Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg: How Success Changed the System — and Them

No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15% off. What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in art? No. Now look, we're going to do this thing, we're going to have a conversation. Hey Film Spotters, Adam here. Can't wait to share this conversation with you between Michael Phillips, longtime friend of the show, longtime contributor to the show, and author Paul Fisher about his book The Last Kings of Hollywood, about the collaborative relationship and occasionally the rival-risk relationship. Is that a word? I think it's a word between Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg, how they completely upended the Hollywood system and changed it forever, for better or for worse. You can be the judge of that as you hear Michael and Paul discuss that and much, much more. Here it is. Lots to talk about with this book, The Last Kings of Hollywood. I have to say, I had about 15 different reactions to it because it's such a fairytale moment for these three giants of contemporary cinema, and we'll call it contemporary cinema, even though the cinema that George Lucas, Francis Coppola, and Steven Spielberg came up in seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you know. But luckily we have all these three filmmakers with us still. But I also had, and at the end, so many kind of wonderful, amazing, bizarre anecdotes going on, and yet I was sort of in the end, I was left with a pretty complicated sense of what was possible then, what was exploitable then, maybe, from the studio's point of view, and what is long lost to me now. I just wonder if any of my feelings chimed with anything you had going into this project in the first place. Yeah, it's kind of a bittersweet thing. I think part of the reason for writing it, there were a few, but one of them was that idea that kind of like, there's been stuff written about the 70s kind of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, new Hollywood kind of vibe. But a lot of it's either 20 or 30 years old, or it takes the conclusions of stuff that was written 20 or 30 years ago. And this felt like a really interesting moment that we kind of live in this world that they unwittingly created. And not a world that's left them behind necessarily, but obviously Lucas doesn't make films anymore. Coppola's doing the megalopolises and taking the giant swings that everybody kind of makes fun of. And Steven Spielberg, you know, he's still putting out bangers, but who cares, because there's a Spider-Man movie coming out next week. So, you know, they kind of all been swallowed up by this environment that they created, and I like that writing it in a human sense, because it's like a monkey's paw thing, of like, they come in very deliberately. That was another reason to write the book, you know, where people sort of... We kind of treat these filmmakers from the 70s like they were just kind of wild and crazy, irrational, irresponsible, overspending, overschedule geniuses. We then had to be kind of reined in, but I like the idea that all three of these guys came in going, no, actually, we know what's wrong with the system, we have an idea of how to fix the system, we have a deliberate plan to fix the system. And it worked in a way that not fully backfired, but you kind of get the good and the bad with it. And I thought that's kind of an interesting 15-year journey to kind of track. Yeah, yeah, let's get into some of that in a little bit. I think for people who are new to, you know, the book, which is most people will be new to the book because it's a new book, it'd be useful to just sort of talk about where you start and then kind of what the 15 years we're talking about really, really sort of involved in where we find these three guys as they all kind of converge in this deeply unlikely way, but sort of inevitable way, in film school, right, in Southern California, or in and around the USC, UCLA kind of ferment, which of that first generation of film school. But the anecdote that you start with is fantastic. They're on the plane flying to the White House. It's 1977, no matter, I think. Lucas has just scored a tiny little hit with Star Wars, okay. Spielberg is coming off Jaws from two years earlier. Coppola has had the remarkable streak beginning in the 70s with the first godfather, then the conversation, then godfather II, and then Apocalypse Now, which is at the moment in 1977 consuming him, right. And they are on this private plane. Eleanor Coppola is writing in her diary and what she's overhearing. Talk about what she's overhearing and kind of why that anecdote became for you. This is the starting point. This hits something I want to start with. Yeah, while she's overhearing, they're going to, it's kind of like a presidential gaol-less thing at the White House, and have all these luxurious canopays and everything on this plane, and Lucas is talking about how, you know, I'm getting the numbers wrong or whatever, but oh, by next Friday Star Wars will be the biggest film ever, overtaking Jaws, which would have been the best film ever, which overtook the godfather, which previously was the best film ever. In terms of grosses, the biggest. In terms of grosses, yeah, yeah. And she's basically overhearing the three of them, Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas. We're like very close friends, close to best friends on top of the world, really kind of bitching and moaning about success and freedom and what to do next and what you have to do next. And like it's not really a celebratory