Affairs, hookups, a suspicious death—suburban St. Louis has it all in this racy, delightfully dark new comedy-mystery series. Jason Bateman and David Harbour co-star as friendly colleagues at a local news station who take different paths to sexual adventure. Prompted by his pal, Harbour’s Floyd becomes obsessed with a hookup app called DTF St. Louis. Bateman’s Clark, meanwhile, begins an affair with Floyd’s wife, who’s played by Linda Cardellini. When Floyd is found dead, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday join the drama as investigators digging for answers. Sunday, March 1, at 9 p.m., HBO and HBO Max

by Paul Fischer

“Paul Fischer’s compulsively readable account of how Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg changed the world of moviemaking isn’t just a group biography,” said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe. “It’s also a collage of art, commerce, and ego, set against what became a new age of Hollywood blockbusters—an age that this trio did much to create.” As the 1960s turned to the ’70s, the trio were little more than “brazenly confident” kids eager to make their own movies, with the older Coppola having a slight head start. By 1971, the three were friends and allies. By 1977, they had found paths within a changing industry to making three market-altering hits: The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars. Fischer’s story of how each got there raises a question that matters in any such field: “What does it mean to sell out?” 

“Fischer shrewdly analyzes his trio’s individual temperaments,” said Wendy Smith in The Washington Post. In 1969, the manic dreamer Coppola partnered with the loner Lucas to create American Zoetrope, a production company that was supposed to break free of cinematic norms. Lucas shared Coppola’s dream of escaping Hollywood’s restraints, but he was prioritizing money when he pushed Coppola to say yes to directing The Godfather. Meanwhile, his love of comic books and old movie serials made him a more natural partner with Spielberg, with whom he eventually cocreated the Indiana Jones franchise. Lucas’ priorities changed after he made Star Wars. Fischer depicts him as becoming the kind of profit-focused producer he once despised. Coppola, in turn, is depicted as erratic and self-indulgent. Yet “there are no simple people in The Last Kings of Hollywood,” Fischer’s “smart, juicy” account of a transitional moment in American filmmaking. 

“At times, one wishes for more characters,” said Alexander Larman in The Spectator (U.K.). Some of the larger-than-life figures of the era, including Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, are “relegated to entertaining walk-on appearances.” But by focusing on Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg as a trio, Fischer “derives a fresh idea from a period that has already been exhaustively studied,” said Michael O’Donnell in The Atlantic. Instead of showing us that lone visionaries can sometimes triumph, Fischer’s account “demonstrates the evergreen value of collaboration.” Though at times the three “fought bitterly,” they made up easily, provided one another with financial support and constructive criticism, and inspired one another to make better films. The title of Fischer’s book suggests that American moviemaking will never have another era as rich as these three knew. But today’s ambitious young filmmakers should read the book differently. “Perhaps the artistic fraternity of the ’70s is not a relic but a model.” 

The shape-shifter who could be savage or sweet

Robert Duvall disappeared into his characters. Over a six-decade career he approached highly diverse roles like “an ethnologist on a field trip into the soul,” as one critic put it. Among his memorable leading performances were roles as an explosive Marine pilot who tyrannizes his family in The Great Santini (1979) and as a fading, alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), which won him a Best Actor Oscar. He also starred as an illiterate, deeply kind farmer in the Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (1972), and as a fallen Pentecostal preacher in The Apostle (1997), which he wrote and directed. But many of Duvall’s best performances came in supporting roles: as a ruthless TV executive in Network (1976), the stoic mob lawyer in The Godfather (1972), and the maniacal lieutenant colonel in Apocalypse Now (1979) who loves “the smell of napalm in the morning.” Secondary roles suited Duvall just fine, he said, and were often more interesting. “Being a leading man is an agent’s dream,” he said, “not an actor’s.” 

Born in San Diego, Duvall grew up in a series of Navy towns where his rear admiral father was stationed, said the Associated Press. An aimless youth, he attended Principia College in Illinois but “nearly flunked out.” His concerned parents steered him toward theater and he “flourished in drama classes.” After his Army service, he moved to New York City to study acting, falling in with fellow students Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. Working odd jobs to support himself, he soon began landing stage and TV roles. He “got his film break” when cast as the misunderstood recluse Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), said Rolling Stone, making an indelible impression without speaking a word of dialogue. Having built his reputation as a character actor over the next decade, he became “a central figure in the New Hollywood of the 1970s,” adding “grit and soul to legendary works” from directors such as George Lucas, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola. 

An exacting performer who researched roles with “intense studiousness,” Duvall was also a private man who kept “Hollywood at arm’s length,” said The New York Times. He spent years living with his fourth wife on a horse farm in rural Virginia, though he acted into his 90s. Despite that intensity, he was unpretentious about his craft, which, he said, just boiled down to “talking and listening.” In acting, “there’s no right or wrong,” he said, “just truthful or untruthful.”