Word: 80s
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Historian. You probably think that becoming a historian demands a Ph.D. and long study, but today anyone may be so designated if he/she remembers anything. Recent grads may become historians if they, say, remember the '80s. You can appear on your own cable channel, and rake in big fees on the lecture circuit. But you will have the most fun simply making up history. Who will correct you? Did somebody say "Professor...
GODZILLA (May 20). Japan's revenge on New York City for getting suckered into buying too much mid-'80s Manhattan real estate. The Chrysler building, MetLife, Madison Square Garden: no icon is safe from the big green guy. And he breeds! (Sequels, we bet.) In its '97 bow, Jurassic 2 took in $93 million. Godzilla could be the first $100 million weekend movie...
...reading a biography of Oliver Stone. Biskind's book ends with a death too: the 1988 demise of brilliant but burned-out director Hal Ashby, whose Coming Home, The Last Detail and Shampoo were touchstone films of the '70s. Other directors fared only a little better, ushering in the '80s and '90s with divorces, addictions and bankruptcy. Indeed, the last chapter's title is the final line of dialogue from Easy Rider: "We blew...
...Simpson's infamous life-style serves as an apt metaphor for the overindulgent '80s and '90s, Biskind's book delivers what's known in screenwriting jargon as the backstory--the preamble sparked when Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider caught fire. Those avant-garde youth movies emboldened a whole new pack of hip filmmakers to make their own iconoclastic films during the '70s: M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces and Paper Moon, among others. Biskind's history lesson also has its fair share of tantalizing dope and sex lore--at times the horrible stories from former spouses...
...charismatic revolutionary who understood the politics of the human-liberation struggle. Party members called him "Papa" or "the Rage!" Fresh out of prison, he became a literary giant with his book Soul on Ice. Eldridge put his heart, mind and soul into the 1960s movement, but in the early '80s, I read that he said the party should have never existed. He tried to contact me, but I refused to speak with him. One day his ex-wife Kathleen called me to say Eldridge wanted to go on the lecture circuit with me and he wouldn't denounce our history...