5 hours ago
6
Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.
Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.
Critic Paul Fischer’s book pivots around a different emblematic moment: it’s 16 November 1977, and a private plane is carrying three of America’s megastar directors from LA to Washington DC for a reception, hosted by President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn, to honour the film industry. On board are Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, aged respectively 30, 33 and 38 – too old to be movie brats, but very young indeed to be the demigods that they had become. Using the diary recollections of Coppola’s wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also disconsolately aboard and feeling thoroughly shut out of the alpha male chatting and joshing, Fischer shows our three dishevelled deities dizzied and stunned and even weirdly depressed by their staggering global acclaim.
Coppola had created an authentic American masterpiece in The Godfather and legitimised the whole idea of sequels and franchises with his masterly follow-up The Godfather Part II. Spielberg had just sent the whole world shark-crazy with Jaws, invented the idea of the event movie, and was about to release Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lucas was on the point of surpassing him as box office champ with his family-friendly sci-fi adventure Star Wars, formerly entitled The Star Wars. As with The Facebook, he had realised that it sounded snappier without a definite article.
The three zeitgeist emperors dined and feted at the White House, and stayed at the Watergate hotel – reading this, I found myself thinking of those plutocrat uncreatives Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk owning their VIP moment at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. But Fischer recounts that Lucas Eeyorishly put a downer on Spielberg and Coppola’s mood over breakfast the next morning by predicting that “laser discs and cassettes could soon destroy the feature film and enable the audience to watch just short scenes …”
Lucas’s proto-TikTok musings habitually baffled and disconcerted Spielberg. On another day, he was slurping chocolate milk through a straw on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seated opposite Lucas, who had developed and owned that franchise as well as Star Wars, making him personally richer than anyone thought possible. Lucas pointed at the straw and remarked: “Someday everything we learn, see and hear will come from something that looks just like that.” In 1986, he sold Lucasfilm Computer Division Graphics Group to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
No one in the industry worked harder, then, to turn Lucas’s predictions into reality than Lucas himself. Yet perhaps it was the effort of inventing a whole new industry protocol and a whole new world in the Star Wars series that exhausted him and ensured that, strangely, he never directed another film outside that universe, apparently unwilling or unable to think of any other stories to tell – whereas Coppola and Spielberg kept producing varied work from that day to this. Spielberg gave us Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Minority Report and The Fabelmans while Coppola made One from the Heart, Rumble Fish, Dracula and his self-funded folie de grandeur Megalopolis.
Fischer’s study of the period mostly concentrates on these three California film school graduates, but has an adjoining role for New Yorker Martin Scorsese – because talking about this era without him is unthinkable – and a walk-on for Brian de Palma. Other New Wave names like Robert Altman, Elaine May, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson and William Friedkin don’t get a look in.
Each suffered exclusion growing up: Coppola and Scorsese were Italian-American immigrants, Lucas experienced depression and what might have been undiagnosed autism, and Spielberg was subject to antisemitism – like ET, he had found himself to be an alien in the American suburbia he loved. That said, they were spared the sexism that stymied their female colleagues. Take Stephanie Rothman, who had worked for shlock-maestro Roger Corman but never managed to emerge from the B-movie world; or Nancy Dowd, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who often had to work under a male moniker or entirely uncredited. Melissa Mathison was the acclaimed screenwriter of ET, but was for many years beforehand in an unhappy extramarital relationship with Coppola. And tough producer Dawn Steel at Paramount, despite her proven track record of developing hits, found herself excluded from test screenings of female leads on account of her alleged inability to gauge how attractive they were.
What united Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg was their yearning for indie freedom. For Coppola and Lucas, that meant longing to set up their own studio outside the system. Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios is depicted by Fischer as an amazing, anarchic place presided over by its boss as mogul-slash-party-giver: a cross between a dissolute Renaissance court and the Beatles’ financially leaky Apple Studios. LucasFilm was, by contrast, a tight ship dedicated to technological innovation, with Lucas’s eye focused on the bottom line. Spielberg also got his own studio, DreamWorks, but it was hardly as storied as the first two.
If there was a battle for the “soul” of Hollywood, then which of them won? Fischer’s book doesn’t make it entirely clear. Probably Spielberg, with his genius for the all-American mainstream. Lucas became the supreme franchise godhead-licencer, of course. But it was Coppola who stuck closest to the rackety ethos of independent film-making – financing the Conradian masterpiece Apocalypse Now himself. He was also incredibly successful in the wine and hotel business, but never hesitated to liquidate assets to make his own films.
He and Lucas evidently took different lessons from a key traumatising moment in their early film-making lives. In 1970 Coppola had presented the first cut of the dark, complex dystopian sci-fi THX 1138, which he had produced and Lucas directed, to the Warner Bros execs who had agreed to distribute it. The result was a disaster – the suits snarled with incomprehension and demanded a re-edit. As Lucas described it: “It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking: ‘Do you know why she’s smiling?’ ‘Sorry Leonardo, you’ll have to go back and make some changes.’”
Fischer has produced a really readable, closely researched account of life at Hollywood’s top table – likably presented with the enthusiasm and commitment of a true fan. 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. For example: everyone agrees that the catastrophic end to the 70s Golden Age came with the ruinous flop of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. It crashed the United Artists studio and put paid to execs indulging “genius” directors once and for all. This book mostly behaves as if this bookending event didn’t exist or wasn’t important (and admittedly Stanley Kubrick did carry on being indulged in his Hertfordshire exile – though again, he isn’t mentioned much). Epic as this tale is, it’s in danger of missing the bigger picture.
