Calendar’s Big Oscars Issue : ...

The odds are strong that Steven Spielberg will win the Academy Award Monday night, but the Oscar he is likely to get at last, for directing “Schindler’s List,” might seem to some to be merely the old guard’s belated concession that he is the most important commercial movie maker in the world.

The academy, after all, is just that--an academy, a repository of received wisdom and guiding tradition. Spielberg and his generation of directors, though the first to be trained in film schools, have not always gone about their careers in academy-like ways as they pursued younger audiences, indulged idiosyncrasy, celebrated technology and sex and, in growing numbers, fled Hollywood altogether.

Spielberg, at 47, is now old enough to embody the academy, or at least the new academy. Furthermore, he’s as much a mogul as a director, the emperor of Amblin and all he surveys. But before he takes that expected walk up the red-carpeted aisle to be industrially sanctified Monday night, it’s worth noting that for 20 years he has been a member of a smaller, more elite fraternity of directors brought together by time, talent and friendship--an extended family that is rarely seen together in public yet communicates through its own back channels and private screenings, a group that has left an indelible mark on Hollywood, yet has only one director’s Oscar to show for it.

The family does not have a fixed number, but at its center are five men: Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.

In the popular imagination, their names conjure up disparate images and mythologies, but if you talk to them and their associates, you discover that the way they view one another is not at all the way critics and moviegoers see them.

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They each have different styles, interests and sensibilities, but in a business where success can depend on your best friend’s failure, they seem to have shared a common regard for the talents of the other members. What is more, they share history.

All of them arrived in Hollywood in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, during the period when the great studios were losing their grip on the business and a new youth culture was clamoring at the gates. Mike Medavoy, the former TriStar and Orion chairman who was then an agent, claims to have introduced many of them to one another after recruiting them for representation.

Lucas and Spielberg together would conceive and create the character of Indiana Jones in 1977, the year they made “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” respectively; last year, when Spielberg had to leave for Poland to film “Schindler’s List,” he asked Lucas to supervise the final editing of “Jurassic Park.” Coppola produced Lucas’ “THX 1138” and “American Graffiti,” then directed the Vietnam movie that Lucas had initially developed with writer John Milius, “Apocalypse Now.” Lucas’ ex-wife, Marcia, a film editor, edited Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” whose script was written by Paul Schrader, who also had written an early draft of “Close Encounters” and had been introduced to Scorsese by De Palma.

De Palma also introduced Scorsese to Robert De Niro, who would become the star of “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy” and “Cape Fear,” not to mention Coppola’s “Godfather II.” (De Niro, then unknown, acted in De Palma’s first feature, “The Wedding Party,” released in 1968.) Coppola recommended Scorsese to actress Ellen Burstyn when she was looking for a director for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” in 1974.

In the fall of 1990 when De Palma was struggling with the final edit of his ill-fated “Bonfire of the Vanities,” whom did he call in for an opinion but Spielberg. Spielberg introduced De Palma to De Palma’s first wife, actress Nancy Allen, who later appeared in the Spielberg-produced “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” De Palma is the godfather to Spielberg’s son, Max, from his marriage to actress Amy Irving, who appeared with Allen in De Palma’s “Carrie” and starred in his thriller “The Fury.” And so it goes.

Scorsese and De Palma eventually returned to New York and Coppola and Lucas retreated to San Francisco, but the professional and personal ties have stretched across the years.

“All of us in that group have had very positive, reinforcing relationships that have gone on forever and ever,” says Lucas, speaking from his headquarters in San Rafael, where he is at work producing the mystery comedy “Radioland Murders.”

“Everyone has been supportive of one another and always been there if someone’s in trouble, if there’ve been any problems. Francis and I have had our disagreements over the years, but there’s never been anything where we stopped talking to each other. I’ve disagreed with everybody and everybody has disagreed with me and that goes from Steven and Brian and Marty and everybody else. But I don’t believe any of the relationships have ever been strained.

“Physically, it’s harder to spend time with each other because everybody’s so busy, but if you define friendship in a more spiritual way, I think everybody’s gotten a lot closer. Because we’ve all gone down the same roads and have been sharing the same experiences.

“And we all like each other’s movies. Brian and Steven and Francis all saw ‘Star Wars’ when I was cutting it and offered me advice. I’ve sat in on a lot of first cuts of Marty’s pictures, giving him advice. There’s been a lot of exchange of plots and ideas over the years from that whole group. I know Brian and Marty have been very close.

“Everybody’s been fairly successful, everybody’s fairly rich and everybody’s gotten a fair amount of respect and everybody’s sort of been equally trashed by the media. There’s probably more camaraderie in being trashed together than in being successful. When filmmakers sit around, they don’t really talk about their successes, they talk about the people that have gone after them for one reason or another.

‘We’ve all had our ‘Howard the Duck,’ our ‘1941,’ our ‘One From the Heart.’ And everything you do, in the end, half the people think what you’ve done is terrible and the other half think it’s wonderful. You know, even ‘Schindler’s List’ is getting blasted, so there’s no escape from getting trashed.”

