Perseus Academic: Gods and Monsters by Peter Biskind

Here is Hollywood over the last three decades—the superfreaks, lowlifes, charlatans and occasional geniuses who have left their bite marks on American culture, as refracted through the trajectory of Peter Biskind's career. Biskind began as a radical journalist and film critic, excavating films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot for their hidden political subtexts in small lefty rags. Now he can legitimately describe himself—as he does in his autobiographical introduction to this book—as a recovering celebrity journalist.

The ghosts of McCarthyism and the blacklist haunt Gods and Monsters as do the casualties of counterculture and the New Hollywood. At the heart of the book are the likes of Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Terrence Malick, Sue Mengers and uber-producer Don Simpson, all of whom Biskind portrays in great Dickensian detail, charting how they have had a simultaneously strangulating and liberating effect on the industry.

Peter Biskind is the author of several books, including Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock Roll Generation Saved Hollywood; and Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. He was editor-in-chief of American Film and the executive editor of Premiere. He is currently a contributing writer to Vanity Fair.