18 March 2026

Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the death of the Hollywood dream

In the 1970s, an ingenious trio of film auteurs conquered Hollywood. But is the renaissance now over?

In the 1910s, the entire world came to California. By the end of the silent period, Paramount Pictures had the transfer from old world to new plotted on a map. If a film producer needed the Nile, he’d shift his cast and crew from Melrose Avenue to Monterey Bay. The Santa Monica Mountains made a convincing stand in for the coast of Wales. Sherwood Forest could be found near the Arizona border.

Then, four decades later, the direction of travel reversed: California spent millions trying to get to the rest of the world. Old Hollywood was dead; the tail end of the 1960s gave rise to the New Hollywood Man, who wanted realism. He wanted to be like the bohemian Europeans, who had already been shooting on location. He wanted every shoot to feel like an expedition. Francis Ford Coppola flew to the Philippines, paying hundreds of locals $2 a day to build a temple in the jungle for Apocalypse Now (1979). George Lucas went to film in the Sahara desert. While industry convention called for transparent tanks on a studio back lot, Steven Spielberg shot Jaws (1975) on the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Practical considerations alone stopped him from casting a real shark. Weave these three careers together and you get an illuminating account of one of the biggest shifts in American cinema. Paul Fischer manages this in his impressive book, The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema.

The New Hollywood Man assumed full creative control. Whatever he directed belonged to him. Where Gone with the Wind (1939) was an MGM production, The Godfather (1972) was very much a Coppola film. A failed project was the sign of an unrealised self. Sometimes New Hollywood directors would go a step further and write themselves into the material. In one episode Fischer relates, Coppola lurks in the soundstage toilets as crew members gossip about the quality of his unfinished film. He’s terrified his producers will step in and replace him with Elia Kazan. It sounds like a scene from Coppola’s next film, The Conversation (1974), in which Gene Hackman sets up listening devices on an anonymous client and eavesdrops on a political conspiracy. Fischer thinks this character is meant to be a stand-in for Coppola himself. But there were dozens of Coppolas in Hollywood. Chinatown (1974),Taxi Driver (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): these prototypically New Hollywood films teem with paranoias and strange obsessions, their main characters going up against sinister, faceless forces.

It could be that the film industry of the late 1960s selected for a ready-made conspiratorial personality. But Fischer’s book provides a convincing environmental argument: Last Kings is really the story of a wavering fight against the established Hollywood order. From the 1920s onwards, moguls like Jack Warner and Louis B Mayer owned the means of production; they were also canny enough to grasp the means of distribution and exhibition, buying cinemas across the US and flooding them with their own material. They pumped out films the way Henry Ford manufactured cars, on sprawling complexes and hyper-efficient production lines. The popular “producer-unit” system meant directors rarely had a final say; creative decisions were farmed out to producers, who chose narrative material and coordinated casts and crew.

The beginning of the end came in 1947: unionised set decorators rioted at Warner Bros and a successful antitrust lawsuit finally barred studios from owning their own cinemas. By the 1950s, television had cannibalised much of Hollywood’s target audience. Most of the major studios stuck around into the late 1960s, attempting to sell sex symbols, produce westerns and revive past stars. After a stint working in B-movies, Francis Ford Coppola wound up at Warner Bros, where he was drafted in to work on a saccharine throwback musical in which Tommy Steele played a dancing leprechaun. Coppola’s grumpy attendant on set was a film student called George Lucas.

Of the three backstories, Lucas’s is the easiest to abstract into a parable about 20th-century America. He began as a teenager with free-roaming, Kerouac-like tendencies. On his last day of high school, he smashed his car into a tree and decided he was destined for an exceptional life. Inspired by the emerging underground cinema of the West Coast, his taste moved away from studio fare towards what Fischer calls “abstract mood poems”. His twenties were spent raging against Warner Bros, whose executives hadn’t got the message about the impending collapse of the studios. They forced him to make cuts to his student-film-turned-debut-feature, the dystopian THX 1138 (1971). He got sick of tiptoeing around the Man.

So Coppola brought him along when he set up an alternative in 1969: it was called American Zoetrope, and was financed by Paramount Pictures. Spurning the birthplace of the studio system, Coppola set up in San Francisco, the heart of California counter-culture. “We have the means of production!” he announced at the Zoetrope opening party. Inspired by the independent Danish studio Laterna Film, it was notionally non-hierarchical and promised creative freedom, resembling a primordial tech firm replete with a pool table and an enormous espresso machine. But Zoetrope haemorrhaged money. Coppola’s slate of auteurs had so much freedom it was hard to get them to do anything; its facilities might have harked back to the gilded age, but hardly anyone could work out how to use them.

The New Hollywood Man then drifted back. Star Wars was a hit; Lucas became his own Louis B Mayer, presiding over a twisted, consumerist version of the real thing. He hired businessmen to preside over Lucasfilm, introducing new characters into the franchise if he thought they’d make good action figures. The cinemas flooded with young boys.

New Hollywood offered upmarket self-actualisation to a particular kind of man. It didn’t do much for women. Actresses often got much meatier roles in the age of the studio system, in melodramas and screwball comedies. Fischer’s trio preferred to seek redemption for their boyhood obsessions and ended up forever reversing Hollywood gender dynamics. Look for the seeds of The Godfather, Indiana Jones and Star Wars and you’ll find them in 1940s TV serials and B-movies. Meanwhile, the lavish women’s dramas of the studio period have their spiritual successor not in cinema, but in the ultra-lowbrow Real Housewives TV franchise.

Last Kings lacks solid discussion of film style. We know the three men are into Europe and the American underground; we only have a faint idea of the effect that had on their output. The highlights here are Fischer’s accounts of twisty interpersonal drama, which he sensitively weaves in. Before his triumphant breakthrough, Coppola had seduced the family babysitter Melissa Mathison, who became his mistress-cum-apprentice and eventually collaborated with other members of his circle. (Her first draft of an ET screenplay is almost perfect.) Eleanor Coppola sat on the sidelines, abandoning her accomplished career as an artist to support her husband. Marcia Lucas fared no better: after leaving George, she got written out of Lucasfilm history like a member of Stalin’s cabinet.

The spirit of New Hollywood would be almost extinguished by the 1980s. Of the major studios, Paramount was the more progressive: even in its early days, you could find a couple of proto-New Hollywood Men lurking on payroll, such as émigré artists Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch, who brought a distinctive vision to an industry that treated directors as cogs in a machine. The studios suffered through the 1960s, but Paramount at least saw fit to invest in Zoetrope.

None of this history mattered to the likes of Michael Eisner, who became president of Paramount in 1976 and later headed up Disney until 2005. Profit took over. The hard-won fight for artistic freedom was of no concern to people like Eisner. Paramount stiffened into a faceless megacorp, the stuff of New Hollywood’s paranoid nightmares. Spielberg went back into the gilded prison; his semi-autobiographical blockbusters were “tentpole franchises”, ripe for endless spin-offs. This was Hollywood shooting itself in the foot: Eisner could never have proposed such a thing without the phenomenal success of Star Wars.

“We have no obligation to make history,” wrote Eisner in 1982. “We have no obligation to make art.” One goes back to Fischer’s most enduring image: Francis Ford Coppola, cowering in the men’s toilets at a California soundstage, waiting for the news of his own downfall. The paranoid dreams of the New Hollywood Man had finally come true.

The Last Kings of Hollywood
Paul Fischer
Faber & Faber, 480pp, £22

[Further reading: Summerfolk review: Maxim Gorky’s tragedy is as relevant as ever]