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would steal his own mother's diary if he could." The book is so crammed with memorable vignettes that I wore down my pencil marking them.

As Biskind tells it, film critic Peter Bogdanovich "went to a screening. There was nothing that was too outrageous." Attendances, which hit an all-time high of 78.2 million a week in 1946, plunged to a low of 15.8 million a week in 1971." With aging studio bosses and producers drained of confidence in their own taste, almost any young director with a hit (and several without one) could, in the words of writer-director Paul Schrader, "just waltz in and have these meetings and propose whatever. According to Variety, 1969 marked the beginning of a three-year slump. "By the late '60s," Biskind writes, "the studios were in dire financial shape. What vested so much control in young film school grads and sound stage schmoozers was panic among the moguls.

But there is an enormous amount of new material here, and the book's value lies in its comprehensive picture of hubris and Schadenfreude, of adulation and addiction, of talented men absolutely corrupted by absolute freedom.

Some of the details cited by Biskind, a veteran movie journalist, may be familiar - the on-location hell of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," for example, or the gargantuan cost overruns incurred by Michael Cimino in filming "Heaven's Gate," a box office disaster that has become a byword for American auteurist excess. Unlike, say, Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon," which appealed to no interest beyond the prurient, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" has a thesis, which goes something like this: The wave of screenwriters and directors that washed into Hollywood in the late 1960s and dominated the industry through much of the '70s - turning out such fresh, intelligent and entertaining movies as "The Graduate," "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Last Picture Show," "The French Connection," "M*A*S*H," "Nashville," "The Last Detail," "The Godfather," "American Graffiti," "Mean Streets" and "Chinatown" - went on to squander its gifts in a binge of drug addiction, megalomania and hypertrophic flops. Peter Biskind's devourable book is that rarity, a Hollywood expose that you can read - mouth agape, slurping up scandal and titillation so fast you're in danger of choking - without feeling ashamed of yourself.

EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood By Peter Biskind Simon and Schuster.