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Lucas went to USC, Coppola to UCLA, Scorsese to NYU, and De Palma to Columbia. Spielberg attended Cal State Long Beach but dropped out to direct television shows for Universal before his 22nd birthday.

Spielberg is the youngest of the five at 47; Lucas is 49; Scorsese, 51, De Palma, 53, and Coppola, 55. Coppola is the only one thus far to win an Oscar, for “The Godfather Part II.” (He also won a screenwriting Oscar, in 1970, for “Patton.”) Spielberg has been nominated four times, Scorsese three times, Lucas twice and De Palma not at all.

Spielberg and Lucas have directed seven of the 10 top grossing films of all time, but while they were at it, the Oscar for best director has gone to such contemporaries as Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone (twice), Jonathan Demme and Michael Cimino. The godfather of the group, Coppola, is old enough to have started in the theater, at Hofstra University on Long Island, before heading west to enter UCLA’s film school. He dropped out to make a B-picture (“Dementia 13”) for drive-in movie czar Roger Corman, though he was later awarded his degree for writing and directing the 1967 Warner Bros. feature “You’re a Big Boy Now” that starred Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page and Julie Harris.

“We had heard about Francis,” says Oscar-winning sound editor Walter Murch, who was then a classmate of Lucas’ across town at USC. “He was legendary because he had managed to get paid for his master’s thesis.”

Lucas managed to get hired as Coppola’s administrative assistant at Warner’s when they were the only two bearded men on the lot.

Says Mike Medavoy: “What was special about these guys is that they had to break through because the older guys were in charge. And remember, some guys didn’t make it.”

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Some of the most promising members of their generation in America dropped out of the fray or took other roads: Monte Hellman (“Two Lane Blacktop”), Terrence Malick (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven”) and Noel Black (“Pretty Poison”).

But at the time, the film-school turks were on the march. The invention of the transistor had made film equipment lighter, cheaper and portable, and opened filmmaking to people outside the studio system for the first time. The nouvelle auteur theory, raising the status of the director to culture hero, had traveled across the Atlantic from France.

“Now, all of a sudden,” Murch recalls, “you could go out with a tape recorder and a 16mm portable camera, portable lights. It was a revolution Godard had started with ‘Breathless,’ where he showed that you could make an interesting film with that technology.

“The early days of Zoetrope (Studio) when George and Francis and I were all together in the late ‘60s was very much part of that aesthetic: ‘Let’s get some of that film-school-type equipment, throw it in the back of the van and travel across the country and make a film.’ ”

After directing Fred Astaire and Petula Clark in Warner’s “Finian’s Rainbow,” Coppola did just that--took off with Lucas in tow on a transcontinental film odyssey to make “The Rain People,” the first film for his own mini-studio Zoetrope, based in San Francisco and fueled by anti-Hollywood idealism.

Planned as a kind of film co-op that would make movies on tiny budgets, Zoetrope would be famously undone by its own success and financial mismanagement. Ironically, the huge box-office bonanza of Lucas’ “Star Wars” propelled Hollywood into blockbuster fever in the late ‘70s and led to a backlash in which Lucas was blamed for Hollywood’s new accountant-driven film economics.

But the spirit of the Coppola commune, in some ways, did not die. In 1985, when Murch was directing “Return to Oz” for Disney in London and having difficulties, Lucas flew in from Japan and Coppola from Los Angeles to lend their hands. Spielberg also stopped by, as did Phil Kaufman, another member of the Bay Area filmmakers’ circle.

“They certainly brought a new sensibility to Hollywood,” says screenwriter Frank Pierson about Spielberg and the rest of the gang of five. “Whether or not it was as revolutionary as it seemed at the time I don’t know. But clearly what they represented was the wave of change in public taste and attitudes in many things, which they brought with them. And they came into the business with a kind of technical training that nobody before had.”

This technical proficiency, however, became and remains controversial. “Knowing which end of the camera is the lens and which end is the handle is not the important thing really,” says Pierson, who wrote such films as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Cat Ballou” and is the current president of the Writers Guild. “The important thing is what you bring in terms of life experience, of wisdom, of insight and all those things that go into making up an artist. I don’t know that film school is necessarily a very good preparation for life, as opposed to a good preparation for making a living.

“They produced a result, which was a shift to ever-younger market orientation, ever-younger executives and an increasing focus on youth and a greater and greater discounting of experience.”

It might also be said that Spielberg and his brethren have inspired a legion of imitators who seem even less interested in the traditions of characterization and drama and more preoccupied with the camera itself--directors like Robert Zemeckis, Chris Columbus, Joe Dante and Phil Joanou. You need a long lens indeed to look at the work of Spielberg’s imitators and hope to see in the distance any traces of the not-so-ancient films of Altman, Peckinpah, Nichols, Penn, Benton, Lumet, Mazursky and Schlesinger.

Spielberg himself has professed highest admiration for British director David Lean, and together with Scorsese persuaded Columbia to restore and re-release Lean’s epic “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1988. De Palma looked to Hitchcock for inspiration as he developed his suspense thrillers, such as “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill,” and endured round after round of public bashing from feminists who believed his movies underscored women as targets.

