JOHN BAXTER

George Lucas
A BIOGRAPHY

DEDICATION

To Marie-Dominique Moveable feast

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The Emperor of the West

2 Modesto

3 An American Boy

4 Cars

5 Where Were You in ’62?

6 USC

7 Electronic Labyrinth

8 Big Boy Now

9 The March Up-Country

10 American Graffiti

11 The Road to the Stars

12 I am a White Room

13 For Sale: Universe, Once Used

14 ‘Put Some More Light on the Dog’

15 Saving Star Wars

16 Twerp Cinema

17 Leaving Los Angeles

18 Writing Raiders

19 The Empire Strikes Back

20 Raiders of the Lost Ark

21 Fortress Lucas

22 Snake Surprise

23 Howard the Duck

24 The Height of Failure

25 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

26 Back to the Future

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.

The computer Alpha 60 in Alphaville, by Jean-Luc Godard

1 The Emperor of the West

The Man in the Panama Hat (years older now) removes the Cross of Coronado from Indy’s belt.

PANAMA HAT: This is the second time I’ve had to reclaim my property from you.

INDY: That belongs in a museum.

PANAMA HAT: So do you.

From Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by Menno Meyjes and George Lucas

As he neared his sixtieth year, George Lucas sat in the shade on the red-brick patio of his home at Skywalker Ranch in Northern California and thought about destiny.

Almost without realizing it, he had become a legend – a man larger than life, magnified by his achievements, but dwarfed by them too. Over forty years, head down, brow furrowed, working every day and most of every night, ignoring discomfort and ill-health, banishing every distraction to the edge of his vision, he had created something remarkable. An empire. A fortune. A myth.

He was not a myth to himself. Only a megalomaniac takes his legend at face value. A sense of his ordinariness was part of the reason he’d succeeded. At first, the awe of his acolytes had puzzled him. Then he’d been amused, but irritated too; he’d been brought up to scorn self-advertisement and conceit.

But as one ages, adulation rests more comfortably on the shoulders. Occasionally, these days, he surrendered to the belief that perhaps he could really achieve anything on which he fixed his energy and instinct.

Other men, less able, less driven than he, paused before embarking on a project, and sometimes wondered, ‘Why am I doing this? What will be its effects, on me and on others?’ They pondered, worried, took advice.

In the beginning, Lucas had sometimes done that, but not lately. Myths don’t hesitate.

There was something presidential, even a touch imperial, in his certainty. Though it wasn’t something he confided to many people, he knew history. He’d read of Julius Caesar looking out on his empire and proclaiming, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ He knew of Napoleon as a young officer surveying a world disordered by revolution and being seized by a vision of mankind united under a single rational mind. Above all, he understood Alexander the Great pausing at the end of his last campaign and weeping because there were no new worlds to conquer.

Yet he, a man less favored in his birth, less wealthy, less powerful, less educated, had achieved more than any of these men. He’d conquered not only this world, but other worlds besides. He was, in his way, master of the universe.

Or so his admirers said.

Was it true? He looked around for somebody to ask, and found only the smiling, alert faces of people anxious to do whatever he ordered, agree with whatever he said, set to work on anything he planned.

A legend is always alone.

On 4 July 1980, while Skywalker Ranch was still scrub and pasture, Lucas hosted his first cook-out on the site. There had been nothing much here in those days: just scrub, some cows, and a few deer which had become over the years the main reason for any stranger venturing this far north in Marin County. The spot where the grills were set up had once been occupied by banks of refrigerators to preserve the carcasses of game slaughtered by hunters.

Twenty-five years of construction and landscaping had transformed the old Bulltail Ranch. Anybody driving up from San Francisco along Route 101 and turning onto Lucas Valley Road at the exit marked ‘Nicasio’ found themselves passing through an expensive housing development, then twisting through an idyllic landscape of rivers and waterfalls. Discreetly, a shining wire fence paralleled the road, just out of sight in the woods. Signs every few yards warned that the fence was electrified – to keep in the deer and other livestock that roamed the estate, explained the custodians of the ranch, though everyone knew of George’s nervousness about strangers, and his fears of kidnap.

After eight miles, a sign so undemonstrative that you might well miss it unless you were looking led to a side road that wound through tall redwoods to a guardhouse. Security staff checked the visitors’ credentials against a list of people deemed persona non grata – ungrateful executives, sceptical critics, invasive journalists, technicians insufficiently respectful of Lucas or his managers. In one famous case, two special-effects technicians had been discovered after a cook-out, ‘drunk as skunks,’ according to one report, in that holy-of-holies, George’s private office. They joined the list of people ‘banned from the ranch’ – a phrase so much in currency within the effects community that one Los Angeles group took it as its business name.

Those who passed inspection were directed down the hill into the huge underground parking station, where their cars’ presence wouldn’t intrude on the rural calm. Any who remembered the ranch from the first cook-out didn’t recognise it now. A three-storied fin de siècle mansion clad in white clinker-built planks like a whaling ship, topped with shingled gables and fringed with wide verandahs, stared west across a wide artificial lake and landscaped grounds to a cluster of equally antique-looking buildings on the far side of the valley.

For centuries, European landowners had built ‘follies’ on their estates. One could have one’s own Roman ruins, with carefully shattered pillars, a picturesquely tumbled wall or two, some fragments of sculpture. Or a grotto in the Gothic style, its fountains decorated with old metalwork that might, if you didn’t look too closely, have been looted from some Etruscan tomb. Such buildings bought the owner an instant pedigree, an off-the-hook connection between a nouveau riche family and the ancient world.

Skywalker Ranch went one better. If anyone asked, staff recounted an invented history as carefully constructed as any screenplay. They were told that the property had been a monastery until a retired sea captain bought it in 1869. He built the Main House, which recalled the ‘cottages’ constructed on Newport, Rhode Island, by Vanderbilts and Whitneys at the turn of the century as summer retreats. The captain added a gatehouse the following year, and a stable. In 1880, he was supposed to have diversified into wine-making and built the large brick winery, which was given art moderne additions by a forward-looking descendant in 1934. In 1915, another innovative son erected a house spanning a brook on the estate, using the then-fashionable Arts and Crafts style pioneered by William Morris in the late nineteenth century. Later additions included the two-story library in polished redwood under a dome of art nouveau stained glass, its shelves housing a well-used and comprehensive reference collection.

On the other side of the valley, ‘unwanted relatives’ of the captain occupied conveniently remote guesthouses – named, in a lapse of historical authenticity, for Lucas’s cultural heroes: Orson Welles, John Huston, George Gershwin. After incidents like the encroachment of the drunken effects men, visitors only entered the main house by invitation. To get into the private compound around the Main House, you needed a coded key-card.

The illusion of old money was as meticulous as anything created in Hollywood at the height of its reconstructive powers in the 1940s. The Victorian-style double-hung windows and other fixtures were made in a workshop on the estate, which also maintained a studio for creating stained glass. The library’s well-rubbed redwood came from a demolished bridge in California’s Newport Beach, the books in its glassed cabinets from Paramount Pictures; they’d once been the studio’s reference library. The two thousand mature oaks, bays, and alders spotted around the 235 redeveloped acres of the ranch were trucked in from Oregon.

One visitor who opened a door marked ‘Staff Only’ found herself staring into a bunker filled with video surveillance equipment. Hidden cameras watched every corner of the estate; conduits snaking under the tranquil meadows carried enough electrical, telephone, and computer cables to feed a small town. The extent of the ranch’s electronics could faze even Lucas. In 1997, looking for a socket into which to plug a journalist’s tape recorder, he pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal a tangle of wires. ‘So that’s what’s under there,’ he murmured.

In 1987, Lucas retained the San Francisco firm of Rudolph and Sletten to build a ‘winery.’ A red-brick two-story building with two large wings and an imposing central entrance leading to a three-story atrium with wooden galleries and a glass roof resembled other wine-making facilities in the area. In fact the building housed Skywalker Sound, 150,000 square feet of state-of-the-art post-production studios in the form of eight mixing stages. San Francisco’s avant-garde Kronos Quartet recorded here. So did the Grateful Dead, and singer Linda Ronstadt. The largest facility, Studio A, also known as the Stag Theater, replicated a high-style pastel art deco cinema of the thirties. Its ninety-six-track mixing console was twenty-four feet long, and on a film like Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer demanded eighty-five technicians.

Elsewhere on the ranch, what looked like a two-story barn held the negatives of Lucas’s films and the Lucas Archive. From 1983, Lucasfilm’s first archivist, David Craig, began photographing, documenting, and collecting the models, art-work – ten thousand items alone – costumes, story-boards and accumulated relics of the Lucas legend: ‘objects of artistic, cultural, and historical significance,’ according to the authorized catalog. Donald Bies became archivist in 1988, and helped plan the building, which opened in November 1991.

Lucas’s own office in the Main House held no hint of how he earned the money to build and maintain this empire. Friends like Steven Spielberg filled their offices with framed posters, awards, and signed photographs from presidents and box-office legends. Lucas displayed no souvenirs at all of his film career – no references to film at all, except for a pair of Disney bookends. Opposite his desk was a large painting of the enmeshed gears of a sixteenth-century clock. The artist, Walter Murch, a minor modernist of the thirties, was the father of Lucas’s close friend, also Walter Murch, who edited American Graffiti and with whom, rare for Lucas, he had remained close since they met at college. Elsewhere in the house hung originals by illustrator Maxfield Parrish and Saturday Evening Post cover artist Norman Rockwell, artist by appointment to those who, like Lucas and Spielberg, another Rockwell collector, yearned for the imagined certainties of American small-town life between the wars.

