Peter Biskind is a journalist who was both executive editor of Premiere magazine, and editor-in-chief of American Film. His work has appeared in publications like Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post.
He is also the author of three impressive books: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, and The Godfather Companion. All these books concern themselves with the motion picture industry, although the Godfather book has a much tighter focus, as the name suggests.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the story of the rise and fall of the great Hollywood producer-directors; the era of the artiste behind the lens who would fight tooth and nail to protect his work and his integrity during the Seventies. Seeing is Believing is a far more precise and calculated look at the Fifties, complete with political analysis and liberal sprinklings of The American Dream. The Godfather Companion, however, finds Baskind showing his colours as a true fan of the work, with an exhaustive work of trivia and background information.
Baskind produces consistently fine work, highly researched and well written, that places itself firmly in the zeitgeist of the era concerned. Incredibly, Baskind manages to remain highly objective throughout, perhaps only falling down in his sometimes tenuous connections between the studio wars and film plot lines. Comparing Star Wars to the battle between Lucas and Fox, and Francis Ford Coppola to Han Solo? I think not.
Baskind lives in New York.
| 