mood, but it's also kind of all their personalities. There's a short exchange where, you know, you get to sense Spielberg's kind of giddy. Lucas is almost like an accountant. Coppola is talking about like, well, whatever you do, you just got to take a big swing and like do something big and be true to yourself. And it just felt like an exchange of like, a, it's talking about the stuff that the book concerned itself about, which was, you know, kind of like success and commercial success versus personal filmmaking and what you do with that kind of success. And then this friendship and then what success does to you and what feels like success because they're kind of at the peak of their powers then. And it kind of, in the American edition of the book, there's a picture of the three of them together kind of leaning on one another. That was taken the day after that conversation in Washington. And I thought, okay, so I can open with a scene that kind of expresses something about the top of the world. It's that exact moment you've just seen on the cover. It's kind of witnessed by one of the women who is their ecosystem that, you know, all these women they take for granted who are kind of flies on the wall over hearing these men complaining about how successful they are and how unfree they are. And so it kind of had everything in it as a great kind of starting point to start there and then go back to, you know, the book kind of starts in like the sort of six month period in summer 67 to January 1968, where the film industry is kind of dead. And there was this guy called Francis Coppola, who's a film school legend, went to UCLA, left early, made a feature film, brought it back as his thesis, worked for Roger Corman, became a staff writer for Warner Brothers. He's now directing his first studio film, first film school kid ever to direct a studio film. So obviously up to that point, directors tended to be employees who worked through the ranks. And he's making this film and this young kid from the Crosstown University USC comes to shadow him called George Lucas. And they kind of hatched this plan to go, you know, what the system is broken, we're going to do our own thing. We've got all these new little cameras, editing beds. We've seen how Europeans can do it. Let's just like break out and take advantage of the system and do it our way. And while they're hatching all these plans, Lucas kind of screens his own thesis short film at this kind of national film student show thing. And there's a guy in the audience who didn't get into film school, who's a bit younger than all of them, who's very desperate to be a filmmaker by the time he's 21, called Steven Spielberg, who's watching these short films going, oh man, everybody's so far ahead of me. I don't know how I'll ever catch up. And he goes and seeks Lucas out. And so I kind of start it there and it's kind of, you know, this is them at the top of the world. Let's go back to when they meet up and see how they get there and beyond. Yeah, it almost sounds like it's already a highly fictionalized version of the true story, but it was the true story. It's a true story. And it's one of those where you're like, okay, I've got to be as strict with these facts as possible. And it's beautiful when they line up and you go, oh, great. And now I've got chapters and scenes and it feels, yeah, like fiction. There's a point out there that the short film we're talking about that Lucas made was, I'm going to paraphrase and shorten it, but it was a T. THX 1130, electronic labyrinth, THX 11384 EB. Right. All the way in truth. 15 minute short, dystopian future. And then Lucas then turned that into his first feature a few years later. Yeah, which is, I think it's the first record I could find someone turning their student short film into a feature as a kind of like using the short film as a calling card for a longer thing. But you know, to put yourself in Spielberg shoes, people are making a little black and white, kind of mostly silent little films that are all derivative of other things. And this version of THX, Lucas was the guy who kind of like he wrangled his way into the USC department that trained like army and Navy reporter guys. And so he got film stock off of them and extras off of them. And so in terms of a short film, it's both like really good and like a blockbuster basically. And like, if you can imagine a world where like he was in the LA times for this paper, he got internships for this short film, internships and job offers. Like it was like, you know, national news best student filmmaker in the country kind of thing. That was George Lucas. And this is the one where Spielberg later said, this basically makes me so sick with envy. I can barely stand. Exactly. Disgusted. So he's like, I gotta seek this guy out. Yeah. We should also mention that you had this equally unlikely situation with Coppola's film that he's making at that time on the Warner Brothers 7 Arts. Lot is the film version of the 1947 Broadway musical Finnean's Rainbow. And if you really wanted to pick a young director who would be a crazier mismatch to that material, you know, I don't know how you'd find it. But that it certainly sparks this conversation between the guy shadowing the director on the set, the clearly overmatched director on the set, but also just disinterested in the material. You had Lucas getting the new Coppola and they're like, this is not for us, as you say. This is not let's go somewhere and make Hollywood, make our studio, make our utopian situation a reality somewhere else. And that just, you know, that takes them up to San Francisco. Yeah. It