In the history of filmmaking, no era is held in such low repute as the Blockbuster Era, the period that held cinema in a suffocating, Vulcan death grip from the surfacing of “Jaws” in 1975 until “Pulp Fiction” turbo-charged indie filmmaking in 1994. According to the official history of American film, laid down in Peter Biskind’s 1998 bestseller “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and retold in Film Studies seminars worldwide, the 1970s was a time when bearded, neurotic film students stormed the gates of the studios and were, for a shining moment, given the resources to bring to theaters idiosyncratic, personal statements like “Mean Streets” and “Shampoo.”

This golden age of cinema, so the story goes, was snuffed out in its cradle by a one-two punch from the audience-pandering mere entertainments of Spielberg and Lucas. What followed at the multiplex was just an extension of the right-wing counterrevolution against the counterculture – blockbusters like “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop” were an arm of the Reagan administration’s assault on America, to be studied alongside classing catsup as a vegetable and Nancy’s china.

Any theory this neat and clean has to cut a lot of corners to make every thing fit, and the Biskind history is built around a tragic arc as streamlined as a Spielberg screenplay. Now, better late than never, a dissenting voice has spoken up to point an indiscrete finger. Tom Shone’s “Blockbuster: Or How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer,” shines as the first full-scale revisionist attack on the 1970s auteurist history.

To begin the debunking, Mr. Shone points out that despite romanticized renderings of the 1970s as an era of cinematic ubermensch sulking wild, there were plenty of bloated contraptions crowding the movie theaters at the time. What the new wave of blockbusters shoved aside was not so much intense portraits of sociopathic loners, but the last gasp of big-budget prestige pictures, which 30 years after its De Millesian heights still dominated box-office in latter-day flabby, degenerated form.

Film studies professors may remember it as the decade of “Five Easy Pieces” and “Panic in Needle Park.” A look at 1970s box-office figures, however, shows that they were not so much the Scorsese Years as they were the Age of Irwin Allen, producer of self-important, big-budget, Oscar-actor-stuffed disaster epics like “The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”

What Mr. Shone’s book does best is remind one just what a breath of fresh air the early days of the blockbuster era were, how vital, vigorous and exciting “Jaws” and “Star Wars” were to their time. In meticulous detail, Mr. Shone relates the (perhaps too) oft-told tales of the combinations of dumb luck, megalomaniacal determination and whiz-bang vision produced those two films.

He also reminds us that, unlike the blockbusters of today, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” were in many ways very small films about very close-knit groups, brought to life as much by unexpected humor and humanity as effects and explosions. The body count in “Jaws,” it is shocking to be reminded, reached a grand total of three. And much of “Star Wars” looks like a movie fixated on rummaging around a junk heap.

Mr. Shone concentrates on one moment in “Jaws,” the quiet little scene where Roy Sheider makes finger pyramids with his son at the breakfast table, as proof that the early blockbusters were as reflective of the true American experience as the ravings of “Taxi Driver.” As he puts it, “If you’re going to remodel the entire industry on a single movie, ‘Jaws’ is, on balance, a pretty good movie to pick; it’s fast and funny and tender and oblique and exciting in an intriguingly nonmacho way.”

Once Mr. Shone moves his wrecking ball past the Biskind Version, however, the book may hold less interest for those outside of film geek circles. Each chapter deals with the making of a single film, so readers may encounter far more than they ever wanted to know about what went on in the kitchen of “Independence Day” or “Jurassic Park 2.” And Mr. Shone is not free of cheap quasi-intellectualism himself, as he offers meta-analyses of the deconstructionist subtexts of his blockbusters, such as this bit on the rallies of UFO freaks in “Close Encounters”: “The one thing the whole thing really resembles, but which nobody points out, is the pre-release buildup for a blockbuster movie.”

Nonetheless, the book performs a useful function, tracing the inexorable cycle of dumbing-down and bad choices that took cinema from “Jaws” to “Van Helsing.” Suffice it to say that once the idea of giant first weekend grosses got out of the bag, directors and producers genuinely worthy of Mr. Biskind’s scorn sought to cram as many special effects and cool logos into two hours as possible. And, as Mr. Shone illuminates, with foreign receipts now surpassing domestic earnings on your average action/adventure, the temptation to do so has become nearly irresistible.

Therein, it seems, lies the true tragedy of the past two decades in cinema – not the false decline, but that fact that, not too long ago, Hollywood knew how to make good adventure films that represented American filmmaking at its best. Somewhere since 1975, that skill has been lost.

Mr. Rushfield last wrote for these pages on Truman Capote.