In the 1970s, as the Hollywood studio system was collapsing, three young directors made game-changing films. Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars” successively smashed box office records and seemed to announce a new age of great popular moviemaking. This was not exactly what Coppola and Lucas had in mind when they launched the production company American Zoetrope in 1969, planning to make independent films as audacious as their student projects at UCLA and the University of Southern California. But when Coppola hesitated to direct “The Godfather” for Paramount, particularly when Zoetrope was struggling financially, Lucas urged him to do it: “Then we can use that money and make our own films.”
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