Early next year, Celadon Books are due to publish The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer: a new biography of Francis Ford
The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries—Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg — revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.
In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros. backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right.
Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism.
Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivaled and supported one another, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws — whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures — intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.
Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood is due to be published by Celadon Books in North America and in the UK, on February 2026.
A satisfying, twisty tale
The Fury is the next novel from Alex Michaelides, the best-selling author of The Silent Patient and The Maidens. Strangely, I still haven’t had a chance to read the author’s first two novels, but the premise for his third book really caught my attention:
We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse ― a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.
Civilian Reader 