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Paul Fischer’s new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema, came out in February, but the number of separate stories that have combined to make it uniquely relevant in the months since are almost… eerie.
The book depicts a period, roughly spanning the decade of the seventies, when the older executives who ran Hollywood had begun to realize that they were suddenly struggling to turn a profit on projects that had once seemed like lay ups: screwball comedies, westerns, song-and-dance vehicles for aging musical stars.
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At the same time as this was happening, there was a crop of younger filmmakers, many of whom had come up through film school programs – which were then very new and widely viewed as the frivolous pursuit of dilettantes (in Fischer’s words, “finishing schools for nepo babies”). Instead, many of these “movie brats” were making their own movies on the cheap, and in many cases, finding new audiences, and making the old Hollywood product seem out-of-touch and corny at the same time.
Sound familiar?
Back here in 2026, The Mandalorian and Grogu, presumably the lay up of all lay ups, landed to widespread indifference in May. This past weekend, Supergirl debuted to $38 million on a reported $170 million budget. (Which is actually worse than the infamous Jared Leto flop, Morbius).
Meanwhile, two of the yea’rs biggest hits have been out-of-left field, low-budget horror movies directed by 20-something YouTubers – Obsession and Backrooms. It’d be premature at this stage to call the YouTuber generation future Spielbergs, but the way that they made an entire system of assumptions about what makes good movie business suddenly seem both corny and misguided feels very much like an echo of the movie brats.
For many of us who’ve been writing about movies for 10, 15, 20 years, the last few years have made movies as a whole feel as culturally irrelevant as they’ve ever been (the handful of legit great movies still managing to get made notwithstanding).
One of the most uplifting aspects of The Last Kings of Hollywood is realizing that the 2020s isn’t the first time that this has happened, and that it’s also potentially reversible.
A few weeks after Obsession and Backrooms became the Zoomer horror Barbenheimer came Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s conscious attempt to bring back “movie magic” and bookend the alien trilogy he started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET (1982).
Aside from the background on Spielberg, one of the most compelling portraits Fischer paints in The Last Kings of Hollywood is of Melissa Mathison. Mathison’s connection to the Coppola-Lucas-Spielberg scene was initially through a friend of Coppola’s, for whom Mathison babysat as a teenager. There’s a gross, typically problematic 1970s scene in which the friend gets Mathison to dress up in a maid’s costume for a dinner party at which Coppola is a guest, knowing it will get him riled up. Mathison eventually becomes Coppola’s mistress, arguably less important as a scandal than it is as her eventual connection to this group of filmmakers. She goes onto write ET and win an Academy Award (as well as marry Harrison Ford, generally acknowledged as the coolest, handsomest man alive in the mid 1970s).
If you watch Spielberg’s alien trilogy, it’s hard not to conclude that ET stands head and shoulders above the other two. And harder, in turn, not to conclude that the reason for that was Mathison. She had a rare talent for writing complicated children, which adds a distinctly human touch to ET that the others, impressive displays of Spielberg’s virtuosic command of the cinematic language though they are, arguably lack. (The kids in Close Encounters are all basically insufferable brats, making Richard Dreyfuss’s decision to just f**k off to space at the end feel almost justified). There are a handful of other great movie books covering some of the same period – memoirs by William Friedkin, Julia Phillips, and Griffin Dunne, to name just a few – but The Last Kings of Hollywood is the first to really give Mathison her due.
Fischer’s book also does a similar thing for Marcia Lucas, who died May 27th of this year. George Lucas’s first wife and collaborator, she edited THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars (receiving an Oscar nomination for Graffiti and a win for Star Wars), as well as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese. While there have been some assorted hot takes about Marcia Lucas being the true reason for George Lucas’s success, or the only reason George Lucas did anything at all, Fischer paints a fuller picture – of a budding filmmaker who loved designing worlds and fiddling with gadgets, and his wife-collaborator who was often his better angel, pushing for more heart and humanity in his work.
I spoke with Fischer this past week. You can listen above, or read the condensed version below.
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So the story that I’m sort of used to hearing about the ‘70s Hollywood is that Bonnie and Clyde came out and then the youth movement changed everything. You’re going a little later than that, and I think making an interesting case for the Movie Brats Generation as the true inflection point.
Kind of, yeah. You’re right that the ‘70s tends to be Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate. And so when you frame it that way, the idea is like, oh, these East Coast, younger film school, kind of edgier, darker, bleaker, depraved, whatever filmmakers come in and they make these films that are more violent and more dark.
There’s that great Pictures at a Revolution book that Mark Harris wrote that contrasts this idea of, there’s one Hollywood that’s The Sound of Music and Dr. Doolittle, and then there’s a new Hollywood that’s Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and all that kind of stuff. So these guys come in and they make those films and then it gets out of control and it’s the sex and drugs kind of generation and the budgets get bigger and you end up with stuff like Apocalypse Now, New York, New York, and Heaven’s Gate, where these filmmakers are blowing budgets, nearly sinking studios and then have to be reigned in.
