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.
As the old studio system collapsed, into the vacuum stepped Coppola, who adapted Mario Puzo’s pulp novel The Godfather into the most decorated mob film of all time; Spielberg, who established the template for the modern summer blockbuster with Jaws; and Lucas, who of course sculpted Star Wars into a vast and enduring mythology. Tracing how they set out to burn Hollywood down and ended up building the franchise-dominated landscape in which we’re still living, Fischer follows their fraught, competitive friendship across three of the most consequential decades in cinema history.
Lucas gravitated towards Coppola, the mercurial maestro, as a quiet apprentice during the filming of the 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow. Where Coppola was flamboyant and instinctive, Lucas was laconic, technically precise and happier in the editing room than on set. Spielberg entered the picture during a Godfather wrap party in 1971, when Lucas found himself transfixed by the director’s debut, Duel, on TV and entreated Coppola to join in watching. A triangle formed: symbiotic, dynamic, toxic.
In 1976, Coppola drove to see Lucas with a proposal: he wanted to direct Apocalypse Now, a Vietnam film Lucas had spent years developing with screenwriter John Milius. Though the script belonged to Coppola’s production company American Zoetrope, Lucas had assumed he’d direct it after Star Wars. “I’ve got it,” Coppola told him. “Let me do it, just to get it off the boards.” Lucas relented.
When Spielberg and Lucas swapped profit points – Star Wars for Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Coppola bridled at having no share of the deal. Lucas was blunt: “Why should he? He had no connection to the movie.” Publicly, Spielberg had been generous to a fault, but privately it was another matter. “I was jealous as hell of [Lucas’s wistful hangout film] American Graffiti,” he later said, while The Godfather had made him want to quit directing entirely. “I thought I’ll never be able to make a movie this good.” Spielberg was convinced Lucas had stolen John Williams’s best work when he heard the Star Wars score. “He was more competitive with me than I was with him,” Spielberg said. Lucas, still smarting from having let Apocalypse Now slip away, bought vineyards in Napa to rival Coppola’s. He also began insisting, with apparent sincerity, that Star Wars was a Vietnam allegory.
If this trailblazing triumvirate achieved independence from Hollywood, they did so with considerable help – and Fischer is scrupulous in acknowledging the women who made it possible. The editor Marcia Lucas, who was married to George from 1969-1983, saved Star Wars. She recut the film, found its heart, won an Oscar – and was, for decades, airbrushed from the record. Melissa Mathison arrived in the Coppola household as a teenage babysitter, became entangled in his world for seven years, and eventually wrote the screenplay for ET The Extra-Terrestrial. Kathleen Kennedy, who would go on to co-found Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg and later run Lucasfilm, became the only person in Spielberg’s orbit with the nerve to say no to him. Fischer gives all three their due – and his nuanced portraits of these women are among the book’s finest pages, a quiet indictment of a New Hollywood revolution that took advantage of their talents readily enough while denying them the credit.
His book is, above all, irresistible company. Glistening with anecdotes – Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas yelling “That’s my pot dealer!” when Harrison Ford arrived on screen as Han Solo – it excels at the behind-the-scenes chaos of how these films came to be.
So who won the battle for the “soul” of Hollywood? While Spielberg conquered the mainstream, giving us everything from Jurassic Park to Minority Report, Lucas became jaded, never to direct again. He’d dreamt of making spare, abstract films, but became, by some degree, the very thing he had set out to destroy. He pressured directors about budgets. He conjured up Ewoks with merchandising in mind. “He’s someone who lost his BS detector,” Fischer says, “and has drunk his own Kool-Aid.” Coppola lurched between bankruptcy and meditative artistic gambles, later reflecting that “maybe I became too ambitious”. Perhaps it was he, though, who stuck closest to the spirit of independent film-making – to the point of implosion, as his disastrous self-funded Megalopolis proved.
Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola changed cinema, absolutely. Whether they changed it in the way they wanted is another question entirely.
‘The Last Kings of Hollywood: The Battle for the Soul of American Cinema’ by Paul Fischer is published by Faber (£22)
