{"schema_version":"bf_book_companion_v1","release_id":"20261010T034321Z-reviewed-full-unique-works","book":{"amazon_purchase_url":"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250878721?tag=bookfrontie00-20","asin":"1250878721","authors":["Paul Fischer"],"book_id":"9781250878724","canonical_url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/the-last-kings-of-hollywood-9781250878724","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781250878724.jpg?v=fc3b8b746419d768","description":"\"Riveting, grade A smack for cinema junkies...Fischer's writing pulsates.\" —Steven Soderbergh, filmmaker 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.","forthcoming":false,"isbn13":"9781250878724","publication_date":"20260210","publisher":"Celadon Books","slug":"the-last-kings-of-hollywood","subtitle":"Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg - and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema","title":"The Last Kings of Hollywood"},"discovery":{"categories":{"all":[{"bisac_code":"PER004030","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film History","score":0.7877,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER004010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film Direction & Production","score":0.7726,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER004040","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film Reference","score":0.742,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"hint":[{"bisac_code":"PER004030","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film History","score":0.7877,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER004010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film Direction & Production","score":0.7726,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"PER004040","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Film Reference","score":0.742,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"publisher":[{"bisac_code":"ART057000","confidence_band":"high","label":"Film & Video Art","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"BIO005000","confidence_band":"high","label":"Lives in Entertainment","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"PER004030","confidence_band":"high","label":"Film History","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"}]},"genres":[{"label":"Film History","score":0.7877,"slug":"film-history"},{"label":"Film Direction & Production","score":0.7726,"slug":"film-direction-production"},{"label":"Film Reference","score":0.742,"slug":"film-reference"}],"reader_fit":["For readers interested in the rise of Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg","For cinema fans drawn to the history of popular American filmmaking"],"related_lists":[],"series":null,"similar_books":[{"authors":["Ben Fritz"],"book_id":"9781328592743","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781328592743.jpg?v=87417fa117d9bc39","score":0.7139,"title":"The Big Picture","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781328592743"},{"authors":["Kelly Roberts","Michael Grasso","Richard McKenna"],"book_id":"9781914420733","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781914420733.jpg?v=8fee4f796a7c31bc","score":0.7015,"title":"We Are the Mutants","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781914420733"},{"authors":["Jay Glennie","Quentin Tarantino"],"book_id":"9798337402925","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9798337402925.jpg?v=c9715cbd9be4858c","score":0.6768,"title":"The Making of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9798337402925"},{"authors":["Ian Haydn Smith"],"book_id":"9780500298565","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9780500298565.jpg?v=87c6fc888847a364","score":0.6686,"title":"A Chronology of Film","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9780500298565"},{"authors":["Daniel Kehlmann"],"book_id":"9781668087794","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781668087794.jpg?v=bc1e8f94e7a9cdff","score":0.6564,"title":"The Director","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781668087794"},{"authors":["Lyn Miller-Lachmann","Tanisia Moore"],"book_id":"9781641606103","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781641606103.jpg?v=1df07e3d5a80b679","score":0.6528,"title":"Film Makers","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781641606103"},{"authors":["Michael Ovitz"],"book_id":"9798217045280","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9798217045280.jpg?v=1f1fdacef1c2294e","score":0.6507,"title":"Who Is Michael Ovitz?","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9798217045280"},{"authors":["Nancy J. 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