“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.
In 1972, at age 32, Coppola made The Godfather, which, upon its release, became the highest-grossing film of all time—for just a couple of years, that is, until Spielberg made Jaws, whose record was broken two years later by Lucas’s Star Wars, which itself was surpassed five years later by another Spielberg film, E.T. Almost single-handedly (triple-handedly?), they resuscitated their industry, and their films set a standard for those we watch today, from the franchise tentpoles modeled on Jaws and Star Wars to the fingerprints The Godfather has left on every prestige HBO show and its violent antihero.
Lucas first met Spielberg in 1967, when 20-year-old Spielberg came to a U.S.C. screening that included Lucas’s short student film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.” Spielberg met Coppola that same year, when the latter had the fresh-faced director (Spielberg had already directed 15 short films by that time) over for a general meeting. And Coppola met Lucas in 1968, when Lucas was a U.S.C. film student shadowing Coppola on the set of his first studio picture, Finian’s Rainbow. (A year later, the two co-founded the production company American Zoetrope, which produced Lucas’s film American Graffiti and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, among others.)
Almost single-handedly (triple-handedly?), they resuscitated their industry, and their films set a standard for those we watch today.
They got each other right away. They spoke the same creative language, had the same dreams, shared a love of computers and special effects, and were not all that comfortable talking to girls.
I could find no other instance of this occurring, before or since, in any film industry in the world. How did this friendship happen? What made these three then unknown filmmakers geniuses? What made them friends? After several months of research, not only had answering these questions become more complicated than I expected, but I had found the words genius and friend harder still to define.
Peers of these men I interviewed told me a genius found passion and joy in their commitment to the work—yet Lucas, by his own admission, couldn’t write and didn’t enjoy directing. (He hired other people to direct the second and third movies of the original Star Wars trilogy and, though he still created the overarching stories, handed over the bulk of the writing of those movies to director and screenwriter Larry Kasdan, who also wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Others suggested it was about control and attention to detail—but Coppola’s methods involved a fair deal of delegating and leaving things up to chance. Frequently, I was told about mastery of the craft, something akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hours-of-practice theory—but Hollywood was pretty much a closed shop, and even Spielberg, who signed a seven-year directing contract with Universal in 1968, had limited time behind a professional-level camera before his breakthrough.
They spoke the same creative language, had the same dreams, shared a love of computers and special effects, and were not all that comfortable talking to girls.
Brian De Palma, a fellow member of the group of directors that formed the “New Hollywood” generation, described genius as a combination of luck, knowledge of your medium, and the willingness to say no—to know when to draw a line, and to have the conviction to hold it.
Though already on thin ice with Paramount from the earliest stages of production on The Godfather, Coppola was adamant about casting Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, setting the film in the 40s, and shooting in chiaroscuro. Spielberg insisted on filming Jaws out on the ocean, not in a tank in a studio, even as he drifted weeks past schedule and Universal threatened to pull the plug. And Lucas fought about everything. He compared studio cuts to his films to a kidnapper chopping fingers off his children. He started his own company to oversee the revolutionary special effects in Star Wars, despite the soaring cost. He refused to give up on a space-fantasy script so outlandish that it took a special meeting of the Twentieth Century Fox board to get it green-lighted.
And yet, some of their greatest successes came when they caved to outside pressure. Coppola only took the Godfather job because he needed the money—he found the original novel by Mario Puzo trashy. Lucas only made his breakout hit, American Graffiti (1973), because his wife, Marcia, along with Coppola, dared him to direct something “warm and human.” Spielberg resurrected his career after the failure of 1941 (1979) by conforming to Paramount’s demands he turn in the more commercially appealing Raiders of the Lost Ark on schedule and under budget.
Their friendship was equally difficult to distill. Coppola didn’t know if Lucas’s first film, THX 1138 (1971), a feature-length adaptation of his 1967 student film, was “a masterpiece or masturbation” and thought Star Wars was beneath him. Lucas was condescendingly magnanimous to a couple of Spielberg’s early television efforts, including one he felt was derivative of his own THX 1138.
Sure, they were attached by affection and mutual esteem, but these bonds ebbed and flowed. Just as often, they turned against each other out of resentment and anxiety. Coppola looked down on Lucas’s decision to go the blockbuster route with Star Wars, and Lucas resented Coppola for taking Apocalypse Now—which he was supposed to direct until his Star Wars commitments got in the way—away from him. When Coppola went bankrupt in the early 80s, Lucas, on his way to being a billionaire, didn’t bail him out—though he did buy, and protect, Coppola’s Northern California winery for him. Spielberg, happy in the bosom of the studio system, stayed clear of his friends’ feverish plays for financial independence—but for years he fretted he would never make a film as good as The Godfather.
But they remained friends, Spielberg might tell you, because they complained about the same things. The film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who worked on Apocalypse Now and American Graffiti, among others, will tell you talent recognizes talent. De Palma suggests they were friends because they were infallibly honest with each other, even if it stung.
A writer embarks on a biography hoping to answer some questions. As my original pitch promised, they were geniuses and they were best friends, but clarity came from separating the two. I stopped writing about Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg—the geniuses—and started writing about Francis, George, and Steven: the friends.That story was more interesting, and messier.
Paul Fischer is a London-based author and screenwriter