Downstairs, inside the front door, a few items, battered relics of Captain Lucas’s film-faring days, were displayed behind glass. They included Indiana Jones’s stained felt hat and whip; an ewok, one of the cuddly forest animals from Return of the Jedi, whom Lucas modeled on his then-two-year-old daughter Amanda; a heavily nicked light saber from Star Wars; and a creature from Willow. The case next to it was empty – for trophies of future triumphs? Or because reality has not kept pace with the growth of the illusion? Because, disguised by all this celebration of past triumphs was the puzzling fact that Lucas had not until 1999 actually directed a film in almost twenty years.

The one aspect of Lucas’s activities not relocated to Skywalker by the late nineties was Industrial Light and Magic, which still operated out of San Rafael, outside San Francisco. In 1988, Lucasfilm had opened negotiations with Marin County to develop more of the ranch as a production facility, and to move in ILM. When the supervisors bridled, Lucas offered to set aside most of the remaining thousand acres for ‘conservation,’ while continuing to own and patrol it. Meanwhile, he kept buying surrounding properties, though not without a fight from local farmers and the zoning authorities. By 1996, he owned 2500 acres and was negotiating for more.

The battle with his neighbors was typical of Lucas’s tentative hold on his retreat. In a quarter-century, more than the ranch had changed. Lucas was the second-largest employer in the county. Power calls to power; money draws money. Skywalker had become a focus for the hopes, ambitions, and needs of millions. There was magic in this place, but also greed, resentment, and fear.

Around dawn on any fourth of July during the mid-1990s, hundreds of people would have been on the road heading for Skywalker Ranch, and Lucas’s annual cook-out.

The first of them had flown up from Los Angeles on the early shuttle and collected rented cars at San Francisco airport – or been collected, if they had that kind of clout, as many did; there are some invitations that even the highest executives disregard at their peril.

Leaning back in their limos, the agents, producers, and stars skimmed Variety and Hollywood Reporter. It would be a long trip, and the headlines reminded them why they were making it. ‘Star Wars’ All-Time Boxoffice Force,’ shrilled Variety. ‘Lucas’ Series Paid off in Spades.’ The story spelled out the news, happy for their host, that the three Indiana Jones films he’d produced and helped write, the Star Wars trilogy he’d conceived and the first of which he’d written and directed, the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and the animated films in the series The Land Before Time were all making money.

So were his other enterprises. LucasArts Licensing was earning millions from franchising toys, clothes, drinks, candy, comic books, and games inspired by his films. One manufacturer alone, Galoob, would sell $120 million-worth of Star Wars toys that year, and the original licensee, Kenner, which still owned some rights, could also have survived comfortably on nothing but Star Wars light sabers, Imperial stormtrooper helmets, and models of Han Solo’s ship the Millennium Falcon and the series’ characters. ‘Since the first film came out,’ noted one report, ‘Star Wars merchandise sales have totaled more than $2.5 billion. It’s safe to say, in fact, that Star Wars single-handedly created the film-merchandising business.’ So expert was LucasArts Licensing that outside enterprises like the TV series Saturday Night Live and the environmental Sierra Club had become clients.

Industrial Light and Magic, founded by Lucas in suburban Los Angeles in 1975 to produce the special effects for Star Wars, was now worth $350 million, and had become the world’s premier provider of movie special effects. It created Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs and arranged for Tom Hanks to shake hands with Jack Kennedy in Forrest Gump. THX Sound, developed by Lucas engineers, was gaining ground in theaters across the world, and his recording complex, Skywalker Sound, had a reputation as the best in America. LucasArts Games, LucasArts Learning … Whatever George Lucas touched turned to gold. And the gold stuck to his fingers. No financial pages listed these companies. Lucas owned every share of stock himself.

That the staid Sierra Club trusted him with its merchandising wasn’t surprising. Lucas radiated probity – too much probity, thought some. Though the movie journal Millimetre lauded Lucasfilm as ‘a profitable multi-departmental corporation that defines the cutting edge of American film-making,’ the Boston Globe detected an omnipresent fogey-ism in its creations. A Lucas production, it wrote, ‘always seems to be about something like pre-war adventurers or pre-Vietnam teenagers or pre-television broadcasting. Even Star Wars is set in the far past, not the far future, and its style famously turned American movies back to old-fashioned (critics say old-hat) narrative strategies.’

Few of the people who distributed Lucasfilms’ products, worked on them, bought or sold their merchandise or otherwise derived a living from the group, had any such criticisms. True, British actress Jean Marsh, who played Queen Bavmorda in the fantasy Willow, did remark tartly that none of its actors relished being merchandised – ‘We would all pay not to be on the T-shirts and things’ – but she was in the minority. Most felt that, as long as it filled the coffers, Lucas could dramatize Pollyanna, or film Aesop’s Fables.

The cars took at least thirty minutes to skirt downtown San Francisco, cross the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, with giant tankers creeping out to sea so far below that they looked like models in a special-effects sequence, and climb the curve of the cliff onto Highway 101, the sole autoroute north into Marin County, and another world.

The social misfits and renegades who fled here in the late sixties, seeking to preserve the spirit of the Summer of Love from a San Francisco inhabited by panhandlers, dope addicts, porn-movie producers, and prostitutes, discovered a haven in old and sleepy towns like San Anselmo, San Rafael, Mill Valley, and Bonitas. Locals found themselves patronizing the hardware store along with long-haired, bearded men, ethereal-looking women in ground-brushing muslin, and barefoot babies. Teepees and geodesic domes mushroomed in the woods, fringed by private gardens of organic vegetables, with, just a few yards down the track, a patch of marijuana, exclusively for private use.

To the relief of locals, the newcomers weren’t particularly anxious to share their new lifestyle. When the town council of Bonitas, on the Pacific Coast, erected signs saying ‘Welcome to Bonitas,’ the hippies took them down. Most felt they already had just as many friends and neighbors as they needed. ‘The ideal in those days,’ said one refugee from the midwest who briefly settled there in the 1970s, ‘was a narrow road winding through the woods without any signs, and a little house at the end. I couldn’t stand it. That’s no way to live – without people. I moved to San Francisco.’

Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate, gave the first clue to Lucas’s guests that they’d moved into this new world. Once San Francisco’s yacht port, a cluster of boatyards and little dockside bars, its waterside warehouses now belonged to companies making models for movies, or sound designers like Ear Circus, the company of Randy Thom, who’d won an Oscar for the sound recording of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and who’d worked too on Lucas’s ill-starred production Howard the Duck.

Thom, large, bear-like, and, like most of the people behind the scenes of special-effects films, shy and soft-spoken, was also on the road, heading north to the ranch. He’d had an office there while he was working on Howard the Duck, but after that he’d gradually moved away, until now he hardly visited the place. Like a lot of people who’d joined Lucasfilm in the heady days of its crusading energy, he’d made his own way. Except for Dennis Muren, now head of Industrial Light and Magic, none of the people who’d started ILM under John Dykstra still had jobs there. Nor did most of those who worked on Star Wars in other capacities.

Lucas’s wife Marcia had gone too, divorcing him in 1983. It surprised many people that the marriage had lasted so long. Marcia edited Lucas’s early films, and was good enough to be asked by Martin Scorsese to cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Taxi Driver, and New York New York. In George’s conflicts with the studios and with Francis Coppola, she’d remained loyal, even when she didn’t share her husband’s obsession. Life with George was no picnic. The narrowness of his vision could be overpowering. ‘I heard this story,’ says Harley Cokeliss, second-unit director on The Empire Strikes Back, ‘that Marcia wanted a particular painting for her birthday. She dropped hints and dropped hints and dropped hints, until she was sure even George had got the message. On her birthday, he said, “I’ve got a nice surprise for you.” As Marcia looked around for her painting, George said, “I’m going to have the roof fixed.”’

John Milius was on the road, and wondering why he bothered. He and George went back longer than almost anyone. Before Star Wars, before American Graffiti and THX1138, back to 1963, when Lucas was a weedy, close-mouthed kid from upstate California, sitting through the same courses at the film school of the University of Southern California. In the famous malapropism of producer Samuel Goldwyn, they had all passed a lot of water since then – and, in Milius’s case, put on a lot of weight. Except that his beard was gray, George still looked the same. But then, he would probably look the same when another twenty years had passed.

Milius assumed that their oldest mutual friend Francis Coppola wouldn’t be at the cook-out. The excuse would be the standard one – he was on location on some film. But everyone knew that the two men were no longer close, and that, even though Coppola’s vineyards were only a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, George and he seldom saw one another. With Lucas, some rivalries never went away: ‘I bear grudges,’ he has said.

Coppola had led the move away from Los Angeles. His company American Zoetrope in San Francisco was meant to create a new Hollywood in Marin County. For a while after its collapse, Milius and the rest of the group half-believed that Lucas might pick up where Coppola left off. The mansion he and Marcia bought on Parkway in San Anselmo as headquarters for Lucasfilm might have been the beginning of an atelier, a collaborative film enterprise like Laterna, the Swedish studio-in-a-mansion which inspired Francis to found Zoetrope. But once Star Wars started earning, George bought the 1700-acre Bulltail Ranch. In 1979, he received planning permission to begin creating Skywalker.

The ranch, Lucas explained, would give him the freedom to make ‘my little films,’ abstract, experimental films that would ‘show emotions.’ Star Wars, he insisted, was only a means to an end. It would buy his way out of big-time cinema. He envisaged a ‘retreat [with] a rich Victorian character, [containing] film-research and special-effects facilities, art/writing rooms, screening rooms, film-editing areas, film libraries, a small guesthouse, and a recreation area complete with handball courts, tennis courts, and a swimming pool.’ His scheme would use only 5 percent of the land area, he said; the rest would remain agricultural.

But old friends like Gary Kurtz, Lucas’s one-time producer, watched with growing alarm as this vision metamorphosed into something closer to the private empire of Howard Hughes. ‘As the bureaucracy got bigger and bigger,’ says Kurtz, ‘George seemed to vacillate back and forth between wanting to control everything absolutely, make all the decisions himself, and being too busy to be bothered. He was busy working on his writing and other creative things, and he left his managers to deal with all that. Then he would come back in and want to be in control again, and that kept going back and forth a lot. Frustrating for a lot of people.’

