Paul Fischer

The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries—Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg—revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it. In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right. Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism. Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws — whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures — intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.

Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema

The Last Kings of Hollywood

Bastien Vaucher

He enrolled and dropped out of school after school, looking for a major that caught his attention, but no colleges offered degrees in his preferred topics of "girls, ball, beer." He grew tall, strong, and charming, with baby blue eyes, that rasping Queens voice, and a strong, jutting lower jaw he could roll left or right to express an-ger, attraction, impatience. From the neck down, he was covered in hair-front and back. He got into football, boxing, martial arts; got so banged up he was covered in so many stitches and scars that the famed Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray later joked Caan wasn't born, "he was embroidered."

George (Lucas)'s script came along, slowly and painfully, every sentence like pulling a tooth. He showed Francis (Ford Coppola) a few pages.

"Boy, you were right," Francis said. "You can't write a screenplay!"

Francis was sitting in one of the toilet stalls when he heard two crew members walk into the bathroom.

..film's a load of shit," he heard one of them say.

"That asshole director doesn't know what he's doing," the other agreed.

Francis held his breath and, as quietly as he could, raised his feet up onto the toilet seat—so the men wouldn't see and recognize his shoes.

The next time Evans [Paramount exec] saw Korshak [lawyer], he asked him how he'd managed to get MGM to let go of Pacino in less than half an hour. Korshak shrugged and reminded Evans that Kerkorian [the owner of MGM] was then building the largest hotel in Las Vegas, the MGM Grand—and the mob ran Vegas.

"I asked him," the lawyer said simply, "if he wanted to finish building his hotel."

George [Lucas] responded to [Spielberg’s] Duel as a piece of art not all that different from the mood poems he longed to make himself. A red car chased down dusty roads by an ugly truck as vividly designed as any human character; expressive sound design of the kind George and Murch were obsessed with. From the simplest of ideas, Steven had created an experience, not with plot, not with dialogue, but almost purely out of sound and images. George was "very, very, very impressed."

"What happened in the '70s was that films that didn't fit into anyone's models started making money," says Paul Schrader, then a film critic himself. Looking for a pattern, executives and their marketing men saw only one: the directors.

Roger Ebert, already one of the arbiters of hip, watched Mean Streets and wrote that, given ten years, Marty [Scorsese] would become America's Fellini. The next time Ebert saw Marty, he found the filmmaker anxious, his thick eyebrows tightly knotted. Marty looked up at him and asked:

"Do you really think it's going to take ten years?"

Martin Scorsese after almost dying from snorting bad cocaine and having lost the drive to make movies.

Marty began to see what had drawn De Niro to Raging Bull for all these years—the humanity in the suffering. Not a boxing story, but the story of a man—who happened to be a boxer-who put himself through pain, and put the people he loved through worse pain; a compulsive man with base instincts always getting in the way of dignity.

"Yes," Marty told Robertson when he saw him, "if I don't do this movie, I have no reason to live."

"There you go," said Robertson. "Do it and do it really good."

Eisner summarized his vision for the studio in an internal memo distributed around the Paramount board in 1982. "We have no obligation to make history," he wrote. "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."

Familiar, satisfying, and replicable-those were the tenets of high concept, and make money it did. But it didn't help Eisner and Diller's reputation with filmmakers that those principles had little to do with art. They were, however, exactly how McDonald's sold a Big Mac.

The story doesn’t say whether it worked

Francis (Ford Coppola) had strung skulls and shrunken heads across the dirt driveway leading onto the property, as a deterrent against creditors and other plaintiffs looking to serve him legal documents.

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