kind of speaks to that tension. You know, the studio, mainstream studio film industry had peaked in the late 40s. And then for various reasons, stuff kind of goes downhill. And by 1967, there is this thing of like the Warner Brothers is one of those studios that's getting taken over by smaller companies. Older executives are still around. They don't really know what to do. They're like, we need films that young people are going to watch, but we don't know what that is. We don't understand young people. I guess the last huge hit we had in this industry was the sound of music. Let's keep on making musicals, but let's get young filmmakers because they'll maybe know how to make them jazzy. And so you get this weird hybrid of Lucas wins this scholarship and he gets to shadow a project and Warner Brothers and he thinks, you know what? And Lucas, you know, we all have this image of George Lucas, but as a 20-something year old coming out of USC, you know, he's a cool kid from the Bay Area who loves fast cars, hates narratives, hates corporations, hates his dad and thinks, I just want to make experimental poems, no narrative, no characters. It's all about like kinetic movements. They're for the underground. And so he comes to the studio and he thinks, the only thing I want to do really is go to the animation department. That's where people make films. I'll get a camera. I'll do something. And he's basically told the animation department shut down. We're not making any cartoons. So he goes, all right, well, maybe I can find another more interesting film. And he's basically told there's only one film getting made and it's, you know, musical about a leprechaun guy chasing a pot of gold, 500-year-old Fred Astaire is in it. And he thinks, well, this is everything I hate about studio filmmaking. But obviously he reads the call sheet and it says Francis Coppola, who's again like a legend, like there's a handful of film schools in America at the time. Everybody thinks they're going and getting away from the draft and never getting a film job and just kind of wasting three years except this one guy, Francis Coppola, who managed to turn it into a career already and he's got, you know, Gold Watch and a Porsche and a family in a big house. And so he thinks, okay, I'm going to go check him out. And it's on this, you know, around a plastic tree at the bottom of the Warner Brothers jungle doing this terrible musical that Coppola doesn't understand. No one understands. Jack Warner is still sending notes. They, yeah, they essentially first think, you know, we got to find a way to get away from the studios. And at this point, they're kind of torn between, do we do it on the go, which eventually becomes the rain people as a kind of attempt, which is a Coppola film that they really shoot like a road trip. They put everything in a van and shoot it around. That was a 12-person crew. Just bombing around in a couple of cars, right? I mean, like for what? We're going to start on the East Coast, drive across. We'll have the editing over here, the thing over there. We'll make up the script as we go along and we'll prove that we don't need a studio. And then through that process, they kind of go, okay, we need a studio, but one that's kind of our own. And so they figure out this plan where Coppola wrangles a few grand out of Warner Brothers by telling them, hey, you don't understand the kids. I'm one of the kids. I'll bring you this whole generation of film school filmmakers. If you just pay for us to write the scripts, you get first look at basically a whole new generation of people, including me, including this kid, George Lucas, who's got the hottest short film in the country, all these different people. And they rent a warehouse up in San Francisco, which feels close enough to LA, but far enough that executives aren't going to drive up every day. You know, splash the money on expensive German editing machines and cool French cameras and a giant espresso machine and a pool table and, you know, kind of like a startup to like, okay, let's get going. We're going to change the industry from this little warehouse on Folsom Street. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-CD hachakar, reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore. And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. The book does not proceed strict chronologically. There's a bit of back and forth which gives it an interesting kind of tension in that we're always dealing with who they were and what they were dreamed of just a few years before wherever they are at the moment. And I'll tell you, one thing to kind of have the stories of these three filmmakers, first huge hunk of success. Coppola with the Godfather, not his first film obviously, but Coppola with the Godfather, Lucas with American Graffiti, which was made for under a million but grossed, I don't know, 50 times that or something like that. That was a huge success. And then Spielberg of course with, you know, a duel on television in 71 but Jaws, all that. It's amazing to me the stories that kind of like talk to each other in your book about how damn hard and how nerve wrackingly closely were to the projects falling apart. The Godfather, you know, it's kind of been told a lot by now Coppola constantly in fear of justifiable paranoia about being fired off his own movie. You know, Spielberg, that shark still doesn't work, you know, but somehow the movie was better for it, for it not working the way they originally planned it. Endless, endless, no faith from the studio really in how it's going to turn out. Same with Star Wars. And that