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

Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is an exhilarating ride through 1970s Hollywood, one of the most innovative decades in American film history. He focuses on the rise of its key directors: Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola. The stories and anecdotes are of frequently of questionable authenticity (and Biskind doesn't seem to have been interested in doing any work to verify them), but it almost doesn't matter — the interviews are so candid and well-sourced, and Biskind has such a perceptive eye for idiosyncratic details that the book is an absolute pleasure from start to finish.

Here for example he describes Terrence Malick's filmmaking process during Days of Heaven: 

Malick was a director, like (Brian) De Palma, who was very much inside his own head. The actors and crew thought he was cold and distant, and he was having trouble getting decent performances. Two weeks into the picture, looking at dailies, it was clear it wasn’t working, it looked like bad Playhouse 90. Malick decided to toss the script, go Tolstoy instead of Dostoyevsky, wide instead of deep, shoot miles of film with the hope of solving the problems in the editing room.

Highly recommended.