“It’s about young Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas. They were geniuses—and they were best friends.”
When I first started work on a collective biography of these three men—arguably the three most successful filmmakers in the history of American cinema—my pitch invariably started with some version of that sentence. A genius is a rare thing, and most of us live our whole lives never meeting a specimen; even art critics and historians struggle to define what one is. We recognize them more reliably by their impact on the culture, a self-reinforcing game of canon-making. By that standard, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are as worthy of the epithet as anyone who has picked up a camera.