That Lucas regarded the ranch as his monument became clear when, at the 1982 cook-out, a time capsule was ritually interred under the Main House, containing relics of what he hoped would become known as the Lucas Era. They included a microfilmed list of every member of the Star Wars Fan Club. He also called in Eric Westin, the designer of Disneyland, to manage the estate.

He hired helpers like Jane Bay. Once secretary to Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia pictures, and later assistant to Californian governor Jerry Brown, Bay was just the sort of management professional Lucas might have been expected to avoid. Shortly after, investment banker Charles Weber became president and chief operating officer of Lucasfilm. He imported studio veterans like Sidney Ganis as his deputies, driving out some of those who had been with Lucas through the long and painful gestation of Star Wars. Since then, Lucas had taken back control of the company, dispensing with Weber and appointing himself chairman of the board. ‘Critical observers feel, however,’ commented the Los Angeles Times tartly, ‘that if Lucas goes too far out of the Hollywood mainstream, he may end up chairman of the bored.’

These days, Lucas spent his days in a small house on the estate with his three adopted children, only visiting the Main House on semi-ceremonial occasions. Security at the ranch had increased. ‘The last thing we want,’ said Lucas in justification of the fencing and electronic surveillance, ‘is people driving up and down the road saying, “They made Star Wars here.”’ He hated being interviewed or photographed. ‘I am an ardent subscriber to the belief that people should own their own image,’ he said, ‘that you shouldn’t be allowed to take anybody’s picture without their permission. It’s not a matter of freedom of the press, because you can still write about people. You can still tell stories. It just means you can’t use their image, and if they want you to use their image, then they’ll give you permission.’

His public pronouncements had come to have overtones of the messianic. In 1981, breaking ground on the new USC Film School, to which he contributed $4.7 million, he lectured the audience on their moral shortcomings: ‘The influence of the Church, which used to be all-powerful, has been usurped by film. Films and television tell us the way we conduct our lives, what is right and wrong. There used to be a Ten Commandments that film had to follow, but now there are only a few remnants, like a hero doesn’t shoot anybody in the back. That makes it even more important that film-makers get exposed to the ethics of film.’

By 1 p.m., most of the guests had arrived and were assembled on the lawn in front of the Main House. At his first cook-out, in 1980, Lucas took the opportunity to hand bonuses to everyone who’d worked with him that year, down to the janitors. Actors and collaborators were given percentage points in his films, and he exchanged points with old friends like Steve Spielberg and John Milius. Overnight, actors like Sir Alec Guinness became millionaires.

There was nothing of that informality and generosity in the cook-out today. Replacing it was something closer to a royal garden party, or the rare personal appearance of a guru. Softly-spoken staff chivvied the guests into roped-off areas, leaving wide paths between.

‘George will be coming along these lanes,’ they explained. ‘You’ll have a good chance to see him. If you just move behind the ropes, and please stay in your designated area …’

Old friends exchanged significant glances; evidently George shunned physical contact as much as ever. Hollywood mythology also enshrines the moment when Marvin Davis, the ursine oilman who bought Twentieth Century-Fox in the eighties, met Lucas and, overcome with appreciation, picked him off his feet and hugged him. Lucas, it’s said, ‘turned red, white and blue.’

A moment after his acolytes had passed through the crowd, the host emerged onto the verandah of the Main House. Flanked by his trusted inner group, he moved to the top of the steps and stood expressionless just out of the early-afternoon sun.

It looked like the old George. Grayer, of course, and plumper, but still in the unvarying uniform of plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers, draped over the same short body.

John Milius was a connoisseur of excess. He had penned Colonel Kilgore’s speech ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like … victory,’ in Apocalypse Now; Robert Shaw’s reminiscence in Jaws of the USS Philadelphia going down off Guadalcanal, and the slaughter of its survivors by sharks; the bombast of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian.

‘I remember one time I was with Steven and Harrison Ford,’ Milius recalled. ‘These people were coming around and saying, “You can be in this line, and you’ll be able to see George if you’re over here,” and moving us around.’

On that occasion, Milius’s mind had flashed to other examples of the cult of personality. Preacher Jim Jones in Guyana, for instance, and those shuddering TV images of bloated bodies fanning out from the galvanized washtubs from which they’d dipped up their last drink of sugar water and strychnine. ‘If George gets up there and starts offering Kool Aid,’ Milius muttered to Ford and Spielberg, ‘I’m bailing out.’

They all laughed, but nobody else around them was smiling. They were all staring with an almost hungry intensity as the frail man in the plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers moved toward them.

2 Modesto

If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place that’s furthest from it.

Luke Skywalker, on Tatooine, his home planet, in Star Wars

There is no easy way into Modesto – nor, for that matter, any easy way out.

Most people approach from the south, up Interstate 5, toughing out the flat emptiness of the San Joaquin, the ‘long valley’ John Steinbeck made famous in his stories of rural life in the twenties and thirties. Then, as now, this was fruit and vegetable country, the kitchen garden of California. Orchards, geometric patches of dense, dark foliage, interlock with fields of low, anonymous greenery which only a farmer would recognize as hiding potatoes, beets, beans. Occasionally, some town raises a banner against mediocrity – ‘Castroville, Artichoke Capital of the World!’ – but the norm is self-effacement, reticence, reserve.

Zigzagging among the fields, a great irrigation canal, wide as a highway, delivers water from lakes set back in the hills. No boats move on its surface, no kids fish from the concrete banks, no families picnic on its gravelled margins. This water, fenced off from the fields and the highway behind chain link, isn’t for leisure but, like everything else here, for use.

Modesto sits on almost the same parallel of latitude as San Francisco, but there any similarity ends. Californian or not, this is a Kansas town set down twelve hundred miles west. Even more than for most places in California, the people here are relative newcomers, migrants from the midwest and the south who fled the dust storms of the twenties and the farm foreclosures that followed.

Laid out flat as a rug on a landscape without a hill to its name, Modesto’s sprawl of ranch-style homes and flat-roofed single-story business buildings is divided as geometrically as Kansas City by a grid of streets, in turn cut arbitrarily by railway tracks. Splintered wooden trestles spanning gullies choked with weeds and the rusted hulks of Chevies and Buicks indicate the high tide of rail in the forties, but traffic still idles patiently at level crossings while hundred-car freight trains clank by.

A garage or a used-car lot seems to occupy every second corner – in farm country, anyone without a car might as well be naked – but one sees almost none of the Cadillacs, Porsches, even Volkswagens common in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pick-ups, trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles predominate, many of them old but mostly well-tended. Cars here aren’t playthings or success symbols, but farm machinery.

In so flat a landscape, anything resembling a skyscraper looks like insane audacity. The town’s one modern hotel, the Red Lion, twenty stories tall and stark as a wheat silo, respects scale as little as a chair-leg planted in a model-train layout. Building the Red Lion broke Allen Grant, the overambitious Modesto businessman who financed it. Defaulting on his loans, he sold out to a chain. Locals recount this cautionary tale with implicit disapproval of his recklessness. In Modesto, it’s the horizontal man who’s respected, not the vertical one. If he wanted to erect something, why not a mall? When Grant used to race sports cars, his mechanic and co-driver was George Lucas.

Appropriately, Modesto’s monument to its most successful son barely lifts its head higher than George Lucas’s five feet six inches. At Five Points, where the narrow downtown streets coalesce into McHenry, a ribbon development of shopping malls and parking lots, a small wooded park next to an apartment block shelters two bronze figures. They loiter against the forequarter of a ’57 Chevy, they and the car both cast from metal with the color and buttery sheen of fudge sauce. Toffee-colored Jane perches on the fender, ankles crossed, absorbed in mahogany Dick who, earnestly turning towards her, describes his latest triumph on track or field – it’s implicit that nothing which happened in class could remotely interest this couple. What they most resemble is an image from the Star Wars trilogy: Han Solo, frozen in carbonite to provide a bas relief for the palace of Jabba the Hutt.

A slab of green marble set into the sidewalk and incised in gold footnotes the figures:

GEORGE LUCAS PLAZA

The movie remembrance of Modesto’s past, ‘American Graffiti,’ was created by the noted film-maker, George Lucas, a Modesto native and a member of the Thomas Downey High School Class of 1962. This bronze sculpture, created by Betty Salette, also entitled ‘American Graffiti,’ celebrates the genius of George Lucas and the youthful innocence and dreams of the 50s and 60s.

The ritual that inspired American Graffiti no longer takes place: large signs specifically indicate ‘No Cruising.’ In Lucas’s time, drivers circulated on Tenth and Eleventh Streets downtown, exploiting a one-way traffic system introduced by shopkeepers to facilitate business parking. Later, the Saturday-night paseo moved to McHenry, but it wasn’t the same. McDonald’s didn’t provide either telephones or public toilets, so cruisers congregated in the parking lots of shopping malls, fields of naked asphalt lit by towering lamp standards.

Without the sense of community it enjoyed downtown, cruising became a magnet for the area’s rowdies, especially on the second Saturday in June – high school graduation night. In 1988, Modesto’s city council belatedly caught up with its own bandwagon and formalized the June weekend bash as an American Graffiti festival. As many as 100,000 people converged on Modesto to line McHenry and watch the parade of ’32 Deuce Coupes and ’57 Chevies. Deejay Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, was master of ceremonies, an honor he enjoyed six more times, the last when he was Cruise Parade Marshal for the 1994 Graffiti USA Car Show and Street Festival. By then, night-time cruising had been banned after repeated problems with drinking and violence. The 1994 parade took place in mid-afternoon. Jack didn’t approve: ‘My favorite thing was the cruising and me being on the radio, and we don’t do that anymore,’ he said nostalgically. ‘Now they do it in the heat of the day with everyone roasting in their convertibles.’ He longed for the days ‘when the carbon monoxide was so thick you could hardly breathe.’