is, and you also get this great portrait out of the book of the different types of temperaments you're dealing with here. You couldn't get, you know, a wider gulf between two people than Coppola and Lucas. And then Spielberg maybe somewhere in the middle. Is that a fair triangle, do you think? Sort of. I think there is, it's kind of a fair triangle. Yeah. And they have that great thing too, like because they're young men at this time in their lives, they kind of have no self-awareness, the way people in their 20s have no self-awareness. And so it makes them great characters, quote unquote, because they keep saying things that they believe or want to do or are going to do and then acting in the opposite kind of way, which is really interesting and compelling. But that thing you were talking about, that was one of the things I was aware of at the combat, right? It's like you say Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, people have an image in their mind, we know who they are, they're almost brands. And so you kind of take the success for granted. And I kind of thought, like I called them by their first names in the book. And I wasn't really a way to like set up fake intimacy, but more kind of like, how do I get the reader to see them as just like regular dudes as when this starts, because they are regular dudes. And how do I get to, in an experiential kind of way, get to really engage and involve in Francis is going to make this film called The Godfather. I know that your brain knows it's a giant success. So I know you already know the ending to the story, but how do I kind of quiet that down? So you're actually in with this guy when he's, you know, there's a moment early in the shoot, where he's literally like hiding in the bathroom while his crew come in and like talk about how crappy is it what he's doing? You know, how do I get you to relate to that so you can feel like, okay, I'm in this moment with early 30s father of two with another on the way broke in debt, has never been really all that successful yet Francis, as opposed to, oh yeah, that's copula doing the Godfather. It's all going to work out. I don't have to, you know, feel involved or engaged. Because, you know, they were, we talk about, I ask people questions about like, what makes this guy a genius or that guy a genius? And you get different answers, but there's so many times where they're so close to failing. There are so many times where the fork in the road is such a narrow kind of, there's like a really big difference between crashing over here and having the biggest thing ever over there. There's forks in the road where they are successful against the one better judgment. You know, Copula doesn't want to do the Godfather and Lucas doesn't want to do American graffiti and Spielberg, you know, up until dual and even Jaws, he's trying really hard to be someone he isn't. And if, you know, if someone green lights young Steve Spielberg's sex comedy in a Chinese laundrette, spin-off version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, we never hear about that guy again. I couldn't, and that's true. I mean, that was one of his proposals, right? Yeah, I'm going to adapt Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a offensive sex comedy, like purposefully offensive edgy sex comedy in San Francisco, where she's, you know, running away from who knows what and the Seven Dwarves, these seven Chinese guys in a laundrette who are super horny for her. Like, terrible, terrible, terrible. That guy makes a movie and, you know, we have no Steven Spielbergs. But in this moment at that time, he's complaining that no one's green lighting this amazing movie I have. Yeah, yeah. And he is the guy who came off 1941 saying, you know, I don't really know if I know how to do physical comedy. Which is actually not true, because I mean, he's got a very good, he's got an astoundingly kind of like good instinct for visual width and some visual gags. But anyway, we'll talk about 1941, another interview. No, and it's in there. And that's when you talk about them kind of as a poll, like I think Coppola, you know, big guy who'll jump off the cliff and figure out a parachute on the way down, and Lucas is much more kind of like uncompromising and tightly wound and maybe a little bit kind of pretentious in different ways. And, you know, under control and very opinionated and doesn't even love people, whereas Coppola is the guy who, you know, he wants to have a dinner party every five minutes. Yeah. And Spielberg, I think he's in between the two in a sense that, you know, that's a guy who is a very young person. It's like, I really want to be loved and accepted, but not for who I am, I want to be loved and accepted for being like you are, right? And so right up until 1941, 1941 to me is one of those films where like, he's still trying to be John Mealier, so Bob Zemeckis or Belushi, and that's not who he is. And it's not so much that he can't do comedy. It's anything you do where you're not really authentic is going to, especially comedy, is going to be a bit of a cluster cuss. Yeah. So it's a real object lesson and I'm not even sure exactly what that is. Maybe you can tell me. When you have this someone like Lucas who makes his name as a college student with the 15-minute short THX1138, which is non-narrative, non-linear, as you say, kind of just an experimental visual poem, and the kind of thing, you know, you wouldn't be on an unusual sort of thing to attempt, I think, at that, you know, on the college level. And you go a few years later and he's the guy on the set of Empire Strikes Back somehow