Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg: How Success Changed the System — and Them

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3:00What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in art? No. Well, look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation. Hey, Film Spotters, Adam here. Can't wait to share this conversation with you between Michael Phillips, longtime friend of the show, longtime contributor to the show, and author Paul Fisher about his book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, about the collaborative relationship and occasionally the rival relationship. relationship. Is that a word? I think it's a word between Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg, how they completely upended the Hollywood system and changed it forever for better or for worse.

3:44You can be the judge of that as you hear Michael and Paul discuss that and much, much more. Here it is. Lots to talk about with this book, The Last Kings of Hollywood. I have to say I had about 15 different reactions to it because it's such a fairytale moment for these three giants of contemporary cinema. And we'll call it contemporary cinema, even though the cinema that George Lucas, Francis Coppola, and Steven Spielberg came up in seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you know, now. But here, you know, luckily, We have all these three filmmakers with us still. But I also had, and at the end, so many kind of wonderful, amazing, bizarre anecdotes going on.

4:38And yet I was sort of in the end, I was left with a pretty complicated sense of what was possible then, what was exploitable then, maybe, from the studio's point of view. and what is long lost to me now. I just wonder if any of my feelings chimed with anything you had going into this project in the first place. Yeah, it's kind of a bittersweet thing. I think part of the reason for writing it, there were a few, but one of them was that idea that kind of like, okay, there's been stuff written about the 70s kind of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, neo-Hollywood kind of vibe. but a lot of it's either 20 or 30 years old or it takes the conclusions of stuff that was written 20 or 30 years ago and this felt like a really interesting moment that we kind of live in this world that they unwittingly created um and not a world that's left them behind necessarily but obviously lucas doesn't make films anymore coppola's doing the megalopolises and taking the giant swings everybody kind of makes fun of and steven spielberg you know he's still putting out bangers but who cares because there's a spider-man movie coming out next week so you know they kind of all been swallowed up by this environment that they created and i like that writing it in a human sense because it's like a monkey's paw thing of like they come in very deliberately that was another reason to write the book you know where people sort of um we kind of treat these filmmakers from the 70s like they were just kind of wild and crazy irrational irresponsible overspending over schedule geniuses who then had to be kind of reined in but i like the idea that all three of these guys came in going no actually we we know what's wrong with the system we have an idea of how to fix the system we have a deliberate plan to fix the system and it worked in a way that not fully backfired but you kind of get the good and the bad with it and I thought that's kind of an interesting 15-year journey to kind of track.

6:44Yeah, yeah, let's get into some of that in a little bit. I think for people who are new to, you know, the book, which most people will be new to the book because it's a new book, it'd be useful to just sort of talk about where you start and then kind of what the 15 years we're talking about really sort of involved Where we find these three guys as they all kind of converge in this deeply unlikely way, but sort of inevitable way in film school, right, in Southern California or in and around the USC, UCLA kind of ferment of that first generation of film school. But the anecdote that you start with is fantastic.

7:27They're on the plane flying to the White House. It's 1977, November, I think. Lucas has just scored a tiny little hit with Star Wars. Spielberg is coming off Jaws from two years earlier. Coppola has had the remarkable streak beginning in the 70s with the first Godfather, then The Conversation, then Godfather II, and then Apocalypse Now, which is at the moment in 1977 consuming him. right um uh and they are uh on this private plane eleanor coppola is writing in her diary what she's overhearing talk about what she's overhearing and kind of why that anecdote became for you this is this is the starting point this this hits something i want to start with yeah while she's overhearing they're going to it's kind of like a presidential gala thing at the white house um and have all these luxurious canapes and everything on this plane and and lucas is talking about how you know i'm getting the numbers wrong or whatever but oh by next friday star wars will be the biggest film ever overtaking jaws which would have been the best film ever which overtook the godfather which previously was the best film ever in terms of grosses in terms of yeah yeah and and she's basically overhearing the three of them francis coppola steven spielberg George Lucas, who are like very close friends, close to best friends, on top of the world, really kind of bitching and moaning about success and freedom and what to do next and what you have to do next.

