Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

...Sinatra and Hope are too old to understand a message like that...

...that cheating (including plagiarism) is routine...

...None...

...Though VMI's first year as a co-educational school was relatively trouble-free under Bunting's leadership, he has not changed his position on the question—as he said in a recent speech before the National Press Club...

...A lot of people younger than Coppola were also too old to understand it, but Hollywood was already embarked on the process which has since fixed the ideal mental age for consumers of its product at about eleven...

...He said, Look, you don't have to worry about this or that, you can do absolutely anything you want" This was what was really different about the 1970's...

...At some point during his time at the college, every student will read The Republic, The Peloponnesian War, War and Peace, and Locke's Second Treatise, among many other Great Books...

...It makes you wonder about the "girlfriend" who was sitting by the phone all evening...

...As a critic—as opposed to an indefatigable interviewer of people to Li g ht Quarterly of Light Verse "...the one place in America that regularly prints new work by the best unserious poets alive...

...The obvious inference is that she was a prostitute, but even in the wake of the Heidi Fleiss affair, Biskind has little to say on the subject of sex for sale...

...As Buck Henry so memorably puts it, "I've always thought left-wing politics in and out of Hollywood was about pussy and/or drugs...

...Students will be required to "master foreign languages—specifically, two of them...

...It is too expensive, too politically correct, insufficiently rigorous, and so forth...

...That such a school does not exist—that in a country full of private and public universities and colleges, there is nothing even close—says something very troubling...

...The common thread here, and in the business of movie-making, was the hippie equation between freedom and license...

...It was this essentially juvenile idea of freedom which also lay behind the Hollywood attitude to morality and politics...

...But if you want to listen to the self-incrimination of those responsible for the state of the American entertainment industry, this book is as good a place to start as any...

...Not unlike Splendor in the Grass, BonAn Education for Our Time Josiah Bunting, III Regnery / 246 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman I n the fall of 2000, according to the respected author of the new book An Education for Our Time, American students will begin matriculating at a small new college, located in the High Plains of Wyoming...

...Again and again Biskind will tell a story: x fires or curses at or beats up or pulls a gun on or bankrupts or sodomizes y. And then will follow this little disclaimer: "x has no memory of this event...

...nie and Clyde carried a message of sexual liberation...

...The stated goal of the college is to admit students who show evidence of being leaders and then to teach them—in the words of the school's founder — "their obligations as American citizens...

...This college is, alas, a fiction, though in the best sense: an act of inspired imagination...

...Students will be required to memorize certain texts, including Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and Robert E. Lee's farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia...

...But one wonders about parents currently struggling to pay crushing tuition bills so that their offspring can learn how to disdain with style the culture that made their education possible: If such a college did exist, how many such parents wouldsend out for an application and look into a home equity loan to pay the bills, if that were necessary...

...qlt+ giant slag heaps of denial Biskind surveys here...

...It is a perfectly natural comparison to make for anyone who is self-obsessed and totally lacking in taste or any sense of shame...

...Students will learn to box, and to "dismantle, then reconfigure in some prescribed way, the engine of a jeep...

...Bunting is the superintendent of Virginia Military Institute, which has been the establishment's least favorite school for the last several years, chiefly for its resistance to admitting women...

...Bizarrely enough," writes Biskind, "a millionaire director like Friedkin was able to identify with the wretched of the earth by way of the studio boot he felt on his own neck...

...X.J...

...Suddenly, the breakdown of the studio44 The common thread here was the hippie equation between freedom and license...

...It was all summed up by that ubiquitous antiwar bumper sticker: Make Love, Not War...

...His focus is always on the gilded youth of the Woodstock generation who pretty much took over the show in Hollywood at the end of the 1960's and for whom promiscuity was a kind of ideological imperative...

...He himself points out at the outset that "In a town where credit grabbing is an art form, to say that memory is self-serving is to say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west...

...Students at this college will build things...

...and they will learn to "live and work efficiently in times and circumstances of pain or danger, and to ignore their solicitations...

...tions of several variables, and other topics offered in conventional courses in integral calculus...

...The students will live in dormitories that are segregated by sex...

...It was also about freedom from corporate control...

...But then, the woes and failures of higher education are well documented...

...He is in no position to explain just how much he knew about whom he was duping, and when he knew it...

