Paul Fischer examines books on American studio filmmaking

The writer Paul Fischer was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in France and now lives in Canada. His first book, A Kim Jong-II Production, the true story of the kidnapping of two South Korean filmmakers in North Korea, was one of NPR’s best books of 2015. His sophomore book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, explores the disappearance of Louis Le Prince, who shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. For his third book, Fischer turns to the inside story of the friendship between Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg. The Last Kings of Hollywood is a New York Times bestseller. Here, he discusses five film books that have influenced his work.

In a way, The Last Kings of Hollywood started with my dissatisfaction with Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), a very fun, readable overview of the New Hollywood generation, that cemented this idea of a sex, drugs, and rock‘n’roll generation of filmmakers including Coppola, Spielberg, Friedkin, De Palma, and Scorsese. I never warmed to it; you can tell it’s the kind of book that prints the legend and discards the facts.

When Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution (2008) came out a decade later, it was a revelation. Harris takes the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1968 (In The Heat of the Night, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Doctor Doolittle) and tells the tales of their making while using that pivotal year as a prism through which you see how the first Hollywood generation was upended by the next. It’s just as readable as the Biskind, just as fun, better written, but also much more rigorous and insightful.

Neal Gabler is the other great chronicler of that kind. An Empire of Their Own (1988) tells the story of Eastern European immigrants like Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, the Warner brothers and so on, who started the Hollywood studios and, in the process, didn’t quite assimilate but, by making movies popular, created America’s idealized 20th-century identity. They defined the American Dream by portraying the country as it aspired to be, rather than how it was.

Sometimes film books can be a little remote, the voice of a journalist passing on quotes and research rather than conveying the immediacy and experience of making movies. There’s a whole genre of great on-set diaries, a couple of which I drew on, like Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log, Bob Balaban’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary, and Carrie Fisher’s raw memoir-notebook The Princess Diarist. I remember flicking through books at the Strand bookshop in New York and finding an old copy of Picture by Lillian Ross, originally published in 1952. Ross, a staff writer at the New Yorker, shadowed John Huston and others as they made the war film The Red Badge of Courage, an expensive flop. Huston, charismatic and self-centered, wants to make a masterpiece; the studio bosses, indecisive, want to churn out safe and broad mediocrity. Ross, witty, observant, and brilliant, witnesses and records all of it.

What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg, son of Golden Age Hollywood producer B.P. Schulberg, remains, for me, the best Hollywood novel ever written. It blends micro human intimacy with macro Hollywood politics with brilliant, breezy skill. Schulberg was accused of being a self-loathing antisemite when it came out, because his selfish, weaselly Sammy Glick is Jewish, but so are most of the people Sammy screws over. What Schulberg witnessed and denounced was much more of an American character than a Jewish one. It’s a prescient book, too. When the novel came out, everyone agreed Sammy Glick was a detestable figure. By the 1980s, young men in Reagan’s America were praising Glick, calling him their hero. It’s the era in which my own book ends, the era of film executives who wrestled control back from filmmakers. Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney, famously said something Glick might have said himself: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art… To make money is our only objective.”