9:12And like, it's not really a celebratory mood, but it's also kind of all their personalities. There's a short exchange where, you know, you get the sense Spielberg's kind of giddy. Lucas is almost like an accountant. Coppola is talking about like, well, whatever you do, you just got to take a big swing and like do something big and be true to yourself um and it just felt like an exchange of like a it's talking about the stuff that the book concerned itself about which was you know kind of like success and commercial success versus personal filmmaking and what you do with that kind of success and then this friendship and then what success does to you and what feels like success because they're kind of at the peak of their powers then um and it kind of the in the american edition of the book there's a picture of the three of them together kind of leaning on one another that was taken the day after that conversation in washington and i thought okay so i can open with a with a scene that kind of expresses something about that top of the world it's that exact moment you've just seen on the cover um it's kind of witnessed by one of the women who is their ecosystem that you know all these women they take for granted who are kind of flies on the wall overhearing these men complaining about how successful they are and and how unfree they are um and so i kind of had everything in it as a great kind of starting point to start there and then go back to you know the book kind of starts in like the sort of six month period in summer 67 to January 1968, where the film industry is kind of dead.

10:48And there was this guy called Francis Coppola, who's a film school legend, went to UCLA, left early, made a feature film, brought it back as his thesis, worked for Roger Corman, became a staff writer for Warner Brothers. He's now directing his first studio film, first film school kid ever to direct a studio film. So obviously up to that point, directors tended to be employees who worked through the ranks. and he's making this film and this young kid from the Crosstown University USC comes to shadow him called George Lucas and they kind of hatched this plan to go you know what the system's broken we're going to do our own thing we've got all these new little cameras editing beds we've seen how Europeans can do it let's just like break out and take advantage of the system and do it our way and while they're hatching all these plans lucas kind of screens his his own thesis short film at this kind of national film student show thing and there's a guy in the audience who didn't get into film school who's a bit younger than all of them who's very desperate to be a filmmaker by the time he's 21 called steven spielberg who's watching these short films going oh man everybody's so far ahead of me i don't know how i'll ever catch up and he goes and seeks lucas out um and so i kind of started there and it's kind of you know this is them at the top of the world let's go back to when they meet up um and see how they get there and beyond yeah it almost sounds like it's already a highly fictionalized version of the true story but it was the true story it's a true story and it's one of those where you're like okay i've got to be as strict with these facts as possible and it's beautiful when they line up and you go, oh, great.

12:27Now I've got chapters and scenes and it feels, yeah, like fiction. We should point out that the short film we're talking about that Lucas made was, I'm going to paraphrase and shorten it, but it was a... THX 1130, Electronic Labyrinth, THX 1138 4EB. Right. 15 minutes short, dystopian future. And then Lucas then turned that into his first feature a few years later. Yeah, which is, I think, it's the first record I could find as someone turning their student short film into a feature as a kind of like using the short film as a calling card for a longer thing. But, you know, to put yourself in Spielberg's shoes, people are making a little black and white, kind of mostly silent little films that are all derivative of other things.

13:14and then this version of THX, Lucas was the guy who kind of like, he wrangled his way into the USC department that trained like Army and Navy reporter guys. And so he got film stock off of them and extras off of them. And so in terms of a short film, it's both like really good and like a blockbuster basically. And like, if you can imagine a world where like he was in the LA Times for this paper, he got internships for this short film, internships and job offers. It was like national news, best student filmmaker in the country kind of thing. That was George Lucas. And this is the one where Spielberg later said, this basically makes me so sick with envy, I can barely stand.

