Peter Biskind, who chronicled the lives and loves of the 1970s movie brats in his last bestseller, has enraged a new generation of Tinseltown tyrants and tycoons with his latest gossipy book. Donald Clarke meets an author with remarkably thick skin

Peter Biskind, a quietly spoken man with an air of the academic he once was, has become, for cinema watchers, one of the age's great myth-makers. It's easy to forget just how recently the popular orthodoxy that the early 1970s was a golden age for film was accepted. During the era itself, critics felt that film-makers would surely continue to build on the achievements of Scorsese, Coppola and Altman and that, rather than a discrete purple patch, what they were looking at was the launching pad for a further Great Leap Forward.

It wasn't until deep into the 1980s, when the studios consolidated their control and properly gelded the mavericks, that cineastes began to realise that something had been lost. And it wasn't until 1998 that the earlier, golden epoch got a name. In honour of Biskind's brilliantly gossipy book of that year (and, of course, in acknowledgment of the two films for which it is named) we would henceforth speak of the 1970s as the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era.

"I lived through it and I really don't remember thinking: this is a golden age," Biskind explains. "I remember going to The Godfather and that I just couldn't wait to see Chinatown, but I never remember sitting back and saying this is a golden time.

"Later on, though, in the 1980s, when I was editor of American Film magazine, we used to host these dialogues with directors at the American Film Institute and I just began to realise that the films weren't very good and the directors weren't very interesting."

Some time later, Biskind, who had gone on to become an associate editor of Premiere magazine, was trying and failing to get publishers interested in a biography of Martin Scorsese. It was suggested that he widen his scope and look into the careers of Scorsese's fellow movie brats - the first generation of directors to attend film school. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was the result.

The book was a staggering success, but left Biskind with a dilemma. Was there another group of film-makers worthy of the same attention that he had lavished on the peace-and-love generation? His new book, Down and Dirty Pictures, doesn't quite come up with a satisfactory answer. A study of the rise and not-quite-fall of the independent film-makers who (at first at least) profited from the emergence of Miramax Pictures and similar quasi-arthouse studios in the 1990s, the book is, like its predecessor, packed full of juicy rumour and bad behaviour.

But are the movies discussed really worthy of such close attention? Can he expect readers to care as much about The English Patient as they did about The Godfather?

"Well, when I was doing press for Easy Riders people would ask me what I thought of the independents, and I would say that they were the spiritual heirs of the 1970s film-makers," he says. "Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the films were as good. But I quote Steven Soderbergh as saying that he was trying to recreate the excitement of the 1970s. A lot of the older guys like Richard Linklater talk about going to see Taxi Driver and that inspiring them. So in terms of their inspirations and aspirations they see themselves as heirs. Now do the movies hold up as well? No, on balance, they don't."

Biskind's subject can be seen as a struggle for the soul of indie cinema between two perfectly complementary figures. In the soft, huggy corner we have the indecisive, passive-aggressive, reclusive founder of the Sundance Festival, Robert Redford. In the fleck-stained, knuckle-dusted corner we greet the impulsive, volatile, gregarious co-founder of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein.

"Yes, I think that they offered examples of people coming from different ends of the independent spectrum," he agrees. "Sundance came out of the 1980s view of independent film; it was art, it had nothing to do with genre. Then there was Miramax, these street guys from Queens. There was a real tug-of-war in independent film.

"I think the Sundance story is less developed in the book, because I didn't have the access. But Miramax, because of their involvement with Quentin Tarantino in particular, ended up winning that battle. Reservoir Dogs opened up Sundance to whole new levels of violence. Before then nobody died in a Sundance film of anything other than AIDS, old-age or boredom."

In truth, the material in Down and Dirty Pictures about Sundance - Redford's Utah-based festival and film development programme - is rather dull, and not just because Rob refused to be interviewed. What we get is a great deal of office gossip that should never have gotten past the water cooler. The real meat in the book comes with the lengthy lists of which objects Harvey has thrown at what film-maker. The mogul really does come out as a fearsome piece of work.

But Biskind saw him wield the carrot as well as the stick. When Harvey found out what the author of the scandal-rich Easy Riders was up to, he summoned him into his office and started to oil him up with an offer of a publishing deal. Throughout the meeting the author did, however, sense an atmosphere of barely withheld menace.

"As I was taping him in the interview he was taping me," Biskind says. "He always seemed to insist on meeting me with a group of his, er " Goons? "Well that's your word not mine," he laughs. "I think he is able to generate an atmosphere of menace hormonally. Without him actually saying he is going to break your legs you always feel he might."

The specific charges against Weinstein and Miramax are, for the most part, familiar ones: pictures brutally re-cut to make them more commercial; excessive, frantic lobbying of Oscar voters; a move away from the acquisition and development of lo-fi pictures to the production of bloated epics ("I keep saying that Cold Mountain is just a film about a guy walking home that could have been made for $2 million. Why did it have to be an $80 million film?"); the inappropriateness of an allegedly independent company's (currently very shaky) relationship with Disney.

Nonetheless, Weinstein & Co have reacted with customary paranoid fury. In a recent letter to Vanity Fair, Ben Affleck, who is quoted liberally, said that he felt Biskind was "yet another gossip columnist masquerading as an 'entertainment journalist'." Were Ben's quotes used inappropriately? "No. I mailed his quotes back to him and he approved them. In fact, what he at first said about Miramax was more negative. I actually allowed him to change them for some reason."

So does he believe that Harvey put Ben up to sending the letter? "I do. I may not be correct, but that is my belief. It just seems odd that he would write such a letter on his own."

Later on, when I mention a barely coherent open letter from the producer Don Murphy, which stops just short of accusing Biskind of engineering the murder of the First Born, the author's ears prick up. "Where did you get that?" It was lurking out on the Internet. "I was just checking. Another interviewer [Tim Adams from the Observer, it seems] told me Miramax had been in contact with him. So I wonder if they are stalking me." But, to get back to Affleck, the cube-headed actor does have a point, doesn't he? Considering the extent to which Biskind relies on quotes in both books, he could reasonably be accused of just re-organising gossip.

"When people do derogate the books they do tend to say that. So I looked up 'gossip' in the dictionary and it was defined as, I think, false rumour. But my feeling is that to make people vivid who operate behind the scenes you have to bring them to life. When you read a biography of Picasso and he comes to life because of the description of his affairs and his background, you wouldn't say that's just gossip."

Biskind must be used to getting bad-mouthed.Easy Riders, Raging Bulls enraged a lot of the old guard. Fortunately, he seems to possess a reasonably thick skin.

"Robert Altman said that he wished I would die, but that is just the sort of guy that he is," he sniggers. "Billy Friedkin seemed to be very philosophical about it. Peter Bogdanovich was quite upset. Martin Scorsese was philosophical. I liked Scorsese and I had been up front. I told him I was going to write about him running down Melrose naked. He said fine, but just don't mention the girl he was chasing."

Biskind's next project is a biography of Warren Beatty. Many more such agreements may need to be struck.

• Down and Dirty Pictures is published by Bloomsbury