Review of The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer – The Rise and Reign of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola | books

HHere we go again: a return to the glory days of the New Hollywood that rose from the ashes of the old studio system of the 1960s and 1970s. Our team is filled with fascinating personalities and creative adventurers, energized by the French New Wave, American counterculture, and an amazing entrepreneurial past.

Peter Biskind’s refreshing, slim and satirical Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranges freely across the 1970s, with controversial tales of vanity and drugs (although the definitive book on the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’ Scenes from a Revolution had the ingenious idea of ​​looking at the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in the transitional year of 1968, from the great Bonnie and Clyde to Squaresville’s Dr. Dolittle, to see what they told us about the American cinematic mind at the time.

Critic Paul Fischer’s book centers around a different, symbolic moment: It’s November 16, 1977, and a private plane is flying three of America’s top directors from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for a reception, hosted by President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn, honoring the film industry. On board were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola, ages 30, 33, and 38 respectively — too old to be children in the movie world, but too young indeed to be the demigods they had become. Using memories of Coppola’s wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also sad on board and feeling completely isolated from chatting and chatting with the alpha male, Fisher shows our three disheveled gods feeling dizzy, distraught and even strangely depressed by the astonishing global acclaim they’ve received.

Coppola created an authentic American masterpiece in The Godfather and legitimized the entire idea of ​​sequels and franchises with his masterful follow-up to The Godfather Part II. Spielberg had just sent the whole world into a frenzy with Jaws, came up with the idea of ​​an event film, and was about to release Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lucas was about to be surpassed as box office champ with the family-friendly sci-fi adventure Star Wars, formerly called The Star Wars. As with The Facebook, he realized that it seemed faster without a definite article.

The three zeitgeist emperors dined and partied at the White House, and stayed at the Watergate Hotel — as I read this, I found myself thinking of those rich, uncreative people Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk having a VIP moment at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. But Fisher recounts that Lucas Euerschli downplayed Spielberg and Coppola’s mood over breakfast the next morning, anticipating that “laserdiscs and cassette tapes could soon destroy the feature film.” The audience was able to watch only short scenes…”

Lucas’s initial musings for TikTok usually baffled and confounded Spielberg. Another day, he was slurping chocolate milk through a straw on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom while sitting across from Lucas, who developed and owns that franchise as well as Star Wars, making him personally richer than anyone thought. Lucas pointed to the straw and said, “One day, everything we learn and see and hear will come from something that looks just like that.” In 1986, he sold the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division to Apple founder Steve Jobs.

No one in the industry tried harder to turn Lucas’ predictions into reality than Lucas himself. However, it was perhaps the effort to invent a whole new industry protocol and a whole new universe in the Star Wars franchise that exhausted him, and ensured, oddly enough, that he never directed another film outside of that universe, seemingly unwilling or unable to think of any other stories to tell – while Coppola and Spielberg have continued to produce diverse works from that day until now. Spielberg gave us Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Minority Report and Fabelmans, while Coppola gave us One from the Heart, Rumple Fish, Dracula and the self-financed Vollet de Grandeur Megalopolis.

Fisher’s study of this period focuses mostly on these three California film school graduates, but she has a neighboring role for New York’s Martin Scorsese — because talking about this era is unthinkable without him — and an additional role for Brian De Palma. Other New Wave names like Robert Altman, Elaine May, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson, and William Friedkin were not given a look.

Both suffered exclusion while growing up: Coppola and Scorsese were Italian-American immigrants, Lucas suffered from depression and what may have been undiagnosed autism, and Spielberg was prone to anti-Semitism — like E.T., he found himself an outsider in the American suburbs he loved. However, they were spared the sexism that crippled their female colleagues. Take Stephanie Rothman, who worked for maestro Roger Corman but was never able to break out of the world of B movies; Or Nancy Dodd, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who often had to work under a male title or go completely uncredited. Melissa Matheson was ET’s acclaimed screenwriter, but for many years she had previously been in an unhappy extramarital relationship with Coppola. And tough producer Dawn Steele at Paramount, despite her track record of developing hit films, found herself excluded from auditions to audition female characters due to her alleged inability to gauge their attractiveness.

What united Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg was their longing for independent freedom. For Coppola and Lucas, that meant wanting to create their own studio outside the system. Fisher depicts Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as a dizzying, chaotic place presided over by its boss as a party-giver: a cross between a corrupt Renaissance court and the Beatles’ financially leaky Apple Studios. LucasFilm, by contrast, was a tight ship dedicated to technological innovation, with Lucas’ eye focused on the bottom line. Spielberg also got his own studio, DreamWorks, but it wasn’t as popular as the first two studios.

If there was a battle for the “soul” of Hollywood, who would win? Fisher’s book doesn’t quite make it clear. Probably Spielberg, with his genius for the American mainstream. Lucas became the franchise’s top licensor, of course. But it was Coppola who stuck to the spirit of buzzy independent filmmaking—financing Conradin’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now himself. He was also incredibly successful in the wine and hotel business, but never hesitated to divest assets to produce his own films.

It’s clear that he and Lucas learned different lessons from a traumatic moment in their early filmmaking careers. In 1970, Coppola submitted the first part of the dark and complex sci-fi film THX 1138, which Lucas produced and directed, to Warner Bros. executives who agreed to distribute it. The result was disastrous, as the suits were filled with incomprehension and demanded re-editing. As Lucas described it: “It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking: ‘Do you know why she’s smiling?'” “Sorry Leonardo, you’ll have to go back and make some changes.”

Fisher has produced an easy-to-read, closely researched account of life at Hollywood’s high table – and he delivers it endearingly with the enthusiasm and commitment of a true fan. But it goes beyond the great man theory of history to something like great men without history, lacking much analysis of larger defining forces and external problems. For example: Everyone agrees that the catastrophic end to the Golden Age of the 1970s came with the devastating failure of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. He broke up the United Artists studio and paid off executives who indulged “genius” directors once and for all. This book mostly acts as if this booking event did not exist or was unimportant (admittedly, Stanley Kubrick continued to indulge in his exile in Hertfordshire – although it is not mentioned much again). Although this tale is epic, it is in danger of missing the bigger picture.