13:58Exactly. Disgusted. So he's like, I've got to seek this guy out. Yeah. We should also mention that you had this equally unlikely situation with Coppola's film that he's making at that time on the Warner Brothers' Seven Arts Lot is the film version of the 1947 Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow. And if you really wanted to pick a young director who would be a crazier mismatch to that material, you know, I don't know how you'd find it, but it certainly sparks this conversation between the guy shadowing the director on the set, the clearly overmatched director on the set, but also just disinterested in the material.

14:42You know, you had Lucas getting to know a couple, and we're like, this is not for us, as you say. It's, you know, this is not, let's go somewhere and make Hollywood, make our studio, make our utopian situation a reality somewhere else. And that just, you know, that takes them up to San Francisco. Yeah, it kind of speaks to that tension. They're kind of like, you know, the studio, mainstream studio film industry had peaked in the late 40s. And then for various reasons, stuff kind of goes downhill. And by 1967, there is this thing of like the Warner Brothers is one of those studios that's getting taken over by smaller companies.

15:20Older executives are still around. They don't really know what to do. They're like, we need films that young people are going to watch, but we don't know what that is. We don't understand young people. I guess the last huge hit we had in this industry was The Sound of Music. Let's keep on making musicals. but let's get young filmmakers because they'll maybe know how to make them jazzy and so you get this weird hybrid of lucas wins this scholarship and he gets to shadow a project the warner brothers and he thinks you know what i and lucas you know we all have the same as a of george lucas but as a 20 something year old coming out of usc um you know he's a cool kid from the bay area who loves fast cars hates narratives hate court hates corporations hates his dad um and thinks i just want to make experimental poems no narrative no characters it's all about like kinetic movements they're for the underground and so he comes to the studio and he thinks the only thing i want to do really is go to the animation department that's where people make films i'll get a camera i'll do something and he's basically told the animation department's shut down we're not making any cartoons so he goes all right well maybe i can find another more interesting film and he's basically told there's only one film getting made and it's you know musical about a leprechaun guy chasing a pot of gold 500 year old fred astaire is in it and he thinks well this is everything i hate about studio filmmaking but obviously he reads the call sheet and it says francis coppola who's again like a legend like every there's a handful of film schools in america at the time everybody thinks they're going and getting away from the draft and never getting a film job and just kind of wasting three years except this one guy francis coppola who managed to turn it into their career already and he's got you know gold watch and a Porsche and a family in a big house and so he thinks okay I'm gonna go check him out and it's on this you know around a plastic tree at the bottom of the Warner Brothers jungle doing this terrible musical that Coppola doesn't understand no one understands Jack Warner is still sending notes um they yeah they essentially first think you know we we got to find a way to get away from the studios and at this point they're kind of torn between do we do it on the go which eventually becomes the rain people as a kind of attempt which is a copola film that they really shoot like a road trip they put everything in a van and shoot it around that was like a 12 that was a 12 person crew just bombing around in a couple of cars right i mean like for months we're going to start on the east coast drive across we'll have the editing over here the thing over there we'll make up the script as we go along and we'll prove that we don't need a studio and then through that process they kind of go okay we need a studio but one that's kind of our own and so they figure out this plan where coppola wrangles a few grand out of warner brothers by telling them hey you don't understand the kids i'm one of the kids i'll bring you this whole generation of film school filmmakers if you just pay for us to write the scripts you get first look at basically a whole new generation of people including me including this kid george luthas who's got the hottest short film in the country all these different people.

18:23And they rent a warehouse up in San Francisco, which feels close enough to L.A., but far enough that executives aren't going to drive up every day. You know, splash the money on expensive German editing machines and cool French cameras and a giant espresso machine and a pool table and, you know, kind of like a startup. They're like, okay, let's get going. We're going to change the industry from this little warehouse on Folsom Street. Here's golf legend John Daly. Hell yeah, these wins are piling up faster than my divorces. I only spent on Moto, America's Social Casino. You know I've won a couple of majors.