“My work is not necessarily me,” De Palma said in 1984, defending the release of “Body Double,” a film in which a woman was murdered with a giant electric drill. “I happen to like women. I’ve said it a hundred-thousand times. If anybody believes it, I don’t know anymore.”

Scorsese became the primary archivist of the group, buying hundreds of films for his personal library in New York. Scorsese met Coppola, a fellow Italian American, at a film festival in Sorrento in 1970, and would frequently come to San Francisco in later years to view movies in Coppola’s home.

After studying film at NYU, Scorsese taught there and then apprenticed with Corman (“Boxcar Bertha”). In all, he spent 11 years in Los Angeles. Spielberg helped him polish the last 10 minutes of “Taxi Driver” in 1976 and Scorsese later directed an episode of Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” for television in the ‘80s. In fact, Spielberg was originally scheduled to direct “Cape Fear” and Scorsese “Schindler’s List,” but they decided to swap projects.

Meanwhile, De Palma, the other New Yorker, became so friendly with Spielberg that it was widely believed the two regularly sent each other their dailies on video to analyze and critique each other’s work. Someone who has worked closely with both men observes, “They’re like mechanical junkies, like these kids who would win the science fairs, comparing notes technically all the time. They’re totally bonded and bound like a fraternity. Beside the spirit of film, the technology of film bonds them together. They’re like little Trekkies.”

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The careers and images of the five men hardly suggest the common ground they seem to have found together.

There’s Coppola, the operatic conductor who made some undeniably great movies a long time ago but more recently has made “Godfather III,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and vintages of premium wine; Lucas, the modern myth maker who has put directing aside to produce films by other directors and oversee an empire of special-effects technology; De Palma, the fabulous voyeur and thrill-seeker whose taste is the raunchiest and least respectable; Scorsese, famous for his fervent dramas like “GoodFellas” and “Mean Streets,” as well as for trying to show Jesus as a man with lust in his heart, and Spielberg, the greatest crowd-pleaser of all for his science-fiction melodramas like “Close Encounters” and “Jurassic Park,” and children’s stories that appealed to grown-ups (“E.T.,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).

Apart from some critical blows he has taken along the way, as when he ventured into more literary territory in “The Color Purple” and “Empire of the Sun,” Spielberg has enjoyed probably the most benign depiction in the media.

Along with scores of other powerful players, he was tarred with broad strokes by producer-author Julia Phillips (who produced “Close Encounters”) in her best-selling “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.” And his integrity and general wholesomeness were questioned by writers Stephen Farber and Marc Green in the 1988 book “Outrageous Conduct,” which investigated the fatal 1982 helicopter crash on the set of the movie “The Twilight Zone” that Spielberg produced. But these are exceptions.

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Because of the high offices each of the five occupies in the movie kingdom, all have been at the center of periodic storms of controversy about one film or another, with the result that they have sometimes been broadly typecast.

In 1992 on the set of “The Age of Innocence” in New York, Scorsese responded, “Ultimately I’m trying to be a director: not necessarily a filmmaker or a maverick filmmaker--they try to give you these titles and suddenly I’ve discovered I’m a maverick. What is that? I’m not made up in the same way as Woody Allen, who has wonderful control of his material because he writes a picture a year within a certain framework production-wise. But I find different stories.

“I don’t know if I can be a director in terms of the old Hollywood system, in which they were able to do anything that was given to them. In most cases, a lot of the men who directed brought the same enthusiasm to every project. But I’m tempted to do that, though I’m not interested in everything.”

Lucas agrees. “None of us is one-dimensional,” he says. “People forget. I’ve done movies with Francis that get lost because they were unsuccessful.” He’s referring to the pair’s producing of independent films like Paul Schrader’s Japanese-themed “Mishima” and Godfrey Reggio’s wordless Third World documentary “Powaqqatsi.”

“People do movies for different reasons and get attached to certain subjects for different reasons and they’re motivated by different kinds of things,” Lucas goes on. “I don’t think any of us would want to make the movies that the other guys are making. Brian wouldn’t want to make my kind of movies, I wouldn’t make Steven’s kind of movies, Steven wouldn’t want to make Marty’s kind of movies, Marty wouldn’t want to make Francis’ kind of movies.”

It’s nearly forgotten now that Scorsese was one of the film editors on NYU colleague Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 feature documentary “Woodstock,” or that it was his idea to employ the humorous anachronism of flashing the lyrics to certain songs onscreen with a bouncing ball.

“Like Marty’s doing ‘The Age of Innocence,’ ” Lucas says. “ ‘The Age of Innocence’ is a perfect Scorsese movie. It’s a movie about constraint and manners and convention--that looms very big for Marty. He loves period epics. It’s only if you think of everything as ‘Raging Bull’ are you surprised.

“Because we know a lot more about each other (than the public) and because we’re good friends, to me when Steve brings out ‘Schindler’s List’ it’s absolutely no surprise at all. Of course he would do that and of course it would turn out like that.

“There are films I’ve always wanted to do that I’ve never managed to get around to doing that are very different from the kind of things I’ve done. Someday if I ever make any of those movies, people will be equally shocked and think, ‘My God, how could he have done that!?’ ”