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WHEN veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese received his much deserved but long delayed Best Director Oscar for The Departed, the Academy couldn’t have chosen a better set of presenters. That Terrific Trio of Yesteryear’s Whiz Kids — Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. How three decades later they have become Hollywood moguls. My mind to the early 1970s when these fledglings had begun to make waves.. Why even the late 1960s as far as Ford Coppola was concerned. In 1969 he made an off-beat film called The Rain People in which Shirley Knight played a depressed housewife who leaves her home and drives across the country, and picks up a`A0 retarded hitch-hiker who tries to protect her. It at once gave evidence of Coppola’s promise and that was much`A0 before The Godfather which earned him immortality. In 1971 Steven Spielberg made a compelling suspense drama called Duel in which a traveling salesman (Dennis Weaver) discovers that a trucker following his limo is determined to kill him and right through the film the viewer isn’t able to see the trucker. Brilliant stuff, though it came to India only after the "wunderkid"`A0 had already arrived with Jaws. In 1967, George Lucas made THX-1138, an absorbing Orwellian sci-fi of how a human begins to break the rules in a computer programmed and emotionless future society. Lucas followed it up with American Graffiti, (1973) a delightful movie about four young men about to leave college gathering for a night of girl-chasing and cop-baiting. Richard Dreyfuss was cast in the lead role and the film was probably inspired by that James Dean-starrer Rebel Without a Cause. These two films gave ample evidence of Lucas’ narrative skill but once he got into the Star Wars mode he somehow shifted channels with form overshadowing content. So all three of these fledglings hit the screen with a bang, to put it rather crudely. But times were a-changing, with apologies to Bob Dylan, and the studio was no longer supreme. Soon the independent producer would replace to studio system because tinsel town was facing one of its many crisis. It helped these whiz kids to become a trio of bearded giants. The late 1960s saw the emergence of a wide variety of films because it coincided with women’s lib, moon-landing, flower power and dying hold of religion. Hollywood came closest to European cinema because it dealt with social issues—not just escapist entertainment. There was Diary of a Mad Housewife (Carrie Snodgress), "I Love You Alice B. Toklas" and "The Big Cube" which both dealt with drugs and a whole lot of anti-Establishment films. Now the three of them are different in their own way. May be Lucas after that celestial adventure "Star Wars" got more involved in special effects. Then came "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi." As if this was no enough 25 years later he made a trilogy of prequels. But by then he was so deep into FX (or special effects) that he set up his own company Industrial Lights and Magic (ILM) which does work for most of Hollywood’s blockbusters. For me cinema is more than just glitz and razmataz. It must have a soul But with every new development in cinema it is the story or the narrative that takes a drubbing. May be that’s why he never got the Best Director Oscar and the two others pulled his legs over it but he surely gave ample evidence earlier So with Lucas out, it leaves Coppola and Spielberg. Spielberg, however, is at times`A0 erratic and often obsessive. He came to India along with New Wave French filmmaker Francois Truffaut (who acted`A0 in the film) to shoot a thee-minute sequence of invoking the UFOs for Encounters of the Third Kind." I liked the film as also his "The Color Purple," a deeply moving film on the blacks. "Jaws. His "1941" is also a delightful comedy but from the 1990s he took to making overlong films, not less than 150 minutes. "Schindler’s List," "Saving Private Ryan," "War of the Worlds" and others followed this pattern. The extra footage proved counter-productive. Coppola on the other hand showed his deep understanding of human nature. "The Godfather" became a cult film and if the first one was physical its sequel "Godfather II" was more cerebral and equally absorbing despite heavy dialogue. The third one, made over a decade later, was quite a comedown. His body of work shows him a psychological filmmaker. He also gained immortality with "Apocalypse Now," (1979) the story of a Vietnam captain who is instructed to eliminate a colonel who r was fighting his own war in the hills. Brando was the Colonel what a gory, devastating picture of the atrocities in Vietnam, it was ! Simply stunning. It draws much from Joseph Conrad’s novel "Heart of Darkness." Coppola himself admitted at Cannes: "It’s more an experience than a movie. At the beginning there’s a story. Along the river the story becomes les important and the experience more important." Very true. As an exception I’d sacrifice a bit of story for this experience. And just for this film I rate him higher than Spielberg. But it was emotionally rewarding to see these bearded giants on stage on Oscars Night. It is the stuff that nostalgia is made of.
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