...Her body had been cremated, and her remains set out in bowls...

...As Michael Chapman, Scorsese's director of photography on Taxi Driver, is quoted as saying: "Godard was the great freeing influence for all of us...

...But that impression may just be my prejudice against anyone prepared to take the posturing ninnies who run (or used to run) most of the film industry in the least seriously...

...Although its argument may be hard to follow, it is valuable as a compendium of revealing quotations—revealing not only of the moral squalor that prevails throughout the entertainment industry but also of the reasons therein why that industry's products are generally so bad...

...I am The Greatest !"'" Now that Ali's boxing-induced Parkinsonism has reduced him to performing sleight-of-hand tricks to get a rise out of his audience—and he reportedly does so with a telling, nearEasy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood Peter Biskind Simon & Schuster 5o8 pages $25 REVIEWED BY James Bowman p eter Biskind is a scrappy reporter, in every sense of the word "scrappy...

...Moreover, defect of memory is a shield that enables people to go to work in the morning, protecting them from the unspeakable behavior that is taken for granted there...

...Bringing drugs on to the campus will be grounds for expulsion...

...Hitherto, "creative" culture was held in check by powerful studios, run by hardheaded businessmen...

...The school is unusual—in fact, utterly radical in its notion of what constitutes an education...

...Why not just pack up, head for the territories, and begin again...

...Bunting led that fight and when the Supreme Court ruled against VMI, he was, in his own words, "savagely disappointed...

...Or, sometimes, "y has no memory of this event...

...He himself seems to me to have something of the Hollywood sensibility in that he is able to report on quite despicable behavior as if he were assuming an attitude of moral censure toward it at the same time that he is getting rather a thrill from its "outrageousness...

...But not all the deficiencies of his approach are his fault...

...Like so much else in post-196o's Hollywood, politics became completely detached from reality and came to be seen as just another excuse for posturing and attitudinizing on the grand scale...

...The young geniuses of the new Hollywood —Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Paul Schrader, even Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—found themselves in a kind of paradoxical prison of licentiousness...

...Thus, writes Biskind, "[Bert] Schneider appeared to be increasingly uncomfortable over what the Weathermen would later call 'white skin privilege,' a common ailment in the movie industry where the rain of money took its toll....Years later, after the South Central riots of 1992, while his contemporaries were buying guns to protect their Bel Air mansions, Schneideris said to have told a friend, 'I wish they'd come up here and burn my house down...

...Biskind records that Coppola, in the planning stages for Apocalypse Now, said: "Imagine, in 1975, getting a telegram from a so-called enemy extending friendship to the American people...

...Consider: • This college will accept no government money...

...Everybody knows that too many courses are taught by demoralized graduate students while the professors with the celebrated names and the six-figure incomes hole up to do research and write papers for journals that nobody reads...

...77 system, big money and the countercultural fashion made doing what people wanted to do not only possible but mandatory...

...At times this may literally be true, since all the major figures in this history seem to have been drugged up to the frontal lobe most of the time...

...Biskind has already told us that, during their marriage, "when Toby had to leave a party early to relieve the baby-sitter, Bob would call a girlfriend, who would invariably arrive moments later to seat herself in Toby's chair, still warm...

...Parents sending their child off to an elite university can, these days, expect to pay a fortune not to have that son or daughter educated as to his duties as a citizen and the glories of his heritage but indoctrinated in the hostile little orthodoxies of the day...

...But while he is a military man—a paratrooper and combat veteran of Vietnam — A School for All Seasons 80 September 19 9 8 • The American Spectator...

...and that some universities admit students who can't read and give degrees to people who don't know when the American Civil War was fought or, in many cases, why...

...Occasionally, you hear about a woman who turned to prostitution to support a drug habit—though never about her customers...

...Some people may enjoy reading such ego-projec-tions, just as they enjoy other Hollywood fantasies...

...But for those with sterner intellectual expectations or pre-postmodern sensibilities, patience will not long survive immersion into Biskind's literary hot tub, which is full of deeply unattractive beautiful people...

...After what we did to the Vietnamese people, you'd think they wouldn't forgive us for 30o years...

...This is what Josiah Bunting, III has in mind in An Education for Our Time: a new college, uncorrupted by all the old compromises and surrenders...

