THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD

The story of the filmmaking pioneers who defined New Hollywood.

Aspiring American directors who came of age in the late 1960s wanted to develop a new, more personal brand of movies. The vanguard consisted primarily of three white male contemporaries: George Lucas, a graduate of USC film school who loved “underground film, direct cinema, avant-garde, 16mm” movies, not Hollywood fare; Queens native and UCLA film grad Francis Ford Coppola, who had “larger-than-life gregariousness” and was a well-remunerated screenwriter by age 26; and Cincinnati-born Steven Spielberg, who longed to make movies but had to attend Cal State because his high school grades weren’t good enough for film school. In this revealing biography, Fischer describes how these three men, along with “intense, skittish, allergic to seemingly everything” Martin Scorsese, led this new era of American moviemaking. The author focuses on the period from 1967, when a young Lucas wandered onto the Warner Bros. lot looking for a job, through 1982 and the release of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. He describes the origins of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios and Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, Spielberg’s early years directing for television, plus each man’s high-grossing successes and their failures, the latter including Coppola’s glitzy musical One From the Heart. The book devotes far more time to the business side of the film industry than to filmmaking itself. Readers who want the inside scoop on negotiations, boardroom meetings, and the like will be thrilled. Those interested in the technical aspects of film or the directing strategies used to elicit performances in The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, and the rest will come away hungry. Fischer is clearly a fan, noting that Spielberg’s and Lucas’ early works “were more complex than they were given credit for” and adding that both men “served up comfort better than anyone else,” a statement that both fans and detractors are likely to agree on.

An industry-focused work on some of cinema’s influential figures.