Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Right now I'm reading a book that is widely regarded as the best thing to read if you want a gritty, warts and all description of the inside of the film industr. The book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" by Peter Biskind covers the last golden age of Hollywood from about 1967 to the start of the eighties. I'm about one hundred pages in and you can tell that this author has seen a thing or two. After reading only a few pages one starts to understand that Hollywood is far from the perfect, glamorous, culture cornucopia that we all look up to and more of a paranoid wreck of a city that just gets by through satisfying its increasingly demanding and insecure ego and pandering to the every whim of equally paranoid fat cat producers. Before starting reading this book I had Hollywood movies in mind as an ultimate career choice. Now I can safely say that I have next to no interest in working on big budget (possibly American) films for the simple fact that they are more often that not driven by insecurity and greed rather than artistic ambition. Then again if I keep this attitude up I might never get a job. Still I recommend that anyone considering going into the film industry should read this, if not simply to check that they actually want to.

The book was so good that they made a documentary about it, here's a clip.