexual coupling that occurs, most of these men are far more interested in other men (their success, their wealth and their fame) than they are in women -- hence the predilection for hookers, starlets and bunnies when the company of women is required.

Still, this group of moviemakers seems very different than similar figures in earlier ages. What's missing is the carefree quality usually present in accounts of Hollywood life. Readers of Biskind and Fleming hoping for glamour are likely to be startled by its absence, and by the excretory fixations that the subjects display. Most only do so verbally; Simpson, fanatically determined to live his fantasies, is drawn to piss, dealing out abuse and shoving dildos where some might think they wouldn't be welcome.

The characters are often so grotesque they seem to have arrived direct from Transylvania. Basic mood control seems a common challenge. William Friedkin, prone to rages and fits, literally foams at the mouth when angry. Coppola makes absurdly megalomaniacal announcements about the future of cinema, then spends weeks hiding from the editors of the movie he's actually at work on. As for George Lucas, after years of whining that all he really wants to make is little experimental films, he finally decides that fate has determined that he should produce a "Star Wars" prequel trilogy. Those little experimental films will just have to wait a few more years.

Drugs are a convincing explanation for some of this gargoyle-like behavior; so too is the almost religious importance these men placed on being filmmakers -- and the visceral aesthetic they pursued. If many earlier Hollywood entertainers offered the equivalent of champagne highs, the boomer filmmakers peddled blow-you-away, drug-style experiences. And where the earlier entertainers reveled in their good luck and their success, the boomer filmmakers pursued art and a place in the history books with earnestness, intensity and a sense of entitlement. Then Don Simpson came along, took their overwhelm-the-audience-with-sensations approach and rammed it home commercially. In fact, when you read both books, Simpson, usually portrayed as the opposite of the movie brats, comes across as the man who pulled it all together -- the ultimate boomer auteur.

For anyone who followed movies in the '70s and '80s, Biskind and Fleming provide an opportunity to remember and reconsider. Those who weren't there and who want to catch up could do worse than start with these books. But it may also be time to reconsider the view of movie history that these two authors, among many others, subscribe to. That view is itself a baby-boom phenomenon; in its focus on extremes and creators, it fails to account for a lot, some of which can be summarized in two simple words: "the audience."

You learn from Biskind almost nothing about the movies most American moviegoers were paying to see in the '70s. Among the decade's hits were "Fiddler on the Roof," "Blazing Saddles," "The Longest Yard" and "The Groove Tube." Fleming takes accurate aim at the frantic, never-enough side of the '80s, but doesn't hint at the existence of such relatively casual audience-pleasers as "Airplane" and "Tootsie." As a result, their books are like those histories of the '60s that leave you with the impression that everyone in the country was a pot-smokin', free-lovin' hippie.

Utopian moviemaking passion may indeed be largely a thing of the past in Hollywood, and a certain kind of moviegoing culture may well have died too. But mourning these facts can blind us to the pleasures that are to be found in the modest and the piecemeal; the absence of fevers and trends can itself be savored, frustrating though that may be to journalists. The supposedly desolate '90s have delivered such varied delights as "Mimic," "The Gingerbread Man," "Devil in a Blue Dress," "A Little Princess," "Clueless," "My Best Friend's Wedding," "Bound," "Donnie Brasco," "Breakdown" and "Before Sunrise." Too scattershot a group to be called a movement, these works all display a determination on the part of their creators to make coherent entertainments out of the deconstructed bits and pieces the '70s and '80s left behind.

Even the success of "Titanic" doesn't have to leave the educated moviegoer in despair. Inane as the movie is, the audience that loves it is enjoying glamour, thrills, eroticism and romance. Biskind writes about how most of the movie brats wanted to overwhelm with art ("the '70s"); Fleming shows Simpson making attacks on the nervous system ("the '80s"). Whatever its scale, "Titanic" isn't an assault on the senses or the psyche. It also has a comprehensible shape -- and its audience is rising to the screen to meet it. They're identifying, dreaming and weeping ("the '90s"?). It may be a good time for moviemakers (and for the people who write about them) to recall that part of the job of an entertainer is to give the audience room enough to have its own responses.
SALON | April 22, 1998

Ray Sawhill is an arts reporter for Newsweek.