Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Kenneth Bowser and based on Peter Biskind's oral history of New Hollywood. It maps the decade when a generation of maverick directors — Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Altman — cracked open the studio system and made it personal.

The film draws on archival footage and interviews with the people who were there: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Roger Corman, Ellen Burstyn, Richard Dreyfuss. They walk through how Easy Rider opened the gate in 1969, how that energy produced The Godfather and Taxi Driver, and how Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate closed it in 1980.

Biskind's book was divisive for its gossip; the documentary keeps the essential story intact. A useful portrait of why the 1970s still look like American cinema's high-water mark. Stream Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003) online on iFILM.