FILM 180
Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola: Popular Auteurs of the 1970s
The 1970s were a transformative decade for American movie making. The early years of the
decade were dominated by the period of the American Film Renaissance, when the advent of the
Movie Ratings System began a period of unprecedentedly realistic and revisionist film-making
that lasted from 1967 to 1975. The patriarchal, insular world of the Hollywood studio system gave
way to a more entrepreneurial creative environment in which American producers and directors
could attempt to apply the European auteur model of film production and direction to American
subjects. Graphic violence, nudity, and profane language could now be used in films rated “R” or
“X.” (“X” films were not generically pornographic until the end of the decade.) Soundstages were
abandoned for location shooting, and directors were working more often with independent
producers who generally gave them more freedom in determining the shooting schedule and final
cut of the film. (For more details, see the previous handout, “The New American Movies of the 60s
and 70s.”) How these trends evolved and changed can be traced through the fortunes in the 1970s
and early 1980s of three of the most talented of the young auteur film-makers who rose to
prominence during this period: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola.
Lucas and Spielberg: Myth and Melodrama
During the second half of the decade of the 70s, two film-makers found ways to re-engage
the popular taste without abandoning imagination and vision. Director/producers George Lucas
and Steven Spielberg used mythic imagination and superior special effects craft to breathe new life
into traditional genres and lure mass audiences back to the movie theatres. Although both Lucas
and Spielberg were products of the UCLA Film School and were well-versed in the techniques and
theories of the European auteurs, they were just as influenced by the escapist romanticism of the
matinee film serials of the studio days, like Flash Gordon. Both young directors believed in the
concept of an individual director’s artistic vision, but they also believed that the pop culture appeal
of science fiction and action-adventure genres, infused with imagination and special effects, plus
a dollop of old-fashioned heroes vs. villains melodrama, could be a winning formula. They were
right. Lucas’ first three Stars Wars films, from 1977, 1980, and 1983, and Spielberg’s Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) brought
audiences to movie theatres in droves.
Neither director was interested in rubbing an audience’s nose into any depressing
contemporary reality; instead, they invested their considerable talents into creating believable
alternative realities into which audiences could escape. None of their incredibly popular and
influential movies made between 1977 and 1983 ever won a single Academy Award for acting or
direction or Best Picture, but they were showered with technical awards for their sound, music,
cinematography, art direction, makeup, and costuming. In short, they grafted the tried and true
Hollywood melodramatic formula (unequivocal heroes and villains, hair-breadth escapes, heartwarming endings) onto fantasy spectacles of stunning visual imagination suitable for family viewing.
Violent death is reserved for the bad guys who clearly deserve it (Imperial generals had better not
displease Darth Vader; don’t pull any martial arts tricks on Indiana Jones; and think twice before
enslaving Princess Leia and chaining her to you.)
These films’ success was also abetted by television. The ratings-obsessed quasi-monopoly of
the three networks was sending television entertainment ever more to the lowest common
denominator, which ironically reversed the demographics of the 1950s. Television was now the
2
conservative, “traditional” medium that had become formulaic and predictable, so the highly
imaginative fantasy spectacles of Lucas and Spielberg came to be seen as genuinely superior
entertainment to what television was offering.
Plus, the two directors were so skilled at their craft that the characters in their fantasy films
became iconic and mythic, inhabiting coherent worlds that could be re-created in sequels, just like
the old Saturday matinees (with much bigger budgets, of course). Thus the Star Wars and Indiana
Jones sequels brought audiences back for more than one helping (six Star Wars films and four
Indiana Jones movies, at last count—all hits). Then there was the franchising of the characters and
plot events of the movies into action figures, comic books, Christmas ornaments, Lego sets, and
knick-knacks offered through fast-food outlets, which not only proved enormously profitable, but
provided toys that conditioned a whole generation of children to meld the characters into their
imaginations so thoroughly that when George Lucas decided, with perfect timing, to make three
“prequel” movies to complete his mythic Star Wars story, an entire young adult generation was ready
and waiting for the results.