Meanwhile, Reno and Las Vegas, to the irritation of some Modestoans, launched what they called Hot August Nights, encouraging local owners of classic cars to cruise; and Roseburg, Oregon, launched an annual Graffiti Week. In Los Angeles, Wednesday night was Club Night on Van Nuys Boulevard, in the dormitory suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. After he made American Graffiti, Lucas enjoyed hanging out there. ‘It was just bumper to bumper. There must have been 100,000 kids down there,’ he said. ‘It was insane. I really loved it. I sat on my car hood all night and watched. The cars are all different now. Vans are the big thing. Everybody’s got a van, and you see all these weird decorated cars. Cruising is still a main thread in American culture.’ But by the late eighties, the Van Nuys ritual too had disappeared.

One isn’t surprised at Modesto banning the Cruise. Cruisers did not plant, nor cultivate, nor harvest. They were a plague, like locusts, and all the more loathed for being locally hatched. Most people in Modesto, if they were honest, would admit they were glad the gleaming cars, the horny guys and giggling girls, the throbbing exhausts and squealing tyres had moved on, taking their creator with them.

Future friends of Lucas like Steven Spielberg who, Angelenos to the heels of their fitted cowboy boots, joked about ‘Lucasland,’ which they visualized as a place of hot tubs, meditation, and marijuana, couldn’t imagine how little his birthplace resembled the satellite communities of San Francisco which furnished this fantasy. ‘Southern California ends at Carmel,’ any San Franciscan will tell you. ‘Once you get to Monterey, you’re in Northern California.’ And Modesto? ‘It’s neither. It’s the Valley.’ Their contempt is obvious, and Lucas shared it. When anyone in Los Angeles asked him where he came from, he said evasively, ‘Northern California.’

Nevertheless, the San Joaquin Valley put its stamp firmly on both Lucas and his films. Without the white upper-middle-class Methodist values he absorbed during his upbringing in this most complacent and righteous of regions, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones series, even the more eccentric THX1138, let alone American Graffiti, would have been very different. Indeed, they might not have existed at all, since Lucas, unlike the directors who joined him in building the New Hollywood in the sixties and seventies, is anything but a natural film-maker. Nothing in his character fits him to make films. The process irritates and bores him, even makes him physically ill.

Actors lament his failure to give them any guidance towards character. Harrison Ford, recalling the making of American Graffiti in Modesto, remembers staring for hours out of the windscreen of his car at the camera car towing it. ‘The cameraman, the sound man and the director could all sit in the trunk, and every time I looked at George, he was asleep.’ Cindy Williams, one of the film’s stars, was flattered when Lucas called her performance ‘Great! Terrific!’, until she found he said exactly the same thing to everyone.

It is easy to forget that Lucas, for all his fame and influence, has only directed four feature films in almost thirty years. Repeatedly he’s handed the job to others, supervising from the solitude of his home, controlling the shooting by proxy, as Hollywood studio producers of the forties did. As critic David Thomson remarks, ‘Lucas testifies to the principle that American films are produced, not directed.’

Martin Scorsese agrees that Lucas differs radically from both himself and others in New Hollywood, especially Spielberg. ‘Lucas became so powerful that he didn’t have to direct,’ he told Time magazine. ‘But directing is what Steven has to do.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I love the work the way Patton loved the stink of battle.’

Lucas has less in common with Scorsese and Spielberg than with a producer like Sam Goldwyn, who fed the public taste for escapist fantasy and noble sentiment forty years before him, with films like Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a young critic, the British director Lindsay Anderson met Goldwyn, and was impressed by his conviction that nobody knew better what his public wanted and needed. ‘Blessed with that divine confidence in the rightness (moral, aesthetic, commercial) of his own intuition,’ Goldwyn was, Anderson decided, one of the ‘lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears that it likes to weep.’ Today, the grandchildren of Goldwyn’s audience laugh at Chewbacca the wookiee, cry at the love of Princess Leia for Han Solo, feel their hearts throb in tune to John Williams’s brassy score for Star Wars.

‘He came from a very practical era,’ the supervisor of Stanislaus County said of George Lucas Sr when he died in 1991. ‘There was never a day that I didn’t see George hailing me over. He’d be gesturing with his hands and pointing, and everyone knew that George was on the warpath with the government.’

The Lucases arrived in central California from Arkansas in 1890, after having left Virginia a century before. Before that, the family history is shadowy. ‘Nobody knows where we originally came from,’ George Jr said later. ‘Obviously some criminal, or somebody who got thrown out of England or France.’ The remark wasn’t made out of embarrassment. In a sort of reverse snobbery, his father had taught him that it was better to trace your roots to Billy the Kid than to the Mayflower.

In 1889, Washington and Montana achieved statehood, and California, with its orchards blossoming, its fishing industry thriving and oil being pumped along its central coast, looked like the place to be. Just before World War I, Walton Lucas, an oilfield worker, settled in Laton, a grim little town south of Fresno, where his son George Walton Lucas was born in 1913. George Walton Sr, the film-maker’s father, never lost the wiry look of a frontiersman, nor the sense, reinforced by Methodism, that life and work were two sides of the same coin. ‘He was one of those people who, at the dinner table, always had little talks about those kind of things,’ his daughter Kate recalled. ‘He quoted a lot of Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true.” He said a lot of things like that.’

In 1928, when George Sr was fifteen, his father died of diabetes, a disease whose gene would skip a generation and pass to his grandson. His widow Maud moved into Fresno, shuffling her son from school to school while she looked for work, a commodity in short supply as America’s economy imploded in the worldwide slump. In 1929 they relocated sixty miles from Fresno, to Modesto, and George enrolled in Modesto High School with the idea of studying law. Already convinced by events that the Lord only helped those who helped themselves, he was a serious student, becoming class president in his senior year. His vice president, who also co-starred with him in the senior-class play, was pretty, dark but frail Dorothy Bomberger, daughter of Paul S. Bomberger, a wealthy local businessman who’d built his father’s property interests into a large corporation that also included a seed company and a car dealership. They married in 1933, the year Lucas graduated. He was twenty, Dorothy eighteen.

With a wife to support, Lucas abandoned any thought of a law degree and found work in an old established Modesto stationery store, Lee Brothers. Shortly afterwards, one of the biggest stationery stores in the state, H.S. Crocker in Fresno, offered him a job at $75 a week. The couple moved, but Dorothy missed her family, so they returned to Modesto. With Dorothy’s father in real estate and her uncle Amos in loans, there was no problem finding a place to live. Lucas and Dorothy moved into an apartment repossessed from a defaulting borrower.

Lucas went to work for LeRoy Morris, who owned the town’s oldest stationery supplier, the L.M. Morris Co. Morris had been in business since 1904, and his shop showed it: school supplies and office materials shared space with books, gifts, and toys. With no children of his own, Morris was on the lookout for someone to whom he could hand on the thriving business. Lucas Sr wasn’t backward in making it clear he was a candidate.

‘This is the next-to-last move I plan to make,’ he told his boss. ‘By the time I’m twenty-five, I hope to have my own store.’

‘That’s a very ambitious goal,’ Morris said mildly.

But the young man’s directness had impressed Morris. Two years later he sought out Lucas in the basement where he was shifting boxes, and asked, ‘Are you satisfied with me?’

When Lucas looked blank, Morris continued, ‘If you are, I’m satisfied with you. Do you think we could live together for the rest of our lives? You know, a partnership is like getting married – maybe harder in some ways.’

‘But I have no money,’ Lucas said.

Morris shrugged this off. ‘You’ll sign a note you owe me so much. This business is no good if it won’t pay it out.’

Lucas switched from earning wages to owning 10 per cent of L.M. Morris. His employer’s generosity reinforced his belief in patriarchy. When he had a son, he would put him into the family business too, and help him run it until he was ready to take over.

In 1934 the Lucases had their first child, Ann, and two years later Katherine, always called Kate. The pregnancies sapped Dorothy’s strength, triggering the ill-health that was to haunt the rest of her life, and looking after her two daughters placed a further strain on her frail constitution. Nevertheless, she encouraged her husband, accepting his decision to spend six days a week at the store, and helping with the book-keeping on Sundays. She even got pregnant again, though two miscarriages had convinced her doctors she should not have any more children. Confident of prosperity, Lucas bought a $500 lot on Ramona Avenue, a wide street on what was then the edge of town. With $5000 borrowed from Paul and Amos Bomberger, he built a single-story house at number 530. It was here that his only son, five-pound nine-ounce George Walton Jr, was brought home after his birth on 14 May 1944 – Mother’s Day.

3 An American Boy

I might be a toymaker if I weren’t a film-maker.

George Lucas to critic Joseph Gelmis, 1973

Ramona Avenue has changed little since 1944. Only two blocks long, and twice as wide as more modern streets, it illustrates the generosity of space with which town planners could indulge themselves in those days of unrestricted development. By comparison, its homes, all bungalows, appear cheap – though now, as in 1944, this corner of Modesto exudes prosperity. No sagging campers or rusting wrecks litter the front yards. Hedges are trimmed, flowerbeds weeded. There are few fences, and those that do exist are low enough to step over. In most cases, immaculate lawns run from the kerb right up to the front door, interrupted only by mimosas, four times taller than the houses, that turn the street into a permanent avenue of shade.

With a business and a family to run, George Sr didn’t go to war. Instead, ever the horizontal man, he deepened and widened his niche in Modesto. In shipbuilding, aircraft production, munitions manufacture, prefabricated housing, petrol and rubber production, food growing and canning, and, not least, film production, California led the rest of the Union. Both those wunderkinder of World War II’s construction industry, shipbuilding king Henry Kaiser and Howard Hughes, his aeronautical counterpart, operated from the state. ‘For tens of millions,’ writes social historian William Manchester, ‘the war boom was in fact a bonanza, a Depression dream come true.’

