“The Last Kings of Hollywood” with Author Paul Fischer

**Dan Bova** (0:00)
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**Paul Fischer** (1:54)
Lucas is interesting in that way because he hated writing, he hated directing, he hated people. He wanted to be a car racer, crashed his car. But then as it kind of progresses, you realize that also what drives him is this kind of small business owner kind of mentality of, how do I, you know, I'm successful with this film, I'll build on it, make the next film, build on it, make the next film.

**Dan Bova** (2:18)
Hey everyone, welcome to How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com. As this episode comes out, we are well on our way into summer blockbuster season. And that's why I was dying to talk to today's guest. Paul Fischer is the author of The Last Kings of Hollywood, a fantastic book that tells the story of the guys who pretty much invented the blockbuster, namely Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and some other guy, George Lucas.
So we're going to talk about what their rises to fame can teach us about the power of imagination, obsession, stubbornness, and more than a little bit of risk taking. Welcome, Paul.

**Paul Fischer** (3:05)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Dan Bova** (3:07)
Man, I love this book, sincerely. When I read it, I was like, I've got to talk to the person who wrote this. My only complaint is that you didn't write it 30 years ago when I was in film school, because man, I remember making my student film and it was not going how I was hoping, and I was just curled up in a ball of misery, and I was like, maybe I wasn't built for this. But it turns out, doesn't seem like anybody is built for this.
You unravel some layers of these guys that I never knew about.

**Paul Fischer** (3:41)
Thank you. Weirdly, it started from a similar thing for me. I went to film school wanting to be Steven Spielberg. I had his poster on my wall. Realized very quickly I was never going to be Steven Spielberg, because my brain didn't speak camera in that way.
But it was also the time period where everybody was reading these books about these guys and they were the generation we all looked up to. There was something about the narrative of that decade, that is drugs and rock and roll and crazy young guys taking over. That felt like it didn't match these guys fully. What I was really interested in, there's this thing people glossed over, which is they go to film school, they're like you or I would have been, they don't know, it feels like a closed shop. How are you going to get a job? They don't like the system. And then, you know, Spielberg tries to be in the system, but Coppola and Lucas specifically, almost like a modern startup, they go up to the bay, they get a warehouse, they get a bunch of new cheap technology, not cheap technology, but cutting edge technology, and they go, to hell with the system, we're gonna do our own thing, we're gonna take it all over, and it's entrepreneurial, but also that very art school kind of dream of, you know, you talk about it from school, to hell with the system, they're not gonna give us jobs, we'll do our own thing. These guys actually go and do it, and it works, and they become these guys.