George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest – it was “beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree”, writes Paul Fischer in his new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: “Maybe there’s a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived.”
If Lucas’s near-death experience shaped everything that followed, the other protagonists in Fischer’s rollicking, well-researched book – Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg – arrived in Hollywood just as bruised. Coppola’s childhood polio left him bedridden for a year; Spielberg endured antisemitic bullying that would shadow him long into adulthood. Built from the testimony of those around them – the three principals declined to be interviewed – The Last Kings of Hollywood chronicles what might be called the Season of New Hollywood Content: three filmmakers who between 1972 and 1977 smashed every box office record, redrew the map of popular cinema, and then spent the next four decades arguing about who deserved the credit. It’s a saga of bold men and their outsized visions – and of what happens when those visions collide, corrupt and, eventually, consume each other.