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19:35destinations. If you're ready for a break without breaking the bank, save up to$150 at AppleVacations.com or contact your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. This is Jana Kramer from Windown with Jana Kramer. Every Mother's Day, I tell myself I'm going to be more thoughtful than flowers because flowers are beautiful, but they don't last. In my house, everyone always ends up in the kitchen. Friends, family, the kids. And I love having things around that spark conversation and feel special. That's why I love the Lennox Spice Village and your mom will too. It's a set of 24 hand-painted little houses that are actually spice jars.

20:16And I swear people notice it the second they walk in. It's charming, it's nostalgic, and it somehow makes even everyday cooking feel a little more fun. And here's the best part. It actually gets used every day. Whether you're starting the full set or helping her complete one she's loved for years, there's a whole world of Spice Village to explore. This Mother's Day, give her something she'll treasure long after the card is put away. Trust me, once you see it, you'll want one too. Find the full collection at lennox.com slash spicevillage. This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal. Find home wherever you roam.

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21:35You know, there's a bit of back and forth, which gives it an interesting, you know, kind of tension in that we're always dealing with who they were and what they dreamed of just a few years before, wherever they are at the moment. and I tell you one thing to kind of have the stories of these three filmmakers first huge hunk of success Coppola with the Godfather not his first film obviously but Coppola with the Godfather you know Lucas with American Graffiti which was made for under a million but grossed I don't know 50 times that or something like that it was a huge success and then Spielberg of course with you know a duel on television in 71 but Jaws all that it's amazing to me the stories that kind of like talk to each other in your book about how damn hard and how nerve wrackingly close they were to the projects falling apart the godfather you know it's kind of been told a lot by now Coppola constantly in fear of justifiable paranoia about being fired off his own movie.

22:51You know, Spielberg, that shark still doesn't work, you know, but somehow the movie was better for it, for it not working the way they originally planned it. Endless, endless, no faith from the studio really in how it's going to turn out. Same with Star Wars. And that is, and you also get this great portrait out of the book of the different types of temperaments you're dealing with here. You couldn't get, you know, a wider gulf between two people than Coppola and Lucas and then Spielberg maybe somewhere in the middle. Is that a fair triangle, do you think? Sort of. I think there is, it's kind of a fair triangle.

23:31Yeah, and they have that great thing too of like because they're young men at this time in their lives, they kind of have no self-awareness the way people in their 20s have no self-awareness. And so it makes them great characters, quote unquote, because they keep saying things that they believe or want to do or are going to do and then acting in the opposite kind of way um which is really interesting and compelling but that thing you were talking about that was one of the things i was aware i had to combat right it's like you say coppola lucas spielberg people have an image in their mind we know who they are they're almost brands and so you kind of take the success for granted and i kind of thought like i called them by their first names in the book and that wasn't really a way to like set up fake intimacy but more kind of like how do i get the reader to see them as just like regular dudes as when this starts because they are regular dudes and how do i get to in an experiential kind of way get to really engage and involved in francis is going to make this film called the godfather i know that your brain knows it's a giant success so i know you already know the ending to the story but how do i kind of quiet that down so you're actually in with this guy when he's, you know, there's a moment early in the shoot where he's literally like hiding in the bathroom while his crew come in and like talk about how crappy is or what he's doing.

24:50You know, how do I get you to relate to that so you can feel like, okay, I'm in this moment with early 30s, father of two with another on the way, broke in debt, has never been really all that successful yet. Francis, as opposed to, oh yeah, that's Coppola doing The Godfather. it's all going to work out they don't have to you know feel involved or engaged um because you know they were we talk about i ask people questions about like what makes this guy a genius or that guy a genius um and you get different answers but there's so many times where they're so close to failing there are so many times where the fork in the road is such a narrow kind of there's like a really big difference between crashing over here and having the biggest thing ever over there there's there's forks in the road where they are successful against their own better judgment you know coppola doesn't want to do the godfather and lucas doesn't want to do american graffiti and spielberg you know up until dual and even jaws he's trying really hard to be someone he isn't and if you know if someone green lights young steve spielberg's sex comedy in a chinese laundrette spinoff version of snow white and the seven dwarves we never hear about that guy again i couldn't and that's that's true i mean that was one of his proposals right that was yeah i'm going to adapt snow white and the seven dwarves as a as an offensive sex comedy like purposefully offensive edgy sex comedy in san francisco where she's you know running away from who knows what and the seven dwarves of these seven chinese guys in a laundrette were super horny for her like terrible, terrible, terrible.