In 1945, when George Jr was eight months old, the Lucases’ fourth and last child, Wendy, was born. Two pregnancies so close together severely strained Dorothy’s health. She was never well again, and for the rest of George’s childhood the Lucas house, like Ramona Avenue itself, lived in shadow. Dorothy spent long periods in hospital, suffering from elusive internal disorders. Her doctors diagnosed pancreatitis, but later removed a large stomach tumor. Georgie and his sisters were brought up mostly by Mildred Shelley, known as ‘Till,’ a businesslike housekeeper who moved from Missouri to look after the family, and who became a fixture of the Lucas household.

George Lucas Sr did just as well in the post-war boom and the expansive business climate under Eisenhower as he had during the war. Like Ike, he became a devoted golfer; and he was a pillar of the local chamber of commerce and the Rotary, for both of which his father-in-law served as long-time president. The most doting of grandfathers, Paul Bomberger was around at Ramona Avenue most weekends with his 16mm camera, recording the progress of his three daughters and his diminutive grandson: watchful, silent, and tiny – only thirty-three pounds and three feet seven inches tall at six years of age – but with a reservoir of nervous energy which most of the family believed he inherited from his mother’s brother Robert, who was also short and feisty.

Georgie’s inquisitive look was accentuated by the Bombergers’ trademark protruding ears. His were so prominent that his father contemplated having the fault corrected surgically. Instead, the family doctor persuaded him to tape back the more protruding ear for a year. With childhood memories of lice infestation, George Sr insisted on having his son’s head shaved every summer. ‘It didn’t matter to us,’ says Lucas’s childhood friend John Plummer, ‘but George was humiliated.’ In his first feature, THX1138, Lucas would show a future repressive society in which everyone’s head is shaved.

When George was nine, the fiancé of his oldest sister Ann died in Korea, a loss which affected George deeply: lacking an older brother, he’d co-opted his future brother-in-law into that role. George also recalled a period of existential anguish when he was six. ‘It centered around God,’ he recalled. ‘What is God? But more than that, what is reality? What is this? It’s as if you reach a point and suddenly you say, “Wait a second, what is the world? What are we? What am I? How do I function in this, and what’s going on here?” It was very profound to me at the time.’ At least one other film-maker went through an almost identical crisis at the same age. Woody Allen’s parents recalled that, at age six, their son became ‘sour and depressed,’ setting the scene for his later films.

In 1949 Leroy Morris sold George Sr the rest of the business, retired, and died three days later. Immediately, Lucas moved the store to new premises on I Street, reopening as The Lucas Company. He began specializing in office machines, becoming the major supplier of calculators, copiers and office furniture to Modesto and nearby Stockton. Later he moved to Kansas Avenue as Lucas Business Systems, district agent for the 3M corporation and its products. In his first year of independence he grossed $30,000, a respectable sum for those days. He had built the sort of business any man would be proud to hand on to his son – if his son was interested.

George Jr was not interested, though for a while his father imagined he’d been born for a life of commerce. Georgie impressed everyone with his practical skills, his creativity, energy, seriousness, and persistence. His sisters remember him at two and a half studying workmen making repairs to the house, then finding a hammer and chisel and attacking a perfectly good wall. By the time he was ten, he showed a talent for construction: ‘I had a little shed out back with tools, and I’d build chess sets and dolls’ houses.’ A childhood friend, Janet Montgomery Deckard, says, ‘Georgie made an entire doll house out of a cardboard box for my Madame Alexander doll. The top was missing so you could look down into it. The walls were wallpapered and everything was in proportion to Madame Alexander.’ A quart milk carton became a sofa, which Lucas covered in blue-and-white chintz, and an old gold lipstick tube served as a lamp.

Lucas also built cars – ‘lots of race cars that we’d push around, like Soap Box Derby.’ With his friends John Plummer and George Frankenstein, he seized the opportunity of a new phone line being laid in the area to appropriate the giant wooden spool on which the cable was wound and, with a rickety runway and a home-made car, improvised a rollercoaster. Plummer, whose father knew people in construction, procured lumber and cement. Under George’s direction they created miniature fortifications and landscapes on which, using toy soldiers and vehicles from the Lucas Company, battles could be fought and refought.

A Lionel model-train set, the best in town, wound through the elaborately re-landscaped garden – a gift from the doting Dorothy. George always knew where to go for help with an ambitious scheme. ‘He never listened to me,’ said his father. ‘He was his mother’s pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it.’

With his friend Melvin Cellini, who lived on the next street, George created one of his most complex ‘environments.’ Atmospheric lighting and careful arrangement of props converted the Cellini garage into a haunted house. Kids paid to see it, and there were queues for the first couple of days. George had the idea of encouraging repeat visits by changing the effects periodically. ‘George always was gifted with creative talent and business sense,’ says Cellini. Through Cellini, Lucas also made his first film. Melvin had a movie camera, and they did a stop-motion film of plates stacking themselves up, then unstacking themselves – Lucas’s first experiment in special effects. He never forgot the wonder of it: ‘We were so excited, like a pair of aborigines with some new machine.’

Modesto in general wasn’t a reading town, but comic books were ubiquitous, fanned by the momentum of the war years, when color printing and the demand for propaganda had turned them into an international enthusiasm. John Plummer’s father had a friend who ran a news-stand. Once a month he returned unsold comic books for a refund, but since wholesalers were satisfied with the torn-off covers, the Lucas gang got the books themselves. Georgie’s collection of five hundred comics became the envy of the town, and rather than have drifts of Captain Marvel and Plastic Man litter the house, his father resignedly added shelves to his backyard shed to accommodate it. His sister rescued the comics when George tired of them. Years later, she re-presented them to him. They became the nucleus of a large and valuable collection.

The first TV sets filtered into Modesto in 1949, and the Plummers immediately bought one. Georgie begged his father to do the same, but Lucas refused to allow such a distraction into his house. The Lucases didn’t get their own set until 1954. In their home, as in America in general, radio remained the primary entertainment. Eighty-two per cent of people still tuned in every night. ‘We didn’t get a television set until I was ten years old,’ Lucas recalled. ‘So for the first ten years, I was in front of the radio listening to radio dramas. It played an important part in my life. I listened to Inner Sanctum, The Whistler, The Lone Ranger – those were the ones that interested me.’

But TV couldn’t be stopped. So many people wanted to see the Plummers’ set that Mr Plummer put it in the garage and built bleachers to hold the crowd. George and his friends gathered there to stare at the tiny, bulging, almost circular screen of the old brown bakelite Champion. There was only one station, KRON-TV from San Francisco. It broadcast mostly boxing and wrestling matches, with the occasional cartoon, but the idea of an image piped into one’s own home awed them; they would have watched the test pattern. Lucas went round religiously to the Plummers’ every night at six for Adventure Theater – a twenty-minute episode of an old serial, with a Crusader Rabbit cartoon. Among the serials was Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Lucas never forgot it. Once the Lucases got a set, George sat in front of it for hours, especially during the Saturday-morning cartoon programs, with his black cat Dinky curled round his neck.

Lucas has often cited his early experience of television, but is more reticent about movie-going. ‘Movies had extremely little effect on me when I was growing up,’ he has said. ‘I hardly ever went, and when I did it was to meet girls. Television had a much larger effect.’

In 1955, George made the newspapers for the first time. The Modesto Bee reported that he and Melvin Cellini had launched a kids’ newspaper, the Daily Bugle. Cellini saw the idea on TV and co-opted his friend as star reporter, for reasons not unconnected with the family business: George Sr typed the paper’s wax stencils and ran them off on his office duplicator, though he insisted the kids paid for supplies from their profits.

In August 1955 they published their first daily one-sheet issue, printing two hundred copies. ‘You will get your paper free for two weeks,’ it announced, ‘but then it will cost 1 cent. Papers will be given out Monday to Friday. But this Friday it won’t be out because the press broke down.’ Even with George Lucas as reporter, however, the Daily Bugle didn’t flourish. Although the paper was padded out with jokes and riddles, they had trouble filling its pages with events around Modesto. George’s father had flown the family to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland, which opened in July 1955, and George described a different attraction in each issue, but by the second week even this resource was exhausted. ‘The Daily Bugle stops,’ announced their issue of 10 August. ‘The Weekly Bugle will be put out on Wednesday only. There is the same news.’

That the Bugle went out of business so soon is the oddest thing about it, since everyone who knew Lucas as a child agrees that his persistence and tenacity were prodigious. Once launched on a project, he would follow it through to the end. At eleven, given the job of mowing the lawn once a week to earn his pocket money, he saved his allowance until he had $35, borrowed a further $25 from his mother, and bought a power mower to lighten his task. His father, not recognizing the stringy resilience of his own father and grandfather in his son, was furious. Pushing the old mower round the yard every weekend was a valuable discipline. Getting through the job quickly with a power mower demeaned the lesson.

One could imagine Lucas devoting the same energy to the Bugle as to lawnmowing: hiring kids as reporters and vendors, making the paper a paying proposition, and ending up a professional publisher at fifteen. Though a team player, he would often in later life begin working with some charismatic and forceful individual, then gravitate to leadership, and finally supplant his mentor. Some people have suggested that this was his response to the lack of a sympathetic father, but Lucas’s explanation is more pragmatic: ‘That’s one of the ways of learning. You attach yourself to somebody older and wiser than you, learn everything they have to teach, and move on to your own accomplishments.’ He needed to be both part of a group and in charge of it; otherwise, he lost interest. In childhood, as in adulthood, Lucas belonged with the entrepreneurs who defined ‘teamwork’ as ‘a lot of people doing what I say.’