worrying about finances because it's all kind of falling apart all around him and the shoot's taking forever. He's not directing it because he's really already become much less interested in not just writing but directing, you know. And it's kind of a peculiar lesson, I guess, and just, I don't know. I mean, he became the filmmaker he was meant to be. You know, he somehow had the instinct, this sounds kind of harsh, maybe dismissive, but in my view, you know, he focused so intently on getting the merchandising rights and the sequel rights that left him astoundingly rich. I mean, he's worth five billion today. I think Spielberg's worth four billion. Coppola, nobody knows because he might be broke. You might have a few hundred million, it's hard to say. But, I mean, the money is like so astounding. These figures are so astounding you can't even get your head around them. But I don't know. I always struggle and, you know, the film spotting gang certainly knows this. I struggle a lot with the influence of Star Wars, not just the film industry, but popular culture in general. But I think I get evidence for my argument in your book. He's so hard to pin down, right? Because he's kind of like, again, you talk about what makes a genius of something and people will tell you, oh, they love what they do. They're obsessed with what they do. They're really good at what they do. And then, okay, well, George Lucas hated directing, really hated it. He really hated the experience, hated writing. And if you've read any of his actual drafts for stuff, it was bad at writing. Not a people person, which is a huge part of being a director and not great under pressure making decisions. And so you go, okay, well, what makes him who he is? And the thing I like about that period is I don't really have an answer, right? Like there's a way to read it where he kind of falls into filmmaking by accident. He wants to race cars. He has this terrible crash. He gets scared off racing cars. And through Haswell Wexler realizes, oh, I can film and get a bit of the thrill of, again, kinetic movement through a camera. This is Wexler shooting American graffiti as well, you're saying? Eventually, but they kind of meet very early when Wexler, who also loved cars, who are the cinematographer, kind of took a shine to him. And so, you know, on race car tracks, how you can film stuff, take photographs, I'll put in a good word for you to come out to LA, whatever. And like very early, Lucas kind of goes, I'm not a director, you know, I'm a filmmaker. And this is one of those very kind of like self-important 60s, 70s debates of like, you're a film director, you're a filmmaker. And very early on, he's like, I'm a filmmaker in the way Simone would be a toy maker or a car maker. And so he thinks in very mechanical kind of ways early on. And so you can kind of see like, okay, maybe then the thrill transforms into something else, which is building this empire, quote unquote. Or you can read it the way Coppola reads it, where he has told people repeatedly, you know, George could have been an amazing filmmaker and it's a shame that all he's done is Star Wars and he should have made other films. Or you could read it the way Lucas himself sometimes says where he's like, oh no, when I'm done with all the Star Wars stuff, I'll go back to making small experimental THX kind of films, which he's never done. And, you know, which other friends of theirs will go, you know, that's BS. He never wanted to do that. He would never do that. That's just George telling himself that. So he doesn't feel like a sellout. And, you know, he doesn't feel like the guy he became, which really was, he's in his 20s complaining about the executives and the interference and the producers in the studios. And by the time the Star Wars films will come around, he's that guy. He's Irving Thalberg hanging over your shoulder going, even though I'm not the writer or the director or I'm the creative impulse behind this, because I pay the bills. And so I get the final say. And then you have that extra dimension. You're also talking about, you know, like I think, I don't think it's super controversial to say the first Star Wars film. It's just called Star Wars. Like it's a good movie and it's a cinema literate movie and, you know, references slash rips off a bunch of world cinema, but at least in those movies. And the more it goes, the more those films become about just selling the toys. Well, the Ewoks, the Ewoks is the Christmas. Well, the Ewoks. The notorious example in the return of the Jedi, the third film. Exactly. And where, you know, Lucas will tell you, well, no, that's the way it had to be. And really the people who turned into merchandising are the executives who came after me. But you get people like this producer, Gary Kurtz and other people who worked on them who went, we never planned on the third film, just being a commercial for stuffed animals. It was meant to end a different way. And it's all very compelling stuff because there's no clear answer. There's no straight answer as there would be, you know, if you were talking about a friend of yours, you might have an opinion. Your wife might have an opinion. Your cousin might have an opinion about what makes them who they are. But there is that kind of thing through it either way of, I can't remember who said this and now I'm being pretentious. It might be Goethers or something, but this idea that whatever you fight within yourself comes back to you as kind of fate. And George Lucas is a little trajectory there, kind of has that. You know, he kind of fights the system, fights the man, claims he's