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Peter Biskind's well-informed and frightfully indiscreet book posits that the years 1967-80 comprise the last golden age of the American cinema. You can see his point. For cinephile youths in 1960s America, the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard and the activism of protesting Vietnam arrived in one incendiary package. The movies these young men proceeded to make were often radical in spirit, their hands dirty with the stuff of real life; and Hollywood could not tolerate such impudence for long. Biskind contends that the later debacles suffered by certain directors were "self-inflicted", compounded of libido, cocaine and egomania. But if you bypass Biskind's readiness to rummage through the bed-linen, there is a valuable story here about money's stranglehold upon movies.

The late 1960s witnessed the death throes of Hollywood studios as property owners and their acquisition by bounteous conglomerates. But the new proprietors were temporarily uncertain as to which "management systems" should be installed, and during this interregnum, audiences flocked to Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider : modestly scaled movies, waist-deep in the counterculture. Easy Rider 's director, Dennis Hopper, brimful of success and illegal stimulants, argued that henceforth the studios should "just concentrate on becoming distributing companies for independent producers". But Universal's Ned Tanen here suggests why the suits briefly tolerated the longhairs: "They thought they'd screw up if they interfered, and the movies didn't cost anything."

There's the rub. And for a while, it rubbed off very nicely - until Warner Bros reneged on a development deal with young Francis Coppola, who fell into the arms of Paramount, then seeking an Italian to direct Mario Puzo's The Godfather . Paramount sold the hell out of Coppola's film, forcing the exhibitors to dance to its tune. Cometh the hour, cometh "movie brats" Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, both of whom had missed the point of the 1960s and harked back fondly to Hollywood's Babylon years of unadulterated affluence. Spielberg's Jaws opened everywhere and was advertised relentlessly on television, destroying the primacy of print reviews. Lucas's Star Wars rammed home the marketing lesson, and Lucas shrewdly enriched himself by keeping rights to music, merchandising and sequels.

Biskind devotes ample space to damning the pervasive influence of the Star Wars series (dispiriting reading for any filmgoers dreading Lucas's next instalment). He laments that, while Coppola "really tried to do things with his power", it was Lucas and Spielberg who begat the almost wholly uninteresting Hollywood of the 1980s and 1990s, in league with a new breed of executives, reared in network television and advertising. As for today's young mavericks, Biskind retains only small faith in film-makers who have neither "a counterculture to nourish them" nor "a vigorous set of oppositional values". And to gauge the happy state of Hollywood lucre, consider Biskind's closing anecdote wherein Spielberg and John Travolta feud amiably over who owns the nicer Learjet.

Nevertheless, this book has its heroes. One is Warren Beatty, the enigmatic, intellectually aspirant heart-throb who forced Bonnie and Clyde through the system. Another is the spirited producer Bert Schneider. Schneider's recreational appetites are fulsomely documented, but Biskind also notes that he championed Daniel Ellsberg, helped smuggle Huey Newton into Cuba and produced Hearts and Minds , a documentary critique of America's dreadful war upon Vietnam. Schneider emerges with more integrity than the star directors of the era - Hopper, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich - not least because Biskind is too busy stealing glimpses of those men with their pants off. (Women have it tough throughout. Biskind's reporting of the murder of Bogdanovich's girlfriend Dorothy Stratten is brief but unnecessarily coarse.) Biskind's occasional discourses on the movies themselves are fine, if familiar: Bonnie and Clyde is Reichian - "Make love, not war"; and The Godfather is Coppola's paean to Italian family ties. But he's especially good on Taxi Driver , which really ends this era, and is where this book should conclude. The years 1977-80 already have their consummate insider-historian in Steven Bach, whose Final Cut recounts the labour pains of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull and the catastrophe of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate .

A final cavil: surely Biskind could have refrained from printing juicy anecdotes which are followed by denials (in brackets) from the victim. The tactic recalls Otto Preminger's film Anatomy of a Murder , in which lawyer James Stewart is defending Ben Gazzara from murder charges, and loudly introduces inadmissible evidence that the prosecution loudly protests against. "How," Gazzara whispers, "can the jury ignore what they already heard?" "They can't," replies Stewart. Biskind plays a similar card, too often for comfort.

Richard Kelly is a journalist and the author of Alan Clarke.