Honestly, you'd be better off just watching every film by the directors that this film interviews and save yourself the thankless task of listening to too many Hollywood has-beens pine for yesteryear. Presumably this film is based on a best-selling book of the same name, but all this film can sum up is that a bunch of cool movies came out in the 70's, and that, YES, the men who made those movies hung out from time to time. This is a film obsessed with the tangential perks of that divine spark that was the 70's renaissance of American movies. One of the rare gems of the film is the sequence recalling how Martin Scorcese, Paul Schrader, George Lucas, Spielberg and many other prominent male film-makers would hang out in the same beach houses in Malibu, but it's only ten minutes long.

It's intriguing to see the commercial success of The Exorcist and the critical success of Mean Streets sharing the same five minute discussion with various Hollywood talking heads all of whom are past their prime. Peter Bogdanovich regales us simpletons with his self-encyclopedia, as if he were ever more than a journey-man director. However, by sheer virtue of sharing artistic or commercial success in Hollywood in the same decade, these two anomylous inclusions are lumped in together. More different film-makers there have never been.

This docu makes the misguided error of comparing the careers of Hal Ashby and Steven Spielberg.

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