Do Anything, Say Anything
James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024
Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November,978 0 241 44390 3 Show More
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November,
“... Iread Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ... ”