Ron Hogan had a problem. While researching The Stewardess is Flying the Airplane!, his exhaustive new book about 1970s American cinema, he discovered he could not watch the films fast enough. There were hundreds of them--backed up everywhere, taking over his life. Or at least his home life.

"I spent like six months watching nothing but '70s films, pretty much," Hogan told The Reeler earlier this week. "Which means that for six months, my TiVo was filled with nothing but '70s films. But actually I shouldn't say 'my TiVo,' because it's actually my wife's TiVo, so that led to some testy moments over the course of the research period. It's like, 'Can we get rid of some of these trashy movies?' I tried to watch through them as much I could and not affect Laura's taping too much, but yeah. It would get to points where there were like a dozen cheap horror films mixed in with, like, The French Connection."

That is not to say that Hogan's book is some catch-all for every low-budget genre film that emerged from the decade--that has been done. Rather, Stewardess is a more of an elegant compendium of history, profiles and photos--lots and lots of photos--recalling a decade that many cineastes like to regard as perhaps the greatest era of American movies. But whereas previous '70s resources such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and the documentary A Decade Under the Influence venerated a relative handful of the period's vanguard, Hogan evaluates everything from genre to celebrity to motif in threading films as disparate as The Muppet Movie and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with the 1970s' overriding ethos of risk and exploration.

"I just knew from growing up in the '70s that there was so much more going on during that whole decade," Hogan said. "And if you wanted to talk about how these guys transformed Hollywood, let's look at some of the results of that from what everybody else was doing. So I wanted to look at the disaster films, the blaxploitation films and at what was going on in thrillers and new portrayals of sexuality. There were just so many different things to write about and so much of that story just hadn't been told yet."

As a result, the sprawling survey's ambition occasionally gets the better of its insight; you naturally would like to see films like The Deer Hunter not literally overshadowed by Apocalypse Now, and one-sentence treatments of films like Slap Shot--a genuine classic to which Hogan refers as "one of the most enthusiastically admired sports films ever made"--provoke a sense that maybe a narrower scope could have benefited both the subject and his readers with some helpful breathing room. Still, actor-specific sidebars (Shelley Winters' is probably the highlight) and "closeups" of fringe filmmakers like Larry Cohen and Stephen Verona provide enough individual attention to keep the deluge of titles from sinking the work. And Hogan's encyclopedic grasp of the material shows in his seamless comparisons and transitions

Take one look at Stewardess, though, and its emphasis is clear: Hogan wants to show you the 1970s. He spent nearly three days in Los Angeles scouring through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' photo archives to do it. "In some cases, there were maybe like two or three photos to choose from," Hogan said. "In other cases, things like Star Wars had something like 200 or 300 photos, and we could really only choose two. And it's hard. You basically have to say to yourself: Either you have to go for an iconic moment or you have to go for something behind the scenes that people maybe haven't seen 100 times before. ... In many other cases, we only had one photo that we could use."

In the end, the photo selection is fairly impeccable--the aforementioned behind-the-scenes Star Wars photo of Alec Guinness and George Lucas faces a bloody full-page view of Alien's still-shocking chest-bursting scene. The "Disasters" chapter offers a classic array of art from the genre that gives the book its name, while Hogan says the rarest find is probably the still from the set of the Sun Ra opus, Space is the Place. For my money, you cannot do much better than glimpsing Raquel Welch's peak form in Hannie Caulder or the eerie still pairing David Lynch and the mysterious, deformed baby from Eraserhead. But then there are Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash in A Gunfight, a production shot from Rocky (complete with some new gadget called a Steadicam), Roger Corman with a Tommy gun... The list goes on, but most importantly, the shots it comprises symbolize the decade's miracle of creativity. Stewardess persuasively insists that the 1970s were built on auteur power, star power, idea power and image power, all equally and to profound effect.

Hogan's encyclopedic grasp of the material shows in his near-seamless groupings and transitions; he reserves separate space for landmarks like Star Wars, The Godfather and The Last Picture Show (whose director Peter Bogdanovich, incidentally, prefaces the text in conversation with Hogan), but he does not miss a beat tying the phenomena of films like American Graffiti to smaller conceptual cousins like September 30, 1955 and The Buddy Holly Story. Other films such as Superman and the last works of Alfred Hitchcock, go noticeably absent, as do Ralph Bakshi's animated masterwork Fritz the Cat and Disney's '70s-era live-action releases.

Sort of unnecessarily, Hogan admits he could not get to everything; as published, the book represent years of viewing and more than three months of full-time film writing. "It was definitely a case where I was sitting there with the TV for months with no book in hand, saying OK, I gotta make sure I hit that," said Hogan, a Web veteran who founded and continues his full-time gig writing the widely read literary site Beatrice.com. "I guess especially towards the back half of the process, a lot of what I would end up doing is watching the film and then going to the computer as close to that same day as possible. Usually, I would watch the films in the afternoon or early evening and write it up late at night. It was like I would get those major talking points out of my head and onto paper as quickly as possible. And then kind of go back and make the connections and fill in the bridges. A lot of that was just figuring out what I wanted to say about the film and get in there so I don't forget it somewhere down the line."

And aside from the omissions above--which he did not even really forget, but chose to leave out for lack of good photos or other measured reasons--you would be hard-pressed to summon a 1970s film that Hogan does not reference. At its best, Stewardess bolsters your perception of a classic era. At its worst, it will clog your TiVo. You could have bigger problems, believe me.