That notion of giving new kids a shot built from “Duel” to “The Sugarland Express” to “Jaws,” from “Boxcar Bertha” to “Mean Streets” to “Taxi Driver,” from “THX 1138” to “American Graffiti” to “Star Wars” and from “The Rain People” through both parts of “The Godfather” to “Apocalypse Now.” In that heady process, young men became hugely rich, emperors in their recent fantasies and wrecks of their novice selves. One does not have to like all the films in this paragraph-or like them in the same way-but the twin blasts of new attitude in 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” led to the movies produced by the alliance of Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson and Steve Blauner (“Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The King of Marvin Gardens”). Still, there was a change in Hollywood, and it was one that many of us welcomed. Mayer while supposing they were Orson Welles or Jean-Luc Godard. These guys thought of themselves as artists, though maybe all they did was match the manners of Sammy Glick and Louis B. Some came out of film school, and most were naked opportunists lit up with that religion called the auteur theory (French for “me! me! me!”) as articulated by Cahiers du Cinema, Andrew Sarris and (forgive them, God) every professor in film studies. 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 and raging bulls