In 1971, at a party at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, his “friend and protégé” George Lucas wandered upstairs, hoping to catch a few minutes of a new TV movie, said Graham Daseler in Literary Review. It was “Duel” by Steven Spielberg – then a “gawky 24-year-old” whom Lucas had met a few times. Riveted, he watched till the end, at one point rushing downstairs to tell his indifferent host: “This guy’s really good.”
Paul Fischer’s “superb” book tells the story of how, over the next decade, these three directors – Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg – went from “obscurity to cinematic immortality” and “remade the movie industry” in the process, while also becoming close friends.
Coppola was the first to achieve stardom when “The Godfather” (1972) raked in $250 million, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time. Three years later, Spielberg “took the title” with “Jaws”, which “earned a cool $458 million”. And then in 1977, Lucas topped both with “Star Wars” – a film so successful that “even on slow days”, it banked upwards of $1.2 million.
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Forced to make things “up as they went along”, the trio behaved badly at times: “friendships were betrayed, bankruptcies filed, and the women in their world – be they collaborators or partners – got the short end of the stick from the boys’ club”.