4 Cars

I love things that are fast. That’s what moved me toward editing rather than photography. Pictures that move – that’s what got me where I am.

George Lucas, Los Angeles Times magazine, 2 February 1997

George Lucas at fourteen, in 1958, was not much different to George Lucas forty years later. He had already, at five feet six inches, reached his full height. High-school class photographers habitually stuck him in the front row, where even classmates of average height loomed over him. The clothes his mother bought for him – jeans, sneakers, green polyester sweaters, open-necked blue-and-red-checked shirts with pearl buttons – would become a lifelong uniform.

By then, Lucas had discovered rock and roll. That was by no means typical. In the hit parade of 1958, ballads like ‘It’s All in the Game,’ ‘All I Have to do is Dream,’ and ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ far outnumbered Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ But Lucas raced home to spend hours playing Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, the Platters, the Five Satins. An autographed photo of Elvis adorned his wall. He adopted the personal style that went with rock. His hair grew longer, but no amount of Dixie Pomade could plaster its natural curl into the classic Elvis pompadour. His compromise – undulating waves at front and side, slicked down on top – only called to mind the Dick Tracy villain Flattop.

Lucas’s mood was unsure and often depressed: ‘I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant. It was just … frightening. I remember that I was unhappy a lot of the time. Not really unhappy – I enjoyed my childhood. But I guess all kids, from their point of view, feel depressed and intimidated. Although I had a great time, my strongest impression was that I was always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.’ In short, he shared the fears and anxieties of every imaginative child, but did not suffer the traumas associated with the break-up of his family or the loss of a loved one – emotional disturbances experienced by many of the people with who he would later work. Steven Spielberg’s parents were divorced; Paul Schrader’s Calvinist family forbade most secular diversions, including the cinema.

Thomas Downey High was the more modern of Modesto’s two high schools. With its echt-Californian frontage in modified fifties art deco, set well back from the road in wide playing fields, it was an agreeable place to spend one’s time; but Lucas took no pleasure in it. ‘I was never very good in school,’ he says, ‘so I was never very enthusiastic about it. One of the big problems I had, more than anything else, was that I always wanted to learn something other than what I was being taught. I was bored. I wanted to enjoy school in the worst way and I never could. I would have been much better off if I could have skipped [the standard curriculum]. I would have learned to read eventually – the same with writing. You pick that stuff up because you have to. I think it’s a waste of time to spend a lot of energy trying to beat education into somebody’s head. They’re never going to get it unless they want to get it.’

His sister Wendy would get up at 5 a.m. and go through Lucas’s English homework, correcting the spelling, but she couldn’t be there to help in the classroom. Another Modestan who graduated from Downey a few years after Lucas remembered the battery of tests inflicted by the teachers:

Some liked ‘big’ comprehensive tell-me-everything-you’ve-learned-this-semester tests, and others preferred exams that covered materials since the previous exam in the class. Some classes had quizzes on a weekly or intermittent basis. Others would have weekly or twice/thrice weekly assignments (essays, math homework, book reviews, stuff for art portfolios, language assignments) that would be more cumulative, requiring fewer exams for the teacher to evaluate your progress. I suspect, if George Lucas had a D average, he was constantly late on a lot of assignments and papers […] Either that, or he didn’t ‘buckle down’ and learn. Or he had/has an undiagnosed learning disability that made it difficult for him to complete the assignments, irregardless of his intelligence.

Lucas’s one aptitude was art. At home, he drew elaborate panoramas, and labored over hand-crafted greeting cards. ‘I had a strong interest even in high school in going to art school and becoming an illustrator,’ he says, ‘but my father was very much against it. Said I could do it if I wanted to, but he wasn’t going to pay for it. I could do it on my own.’ Teachers were no more encouraging. Schoolmate Wayne Anderson remembers the art teacher snapping, ‘Oh, George, get serious,’ when she found he’d ignored the subject assigned and had instead sketched a pair of armored space soldiers.

When he was fifteen, George’s life underwent a fundamental disturbance. Modesto was spreading as fruit-growers sold their orchards for building lots, and planted less fragile and labor-intensive crops. In 1959, George Sr bought thirteen acres under walnut trees at 821 Sylvan Road, on the outskirts of town, and moved his family into a ranch house on the property. George loathed his new home, which cut him off from all his friends. Until he could get his driver’s license and, more important, a car, he was a prisoner. When school ended each afternoon at 3 p.m., he rode his bike or took the school bus home, went straight to his room and spent the hours before dinner reading comics and playing rock’n’roll. Emerging, he’d eat in silence, watching the family’s Admiral TV, which, fashionably for the time, sat on a revolving ‘Lazy Susan’ mount that swivelled through 360 degrees. After that, it was back to his room again. Hoping to revive his son’s interest in construction, Lucas Sr designed a large box, with a glass top and front, in which he could continue to create his imaginary battlefields. He gave him a 35mm camera for his birthday, and turned the house’s second bathroom into a dark room. But while George fitfully pursued these enthusiasms, his heart was no longer in them. He was fifteen – in America, the age when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of wheels.

When America went to war, the car industry was one of the first to be militarized. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. By February 1942, every automotive assembly line in America had been turned over to tanks. The government impounded any cars Detroit had in stock, and doled them out to the military and to people in protected occupations. By 1945, the supply of new cars was down to thirty thousand – three days’ worth by 1939 rates of sale. The shortage didn’t ease for five years, when the government permitted the importation of a few vehicles from Europe, almost entirely luxury cars like the Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, or Bentley, or, at the other end of the market, the Volkswagen and the Fiat Innocenti and the Autobianchi – the kind of ‘toy’ cars with which Detroit, still committed to the gas-guzzler, refused to soil its hands. (Curt Henderson in American Graffiti drives a clapped-out Citroën Deux Chevaux.) The occasional independent, like Preston Tucker, who tried to build and sell cars in competition with Detroit was ruthlessly put down.

‘If you didn’t have a car back then,’ says Modestan Marty Reiss, ‘basically you didn’t exist.’ Lucas agrees: ‘In the sixties, the social structure in high school was so strict it didn’t really lend itself to meeting new people. You had the football crowd and the government crowd and the society-country-club crowd, and the hoods that hung out over at the hamburger stand. You were in a crowd and that was it. You couldn’t go up and you couldn’t go down. But on the streets it was everyone for himself, and cars became a way of structuring the situation.’

If a kid couldn’t afford a VW or Fiat, he grabbed what he could, and adapted it. Four years of tinkering, repairing and making-do, added to the repair skills expected of kids who often needed to service farm machinery, had turned farm boys into fair auto mechanics. Prewar Detroit made its cars as simply as possible, to standardize spare parts. Two rusting wrecks might be cobbled together into one vehicle. During the war, undertakers could still buy hearses. Ranchers usually got a station wagon, farmers a pick-up. All were ingeniously adapted in the late forties and early fifties.

Surfers liked the long vehicles, ideal for carrying boards, but kids looking for something hot sought out the 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe and the ’47 Chevrolet, which they ‘chopped’ – lowering the roof as close to the hoodline as possible – and ‘channelled’ – dropping the body down between the wheels. Playing with the suspension could make the car look nose- or tail-heavy, or simply close to the ground in general: the ‘low rider’ look that signalled a driver looking for trouble. (In American Graffiti, John Milner reassures a cop that his front end is the regulation 12½ inches above the road.) Fitted with an engine souvenired from some much heavier car, with a ground-scraping new suspension, the low roofline giving the divided windscreen the look of threatening slit eyes, all the chrome stripped off, door handles removed, only the legal minimum of lights retained, and the whole thing repainted yellow, with flames down both sides, Grandpa’s 1932 Ford became that most ominous of post-war cultural artefacts, the hot-rod.

One end of the post-war car world was represented by customizers like George Barris, who turned Cadillacs into lavish display vehicles for Hollywood stars, with lashings of chrome, iridescent and multiple-layered lacquer finishes, and whorehouse interiors upholstered in animal skin, velvet or fur. At the other extreme was Junior Johnson, a North Carolina country boy who dominated the dirt-track circuits of the rural South, winning such a reputation that Detroit and the tire and gas companies began investing in the burgeoning worlds of stock cars and hot-rods.

Long, straight country roads offered the perfect laboratory for testing and perfecting often bizarrely adapted vehicles. The mythology of cars flourished particularly in predominantly white Northern California. Black musicians seldom sang about cars, but white ‘surfer’ groups like Jan and Dean and, particularly, the Beach Boys made them a staple. The latter’s ‘Little Deuce Coupe,’ ‘Shut Down’ and ‘409’ – named for the cubic-inch displacement of a Chevrolet engine – were major hits.

All over Stanislaus County, kids worked on their cars through the week and, on Saturdays, brought them to downtown Modesto, where they took advantage of the one-way system imposed by merchants to make a leisurely tour d’honneur along Tenth Street, across one block, down Eleventh and onto Tenth again.

Lucas said later, ‘When I was ten years old, I wanted to drive in Le Mans and Monte Carlo and Indianapolis,’ but his real interest in cars actually began when he was around fifteen, and became a ruling passion. On any Saturday from 1959 onwards, you could have found him on Tenth Street from around four in the afternoon to well after midnight.

Cruising in Modesto had a lot to do with sex, but, though Lucas claimed he lost his virginity in the back of a car with a girl from Modesto High, the tougher and more sexually active of the town’s two high schools, nobody has ever admitted to being his girl. John Plummer recognizes a lot of Lucas in the inept teenager played by Charles Martin Smith in American Graffiti: ‘There’s so much of George in Terry the Toad it’s unbelievable. The botching of events in terms of his life, his social ineptness in terms of dealing with women.’ His mother said, ‘George always wanted to have a blonde girl friend, but he never did quite find her.’ In Graffiti, Terry, who normally bumbles around on a Vespa scooter, inherits the car of his friend Steve Bolander when Steve goes off to college, and immediately snags Debbie (Candy Clark), the most bubble-headed blonde anyone could desire.

