BOOK REVIEW: What the ‘New Hollywood’ Won — and Lost — as it Reinvented Movies

By Peter Tonguette

From “Easy Rider” (1969) to “Taxi Driver” (1976), “The Last Picture Show” (1971) to “The Godfather” (1972), the movies that were made possible by the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s and ’70s have proven to have a special sort of resilience. These movies, unlike those produced in earlier decades of Hollywood history, seem inoculated against the effects of changing tastes. Though the earliest films among this wave are now approaching 60 years old, the best of them remain fresh and relevant.

But if there is anything that has proven even more enduring than New Hollywood movies, surely it is the cottage industry of books about New Hollywood movies. In 1998, when film journalist Peter Biskind wrote his now-classic book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” some of the last films that could be considered to have sprung from New Hollywood — such as Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” and Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” both released in 1980 — were not even two decades old. But just as the movies from that era have remained in our consciousness for the long haul, so, too, has Biskind’s book, which is now some 28 years old and shows no sign of losing its influence.

“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” provided the template for a raft of books on the same period and many of the same figures. Ever since, books by and about filmmakers from that era have appeared with regularity, including Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution” (2009), director William Friedkin’s memoir “The Friedkin Connection” (2013), Sam Wasson’s history of the movie “Chinatown,” “The Big Goodbye” (2020), Wasson’s portrait of Francis Ford Coppola’s dreams and defeats, “The Path to Paradise” (2023), and more. (Disclosure: I have contributed to the subgenre with my book-length interview with director Peter Bogdanovich, “Picturing Peter Bogdanovich” [2020]).

The latest writer to exploit interest in New Hollywood is film scholar Paul Fischer, whose 2022 book “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures” — about the earliest iterations of what we would now refer to as moviemaking technology — demonstrated gifts for meticulous research and engaging storytelling, especially important virtues for that relatively esoteric topic. By contrast, “The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema” will be familiar territory to cinephiles acquainted with “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” or its successors. Even so, Fischer wisely does not attempt the comprehensive approach of Biskind, whose book was a kind of patchwork biography that covered virtually every notable director of the era, but largely confines his focus to the three inimitable figures named in the subtitle.

Of course, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg have not been chosen as some random trio: these filmmakers are not only colleagues working in the same industry at approximately the same time, but friends, collaborators, and mentors or mentees to one another. Fischer recognized that because their careers crisscross in all sorts of ways, their stories would be ideally suited for a triple-biography such as this.

Another factor keeps “The Last Kings of Hollywood” from coming across as “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Redux”: So many of the directors written about in the earlier volume — such as Friedkin, Hal Ashby, and Bob Rafelson — premised their careers on confronting and upsetting Hollywood orthodoxy. By contrast, Lucas and Spielberg made movies that kept continuity with older Hollywood traditions, even if both did so on their own terms. And despite his restless quest for independence, Coppola, too, was more successful as the populist who made the “Godfather” films rather than the artsy marginal figure he seemed to want to be. In other words, Fischer was right to characterize these three in monarchical terms in his book’s title; instead of toppling Hollywood, they were content to reign.

Fittingly, the book opens with a striking image of the moment when the takeover began. “George Lucas walked through the gates of Warner Bros. the same day Jack Warner walked out — at least, that’s how George liked to tell it,” Fischer writes in his potent opening line. In 1967, Warner was making his hasty exit upon ceding ownership of his studio to a Canadian business, while Lucas, then a 23-year-old University of Southern California film school graduate, was making his wary arrival to reap the benefits of having won the Sam Warner Scholarship, which gave him the right to ingratiate himself inside a studio department. “George asked to be assigned to the animation department, where he was least likely to have to deal with other human beings,” writes Fischer, who sketches well his subjects’ various personalities, including Lucas’s noted owlishness.

Fischer does not press the point of the allegedly concurrent departure of Warner and arrival of Lucas, but he makes clear it was a consequential moment. “One event didn’t cause the other, but they weren’t, in the great scheme of things, unrelated,” he writes. “By late July 1967, the studios were on their last legs. Kids like George Lucas were a Hail Mary pass: a desperate, lastgasp attempt to do something about it.”

Dissatisfied with the inactivity in the animation department, Lucas strolled onto the set of “Finian’s Rainbow,” a late-in-life musical vehicle for Fred Astaire with the unlikely costar of Petula Clark and the even unlikelier director of Coppola, whose gift for whipping up excitement among a group of collaborators had been with him, evidently, since youth. “I had a little movie company there on 212th Street in Queens,” Coppola said of early movie ventures made on 8mm with family and friends. In time, Coppola sought employment with and an apprenticeship from Roger Corman, which he parlayed into a job directing a quirkily personal film, 1966’s “You’re a Big Boy Now.” Then came “Finian’s Rainbow.” “He was dealing with Hermes Pan, who disapproved of Francis’s roving camera and tendency to improvise the dancing,” Fischer writes. “He was dealing with Petula Clark, whose publicist husband kept asking to rearrange her shooting schedule to maximize her tax position back in Britain.” But Coppola was also encouraging Lucas, who was ready to forsake his apprenticeship. “Look,” he told Lucas, “stick around, and I’ll give you something to do. Come up with one good idea every day.”