26:33That guy makes that movie and, you know, we have no Steven Spielberg. But in this moment at that time, he's complaining that no one's greenlighting this amazing movie I have. Yeah. Yeah. And he, he is the guy who came off 1941 saying, you know, I don't really know if I know how to do physical comedy. Right. Which is actually not true because, I mean, he's got a very good, he's got an astoundingly kind of like good instinct for visual width and some visual gags. But anyway, we'll talk about 1941, another, another interview. No, and it's in there. And that's, and when you talk about them kind of as a pole, like I think Coppola, you know, big guy who'll jump off the cliff and figure out a parachute on the way down.

27:16And Lucas is much more kind of like uncompromising and tightly wound and maybe a little bit kind of pretend they're pretentious in different ways and you know under control and very opinionated and doesn't even love people whereas Coppola is the guy who you know he wants to have a dinner party every five minutes yeah um and Spielberg I think he's in between the two in a sense that you know that's a guy who as a very young person is like I really want to be loved and accepted but not for who I am I want to be loved and accepted for being like you are right and so right up until 1941 1941 to me is one of those films where like he's still trying to be John Milius or Bob Zemeckis or Belushi or and that's not who he is and it's not so much that he can't do comedy it's anything you do where you're not really authentic it's going to especially comedy it's going to be a bit of a cluster cuss yeah so it's a real object lesson and I'm not even sure exactly what that is maybe you can tell me when you have you have this this someone like Lucas who makes his name as a college student with the 15-minute short THX 1138, which is non-narrative, non-linear, as you say, kind of just an experimental visual poem.

28:29And the kind of thing, you know, it wouldn't be an unusual sort of thing to attempt, I think, at that, you know, on the college level. And you go a few years later, and he's the guy on the set of Empire Strikes Back, somehow worrying about finances because it's all kind of falling apart all around him and the shoot's taking forever. He's not directing it because he's really already become much less interested in not just writing, but directing, you know? And it's kind of a peculiar lesson, I guess, and just, I don't know. I mean, he became the filmmaker he was meant to be. You know, he somehow had the instinct, This sounds kind of harsh, maybe dismissive, but in my view, you know, he focused so intently on getting the merchandising rights and the sequel rights that left him astoundingly rich.

29:28I mean, he's worth$5 billion today. I think Spielberg's worth$4 billion. And Coppola, nobody knows because he might be broke. He might have a few hundred million. It's hard to say. But, I mean, the money is like so astounding. These figures are so astounding you can't even get your head around them. But I don't know. I always struggle. And, you know, the film spotting gang certainly knows this. I struggle a lot with the influence of Star Wars, not just the film industry, but popular culture in general. um and and i but i i think i get i think i get evidence for my argument in your book he's so hard to pin down right because he's kind of like again you talk about what makes a genius or something and people will tell you oh they love what they do they're obsessed with what they do they're really good at what they do and then okay well george leek has hated directing really hated it viscerally hated the experience hated writing and if you've read any of his actual drafts for stuff was bad at writing um not a people person which is a huge part of being a director and not great under pressure making decisions and and and so you go okay what makes him who he is and and the thing i like about that period is i don't really have an answer right like there's a there's a way to read it where he kind of falls into filmmaking by accident he wants to race cars he has this terrible crash he gets scared off racing cars and through Haskell Wexler realizes, oh, I can film and get a bit of the thrill of, again, kinetic movement through a camera.

