The brief of Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema (2026) is defined by that troika of names. The story opens in the late 1960s as all three directors converge on Los Angeles amidst the “New Hollywood” upheaval and ends with the studios reasserting control over the creative process at the close of the ‘80s. That tumultuous friendship, complete with collaborations, competition, and fallings-out, encapsulated the chaos of its era and shaped the cultural environment of today.
Fischer widens the iris out to include other foundational figures in their cohort like filmmakers John Korty, John Milius, and Walter Murch. Their East Coast contemporaries Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma are heard from, the latter providing candid eyewitness testimony. But Fischer’s most effective move is to shine a spotlight on the women in their lives, whose contributions have frequently been diminished or ignored. At a moment of generational shift in Hollywood, the new voices being welcomed belonged almost exclusively to young white men; as Fischer points out, Stephanie Rothman’s films for Roger Corman like The Student Nurses (1970) ranked among his most successful, but she was never able to break out of exploitation fare and eventually left the industry, while Nancy Dowd—whose script for Slap Shot (1977) is an all-timer—wrote without credit or under male pseudonyms to stay employed. Fischer devotes considerable space to Marcia Lucas, an accomplished editor who cut films for her husband (winning an Oscar for Star Wars) and Scorsese; Eleanor Coppola, an essential contributor to and chronicler of her spouse’s work; and producer Kathleen Kennedy. The most haunting presence is Melissa Mathison, who went from babysitting Coppola’s children to becoming his assistant/paramour before writing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) for Spielberg.
Coppola comes across as a figure consistently undone by his appetites personally, artistically, and financially. Much of the material on his failed American Zoetrope experiment—a bid to create a utopian arts collective—was covered in Sam Wasson’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023). That book, written with Coppola’s full cooperation, presented Zoetrope as a quixotic, open-minded endeavor; Fischer appraises the same narrative from a clinical, even skeptical remove and reaches different conclusions. For all of Coppola’s professed love of the group tradition of the theater where he began, it’s telling that his vision of the future of cinema turns the process into a one-person band, with even actors digitally replaced. A future we’re pretty much barreling toward right now.
Lucas, meanwhile, loathes the filmmaking process and ends up establishing the kind of bottom-line-driven enterprise he railed against in his youth; American Graffiti (1973) feels like a miracle in more ways than one in this telling. His story does provide the best gossip: Lucas could have directed Tommy (1975), which almost certainly would have deprived us of Ann-Margret writhing in baked beans, and among the finalists to play Princess Leia were Koo Stark, a name I hadn’t heard in a while, and 14-year-old Terri Nunn, later the lead singer of the band Berlin.
Of the three, Spielberg has of course had the most storied run, finding a way to blend the commercial and the idiosyncratic, making films as daring as Munich (2005) and as personal as The Fabelmans (2022) late in his career. In his 79th year, he was nominated for an Oscar for producing Hamnet (2025) and has one of this summer’s biggest titles on the way in Disclosure Day (2026). Ironically, a project he and Lucas dreamed up as a consolation prize for Spielberg not getting to direct a James Bond movie would mark the balance of power shifting back to executives. As Fischer writes, “Paramount wanted the money unicorn filmmakers generated without ceding the control most of them demanded,” and the studio, then led by Michael Eisner, Don Simpson, and other disciples of the church of “high concept,” made Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) a cornerstone of the faith. Fischer’s book is a rigorously researched, compassionate account of a moment that feels like a thousand years ago, when artists were in charge and often proved their own worst enemies. Yet the films this trio made at the peak of their powers remain among the definitive American artworks.
Sometimes a book finds you exactly when you need it.
Work proceeds apace on A Hell of a Drink, the compendium of horror-movie-inspired cocktails I’m writing with Chris Elford that will be out next year. One of the films featured is Night of the Living Dead (1968). I decided to delay working on that chapter until I’d read Daniel Kraus’ Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World (2026).