In short, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg became media moguls--not by being just
canny business people, as the old studio heads had been, but by having a clear artistic vision, keenly
attuned to the wants and needs of the American movie-going audience. In the intervening years,
Spielberg has made more ambitious and grittily realistic films about World War II and the Holocaust
(Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List), but he has never abandoned his fundamentally melodramatic
premises. World War II in Europe and the Holocaust were terrible and good people died, but there
is a moving tribute to the sacrifice at the end to remind everyone that it was all worth it. Lucas did
not achieve the same degree of critical recognition with his attempts to trace the genesis of Aninkin
Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader and his fall into evil collusion with the Empire in the
three prequels to Star Wars because the tragedy inherent in Anikin’s fall is just too alien to the
fundamentally optimistic spirit of the enterprise. In sum, Lucas and Spielberg both managed to
combine brash artistic vision with marketing savvy and an instinct for popular taste.
Francis Ford Coppola—the Determined Auteur
The third outstanding young director to emerge in the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola,
adhered most closely to the original European principles of auteur film-making, which emphasized
more artistic film making that challenged audiences’ assumptions, and like the proto-typical artist, he
had to suffer for the purity of his vision. Coppola made the earliest splash of the three, directing The
Godfather to enormous popular and critical acclaim in 1972. The film was a tour de force of
revisionist history, graphic violence, and moral ambiguity that both challenged and shocked
audiences. Starring Marlon Brando, probably the most talented and iconoclastic actor of the 1950s
through the 1970s as Vito Corleone, head of a prosperous and influential organized crime family,
The Godfather drew on Coppola’s own Sicilian heritage to adapt Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel to the
screen. After his father is wounded and his older brother assassinated by rival mobsters, younger son
Michael Corleone (brought convincingly to life by Al Pacino) agrees to take revenge and rescue his
family’s fortunes.
Unlike Lucas and Spielberg, Coppola was determined to make as few concessions to
audience taste as he could to tell an honest and tragic story. Once The Godfather became an enormous
hit, Coppola took his new riches and invested them in more films, each more ambitious and
challenging than the last: The Conversation (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974-75), and Apocalypse Now
(1979). All three films have anti-heroes as their main characters, none features a happy ending, their
3
plots are complex and non-linear, and all three are drenched in guilt and violence. In addition, these
films also made extensive use of location shooting. The Conversation is shot directly on the streets and
parks of San Francisco, Godfather Part II in Sicily and on meticulous reconstructions of early 1900s
New York streets, and Apocalypse Now in the Philippines to re-create Vietnam and Cambodia.
The method worked pretty well, albeit expensively, through Godfather II, but Apocalypse Now,
Coppola’s visionary and epic take on the horrors of Vietnam filtered through Joseph Conrad’s
“Heart of Darkness,” nearly ruined Coppola personally and economically, and showed the
limitations of the auteur concept when attempted on a really large scale. After demanding a giant
salary and artistic control over his part, Marlon Brando (who was to play the horrifically murderous
military renegade, Colonel Kurtz) showed up weighing 300 pounds and psychologically unstable;
lead actor Martin Sheen (father of the notorious Charlie) suffered a heart attack; a hurricane
destroyed the sets. Coppola somehow managed to finish the film, and it has held up over the years
(and now available in two different versions), but Coppola never returned to the critical and popular
status he achieved in the 1970s.
Although Coppola was to a certain extent a victim of his unyielding commitment to physical
and psychological realism, his films of the 1970s were triumphs of story and acting. In contrast, to
Spielberg and Lucas, who were critically and professionally honored at the time for their technical
and visual innovations, Coppola’s stories and actors won Oscars for writing, acting, and Best
Picture. Like Spielberg and Lucas, he has continued to make films, some well received, but, unlike
them, his enduring legacy is his uncompromising commitment to the fundamentally tragic nature of
life that is central to the auteur concept of film-making.