30:58This is Wexler shooting American graffiti as well, are you saying? Eventually, but they kind of meet very early when Wexler, who also loved cars, who was a cinematographer, kind of took a shine to him. And so, you know, on race car tracks, hey, you can film stuff, take photographs, I'll put in a good word for you to come down to L.A., whatever. And like very early, Lucas kind of goes, I'm not a director. You know, I'm a filmmaker. And this is one of those very kind of self-important 60s, 70s debates of like, are you a film director? Are you a filmmaker? And very early on, he's like, I'm a filmmaker in the way Simone would be a toy maker or a car maker.

31:32And so he thinks in very mechanical kind of ways early on. And so you can kind of see like, okay, maybe then the thrill transforms into something else, which is building this empire, quote unquote. or you can read it the way Coppola reads it where he has told people repeatedly George could have been an amazing filmmaker and it's a shame that all he's done is Star Wars and he should have made other films or you could read it the way Lucas himself sometimes says where he's like oh no when I'm done with all the Star Wars stuff I'll go back to making small experimental THX kind of films which he's never done and you know which other friends of theirs will go you know that's BS he never wanted to do that he would never do that that's just George telling himself that so he doesn't feel like a sellout and he doesn't feel like the guy he became which really was he's in his 20s complaining about the executives and the interference and the producers and the studios and then by the time the Star Wars films come around he's that guy, he's Irving Thalberg hanging over your shoulder going even though I'm not the writer or the director I'm the creative impulse behind this because I pay the bills and so I get the final say and then you have that extra dimension you're also talking about of, you know, like I think, I don't think it's super controversial to say the first Star Wars film, which is just called Star Wars.

32:55Like it's a good movie and it's a cinema literate movie and, you know, references slash rips off a bunch of world cinema. But at least in those movies, and the more it goes, the more those films become about just selling the toys. Well, we're talking about the Ewoks. The Ewoks is, of course, Well, the Ewoks, notorious example in Return of the Jedi, the third film, yeah. Exactly. And where, you know, Lucas will tell you, well, no, that's the way I had to be. And really the people who turned into merchandising are the executives who came after me. But you get people like his producer, Gary Kurtz, and other people who worked on them who went, no, we never planned on the third film just being a commercial for stuffed animals.

33:35It was meant to end a different way. and it's all very compelling stuff because there's no clear answer there's no straight answer as there would be you know if you were talking about a friend of yours you might have an opinion your wife might have an opinion your cousin might have an opinion about what makes them who they are but there is that kind of thing through it either way of I can't remember who said this and now I'm being pretentious it might be Goethe or something but this idea that whatever you fight within yourself comes back to you as kind of fate and George Lucas's little trajectory there kind of has that you know he kind of fights the system fights the man claim he's everything opposite of that fights his dad and then becomes his dad becomes a system becomes the man to where you know now you know he's that guy people protest because he wants to like raise buildings and build a museum for his collection of art he's put behind glass right so if the if the studio system was falling apart during the period you're writing about in in uh in the last kings of hollywood yeah where is it now it was falling apart then yeah or changing certainly out changing would be the two week a word but but we are uh i mean i mean some things have changed uh it's not necessarily entirely a hundred percent uh the story of today we're not retelling exactly the same hopefully demographic story about who has any power to make a movie in Hollywood.

35:07It's maybe 89%, 95 % white male now. It was probably closer to 99.9 back then. You know, it's a certain time, and I mean, everyone else is shoved to the margins, and you do read and hear certainly a lot about the women, especially, who didn't get the shot, who might have gotten a screenwriting gig like Melissa Matheson or something like that, but it's really more through who they knew first and being either the wife or the partner or the mistress of some other famous director. It's just not, you know, it's a time that you just, there's a lot of minefields that make it a hell of a lot more complicated than wasn't it wonderful what was possible back then.

