Peter Biskind

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Biskind has spent decades poking at Hollywood's most carefully maintained myths. Born in 1940, he became one of American film culture's sharpest critics by asking a question most insiders preferred to leave unasked: what is really going on behind the stories the industry tells about itself? His books on the era that transformed American cinema, on the rise of independent film, and on figures like Warren Beatty drew wide readerships and stirred genuine controversy. His bibliography has been translated into more than thirty languages. But not everyone in the film world has been pleased with what he found. What happens when a cultural critic becomes a target of the very subjects he examines?

• 2. The Making of a Critic

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  Swarthmore College shaped Biskind's early intellectual formation, and he eventually arrived at the intersection of film history and cultural journalism. He served as editor-in-chief of American Film from 1981 to 1986, then moved to Premiere magazine, where he held the position of executive editor from 1986 to 1996. Those fifteen years at the center of serious film publishing gave him both access and credibility. He and his wife Elizabeth Hess were both on the editorial staff of Seven Days magazine in the late 1970s, which suggests a shared commitment to adversarial journalism well before his Hollywood books made him famous. His bylines eventually appeared across a wide range of outlets, from Rolling Stone and The Washington Post to Paris Match, The Nation, The New York Times, The Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, and film journals including Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly. That breadth of publication pointed toward a writer with a genuinely large audience and a restless range of interests.

• 3. Hollywood Under the Microscope

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  Seeing Is Believing, published in 1983 by Pantheon Books, was Biskind's opening argument: Hollywood films from the 1950s were not innocent entertainment but politically coded texts. The book's subtitle framed the claim directly, describing how Hollywood taught America to stop worrying and love the fifties. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, published by Simon and Schuster in 1998, turned its attention to the generation of filmmakers who broke the old studio system wide open, framing their story as a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll rescue mission for American cinema. Down and Dirty Pictures, also from Simon and Schuster in 2004, tracked the rise of independent film through Miramax and the Sundance Film Festival. These were not gentle appreciations. They were dissections, and some of the subjects who found themselves on the table pushed back hard. Gods and Monsters, also published in 2004, collected thirty years of his film writing under a single cover from Nation Books.

• 4. The Ebert Dispute

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  Roger Ebert, one of American film criticism's most prominent voices, was openly critical of Biskind's work following the publications of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures. Ebert accused Biskind of shaping his accounts to fit a pre-existing argument, saying that Biskind has a way of massaging his stories to suit his agenda. The dispute turned specific around a single anecdote. Biskind wrote that at a film festival, Ebert had been introduced to director Todd Haynes, whose film Poison was screening, and had responded by saying "Who the hell is Todd Haynes?" while physically pulling his hand away from a handshake. Ebert denied the incident ever occurred. So did Christine Vachon, who Biskind had named as his source for the story. That double denial put the anecdote in a difficult position: Biskind's alleged source was contradicting the account he built from her testimony.

• 5. Warren Beatty and Beyond

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  In 2010, Simon and Schuster published Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, Biskind's full-length biography of the actor and director. The title carried the same provocative framing that had characterized his earlier books, treating a Hollywood career as an act of cultural seduction rather than simple artistic achievement. Three years later, in 2013, Metropolitan Books published My Lunches With Orson, which Biskind edited: a collection of recorded conversations between director Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles. That project was structurally different from his authored books, positioning him as the person who preserved and organized someone else's words. In 2018, The New Press published The Sky Is Falling, which shifted attention from Hollywood's past to genre cinema's political meanings, examining vampires, zombies, androids, and superheroes as symptoms of American extremism. His most recent book, Pandora's Box, appeared in 2023 from William Morrow and turned its gaze toward the television industry.

• 6. Vanity Fair and the Essay Form

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  Alongside his books, Biskind maintained a steady presence in long-form magazine journalism. He became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he published essays on Woody Allen in December 2005, on the making of Reds in March 2006, and on films connected to the Vietnam War in March 2008. Two of those Vanity Fair pieces, Midnight Revolution and Thunder on the Left, were selected for inclusion in Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood, a 2008 anthology edited by Graydon Carter and published by Penguin Books. His essay Inside Indiewood, published on the 3rd of April 2000, appeared in Cinema Nation, a collection of the best film writing from The Nation spanning 1913 to 2000. That placement alongside a century of film criticism suggested the degree to which Biskind's magazine work was seen as part of a longer critical tradition, not merely a promotional supplement to his books.