everything opposite of that, fights his dad and then becomes his dad. Becomes his dad, becomes the system, becomes the man. Now, you know, he's that guy people protest because he wants to like raise buildings and build a museum for his collection of art he's put behind glass. Right. So if the studio system was falling apart during the period you're writing about in the last Kings of Hollywood, where is it now? It was falling apart then. Yeah. Or changing, changing would be the too weak a word, but we are, I mean, some things have changed. It's not necessarily entirely 100% the story of today. We're not retelling exactly the same, hopefully demographic story about who has any power to make a movie in Hollywood. It's maybe 89%, 95% white male. Now it was probably closer to 99.9 back then. Yeah. You know, it's a certain time and I mean, everyone else is shoved to the margins. I mean, and you do read and hear certainly a lot about the women, especially who didn't get the shot who might have gotten a screenwriting gig like Melissa Matheson or something like that. But it's really more through who they knew first and being, you know, either the wife or the partner or the mistress of some famous director. It's just not, you know, it's a time that you just, it's a lot of a lot of mind feels that make it a hell of a lot more complicated than wasn't it wasn't a wonderful what was possible back then. Would you agree with that? Yeah. I think so. I think there are parallels in the sense that, you know, you can kind of simplify it where you kind of go, okay, late 60s, these guys are coming in. There's new technology that no one really knows how to harness the industry is going to play in catch up with like rival models like television, foreign films, whatever. Don't understand young people. The young people don't think there's any way to get a job in the industry. You know, there's bloody illegitimate foreign wars above. There's a guy in the White House. Everybody feels this corrupt. Everybody's quite depressed and there's protests on the street and law enforcement shooting people. And you're like, okay, this sounds quite familiar. I know what this is. And there are parallels to another thing you're talking about of, you know, okay, if we're going to try something new, maybe we'll just try a slightly different or slightly younger brand of white dude. That's as far as we'll go and like trying to reach all this stuff that we can't reach. Even though being daring would pay off. I think the difference between then and now a little bit is I get the feeling now almost every time I hear something about the film industry where I go, oh, this is an industry that really, really hates filmmakers, like really hates them. You know, like if you've got the nerve like a Ryan Coogler to go, I don't want to own my film in a little while because I made it. Then the pitchforks are going to come out to call you entitled and, you know, this is not how it works. And to, and again, there's a whole extra dimension as well of this being an African-American man who wants to own his own work rather than a tarantino or whatever. But, you know, and there are filmmakers who will go, you know, we've got ideas. You want to Star Wars? I'll give you something like a Star Wars, but you got to trust us to make something new like a Star Wars. And the industry's default is to go, no, how about we'll make a deal with like the AI companies that have pillaged the other stuff so users can make their own little videos of Star Wars. We're just going to go back and rob all the graves and all the past stuff instead of trying anything new because we'll do anything before we actually go. Hey, filmmaker, I'll trust you. And if by accident, trusting a filmmaker gives you something that works, whether it's, you know, at the time we're recording Project Hail Mary, that worked. It's a great, you know, success. Everybody likes it. You know, should we make other original films that are different that people are going to see? No, let's try and make Project Hail Mary two and three and four and five. So it's kind of everything to not trust the director. Whereas I think the opening these guys had at that time, these older executives didn't understand the market, but they kind of went, I mean, if we spin the wheel on enough of these young filmmakers, something's going to hit. So the approach was kind of different. And I think tied to that, there's a risk aversion now. I think, you know, if Seven Arts or a small company back then takes over Warner Brothers or if GE takes over. Paramount, the guy comes in going, I know better than you. We're going to shake everything up. We're going to make big films. I'm going to hang out with beautiful women. You know, there was an ambition to it. Whereas now people take over and, you know, this is not a new conclusion, but you're not in it to make films. You're in it for the, you know, board members meeting in six months, 12 months, you know, you get stuff like, you know, Zaslav can drive Warner Brothers into the ground. But half of his constituency will tell you great success because we all made money on the way down. Right. It was brilliant. And I don't know if that was so much of a thing back then. Big failure. Yeah. And that risk aversion again also means, well, you know, let's get films that are like the films that worked before. Let's get filmmakers who are white dudes who like the filmmakers that worked before. Let's assume that those things are the default kind of less risky choice. Yeah. And like, I hate being fatalistic. I hate feeling like, oh, everything's worse than it's ever been. And