How the 1970s remade Hollywood
In the 1970s, as the Hollywood studio system was collapsing, three young directors made game-changing films. Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’ “Star Wars” successively smashed box-office records and seemed to announce a new age of great popular moviemaking. This was not exactly what Coppola and Lucas had in mind when they launched the production company American Zoetrope in 1969, planning to make independent films as audacious as their student projects at UCLA and the University of Southern California. But when Coppola hesitated to direct “The Godfather” for Paramount, particularly when Zoetrope was struggling financially, Lucas urged him to do it: “Then we can use that money and make our own films.”
It didn’t work out that way. Paul Fischer’s excellent book “The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg ― and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema” traces the careers of his three protagonists (with substantial cameos by Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma) from the late 1960s through their heydays in the ’70s and varying fortunes in the ’80s; he also briefly sketches developments from the ’90s on. Fischer places movie-set anecdotes familiar to film buffs within the context of a revamped studio system gradually reasserting control over unruly creatives. There’s no question about his point of view: Of the wild success of “Jaws” in the summer of 1975 paired with the million-copy paperback sales of Stephen King’s horror novel “Carrie” (later filmed by De Palma), he comments, “Both were early triumphs of mass-market capitalism — fruits of corporate America’s eagerness to leave the radicalism and division of the 1960s behind, and corral its consumers into a lucrative, hegemonic monoculture.”
Happily, “The Last Kings of Hollywood” is not (just) an antiestablishment diatribe. Fischer shrewdly analyzes his trio’s individual temperaments to consider how they affected the evolution of their careers and of the movie business. Coppola’s impulsive, improvisatory nature fueled the brilliance of “The Conversation.” It also incited the mayhem of making “Apocalypse Now,” which survived a typhoon, the leading man’s heart attack and a lot of drug use to become a near-masterpiece marred by Coppola’s tendency to leave his movie’s endings to inspiration. He pulled it off that time, but the spectacular failure of “One From the Heart” in 1982 made him Exhibit A in Hollywood studios’ case that out-of-control artists must be reined in.
“THX 1138,” the experimental film that won Lucas fame as a student director, was an expression of his controlling temperament, happier in the editing room than on set. He disliked screenwriting and directing; once “Star Wars” enabled him to set his own terms, he preferred to exert control by devising a film’s concept, hiring people to execute it and owning all the rights. This fervent denouncer of interfering studio executives morphed, Fischer writes, into “the very thing he had often scorned: the producer as author.” Spielberg admired Coppola’s daring but was closer in temperament to Lucas; they shared a love of comic books, serial television and adventure movies that made their collaboration as director and producer on the Indiana Jones movies a natural progression in the ’80s. By then, Zoetrope was Coppola’s baby. It took Lucas a long time to forgive him for killing a deal with Columbia by refusing to cede Zoetrope’s rights to “Apocalypse,” which Lucas had developed with screenwriter John Milius; instead, Coppola rewrote and directed it himself.
As Fischer follows these various careers into the ’80s, risk-taking films are supplanted by crowd-pleasing entertainments. He paints an unflattering picture of Lucas caring less about the quality of the Star Wars sequels than their ability to guarantee his complete independence with massive profits. Fischer’s take on Coppola is less jaundiced but equally critical, depicting a man of tremendous charm and vulnerability who was also erratic and self-indulgent, professionally and personally. Spielberg, warmer than Lucas and more disciplined than Coppola, had genuinely popular tastes that allowed him to follow up a personal film such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and to comfortably alternate blockbusters with more challenging fare.
Fischer surrounds their odyssey with rich portraits of the people who shared it and the places they congregated. The counterculture vibe at an A-frame on Trancas Beach in Malibu, a New Hollywood hangout in the early ’70s, comes across with particular verve. Fischer excels in thumbnail sketches, skewering Milius for “his coarse masculinity, his disdain for any kind of consequence to his own statements and actions” and characterizing writer-director Paul Schrader as “so abrasive that a group of writers who shared an agent with him once threatened to leave the agency en masse just to get away from him.” Profiles of Coppola’s much-tried wife Eleanor and screenwriter Melissa Mathison are more generous and nuanced, reminding us that New Hollywood showed little interest in empowering women. The complexities of that period are manifest in Francis Coppola’s multiyear affair with Mathison, who was his children’s teenage babysitter when it began. Fischer depicts him as genuinely in love with her, refusing to leave his wife and setting Mathison on the path to a successful career by encouraging her to write “The Black Stallion” for Zoetrope.
There are no simple people or issues in “The Last Kings of Hollywood.” Fischer weaves an intricate tapestry of iconic films and remarkable artists against the background of an industry in the throes of wrenching change. He clearly thinks the suits won his subtitle’s “Battle for the Soul of American Cinema,” and today’s movie landscape makes it hard to disagree. All the more reason to enjoy Fischer’s smart, juicy account of the time when a new kind of filmmaking came to the fore.