The Last Kings of Hollywood : Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema /
Fischer, Paul
The Last Kings of Hollywood : Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer - First edition - New York : Celadon Books, 2026 - xv, 462 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Author's note
Opening credits
Introduction
Part one: The outsiders. Twenty years later ; Beyond the rainbow ; Reality ends here ; The fear that thrills ; I lie to you all the time ; Do you wanna be a film director? ; Test-tube baby
Part two: Young moguls. American zoetrope ; Black Thursday ; I believe in America ; The family business ; Unicorns ; America's Fellini ; Harrison Ford is not a good name for you ; Paranoia in North Beach ; From Sugarland to the vineyard ; You're gonna need a bigger boat ; Indiana Smith and Francis's apocalypse ; We could get another scream here ; Blockbuster ; Final-cut directors
Part three: Company men. Those fuckers are crazy ; A walk in the dark ; This is the way the world ends ; Lucky sandcastles ; The horse may talk ; Do you want to live or die? ; Empire ; What if he got the dog? ; The dream ; High concept ; Like the old serials ; Shangri-Coppola ; The way of the Force ; The edge of the future
Epilogue
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"
9781250878724
/ F529 2026
The Last Kings of Hollywood : Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer - First edition - New York : Celadon Books, 2026 - xv, 462 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Author's note
Opening credits
Introduction
Part one: The outsiders. Twenty years later ; Beyond the rainbow ; Reality ends here ; The fear that thrills ; I lie to you all the time ; Do you wanna be a film director? ; Test-tube baby
Part two: Young moguls. American zoetrope ; Black Thursday ; I believe in America ; The family business ; Unicorns ; America's Fellini ; Harrison Ford is not a good name for you ; Paranoia in North Beach ; From Sugarland to the vineyard ; You're gonna need a bigger boat ; Indiana Smith and Francis's apocalypse ; We could get another scream here ; Blockbuster ; Final-cut directors
Part three: Company men. Those fuckers are crazy ; A walk in the dark ; This is the way the world ends ; Lucky sandcastles ; The horse may talk ; Do you want to live or die? ; Empire ; What if he got the dog? ; The dream ; High concept ; Like the old serials ; Shangri-Coppola ; The way of the Force ; The edge of the future
Epilogue
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"
9781250878724
/ F529 2026