there's no way out because I'm sure there is a way. But it does feel more depressing. Yeah. And it does feel, you know, and it's also that thing of like, you know, I went to film school that kind of last generation, 20 years ago, where people went, oh, the internet's going to be great. You know, you can get a small camera. You can do whatever you want. And you can put on the internet and anybody can watch it. And we hadn't quite worked out yet that that would just be a lot of white noise. That you would just be like throwing a rock into the ocean and going, someone watch this. Right. Which is what it's become now. And so I think the distribution thing, you know, that was the thing back then where, you know, Coppola, Lucas, as rich as they got with the Star Wars, as the Godfathers, they still had to go. Hey, 20th Century Fox, will you put this in cinemas for me? Will you get this out to people? And now that still exists, but in a different way. Right. Because like, I make a masterpiece at this great festival. It's going to go on Netflix for five minutes. And then there's another Mormon wives season that everybody's talking about. Yeah. Or there's another Marvel film, or there's another, and I don't know how you deal with that. Yeah, same. I mean, yeah. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease, and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians, and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-CD hachakar. Reach the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah. I am not writing actively anymore, and when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show, and the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire. In the book, you're dealing with a great wealth of archival material. These guys gave a lot of interviews and all that. That's got to be a weed out process that takes a long, long time. I also wonder who, if you could talk a little bit about that, just how the book, when you actually started it, when was the first interview for it you did, and who would you have loved to get for your own interviews, but couldn't? Well, there's a few. So, the first interview I did was with Matthew Robbins, who co-wrote the Sri Lankan Express with Hal Barwards. All the stuff with the kid in Close Encounters, that's Matthew Robbins. He writes with Diyoma Deltora now. Went to film school with George Lucas and Walter Merchant, all those guys. And I remember reaching out to Matthew and I said, I'm writing this book. It's about this time period. And part of where it comes from is, you know, I know you spoke to Peter Biscan for Easy Writers Raging Bulls, and I kind of hate that book because it doesn't feel like a non-spook. Wow, so... Well, like there's stuff in Easy Writers Raging. I think Biscan, by his own admission, is a very kind of like print the legend rather than, you know, find a truce kind of guy. And I think there's a lot of treats in that book. There's also a lot of, hey, if that sounds good, put it in. And there's also a lot of, there are times in that book when I was writing my proposal, because I'm the guy who writes 100 page proposals for publishers when we sell the book, where you go, oh man, his timeline is kind of all messed up to suggest causality where there may not be. You know, where a chapter kind of goes to April 74 and then goes extras to make that film because of this. And then two chapters later you go, wait, but he accepted that film in like January 74. So four months before you said the reason for him accepting it was, and it just gets sloppy. And it's also about these three guys. That book is very kind of like, you know, sex and drugs in excess. And you go, well, these are the guys who didn't do any drugs and they're kind of sexless, copally accepted. So they kind of get swallowed up by the scope and the scale of that book. And so I kind of mentioned that. And Matthew was one of those people who was like, okay, great, because I'm one of those people who I spoke to Biscand and I lost friendships. And there's, you know, stuff that was in context that I didn't agree with, whatever. So can we talk? And so we talked and we got on and he's a, you know, lovely person. And then it went from there. And then I spoke to Walter Merch, pretty soon after that, who, Walter is one of those people, not only no one has anything bad to say about, but he mentioned his name and everybody has a 10 minute speech about how great he is. So Walter was lovely and then it kind of spread out and I spoke to 400-ish people. And I really wanted to talk to kind of crew members and people in the offices. And, you know, I've been on film sets and I'm often like, you know, the thing that gives you the vibe of making a film is the people who are there by crafty. It's the people who are there wondering if they're going to have time to drive home. It's the people who are there when all the stuff's not working day to day, six days a week. It's not the agents and it's not the headlines and it's not. So I was like, I want to speak to a lot of those people and then people who, you know, knew these guys before they were these guys, people who knew them all the way through that kind of thing. I wonder how early on did you make a run at Coppola and Spielberg and Lucas and how, you know, what was the plus? Really early. Really early. And Matthew Robbins was one of those people who was like, you know, I still see George every week. You know, I like you. You get it. It seems like you get what happened then. I'll talk to George. I'm sure he'll do it. And I was like, I don't think he ever does these things. I'll talk to George. And