On the Shelf <\/p>\n
The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg\u2014and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema<\/p>\n
By Paul Fischer
Celadon Books: 480 pages, $32<\/p>\n
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\n Paul Fischer showed \u201cJaws\u201d to his daughter when she was 10. She wasn\u2019t scared. In fact, she loved it so much that she dressed as Richard Dreyfuss\u2019 Hooper for Halloween. To Fischer, who watched \u201cRaiders of the Lost Ark\u201d at age 4 (\u201cI remember the melting heads but I don\u2019t think I was traumatized\u201d), it shows the staying power of some of the \u201970s blockbusters.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the flip side of how these franchises became so massive and had such a long tail,\u201d he said in a recent video call with The Times, discussing how each generation still finds \u201cStar Wars,\u201d \u201cRaiders,\u201d \u201cE.T.,\u201d \u201cJaws\u201d and \u201cThe Godfather.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019ve created films that endured and that overshadow others.\u201d<\/p>\n That is part of the impetus behind his new book, \u201cThe Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg\u2014and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema.\u201d<\/a> The book, Fischer\u2019s third about film history, starts before the trio were \u201cbig mythical names\u201d and instead were just a bunch of guys setting out to fulfill their dreams.<\/p>\n The narrative then follows their journeys from the late \u201960s through the early \u201980s, filling in the \u201cecosystem\u201d the trio came up in and how they wanted to change the system to gain creative autonomy. Spielberg worked within the system, Coppola spent lavishly and even ostentatiously to build his own studio and Lucas found his independence through a quieter, more conservative and technology-driven route.<\/p>\n (Martin Scorsese, who was friends with the three and \u201cthe most interesting human being of that generation of filmmakers,\u201d gets plenty of ink but was not a titular character, Fischer said, because he remained an outsider who just wanted to make movies, not change the system.)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to pretend I can tell you what was going on in their heads but I tried to make people feel like they were there when it happened,\u201d Fischer said.<\/p>\n While none of the three men would be interviewed, Fischer had decades of quotes and conducted his own interviews with hundreds of people in the filmmakers\u2019 orbits to get a fuller and more honest story. (He added that their representatives were uniformly helpful with fact-checking and providing photos. \u201cThere was never a door closed on me,\u201d he said in an accidental reference to the final scene of \u201cThe Godfather.\u201d)<\/p>\n Coppola, \u201cwho changed quite a bit, was the hardest one for me to pin down,\u201d Fischer said. \u201cThere are layers of complexity to him and his willingness to treat the creative life as if it\u2019s an experiment.\u201d Blending that with his self-indulgent philandering and spending of money, he added, \u201cyou can change your mind about that guy every five minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n During that era at least, Fischer said Lucas and Coppola seemed \u201dcompletely devoid of any self-awareness.\u201d He chronicles how Coppola pressured Lucas to accept changes to his first feature, \u201cTHX 1138,\u201d<\/a> so the studio would release it while Lucas viewed that as Coppola pushing him to sell out. Meanwhile, Lucas was pushing Coppola to do a studio film for hire to keep his fledgling Zoetrope Studio afloat, making Coppola feel pressured to sell out. (That movie was \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d so it worked out OK for Coppola.)<\/p>\n \u201cThey keep giving each other advice about how to do things and then betray that same advice when it applies themselves,\u201d he said, although he added that he doesn\u2019t \u201cwhip them for 300 pages for having giant egos,\u201d and said it\u2019s part of the recipe to be a visionary filmmaker, especially in the Hollywood studio system.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the book depicts Lucas as more of a sellout, acting like the studio suits he once detested as he pressures \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back\u201d director Irvin Kershner to make changes, often based on budget and then focusing more on profitability as he conjured up characters like the Ewoks for \u201cReturn of the Jedi.\u201d Fischer doesn\u2019t believe Lucas would recognize that version of himself in the book. \u201cHe\u2019s someone who lost his BS detector and has drunk his own Kool-Aid.\u201d<\/p>\n In Fischer\u2019s telling, the creative and business sides are interwoven and inseparable from each other and from the personal relationships \u2014 their friendships and rivalries with each other but also their relationships with those who worked for them or loved them.<\/p>\n