by Lou Lesko
In 1977 I was third in line for the first showing of Star Wars on its opening day at the Coronet theater in San Francisco. It was the first time I had ever seen people line up for a movie.
The atmosphere was incredible. A movie the studios anticipated would do little business was on its way to becoming a cultural phenomenon.
At twelve years old, Star Wars had radically changed my life by introducing me to filmmaking. Little did I know its author, George Lucas, along with filmmakers Francis Ford Coppolla and Steven Spielberg, were in the middle of radically changing Hollywood. They were saving it from collapse by paradoxically fighting against it.
It all started on the Warner Brothers lot. Lucas, a USC film school graduate, started working for an up-and-coming director named Francis Ford Coppola. Across town at Universal Studios, Steven Spielberg was desperately trying to break out of his studio apprenticeship so he could start directing his own films. The three would become friends and rivals, each outdoing each other for highest grossing movie of the year during the seventies and early eighties.
The story is told by Paul Fischer in his book The Last Kings of Hollywood. On this episode of the Chaos and Creativity podcast, I talk to Paul about how the book came about and how his filmmaking aspirations turned into writing about the filmmakers who reinvented American cinema.
Listen now to the full episode.
Mentioned in This Episode
Books by Paul Fischer:
Quotes about Writing and Art:
- “Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible.” – Elie Wiesel
- “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with.” – Joan Didion
Other:
- The Coronet Theater, San Francisco
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson
- Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
- A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
- The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
- Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh
- Searching for Sugar Man, directed by Malik Bandjellou
- Flicker, by Theodore Roszak
- Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis
- Industry, directed by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay
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Connect with the Show
Hosts: Kimi Recor and Lou Lesko Producer: Cheramie Johnson Editor: Alexandra Covey Music: Kieran Kerwin Instagram: @chaosandcreativitypodcast