...Bunting is a soldier, and not afraid to fight for his beliefs...

...Besides, one ought occasionally to read a book that reminds one of the reasons for such a prejudice, and Biskind's certainly does that...

...In the picture's somewhat crude emotional economy, Clyde's gun does what his dick can't and when his dick can, there's nothing left for his gun to do, so he dies...

...The bereaved guests snorted the ashes, like they snorted coke...

...It is the kind of thinking that went on throughout the industry and resulted in what it would be too kind to call political idiocy...

...The curriculum will include courses in the history of Western music and also the use of basic hand tools...

...They will also perform most of the housekeeping chores in the dormitories and around the campus...

...Talk about "somewhat crude...

...Hollywood is a place where the borderline between reality and fantasy has been permanently blurred, a place where people (especially rich and powerful people) are accustomed to remodeling reality to their liking...

...When she died," writes Biskind, "Bert held a wake for her...

...It is a reminder, however, that Hollywood's attitude towards drugs —especially cocaine, which Dennis Hopper takes credit for introducing to Hollywood in Easy Rider—was also a quasi-political one...

...Likewise, everybody knows that crime is widespread on the average campus...

...Toby Rafelson, former wife of the director Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, The King ofMarvin Gardens), is quoted as saying, "In Hollywood, if you're married to a powerful guy, you don't ask them if they're cheating on you because they are, and if The Folks Who Made Hollywood Dark and Dirty 78 September 1998 The American Spectator you can't take it, you shouldn't be there...

...That story may be apocryphal, but it is beyond question that, at the Academy Awards ceremony of 1975, Schneider, a winner for Best Documentary for Hearts and Minds, conveyed "greetings of friendship to all American people" from Dinh Ba Thi, chief of the Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary government's delegation to the Paris Peace talks...

...That strikes me as likely to be a bit of fabricated outrageousness, though Biskind reports it as fact...

...One such was Susan Branaman, a Radcliffe girl and scion of the Mack truck fortune who came under the protection of the producer Bert Schneider after she contracted cancer...

...What's bizarre about that...

...Biskind, though he is perceptive about the blockbuster economics that began to dominate the industry after Jaws and Star Wars, never quite grasps the extent of the devastation wrought by such dumbing down...

...Getting this positive, human, optimistic message was such a beautiful idea to me—it was overwhelming...

...There are no exemptions from mathematics and every student will be required "to work comfortably through problems in single-variable calculus, series and funcGEOFFREY NORMAN is editor at large at Forbes FYI...

...They will master outdoor survival skills such as mountaineering, orienteering, swimming, living off the land, and parachuting...

...Thanks to the horrible toll his greatness took, Ali isn't talking...

...Somewhere deep inside the pretentious and mendacious Apocalypse Now there lurked the seeds that were later to produce Coppola's otherwise lamentable Jack—about a little boy trapped in the body of a full-grown man—which was at least a perfect metaphor for what had happened to the movie industry...

...Here, for instance, is part of his analysis of one supposed masterpiece: "If the '5os saw American culture turning away from Marx toward Freud, Bonnie and Clyde signifies not so much a return to Marx, as an escape from the insistent navel-gazing and psychologizing of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, a rebirth of interest in social relations....If Freud was dead, long live Wilhelm Reich...

...It wouldn't be...

...For those who are not already close students of the Hollywood power elite in the 1970's, the story told in his book will be hard to follow, and even for those who are it will come across rather like a collection of anecdotes on index-cards...

...As the studio executive Ned Tanen told Biskind, "I once asked Howard Hawks, my former father-in-law, about it, and he said, 'The studio system worked because we couldn't be excessive, we couldn't just do what we wanted to do...

...Kennedy www.litline.org/html/lightquarterly.html At Barnes & Noble $16/YR 1-800-285-4448 BOX 7500 CHICAGO IL 60680 The American Spectator September 1998 79 whom he has become, perhaps, too close—he has little to tell us...

...It does not make for a history in the normal sense of the word...

...his sources are also to blame...

...compulsive frequency—he cannot develop this theme at any length...

...So, how about starting afresh, in the American tradition...

...The industrial by-products of Tinseltown's dream factory are the JAMES BOWMAN is the movie critic of TAS and the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement (London...