The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg —and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema (Preview)
by Paul Fischer. New York: Celadon Books, 2026. 463 pp., illus. Hardcover: $32.00.

Reviewed by Michael Sandlin

Considering the narrative-driven novelistic qualities that film journalist Fischer brings to this rich biographical study and detailed production history, one can’t help but think of these titular “last kings” of the New Hollywood movement as classic American literary characters themselves. In the beginning, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas resemble dueling Ahab figures trying to co-captain the same ship, both pursuing the elusive white whale of total creative freedom. Coppola’s own monomania stemmed from a God-like ego, trying to remake American cinema in his own image; Lucas’s lifelong quest for utopian creative autonomy was largely driven by Ahab-like revenge on the studio suits who had ruined his dystopian 1971 sci-fi movie THX 1138—a film Lucas himself had compared to the “Mona Lisa.” Whereas Spielberg, perhaps the more moderate Ishmael figure of the trio, never craved total control of the show business “ship,” as it were. He was more along for the voyage itself—which is not to say he didn’t have his own crazymaking utopian visions of perfection to pursue. But for that, the studios would eventually need to give him a bigger boat.

As exemplified by 1969’s Easy Rider, the flagship film of the New Hollywood generation, freedom from the American “system” was the utopian hippie dream in the Sixties. And from the Altamont-era beginnings of his scrappy bohemian Zoetrope filmmaking collective on San Francisco’s Folsom Street, the guru-like Ginsbergian Coppola and prickly young pipe-cleaner-thin apprentice Lucas could only envision true creative independence outside the Old Hollywood studio system. First, however, they would have to work within the decaying system to fund the kind of small “personal” films they had made as young students.

 Meanwhile, ideological outlier Spielberg, lonely child of divorce and college dropout, just wanted to make movies about little green men from outer space. When he was a young director on contract to direct television movies for Universal, he was offered a stake in Zoetrope with Lucas and Coppola—it was an offer he could refuse and did (no hippie communal crap for him). But he would have to make a couple of car-chase films—Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974)—before getting a shot in 1975 at making movie magic of Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel Jaws.

Although Coppola and his original band of eccentric merry pranksters at Zoetrope were never destined to be solvent, this espresso-driven beatnik enclave would in many ways serve as the unlikely seedbed for the later 1970s blockbuster revolution that rocked American cinema: the indomitable rise of Lucas’s Star Wars franchise and, perhaps more indirectly, Steven Spielberg’s meteoric post-Jaws ascendance as a director.

And hats off to Fischer for the relative even-handedness he extends to these three titans of Tinseltown. He doesn’t seem to play any particular favorites when it comes to how these director/auteurs conducted their often-melodramatic personal lives, dealt with artistic failures, or how they handled (or were consumed by) success. Coppola could be charming and generous: a warm uniting figure in some ways but also a slave-driving workaholic, megalomaniac, and the worst kind of womanizing patriarch. The Ohio-born Spielberg comes off as predictably likable, diplomatic, a geeky perfectionist who also wanted to be a hipster; and further, he could be a Zelig-like directorial chameleon whose career, even after the megahit Jaws, still sputtered until George Lucas tapped his directorial talents for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Only then would Spielberg be allowed to make E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the alien film that would be as personal a cinematic statement as it was publicly in tune with the Reagan Eighties zeitgeist.

 Of the three kings, Lucas comes off the worst. Cold, distant, perpetually bitter, uncooperative, always quick with a grudge. Certainly not someone you’d want to have a beer or a McDonald’s Happy Meal with. While in the early Seventies Coppola did everything he could to help the young aspiring director, including putting his star-powered post-Godfather name on the production of American Graffiti (1973) to ensure it got greenlighted, Lucas both solicited and resented Coppola’s help. And yet, without Coppola’s name recognition and economic clout behind Lucas’s early efforts, there would have been no megahits like American Graffiti, nor, for that matter, any Star Wars franchise.

But apart from its merits as a thinking person’s celebrity bio, Last Kings is also a meticulous you-were-there production history, showing in granular detail the Dantean directorial hell that can break loose when B-movie budgets clash with the uncompromising visions of mad-genius auteurs. New Hollywood film buffs probably know at least something about the disastrous shoots of Jaws and Apocalypse Now (1979). You know, where Spielberg and Coppola, respectively, were driven to the brink of madness not just by a host of mechanical, environmental, and human failures but also their own unrelenting perfectionist egos. But Fischer takes care to reassure us that Lucas’s directorial experiences with 1977’s Star Wars were just as horrible. Lucas hated dealing with the British crew, hated the English weather, hated the food, and “nothing he saw through the camera viewfinder lived up to the images he had in his head,” as Fischer pithily states it. In fact, the Star Wars shoot was such a debacle that the diabetic Lucas, upon arriving back in America, began suicidally bingeing on chocolate sundaes…

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Michael Sandlin, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is a U.K-based writer and academic.

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