And it’s not that that framing is false necessarily, but I remember reading all these books and watching all these films and thinking that it feels like it’s missing something. I was a kid in the ‘80s, and the filmmakers that were the most influential of that group were Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola and Scorsese, to some degree. And if you set Scorsese aside, you’ve got three guys there who, they’re in the sex-and-drugs kind of generation, but they don’t do drugs and they’re kind of sexless (Coppola excepted). They didn’t feel like guys who were out of control in their budgets and stuff, but more guys who actually had a very clear idea of how financial freedom and creative freedom and the way the industry was built were related. And so this book started with this idea of, oh, maybe there’s a different framework there. Which is, it’s not Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate, it’s maybe George and Francis meeting, up to Return of the Jedi.
When I think about the cultural forces that we’re still living with and that the movie industry as a whole has been shaped by, I’m not really thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. I’m definitely thinking about this sort of crop starting with Lucas and Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese.
Yeah. And every HBO show has the DNA of The Godfather and Scorsese movies and every kind of Marvel franchise blockbuster tentpole thing. The DNA is Star Wars and Indiana Jones and all these things. Even that idea of, how do I come into an industry that feels kind of closed and there’s technological tools that could be the thing that give me freedom to make my films or it could be my downfall because money controls them. That’s what people are dealing with now if you want to be a filmmaker, and that’s exactly what they dealt with in 1968. And so their kind of arc felt like it had more to say about the long tail of what happened to the film industry and our film culture.
There’s an irony to this story, where, when I and most people my age think about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we probably think, oh, these are the two most commercial filmmakers alive. But when they started out, it seemed like their goals were, we want to create our own industry that’s basically completely separate from the studio system.
It’s one of the things I loved from a storytelling standpoint. We have this idea of Coppola, he’s the guy who will gamble everything, loses money, makes films his way. He’s like, the filmmaker’s filmmaker. But in 1968, when the book starts, people think of him as a sellout. He’s got a Porsche, he’s got a gold watch, he’s a screenwriter on assignment, he works for the studio writing and churning out whatever they want him to do. And then on the flip side, Lucas, who we think of as the guy who makes films to sell toys, in the late ‘60s, he’s actually like, I hate capitalism, I hate the studios, I hate working for anybody else, I hate narrative, I hate emotions. I just want to make abstract mood poems and be experimental. And Spielberg, who we think of as this almost idiot savant who understands the camera and can plug into childlike emotions, in the ‘60s he’s actually both kind of a dark kid who’s experienced Anti-Semitism and feeling unloved but also, and I don’t mean this in a bad way necessarily, very calculated.
Spielberg seems like he has a desire to be accepted in a way that some of the other filmmakers that you profile maybe don’t.
Fully. I think Lucas and Coppola – you don’t want to be a pop psychologist, but they’re those artists who are kind of like, “I have something to say. I am brilliant. I’m going to impose it upon you and you will all see that it is brilliant.” And Spielberg on the flip side is the guy who’s kind of like, “I want you to accept me because I’m like you.”
So shifting gears to another character, there’s a lot of strands of this story that I’ve heard before, whereas I think the Melissa Mathison story in particular, that was very new and sort of a revelation for me.
Melissa Mathison, so she co-wrote E.T., co-wrote The Black Stallion, wrote Indian in the Cupboard, married Harrison Ford, died quite young, tragically. So she’s clearly important to the story, but giving a sense of Melissa Mathison as a person also meant addressing this sort of open secret, which was very challenging from a storytelling standpoint. Peter Biskind had named her once in a Vanity Fair article, but basically she was involved romantically with Francis Coppola for a decade before writing those films.
She was his babysitter, originally, or his friend’s babysitter?
This sounds so bad and it should sound bad. She was his friend’s babysitter. She was still in high school. And one New Year’s Eve dinner party, that friend went, “Hey, Missy, Melissa, you and your friend dress up as French maids, and come and serve dinner for Francis.”
And Coppola, who’s already married with children, starts a relationship with this 18-year-old. So there’s no way to really dress it up in a way that sounds good. And then the relationship essentially is for 10 years, as Coppola grows in stature and in power and he encounters tensions with Eleanor, his wife. The relationship became more and more in plain sight. A lot of what falls apart in Apocalypse Now and a lot of what happens in Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes documentary thing – it’s not just that the film’s going badly and there’s a typhoon and they’re losing money and Martin Sheen has a heart attack. All this stuff is happening, that’s true, but also Francis has brought Melissa to the Philippines with him and this is when his wife finds out that he’s been having this long affair. And then after Apocalypse Now, when he’s had to break it off with Melissa Mathison, his kind of goodbye gift is, “I’ve been telling you, you should be writing, you should be a writer. Can you go to the set of this film I’m producing called The Black Stallion and help them write this? “
And so in a way he gives her this career. I think Melissa Madison is a very private person and was very happy with no one talking about any of this stuff, but I encountered this kind of scenario writing this book where it’s like, okay, if I write about Apocalypse Now without writing about that bit, then I’m not telling the full story. I’m erasing her.
