One of the great moments, among many, in Paul Fischer’s new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, occurs in the twelfth chapter, when Fischer describes a party that took place at Francis Ford Coppola’s house in 1971. Never comfortable in crowds, Coppola’s friend and protégé George Lucas wandered upstairs in search of a television, hoping to catch a few minutes of Duel, a TV movie that was playing that evening about a man being pursued by a psychotic truck driver. Lucas had met the director a few times before, a gawky 24-year-old named Steven Spielberg. Lucas had no intention of watching the whole thing, just enough to gauge Spielberg’s talent. But once he turned the movie on, he couldn’t turn it off. At the first commercial break, he ran downstairs to tell Coppola. ‘Francis, you’ve got to come see this movie,’ he said. ‘This guy’s really good.’ But Coppola was too engrossed in the party to care, so Lucas went back upstairs alone, remaining glued to the television for the next hour.

It was a fateful moment. At the time of the party, Coppola had just finished shooting The Godfather (1972), which would turn him from a relatively unknown, semi-independent filmmaker