Not even the presence of Coppola and Lucas on the same set could add much verve to “Finian’s Rainbow,” but a consequential relationship had been formed. Coppola prevailed upon Lucas to tag along as the former made a far more independent-spirited feature for Warner Bros., “The Rain People” (1969), a drama starring Shirley Knight as a housewife who adopts the ethos of “On the Road.” “We borrowed everything,” said production associate Mona Skager. “Cars, everything. We had nothing. It was made on a shoestring. We didn’t know where we were going. We would follow disasters, like a train wreck — we would go, and then Francis would rewrite the scene to the train wreck. And then we’d shoot the train wreck.” Lucas was on hand to document all the cinematic commotion, but he was also writing what would become his first film, the sci-fi mood piece “THX 1138.” “Francis would give him pep talks about the power of authorship,” Fischer writes.

Even more improbably, Coppola cajoled Warner Bros. into subsidizing a shelfful of movies by rogue figures including Lucas, John Milius, Carroll Ballard, John Korty, and, of course, himself. “For a small price — and entrusting Francis to oversee the projects as a producer, through a new company he called American Zoetrope — Warner Bros. could tie down a whole slate of projects from the finest film school graduates in America,” Fischer writes. Jack Warner might not have gone for it, but studio executive John Calley said yes. “Francis always lived on the edge,” said Bart Patton. “He’d mortgage his grandmother if it could get him some extra money.” This hectic early history of American Zoetrope is lively and well told.

The problem was that “THX 1138,” though beautifully visualized and boldly opaque, was about as companionable as its director. “We didn’t have a lot of takes,” said Maggie McOmie, who co-starred with Robert Duvall. “Two, three. I just did what they told me to do.” No matter how many takes were done, the resulting film was very far from a hit, but Coppola had bigger problems. As Fischer tells it, debt collectors were in hot pursuit of American Zoetrope when Coppola consented to direct “The Godfather” at Paramount, primarily for its promise of a payday: $75,000 upfront and 6% of the net profit.

Herein lies an irony: “The Godfather” was ostensibly made to provide life support for American Zoetrope. “Everybody who knew Francis felt he was selling out,” commented cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Yet it turned out to be a masterpiece. So did the far more accessible and appealing film Lucas made in the wake of “THX 1138,” 1973’s “American Graffiti.” “You gotta make a movie that’s about people,” Coppola advised Lucas. “Real people.” So much for high art. Yes, both “The Godfather” and “American Graffiti” faced attempted and actualized studio intervention, as Fischer makes clear in his grippingly told mini-histories of their makings. Still, both were also firmly within the bounds of mainstream moviemaking. In the case of Lucas’s career path, “American Graffiti” could trace its lineage to a hundred coming-of-age pictures, while Lucas’s third film — ahem, “Star Wars” — was explicitly conceived as an elaboration of Flash Gordon serials. In other words, “the new kings of Hollywood” may have arrived with the intention of upending the system, but they ended up sustaining the system.

The third key figure in the book — Steven Spielberg — recognized sooner than most that this was his calling. Possessing neither the cryptic pretensions of Lucas nor the circus ringmaster instincts of Coppola, Spielberg wanted to make good movies whose appeal was widespread. Not insignificantly, Universal executive Sid Sheinberg was among Spielberg’s earliest supporters on the strength of his first-class short film, “Amblin.’” “Sir, I liked your work,” Sheinberg told Spielberg before proposing a seven-year deal to direct television. “How would you like to go to work professionally?” The book does deep dives into the makings of “The Sugarland Express” (1974), “Jaws” (1975), “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), and more, but Spielberg’s cozy position within the studio infrastructure never really seems in doubt. “Steven wanted to be a studio director,” said “Sugarland” star William Atherton. “He stormed the studios. He wasn’t going out with a handheld.”

Fischer does not skimp on details when it comes to his making-of accounts of all these films and more, including Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and subsequent installments of the burgeoning “Star Wars” franchise. He includes a good amount of material on editing and post-production. There’s a nice anecdote of Lucas visiting the cutting room of “The Godfather.” Upon learning Coppola hadn’t shot enough material to intercut a scene the way he wished, Lucas suggested using “the trim ends” — “the seconds of footage before the assistant director called action and after he called cut.” “Studio editors usually discarded these as scraps, but George had learned to use every second of available film at USC,” Fischer writes. Picture editor Walter Murch, ACE, longtime associate of both Coppola and Lucas, is a major supporting character, as is Lucas’s first wife, picture editor Marcia Lucas. “Marcia shaped scenes around the characters’ emotions,” Fischer writes of her Oscar-winning work, with Paul Hirsch, ACE, and Richard Chew, ACE, on “Star Wars.” “She cut her first passes quick and rough, like a writer following her gut, or a painter instinctively flicking her brush at the canvas.” Murch, though, gets the best line when accounting for how these outsider filmmakers were incorporated into Hollywood but could not sustain their kingship forever.

“The successful films of the ’70s taught the studios: Oh, this is the new template,” Murch said. “‘Okay, we could make this work,’ the studio would say, ‘but we’re going to do it our way.’ Which immediately undercuts what made it successful. It’s the trajectory of every revolution, you know. As Eric Hoffer said, every great idea starts as a movement, becomes a business, and winds up as a racket.”