Peter Biskind is an American film historian, critic and journalist, born in 1940, the pre-eminent chronicler of modern Hollywood's great upheavals.
A former editor-in-chief of American Film and executive editor of Premiere, and a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he has made a speciality of the gossipy, deeply reported, warts-and-all history of the movie business - the deals, feuds and egos behind the films.
His landmark book is Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a riotous account of how a generation of young mavericks - Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and their peers - remade American cinema in the 1970s before the blockbuster era swallowed them; it has become the definitive popular history of 'New Hollywood'. He followed it with Down and Dirty Pictures, an equally unsparing look at Miramax, the Weinsteins and the independent-film boom of the 1990s, and with a candid biography of Warren Beatty, Star, among other works.
Sharp, exhaustively sourced and never reverent, he writes the kind of behind-the-scenes history that film lovers devour.
