Now available in paperback, Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Bloomsbury, £8.99 in UK) is the most revealing film book in years. Compulsive reading, it chronicles the last golden age of Hollywood cinema, from 1969 to 1980, as maverick film-makers tore up the rule book and amazed the studios with their achievements and their success. Biskind interviewed almost all the key players and the quotes he elicits are remarkably candid.
Running to a fat 700 pages, The Penguin Book of Hollywood (Penguin, £12.99 in UK), edited by Christopher Silvester, offers a trove of insights, anecdotes, background information and ephemera. Culled from memoirs, autobiographies, letters and articles, it spans the century and features, among many others, film-makers Capra, Bunuel, Eisenstein and Sturges, and writers William Goldman, Nathanael West, Anita Loos, along with infamous producer Julia Phillips. Many extracts will entice readers to check out their sources in full. Directors A-Z: A Concise Guide to the Art of 250 Great Film-Makers (Prion, £15 in UK) is a handsomely produced paperback which makes striking use of illustration to accompany each of the too-short essays by Geoff Andrew, film editor of Time Out magazine. Inevitably, such a selective guide is guilty of the sin of omission, and one of its most glaring omissions is that of Neil Jordan, whose body of work surely warrants precedence over many of the directors who have been chosen.