Two weeks out from the Super Bowl, the trusty old plasma-screen TV I bought in 2008 gave up the ghost. I also never really cottoned to the binge-watchable TV series revolution; multi-episode, multi-season storyline arcs of prestige series frequently just lost me. Paul Fischer’s sprawling new history, “The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg — and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema,” provides plenty of biographical texture for what surely was a golden age. It traces the intertwined careers of a group of young men who first barged into Hollywood, determined to make more “personal” films just as the old studio system was running out of steam. The three main protagonists, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, end up in different places, though all three prove Murch right in their own way.

Source: Forbes February 14, 2026 14:31 UTC