As cruising petered out in the early hours, more aggressive drivers peeled off and headed to the long, straight roads on the edge of town, where they could prove just whose car was the fastest. A mythology grew up around these dawn races, which Lucas celebrated in American Graffiti. In the film, they take place on Paradise Road – a real Modesto thoroughfare, but too twisty, locals agree, for racing. Dragsters preferred Mariposa Drive, Blue Gum Avenue, or, best of all, Rose Lane, where painted lines marked out a measured quarter-mile. The film showed drivers gambling their registration papers – ‘pink slips’ – though this was almost unknown: even a $20 side bet was daring. Most kids didn’t own the cars anyway: ‘You’re racing your daddy’s car tonight,’ was a favorite gibe – used by Harrison Ford as Bob Falfa in American Graffiti when he challenges John Milner. If parents bought a second car for their kids, they normally retained title. Most kids simply cruised in the family Chevy or Ford, the automatic transmissions of which they wrecked in a few months by intemperate ‘peeling out’ at high speed from the kerb, or by racing.

The bad boys of the car culture were the gangs. Modesto already had a hot-car club, the Century Toppers, which went back to 1947 and was led by Gene Wilder, later a prominent professional customizer. A car modelled on his chopped Mercury, the roof so low that the windscreen is barely a slit, features in American Graffiti, but Lucas preferred to confer immortality on a later and raunchier gang, the Faros, archetypal juvenile delinquents who hung out at a burger joint called the Round Table.

In American Graffiti, the Pharaos (sic) and their slow-talking, gum-chewing leader Joe, played by gangling Bo Hopkins, are every mother’s nightmare, in glitzy satin jackets and skin-tight jeans. They kidnap Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and put him through an initiation rite that involves hooking a chain to a police car and ripping out its back axle.

Surviving Faros reject this characterization, and deny charges that they instigated fist-fights or poured gasoline onto roads and set it afire. ‘We never got in trouble,’ insists Ted Tedesco, one of three brothers, all foundation members of the Faros when the gang formed in 1959. To hear the Tedescos and other ex-members like Marty Reiss tell it, the Faros were just decent kids high on the car culture. ‘I don’t think more than five people smoked cigarettes,’ says Reiss. ‘Nobody was on drugs. Any obscenity, including “Hell” and “Damn,” was punished by a swat from the club paddle, as was spinning your tires within two blocks of the clubhouse.’ They’re silent, however, about Lucas’s accusation that though he was never a member, they used him as a stooge, sending him in to enrage other gangs who, when they chased the pint-sized troublemaker down an alley, found themselves facing the Faros armed with bike chains.

Lucas was right, they agree, about initiations, but they deny ever having done anything as drastic as trashing a police prowler. (Lucas insisted ‘some friends’ did try this trick one Halloween, but without the film’s spectacular result: ‘The car just sort of went clunk, and it was really very undramatic.’) The worst a potential member might endure was being rolled through a supermarket on a trolley, dressed only in a diaper, or being blindfolded and forced to eat dogfood, or a live goldfish – and even then, they insist, the fish was replaced by a piece of peach. ‘That was the big, tough club,’ says Reiss, now a respectable local businessman, like most other members. The Faros’ last president, Marty Jackman, even became the local representative of the Sierra Club.

As a teenager, Lucas wanted to join the Faros, or at least win their acceptance. He let his hair grow even longer, fitted silver toecaps to his pointed boots, and wore black Levi’s that remained unwashed for weeks at a time. Nagging his parents finally got him a car, a tiny Autobianchi, nicknamed, when Fiat bought up the company, the Bianchina. It had a two-cylinder engine, hardly more powerful than a motorbike, and with an appalling clatter. Even then, there was a trade-off: George would become the delivery boy of his father’s business.

Lucas was grateful and resentful at the same time. He had a car, but it was barely a car. It had ‘a sewing machine motor in it. It was a dumb little car. What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter.’ Some of his humiliation would pass to Terry the Toad in American Graffiti, forced to bumble about on a Vespa. The deal with his father to work at the store didn’t last long. George was expected to haul large, heavy boxes of paper in the summer heat, then sweep up the store, clean the toilets, and lock up. After a few weeks he had a blazing fight with his father, who fired him and offered the job to George Frankenstein. ‘The damn kid won’t even work for me,’ he told Frankenstein, ‘after I’ve built this business for him.’ Privately, he called his son ‘a scrawny little devil.’ Lucas later said of American Graffiti: ‘In a way, the film was made so my father won’t think those were wasted years. I can say I was doing research, though I didn’t know it at the time.’

Still a few months shy of the date on which he could get his license, Lucas could only drive on the family ranch. Once, trying to make the Bianchina behave like a high-powered rod, he swung its back end into a walnut tree. He got his license after one failure, for forgetting traffic rules, but promptly drove the Fiat so fast that he rolled it at seventy miles an hour going round a bend.

Lucas had the car towed forlornly to Modesto’s Foreign Car Service. Fortunately, his friend John Plummer worked there. Also into cars, he’d rescued and restored an old MG, and offered to help George fix up his Fiat. For weeks, the two boys worked side by side in the garage, which was also the local Renault dealership. After hours, they turned the Fiat into at least an approximation of a lean, mean machine. They cut away the mashed roof entirely, fitted a new low windscreen, and a rollbar. They souped up the engine and put in a silencer, the ominous growl of which belied the feebleness of the motor. Better shock absorbers improved the suspension and minimized the chance of another roll, and Lucas also installed extra-wide professional seat-belts. The Fiat, never very attractive, now looked ungainly and foreshortened – a ‘weird little car,’ in the words of one friend – but George loved it. He had wheels at last, and he was ready to roll.

He began to explore the pleasures of driving fast. He and Plummer raced on an old go-kart track behind the garage. Plummer inclined to heftiness, but George was light, like the Fiat. He found he could take turns faster than larger cars and still not spin out, which made up for his lack of speed on the straightaways. The experience was exhilarating: ‘The engine, the noise, being able to peel rubber through all four gears with three shifts, the speed. It was the thrill of doing something really well. When you drift through a corner and come up at just the right time, and shift down – there’s something special about it. It’s like running a very good race. You’re all there, and everything is working.’

What wasn’t working was everything else. George’s camera lay unused, the environment box his father built him was discarded. His schoolwork limped along at a D+ average, barely high enough to graduate. Worst of all from the perspective of George Sr, he showed no inclination to take over the Lucas Company. ‘I was a hellraiser,’ Lucas conceded. ‘My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. My parents – not my mother: mothers never write off their sons – but my father wrote me off.’ He overstates the case, but not by much. Even when George began his film career, his father was pessimistic. ‘He kept telling me he wanted his son to go into his business,’ recalled a friend, Modesto city councilman Frank Muratore, ‘and didn’t think he would do very well in movies. I recall how sad George [Sr] was about that.’ George Sr confessed later, ‘Frankly, we just didn’t understand George. I’d try to get my point across and he’d just sit there and look at me. I’d just run out of breath. He wouldn’t pay any attention.’

At sixteen, the gap between Lucas and his father seemed an abyss, but over the next twenty years George would become more and more recognizable as the son of a small-town Methodist businessman. ‘It’s sort of ironic,’ he muses about his father, ‘because I swore when I was a kid I’d never do what he did. At eighteen, we had this big break, when he wanted me to go into the business and I refused, and I told him, “There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars … and two, that I will never be president of a company.” I guess I got outwitted.’

Almost as soon as he won his license, George started getting traffic tickets. For the police, hot-rodders were anathema, and trapping them something between a sacred calling and a sport. Most of the local cops were young themselves, had grown up with the low-riders and hot-rodders, and envied their lawless opposite numbers. In More American Graffiti, Lucas brings back Bob Falfa, the rodder defeated by John Milner in the first film, as a California Highway Patrol cop on a motorcycle, booking the people who used to be his rivals. Called into traffic court, Lucas went with his father, who insisted his son get a haircut and wear a suit – the only time anyone ever saw George in collar and tie. Business clothing became the symbol of everything his generation despised: functionaries of all sorts came to be dismissively called ‘suits.’

The car culture thrust Lucas into a new, pragmatic world. All that counted were your skills, your capacity for action. Life wasn’t for reflection: it was for use, like the landscape around Modesto. ‘George has this idea about a used universe,’ says sound engineer Randy Thom. ‘He wanted things in his films to look like they’ve been worn down, rusted, knocked about. He didn’t want things to look brand new.’

It’s not hard to trace this vision to those days in 1960 and 1961 when Lucas kicked around the world of Northern Californian car racing. Plenty of fairgrounds had installed raceways. They staged demolition derbies on weekends, preceded by auto-cross – racing sports and stock cars against the clock. Like hot-rodding, auto-cross was a first step into the pro world of the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR), or Class C sports car competition. Detroit was already taking an interest in what happened at circuits in Stockton, Goleta, Willow Springs, Cotati, and Laguna Seca, just outside Monterey. New tires, new fuels, new engines could be tested to destruction by these rural daredevils, some of whom might make it to the sponsored big time, as had Junior Johnson and Freddie Lorenzen, backed by Chevrolet, Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear. Lucas delved into this world in More American Graffiti, where John Milner, having made his reputation as a hot-rodder, tries to break into big-time drag racing, with its professional teams sponsored by big automotive companies.

The Bianchina was a toy in the high-powered world of auto-cross, but even if Lucas had had a better car, Californian law forbade anyone to race until they were twenty-one. Always the team player, he attached himself to a winner and insinuated himself into his group until he made himself indispensable, much as he would do with Francis Coppola a few years later.