Kraus is the author of Whalefall (2023) and his last novel, Angel Down, was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2025. He has also, by his estimate, seen Night of the Living Dead over 300 times. He has visited the locations, gone to conventions, purchased any and all ancillary products, and watched every remake, sequel, and spinoff, to the extent that I, a total stranger, am concerned for his well-being.
There is a close reading of a film, there is a love letter to one, and then there’s what Kraus achieves here, which is an exploration of a work of art so intimate that it borders on invasive. The book doesn’t have chapter headings but timecodes, because he goes through the movie a frame at a time. Night deserves this level of obsessive attention, even love:
If one defines ‘country’ by Hollywood standards (i.e., not L.A. or New York), Night is our most famous country blockbuster. It wasn’t made by a ‘system.’ It was made by flesh-and-blood outsiders, an unmitigated piece of Americana. The film is America. For better and for worse.
In this granular approach, nothing escapes Kraus’ eye. He dutifully records every mistake in the threadbare production. A typo in the credits turning Judith O’Dea’s Barbara into Barbra, a la Streisand, for eternity. A pair of miraculously reappearing driving gloves. The jerk of a poorly calibrated tripod: “Of all the tech glitches in Night, this is my favorite. I know this stutter by heart.” For Kraus, those stumbles and miscues only intensify the film’s impact.
The importance of art like this grows by the day. In a world where AI and CGI create seamless visual media, seeing those seams right where fallible human hands put them is everything—it’s proof of intent, of passion, of life itself.
One catastrophic blunder—the absence of a copyright notice under the film’s title—put Night in the public domain almost instantly, with shoddy prints forever airing on TV and circulating on home video. Director/cowriter George A. Romero and his colleagues were unable to profit from this ubiquity, but Kraus argues that Night might never have reached landmark status without it. He considers each member of the creative team in turn, lamenting that lead actor Duane Jones, who died too young, never got to participate in Night’s success because of the distance he maintained from the film.
He also fervently defends O’Dea, whose catatonic performance can be divisive. Kraus compares her turn to that of Candace Hilligoss in another independent horror classic, Carnival of Souls (1962), saying of Barbra: “Her shell shock is every bit as likely as any other response … A strong female lead is one who doesn’t operate in clichés. That’s it.” O’Dea nearly wasn’t cast. Romero routinely worked on the Pittsburgh-shot Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—Kraus does the math and realizes Romero continued to do so after Night’s release, which is astonishing—and asked the show’s Betty Aberlin to play Barbra, but then Mr. Rogers politely requested that he not use Daniel Stripèd Tiger’s confidante in his flesh-eating ghouls movie.
The sheer amount of information in Kraus’ book is mindboggling, but whenever it threatens to overwhelm, his passion for the movie reasserts itself. And he’s completely capable of bringing you up short, as when he explores what Romero’s zombies truly mean.
One day, your young eyes see multiple paths to what you want; the next, you can’t keep your prescriptions straight and every few months someone you know dies.
I devoured Partially Devoured, and when I was done I saw Night of the Living Dead through Kraus’ eyes, appreciating it anew for the masterwork it is. (Do yourself a favor and watch the best print, the MOMA restoration available on the Criterion Channel.) I think Chris and I do it justice in A Hell of a Drink. As for the cocktail, it’s an update of Donn the Beachcomber’s classic Zombie—what else?—with ingredients acknowledging the Pennsylvania setting and Romero’s background. And it packs just as big a wallop.
Researching The Exorcist (1973) for the book, I read an article in the New York Times from January 27, 1974 on the then-new phenomenon of people waiting in line for hours to see the movie. There I stumbled onto this tiny gem.
I can’t say it’s him with legal certainty, but William Hurt was a 23-year-old Julliard student in January 1974, and God knows he always talked like a sociologist. I liked seeing this glimpse of him, his first professional credit still years off, wondering what the future held while he waited to see the movie everyone was talking about.
Oh, and the Exorcist cocktail is a banger, too.
I was lucky enough to see the Exorcist in a big old Manhattan theater, night after it opened. The screams! the vomit! the dissolved relationships! Movie was good too.