then we spoke a week later or something. I was like, yeah, George isn't doing it. And so you can't, I tried very hard from the beginning repeatedly. You know, you do that thing where you got to push jazzy beyond politeness kind of thing. And Spielberg is one of those where you kind of know from the start, he's very controlled. You know, Laurent Boussard does his books and his DVDs and his behind the scenes. And, you know, he only goes to serve mouth. There's a certain reason. And Lucas is understandably that guy who's like, I'm a billionaire. Why would I wade out into any of this and make my life more difficult? There's no upside for me. Right. Right. And in Coppola, we were very close to speaking, I think. And everybody in Coppola's circle is very, very welcoming. There were people I had to speak to who were like, well, let me ask Francis first if it's okay. And it would always take 10 minutes for an email to come in from Francis or Roman or someone going, yeah, do whatever you want. And then Eleanor Coppola passed. Fred Roos passed like 10 days after we spoke for the last time, that kind of thing. And it became, well, you know, he's going to be in Canada and he's going to be in London for a couple months. And then I was like, I'll go to London, I'll find him. And then I was like this. And then my publisher is like, you know, it will publish. It happens. And the thing with those guys is you're kind of like, okay, there's super media trained. They've told these stories for 50 years. It would be lovely to have them. But how much actual mileage am I getting out of someone who's very, very media trained telling me stories they've already told. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was, I never grieved over it all that much. And to their credit, they were all, or them or the people representing them, like very helpful with like photos, fact checks, you know, if I'm especially at Zoetrope, if you're like, I'm trying to reach this guy. Does anybody still know them? They'd be like, okay, here's a phone number. You know, no one at any point was like, throwing a box up. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So now that you're a little apart from the writing, you know, it's been a while now since you actually live with this thing as a writer, right? Yeah. A little while. What's the one thing, Paul, that kind of sticks in your mind about the story of these three and story of others? There's much about Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, a lot of people with big careers, different careers, you know, in and out of their own stories, the stories of these three. But what's the one thing you think that it has to say to us right now, where we are as movie goers? They don't do it without each other. You know, I think that's the thing that I really took out of it, that kind of competitive, collaborative ambition. You know, you read film history or art history, any of those things, and it tends to be like, you know, this is a book by Francis Coppola and that part, or like George Lucas or, you know, Mike Nichols, whoever, and that person becomes the main character of that life, of that narrative. And over and over writing this, you go, none of these successes happen, you know, if Coppola doesn't have Lucas pushing him in this way, or Lucas doesn't have Coppola pushing him in that way, or Scorsese doesn't have this thing hanging, you know, and sometimes they're negatives, right? Sometimes it's something you did that you regretted at your hiding or that you did somebody else, or, you know, Spielberg doesn't have the career if he doesn't have Lucas and Coppola at the kind of thing. Lucas and Coppola to kind of look up to and feel sick watching their stuff and kind of rethink, you know, because that thing about the HXC also has with the Godfather where he goes to see it when he's about to make like a Bert Reynolds action film. Well, that's right. Spielberg was about to make McCluskey, which turned into Gator, I don't know, White Lightning, I guess was the first one. Yeah, yeah, and he comes out of Godfather going, what am I doing with my life, basically. And that happens over and over again, this thing of, even in small ways, if they don't have Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt, who have that house where they can all go hang out in LA and feel... Malibu Beach House, right? Malibu Beach House. Yeah, and meet kindred spirits and not feel like, you know, Scorsese the first couple of years there is like, I just want to go home, man. So if you don't have each other in all these different support systems, from your wife to, in Coppola's case, the person you're sleeping with who's not your wife, to your friends, to your rivals, to that one film executive, as an Alan Ladd who goes, I don't get this, the Star Wars thing, but I like you, so I'll go to Beth for you. You know, none of these things happen because one guy went it alone, and it all kind of builds because they did it together. And that feels relevant to now, again. Yeah, right. I really appreciate the time, Paul. Thank you. Yeah, I like what I was, I love to chat. Yeah, and good luck with the rest of whatever you're going to do to, you know, in support of the last Kings of Hollywood. Thanks, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Paul. We will link to more information about the last Kings of Hollywood in our show notes. And yes, I have confirmed that rivalrous is indeed a word. 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No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. For a son who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire.