Through that crack came a horde of easy riders and raging bulls, most of them desperate for their share of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and all of them driven by that Grail-like notion that it would be awesomely hip to make a movie.

Television had taken its audience and its plot lines, and a whole generation of directors was dead or retiring. “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” works off the familiar assumption that, in the late ‘60s, Hollywood’s confidence and its way of working cracked. If you have talked, you have been talked about too-if only by an ex-wife or a bruised personal assistant. But read on, dear confiders, for no one is spared here.

Meanwhile, all those who talked to Biskind can be assured that they will see their friends and rivals speared in the side (and other tender places). We should congratulate Wilder on having lived to down this full cup of rue-it may give him another 20 years (time enough for Bogdanovich to polish his impersonation of Wilder’s “pained” scorn). As the first words of debacle spread, so Billy Wilder (nearly 70 already but clinging to malice as if it were testosterone) reported the sound of Champagne corks popping all over L.A. I am thinking of the legend, repeated here, how when Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love” premiered on March 1, 1975, the town went into raptures of pent-up loathing. Peter Biskind’s calm, encyclopedic and compulsively readable dish on Hollywood heroes should be served with cold Cristal-nothing else so isolates the decaying bouquet of Schadenfreude.

Easy riders raging bulls documentary