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August 05, 2007
Schrader on that so-called golden age
Talking to Stephen Dalton at the Times, Paul Schrader offers perspective about the 1970s movie "renaissance". “Yeah, that so-called golden age,” he shrugs. “It was a golden age in the sense that cinema was really important, it had a powerful role in society. Movies really mattered. There were a lot more serious movies being made and people thought of movies a lot more seriously. That is true, but there was also a lot of junk.” Lurid stories about Schrader abound in Peter Biskind’s controversial postmortem on 1970s [American movies]. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." Cocaine, porn, nervous breakdowns and backstage bust-ups figure heavily. But like most of the heavyweight names whose highs and lows Biskind documents, Schrader dismisses the book as overblown quasi-fiction. “It was just a patchwork quilt of gossip of innuendo,” he argues. “Peter had himself a great theme but rather than do a solid book he decided to do a gossip book. It’s full of false things about people I know, one after another. It was a classic case of print the myth. It’s second, third, fourth-hand gossip. That’s why it pissed a lot of people off.”
Posted by Ray Pride at August 5, 2007 11:21 PM
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