Welcome to The Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real. — Paul Fischer’s new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema, came out in February, but the number of separate stories that have combined to make it uniquely relevant in the months since are almost… eerie. The book depicts a period, roughly spanning the decade of the seventies, when the older executives who ran Hollywood had begun to realize that they were suddenly struggling to turn a profit on projects that had once seemed like lay ups: screwball comedies, westerns, song-and-dance vehicles for aging musical stars. The Content Report, By Vince Mancini is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. At the same time as this was happening, there was a crop of younger filmmakers, many of whom had come up through film school programs – which were then very new and widely viewed as the frivolous pursuit of dilettantes (in Fischer’s words, “finishing schools for nepo babies”). Instead, many of these “movie brats” were making their own movies on the cheap, and in many cases, finding new audiences, and making the old Hollywood product seem out-of-touch and corny at the same time. Sound familiar? Back here in 2026, The Mandalorian and Grogu, presumably the lay up of all lay ups, landed to widespread indifference in May. This past weekend, Supergirl debuted to $38 million on a reported $170 million budget. (Which is actually worse than the infamous Jared Leto flop, Morbius). Meanwhile, two of the yea’rs biggest hits have been out-of-left field, low-budget horror movies directed by 20-something YouTubers – Obsession and Backrooms. It’d be premature at this stage to call the YouTuber generation future Spielbergs, but the way that they made an entire system of assumptions about what makes good movie business suddenly seem both corny and misguided feels very much like an echo of the movie brats. For many of us who’ve been writing about movies for 10, 15, 20 years, the last few years have made movies as a whole feel as culturally irrelevant as they’ve ever been (the handful of legit great movies still managing to get made notwithstanding). One of the most uplifting aspects of The Last Kings of Hollywood is realizing that the 2020s isn’t the first time that this has happened, and that it’s also potentially reversible. A few weeks after Obsession and Backrooms became the Zoomer horror Barbenheimer came Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s conscious attempt to bring back “movie magic” and bookend the alien trilogy he started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET (1982). Aside from the background on Spielberg, one of the most compelling portraits Fischer paints in The Last Kings of Hollywood is of Melissa Mathison. Mathison’s connection to the Coppola-Lucas-Spielberg scene was initially through a friend of Coppola’s, for whom Mathison babysat as a teenager. There’s a gross, typically problematic 1970s scene in which the friend gets Mathison to dress up in a maid’s costume for a dinner party at which Coppola is a guest, knowing it will get him riled up. Mathison eventually becomes Coppola’s mistress, arguably less important as a scandal than it is as her eventual connection to this group of filmmakers. She goes onto write ET and win an Academy Award (as well as marry Harrison Ford, generally acknowledged as the coolest, handsomest man alive in the mid 1970s). If you watch Spielberg’s alien trilogy, it’s hard not to conclude that ET stands head and shoulders above the other two. And harder, in turn, not to conclude that the reason for that was Mathison. She had a rare talent for writing complicated children, which adds a distinctly human touch to ET that the others, impressive displays of Spielberg’s virtuosic command of the cinematic language though they are, arguably lack. (The kids in Close Encounters are all basically insufferable brats, making Richard Dreyfuss’s decision to just f**k off to space at the end feel almost justified). There are a handful of other great movie books covering some of the same period – memoirs by William Friedkin, Julia Phillips, and Griffin Dunne, to name just a few – but The Last Kings of Hollywood is the first to really give Mathison her due. Fischer’s book also does a similar thing for Marcia Lucas, who died May 27th of this year. George Lucas’s first wife and collaborator, she edited THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars (receiving an Oscar nomination for Graffiti and a win for Star Wars), as well as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese. While there have been some assorted hot takes about Marcia Lucas being the true reason for George Lucas’s success, or the only reason George Lucas did anything at all, Fischer paints a fuller picture – of a budding filmmaker who loved designing worlds and fiddling with gadgets, and his wife-collaborator who was often his better angel, pushing for more heart and humanity in his work. I spoke with Fischer this past week. You can listen above, or read the condensed version below. As always, if you enjoyed this, please consider a paid subscription. — So the story that I’m sort of used to hearing about the ‘70s Hollywood is that Bonnie and Clyde came out and then the youth movement changed everything. You’re going a little later than that, and I think making an interesting case for the Movie Brats Generation as the true inflection point. Kind of, yeah. You’re right that the ‘70s tends to be Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate. And so when you frame it that way, the idea is like, oh, these East Coast, younger film school, kind of edgier, darker, bleaker, depraved, whatever filmmakers come in and they make these films that are more violent and more dark. There’s that great Pictures at a Revolution book that Mark Harris wrote that contrasts this idea of, there’s one Hollywood that’s The Sound of Music and Dr. Doolittle, and then there’s a new Hollywood that’s Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and all that kind of stuff. So these guys come in and they make those films and then it gets out of control and it’s the sex and drugs kind of generation and the budgets get bigger and you end up with stuff like Apocalypse Now, New York, New York, and Heaven’s Gate, where these filmmakers are blowing budgets, nearly sinking studios and then have to be reigned in. And it’s not that that framing is false necessarily, but I remember reading all these books and watching all these films and thinking that it feels like it’s missing something. I was a kid in the ‘80s, and the filmmakers that were the most influential of that group were Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola and Scorsese, to some degree. And if you set Scorsese aside, you’ve got three guys there who, they’re in the sex-and-drugs kind of generation, but they don’t do drugs and they’re kind of sexless (Coppola excepted). They didn’t feel like guys who were out of control in their budgets and stuff, but more guys who actually had a very clear idea of how financial freedom and creative freedom and the way the industry was built were related. And so this book started with this idea of, oh, maybe there’s a different framework there. Which is, it’s not Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate, it’s maybe George and Francis meeting, up to Return of the Jedi. When I think about the cultural forces that we’re still living with and that the movie industry as a whole has been shaped by, I’m not really thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. I’m definitely thinking about this sort of crop starting with Lucas and Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese. Yeah. And every HBO show has the DNA of The Godfather and Scorsese movies and every kind of Marvel franchise blockbuster tentpole thing. The DNA is Star Wars and Indiana Jones and all these things. Even that idea of, how do I come into an industry that feels kind of closed and there’s technological tools that could be the thing that give me freedom to make my films or it could be my downfall because money controls them. That’s what people are dealing with now if you want to be a filmmaker, and that’s exactly what they dealt with in 1968. And so their kind of arc felt like it had more to say about the long tail of what happened to the film industry and our film culture. There’s an irony to this story, where, when I and most people my age think about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we probably think, oh, these are the two most commercial filmmakers alive. But when they started out, it seemed like their goals were, we want to create our own industry that’s basically completely separate from the studio system. It’s one of the things I loved from a storytelling standpoint. We have this idea of Coppola, he’s the guy who will gamble everything, loses money, makes films his way. He’s like, the filmmaker’s filmmaker. But in 1968, when the book starts, people think of him as a sellout. He’s got a Porsche, he’s got a gold watch, he’s a screenwriter on assignment, he works for the studio writing and churning out whatever they want him to do. And then on the flip side, Lucas, who we think of as the guy who makes films to sell toys, in the late ‘60s, he’s actually like, I hate capitalism, I hate the studios, I hate working for anybody else, I hate narrative, I hate emotions. I just want to make abstract mood poems and be experimental. And Spielberg, who we think of as this almost idiot savant who