If I’m writing about this ecosystem, Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg and DePalma and all these people, a big part of how they connect to one another and have the stamina, a big part of the emotional ecosystem of how they do that is Francis has got Eleanor Coppola and Melissa Mathison. George works with his wife, Marcia, who’s his editor. Steven’s perpetually looking for a kind of mother figure and DePalma is writing films for Margot Kidder, who’s his girlfriend who has this house where they all gather that they’re all horny for Margo and Martin Scorsese can’t help falling in love with every person who stars in his films. And so you kind of go, okay, well, I can’t talk about these guys without talking about the women who are emotionally propping them up.
No, you gave her her due instead, which really complemented watching Disclosure Day. Watching Spielberg’s alien trilogy, I do think ET stands above the other two specifically because it has a way of writing children with empathy, and I have to think that comes down to Melissa Mathison.
For sure, and even Spielberg, to his credit will say no, that’s her screenplay. You can tell, “Oh, this is a woman who understands insecure little boys.”
And whether that insecure little boy is Elliot or Francis Coppola or whoever, that was kind of her thing, being very good at being empathetic. And being such a sounding board, that it was almost like “okay, I’ll take this stuff that’s in your head and write something that is so you that people will assume forever that you’ve come up with every part of this, that this is about your childhood.” And the reality is that she was often just quoting kids that she had babysat.
There’s a similar thing with Marcia Lucas, which is another unfortunately very timely thing that she just died, but you have her in there being the person who pushes George Lucas to be a little more humanistic and give people actual emotions and interpersonal reactions, which he doesn’t want to do, it seems like.
We were talking about narratives earlier, and you had this whole weird period where the perception is that Star Wars came out of George’s head, like Athena out of Zeus’s skull. But then later, the prequels come out and the pendulum swings in the other direction where there was this weird overreaction of like, “no, actually, Star Wars would be s**t without Marcia, she was actually the one who made it all work.”
And so I got to delve back into this thing where, actually, it’s a soup of a bunch of different people. She contributed, he contributed, stuff worked, maybe she was right about this, he was right about that. It’s also just about the difficulty of living with the people you work with. I find it very touching and it’s only slightly in the book because the book kind of ends at that period, but there’s also a framing where, these are two people making these films for kids, who don’t have a family of their own the way that they want to have it, really.
There’s also this aspect where George Lucas seems like a guy who at a basic level hates the act of directing. He doesn’t seem to enjoy that part of it. And then when I watch a Spielberg movie, I feel like I can imagine him running around with a bullhorn and telling people where to go and what to do and moving the pieces around and he’s just living his best life in that moment.
It’s totally that. It’s kind of like, if you’re John Milius, you’d say, “You’ve got to be a general and run your army.” And if you’re Coppola, you’d say, “Well, it’s a dinner party and you got to entertain everybody.” And I think Lucas would’ve been like, “Well, I don’t want to lead anybody and I don’t want to have a dinner party, just leave me alone with the editing machine.”
When I’ve been on film sets, it’s like you’re making 8,000 decisions every day and any one of them could be the one where everything kind of falls apart. I really related to that stuff [Lucas] talks about, of shooting Star Wars in England where he’s like, “The food was s**t, my house was s**t, the weather was s**t.”
People think, “Oh, you’re a filmmaker. You’re going to turn up every day and it’s the same,” but he’s actually like “It’s drafty. I’m cold. I haven’t had a burger in ages. Can’t get a good cup of coffee. There’s nothing on the TV.”
It’s all the stuff that people don’t think about, that’s the stuff that makes you miserable.
Has it struck you that executives today seem out of touch in a lot of the exact same ways as they did in the period you were writing about?
When I spoke to DePalma, he had this really interesting point where he said, the thing that set us apart as a group was that the work was the only thing that mattered. We only had one allegiance. Whereas you go to an executive and he’s worried about what his peers think, what his wife thinks, if he’s going to keep his job, if he’s going to get a raise, what Variety’s going to say, what the Hollywood Reporter is going to say, what the shareholders are going to say, and all that stuff is the enemy of creativity. Whereas [De Palma was saying], we made good s**t because we stuck to our guns, because there was only one thing we had to be loyal to and it was making the film we had in mind the best way we can make it.
Maybe the best part of the book was knowing that that has happened before, where people thought movies were no longer important or a major part of culture, and then some people with passion got their shot and they were able to change things.
I think part of the reason we can’t see the horizon is we’ve got a bunch of 40-year-old columnists asking 60-year-old film executives what the future is going to be and we’re just having the wrong people ask the wrong questions to the wrong people.
I think in a weird way, the systems made the culture so impoverished that we’re back to craving and valuing that stuff the way we used to. That’s where I kind of am with the book. There was that period between the late 40s and the late 60s, there was a dark ages where stuff didn’t work. People were like, “Is the film industry dead?” And I think that’s where we’re at now.
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