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The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"Rich in glitterati name-dropping and insight into the minutiae of movie creation, Fischer's tell-all will cause film history buffs to swoon and will assuredly entertain any nostalgic moviegoer."
"Not (just) an antiestablishment diatribe ..."
"This is a serious-minded film book that also happens to be a great deal of fun, carefully structured and well-reported."
"Throughout, Fischer leverages a novelistic style that makes his extensive research and interviews a pleasure to read."
"But it goes beyond the Great Man theory of history into something more like great men without history, lacking much analysis of the larger determinant forces and external problems ..."
"but the book makes clear how often they got lucky or were saved from themselves."
"An entertaining, informative, and necessary book for all fans of contemporary cinema."
"A breezy narrative as faux-intimate as its use of first names, as hyperbolic as its title ..."
"Fischer skillfully braids the three stories together, situating them in an atmosphere of creative ferment and reckless churn."
"A brisk, engaging account that breaks no new ground and offers few fresh insights."
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