For some people it’s Star Wars; for others it’s Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For me not a year goes by without watching Chinatown and the first two parts of The Godfather. This urge to repeatedly live through familiar narratives surely starts with bedtime stories; and though it diminishes in early adulthood as we push ourselves out into the world, the habit returns before long. So, although The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer’s partial history of American movie-making focusing on Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, tells a familiar story, it will be read by the same people who have already worked their way through the holy scriptures on the period. These include Michael Pye and Linda Myles’s The Movie Brats, Robin Wood’s Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, Tom Shone’s Blockbuster, and – the genre’s urtext – Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
To be fair, Fischer does serve up some eye-opening moments. Coppola is happy to be seen as one of the emblematic director-as-artist figures; but as a young man desperate for a break, Coppola not only worked on low-budget exploitation movies for Roger Corman, he even edited the odd porn flick. Meanwhile, his chum George Lucas, whose Star Wars and Indiana Jones series would pretty much wreck the idea of cinema as the seventh art, started his working life shooting what he called ‘abstract mood poems’ in the Arizona desert.
