“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” - How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

The 1970s was the last Golden Age of Hollywood film. This was the era of movies like The Godfathers, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, The French Connection, The Last Detail, Annie Hall, Jaws, The Last Picture Show, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and so on, a group of pictures that towers over the product Hollywood is releasing today. How did this happen? What was going on in America, and Hollywood in particular to prepare the soil from which sprang such a remarkable group of films?
New Hollywood filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, Robert Altman, Billy Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, and so on recall in their own words the heady atmosphere of that era in which it seemed like anything was possible — until it wasn’t, and the movement was choked by a cloud of reefer and coke, and collapsed under the weight of hits own success.