This article is taken from our new weekly film and TV newsletter, INTERMISSION from GQ’s culture editor Ben Allen and the crew. Sign up here to navigate the avalanche of streamer slop to find the stuff actually worth hitting play on.

I’m finally starting to believe that cinema is going to be OK. There are a few reasons why – an original movie like A24’s indie horror Backrooms doing Marvel numbers at the box office is particularly heartening. And earlier this week, US GQ published an excellent behind-the-scenes story about Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey, an epic, shot-in-the-real-world blockbuster that should be the hit of the summer. In it, Nolan himself – a fairly reliable source on the subject – put it nicely: “If you love Hollywood, the history of Hollywood, the thing that you understand in your bones is that what the audience wants is something new.” That’s nice to hear, isn’t it? New is good! Particularly after a decade or so where it felt like we were relentlessly huffing on different flavours of the same superhero vapour (have you tried triple Spider-Man???). But, actually, the main thing giving me hope right now is a book about 1970s cinema.

A few weeks ago, Intermission interviewee and Rivals star Alex Hassell recommended I read The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer’s new book about how Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg totally revitalised America’s film industry in the 1970s. And fair play to him – it’s excellent. It crunches a decade’s worth of revolutionary filmmaking into a digestible narrative filled with hundreds of details that would make an Empire reader weak at the knees. Reading it, I’ve found myself falling back in love with the fruits of the trio’s labour. Movies as obviously great and celebrated as The Godfather, Star Wars, and Jaws have become the furniture of our cultural consciousness. You rarely take a minute to stop and appreciate the artistry – or I didn’t, anyway.

The Last Kings of Hollywood has made me more optimistic about the future of movies, too, because it shows us that salvation after a period of artistic and commercial decline is possible. When the story begins, in the mid-1960s, Hollywood is on its knees in a way that feels very familiar. Movie studios are relying on tired formats like musicals and historical epics to draw in audiences, and it isn’t really working. TV has recently come into people’s homes, presenting the kind of legitimate existential threat to cinemas that streaming has in the past decade. Then our core trio rises from the ashes.

How exactly did Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg manage to create some of the most popular and critically revered movies of all time in the 15 years that followed? It can be chalked up to a fascinating mix of talent, luck, good and bad decision-making on various rungs of the corporate ladder, and, presumably, the intervention of some sort of higher power. In the book, the productions unfold in the most disorderly manner possible, largely because the three filmmakers are trying to make art that doesn’t look like anything made in the preceding 60 years of cinematic history. The people with the money are absolutely terrified, so they try to sand down edges at every opportunity.

All three filmmakers are presented as refreshingly fallible, even while their genius as directors is made clear. If anything, their greatest strengths are to do more with perseverance, self-belief and single-mindedness in the face of absolute chaos. The Godfather only exists because the San Francisco-based independent film company Coppola had set up was haemorrhaging so much money that he had to take it on to dig himself out of debt. George Lucas’ career nearly flatlined entirely when his debut THX 1138 was a total flop. Spielberg had such a torrid time making Jaws that he was close to being fired at every juncture (the malfunctioning mechanical sharks gave him plenty of grief, too). It is very interesting to see how these three weave in and out of each other’s lives, influencing and uplifting – and I’m sure competing with – one another as they changed the game.