36:01Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think so. I think there are parallels in the sense that, you know, you can kind of simplify it where you kind of go, okay, late 60s, these guys are coming in. There's new technology that no one really knows how to harness. The industry is kind of playing catch-up with like rival models like television, foreign films, whatever. Don't understand the young people. The young people don't think there's any way they can get a job in the industry. You know, there's bloody illegitimate foreign wars above. there's a guy in the white house everybody feels is corrupt everybody's quite depressed and there's protests on the street and law enforcement shooting people and you're like okay this sounds quite familiar i'm i know what this is and there are parallels too in that thing you're talking about of you know okay if we're going to try something new maybe we'll just try a slightly different or slightly younger brand of white dude that's as far as we'll go and like trying to reach all this stuff that that we can't reach um even though being being daring would pay off i think the difference but between then and now a little bit is i i get the feeling now almost every time i hear something about the film industry where i go oh this is an industry that really really hates filmmakers like really hates them um you know like if you've got the nerve like a ryan krugler to go I might want to own my film in a little while because I made it then the pitchforks are going to come out to call you entitled and this is not how it works and again there's a whole extra dimension as well of this being an African American man who wants to own his own work rather than a Tarantino or whatever and there are filmmakers who will go you know we've got ideas you want a Star Wars I'll give you something like a Star Wars but you got to trust us to make something new like a Star Wars and the industry's default is to go, no, how about we'll make a deal with like the AI companies that have pillaged the other stuff so users can make their own little videos of Star Wars.

38:01We're just going to go back and rob all the graves and all the past stuff instead of trying anything new. Because we'll do anything before we actually go, hey, filmmaker, I'll trust you. And if by accident, trusting a filmmaker gives you something that works, whether it's, you know, at the time we're recording, project hail mary that worked it's a great you know success everybody likes it you know should we make other original films that are different that people are going to see no let's try and make project hail mary two and three and four and five so it's kind of everything to not trust the director whereas i think the opening these guys had at that time these older executives didn't understand the market but they kind of went i mean if we spin the wheel on enough of these young filmmakers, something's going to hit.

38:48So the approach was kind of different. And I think tied to that, there's a risk aversion now. I think, you know, if Seven Arts or a small company back then takes over Warner Brothers, or if GE takes over Paramount, the guy comes in going, I know better than you. We're going to shake everything up. We're going to make big films. I'm going to hang out with beautiful women. You know, there was an ambition to it. Whereas now people take over and... You know, this is not a new conclusion, but you're not in it to make films. You're in it for the, you know, board members meeting in six months, 12 months.

39:26You know, you get stuff like, you know, Zaslav can drive Warner Brothers into the ground, but half of his constituency will tell you great success because we all made money on the way down. Right, right. It was brilliant. And I don't know if that was so much of a thing back then. Back then, yeah. Yeah, and that risk aversion, again, also means well you know let's get films that are like the films that worked before let's get filmmakers who are white dudes who like the filmmakers that worked before let's assume that those things are the default kind of less risky choice yeah um and like i hate being fatalistic i hate feeling like oh everything's worse than it's ever been and there's no way out because i'm sure there is a way um but it does feel more depressing yeah and it does feel you know and it's of that thing of like, you know, I went to film school, that kind of last generation, 20 years ago, where people went, oh, the internet's going to be great.

40:20You know, you can get a small camera, you can do whatever you want, and you can put it on the internet, and anybody can watch it. And we hadn't quite worked out yet that that would just be a lot of white noise. That you would just be like throwing a rock into the ocean and going, someone watched us! Right, right. Which is what it's become now, and so I think the distribution thing, you know, that was a thing back then, where, you know, Coppola... Lucas, as rich as they got with the Star Wars, the Godfathers, they still had to go, hey, 20th Century Fox, will you put this in cinemas for me? Will you get this out to people?