The winner in this case was Allen Grant, a coming sports-car driver whom Lucas met at Laguna Seca. Four years older than Lucas, he had graduated from Downey in 1958 with grades almost as poor as Lucas’s. Now he drove a dazzling Ford Mustang Cobra and was attracting attention from big sponsors. Good-looking, well connected, successful with women, Grant had already embarked on a business career which would make him, for a while anyway, one of the richest entrepreneurs in Northern California.

Grant offered a potent role model. Lucas became his mechanic, and a conveniently light co-driver. He also joined the Ecurie AWOL Sports Car Competition Club, and began editing its newsletter, BS. His drawings of sports cars and caricatures of drivers appeared in BS, and he sold or gave the originals to his friends, including Grant. Through Grant, Lucas began to sense that another life existed outside Modesto; but he wasn’t sure how to exploit this knowledge. He was well into his last year at high school, but didn’t delude himself that his grades would get him into junior college, let alone either of California’s two main universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with its main campus in Westwood, a luxury suburb of Los Angeles, or the University of Southern California (USC), situated in a funkier corner of the city, on the edge of the old downtown area. UCLA, the official state college, required no tuition fees, but its academic requirements were high. USC had lower requirements, but demanded fees.

Lucas and John Plummer pored over college prospectuses. ‘We wanted a school,’ says Plummer, ‘that didn’t have a lot of requirements in math or anything else, but that would let us go into more of the creative side.’ If they didn’t find one, they had more or less decided to go to Europe together, though with Dorothy Lucas in hospital again and three other children to put through school, George Sr showed no inclination to fund such a trip. Nor could he countenance his son going to study in Los Angeles, which he ridiculed as ‘Sin City.’

George persisted. Of the two universities, USC looked the more promising. It even offered a film course, one of the first in the country. ‘In those days, film school wasn’t like it is now,’ says Willard Huyck, the screenwriter who would graduate from USC and, with his wife and writing partner Gloria Katz, script American Graffiti. ‘Nobody knew about it, and they sort of stood outside the door of film school and grabbed you as you walked by, and asked if you’d like to become a film major.’

The USC course included animation and photography, and Lucas wondered if he could bluff his way in with a portfolio of drawings and his skill with a 35mm camera. First, however, he had to graduate from Downey – and with a D average, that was anything but assured. School ‘commencement,’ the end of the academic year, was on a Friday in the middle of June. As the day approached, he still had three ‘incompletes,’ and unless he delivered the papers necessary to finish the coursework, he could fail to graduate.

These things were on his mind when, on a hot Tuesday, 12 June 1962, he drove the Bianchina out of the gate of the walnut ranch and headed for town. His mother was resting, having just returned from another spell in hospital, weak and emaciated: she and her son now both weighed the same, eighty pounds. He’d tried to persuade his sister Wendy to come to the library with him, as she often had before, to help with his spelling and sentence structure, but she preferred to stay by the pool and keep an eye on her mother.

George spent a few hours at the library, but did little work. He would always hate writing, and on a hot day like this, he hated it more than usual. At around 4.30 p.m. he left, and roared the little Fiat back along the road home. He arrived outside his home at 4.50, and swung the car to the left to enter the dirt track leading to the house. He never saw the Chevrolet Impala driven by seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, a classmate from Downey, coming up fast behind him. It tried to overtake just as Lucas swung across the road. The heavier Chevy slammed into the side of the Fiat, level with the driver’s seat, and sent it bounding like a toy. On the third roll, Lucas’s seatbelt snapped and he was thrown clear, flying high into the air before landing with stunning force on his chest and stomach. The car bounced twice more, showering dust and pebbles of safety glass, crashed into a walnut tree at sixty miles an hour, and stuck there, wrapped around the trunk. So great was the impact that the tree, roots and all, shifted two feet.

5 Where Were You in ’62?

I should have been killed, but I wasn’t. I’m living on borrowed time.

Lucas on his accident

Lucas’s survival was miraculous. Had the seatbelt not snapped, had he not been thrown clear, had he landed on his head rather than his chest, he would almost certainly have died in the road in front of his own home.

Nobody inside the Lucas house heard the crash. Their neighbor opposite, Shorty Coleman, bolted out, saw him lying unconscious, face bloody, and rang immediately for an ambulance. With the hospital only five miles away, it arrived quickly. As Lucas was loaded in, he began to turn blue with cyanosis, and on the trip to the hospital he started vomiting blood.

At the hospital, the doctor on duty, Paul Carlsen, gave him a blood transfusion and inserted four needles into his stomach to check for the internal bleeding that would indicate ruptured organs. George Sr was telephoned, and he raced to the hospital, then home to collect Wendy and his wife. When they arrived at George’s bedside, they found him connected to oxygen and transfusion tubes, his forehead bandaged, his face ashen. ‘Mom, did I do something wrong?’ he muttered, half unconscious. Dorothy wept, and had to be led from the room. George Sr prayed. Wendy just stared at her brother, and wondered what would have happened had she gone to the library with him. From the look of the car, she would probably have been dead.

A photographer from the Modesto Bee took a spectacular photograph of the mangled Fiat, which the paper used on the front page next day, under the heading ‘Youth Survives Crash.’ ‘Just what part in saving his life the rollbar and a safety belt played is not known but George W. Lucas Jr survived this crash yesterday,’ said the Bee. Later, the circumstances of the accident would be subtly manipulated by the Lucas machine to shift any blame from him. A 1994 book authorized by Lucasfilm describes Ferreira as ‘driving behind him at eighty to ninety miles an hour’ – a charge not supported by the record – and ‘with his headlights off – hardly a crime at 4.50 p.m. on a summer afternoon. The local police were in no doubt about who was to blame. While he was still in hospital, they gave Lucas a ticket for making an illegal left turn.

The same book magnifies the extent of Lucas’s injuries, describing him as ‘without a pulse, his lungs collapsed and numerous bones crushed.’ In fact, to the surprise of Carlsen and the other medical staff, they proved less severe than they looked. Despite the gash on his forehead and the bruises on his shoulders, he had only two minor fractures, and his liver, spleen, and kidneys were intact, though bruised. The worst damage was to his chest, which had absorbed most of the force. X-rays revealed hematomas on his lungs, which were hemorrhaging. But that could be dealt with. The doctors injected anti-inflammatory drugs, and George, who was in good health generally, started to recover.

Paradoxically, his accident won him the high-school graduation which had been in doubt. On Friday, the day of commencement, someone from the school brought his diploma to the hospital, his failure to make up his courses conveniently forgotten.

Lucas was too dazed to relish his good fortune. If anyone were to ask him the question posed by the publicity for American Graffiti, ‘Where Were You in ’62?’, he would have replied, ‘In bed.’ Most of his summer was spent convalescing, and the legend has grown up of his Pauline conversion during this period to hard work, ambition, and the life of the mind.

It may even be partly true. A lot was happening in the world, and with leisure to contemplate it, Lucas may have seen his life in a new light. During 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in October, John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev over the missiles he’d sneaked into Cuba; America exploded a nuclear device over Johnston Island in the Pacific; Polaroid launched a new one-minute color film; and the first Titan inter-continental ballistic missile was installed in a concrete silo in the American heartland, targeted on Russia.

Lucas couldn’t get out to see the summer’s biggest movies, some of them destined to be among his favorites, like the first James Bond film, Dr No, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; but he watched plenty of television, none of it very significant. That year’s Emmys chose the thoughtful legal series The Defenders as the best show of 1961, but the networks, eyes ever on the ratings, premiered nothing as interesting in 1962, which saw the debut of The Beverly Hillbillies, the World War II series Combat, animated science fiction from Hanna-Barbera in The Jetsons, and the mindless comedy McHale’s Navy. The Tonight Show also got a new host, Johnny Carson.

It was a big year for dance music. The Twist was hot – Chubby Checker seemed to be on every TV pop programme – followed by Joey Dee and the Starliters doing ‘Peppermint Twist.’ Fads like the Limbo Rock, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi and the Lo-co-motion were sent up in ‘The Monster Mash’ by the Crypt Kickers, with Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, imitating the sepulchral tones of Karloff.

What caught Lucas’s ear, however, was a new presence on the air, from an unexpected source – Mexico.

Robert Weston Smith was born in Brooklyn in 1938. His resonant voice and interest in music made him a natural for radio, and by 1962 he was a disc jockey on KCIJ-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, where as ‘Big Smith with the Records’ he gained a following among admirers of rhythm and blues. In Shreveport, Smith began developing a fictional character for himself, one which would exploit a certain furtive quality in his voice, and his flair for the outrageous. He took his idea to XERF-FM in Del Rio, Texas. Most of the station’s clients were preachers, who paid generously for the right to broadcast their message all over the US via its massive 250,000-watt transmitter – five times the power allowed for stations within the US – sited just over the Mexican border.

Smith convinced XERF that he could win just as many listeners in the late-night and early-morning hours with rhythm and blues and bluegrass music. His sponsors were the same preachers who dominated the daylight hours. Smith’s throaty musical introductions, occasional lycanthropic howls, yelps of ‘Mercy!’ and exhortations to ‘Get yo’self nekkid!’ interspersed with commercials for plastic effigies of Jesus, sanctified prayer handkerchiefs, and the collected sermons of his holy-rolling backers, soon became a feature of the American soundscape, and ‘Wolfman Jack,’ as Smith now called himself, an institution.

Lucas became a fan. Later, he would remark that, ‘People have a relationship with a deejay whom they’ve never seen but to whom they feel very close because they’re with him every day. For a lot of kids, he’s the only friend they’ve got.’

While he lay in bed listening to the Wolfman, Lucas contemplated his future.

There were plenty of alternatives. As he recovered, his father pressed the point that if there was a time for his son to go into the family business, this was surely it. George responded with the stubbornness which his father must have recognized, since it reflected his own. Lucas Sr saw that money bought power and freedom. So did his son. He believed in a hard day’s work for a fair salary. So did his son. He saw discipline, self-control, and self-reliance as the core of good character. So did his son. Lucas Jr rejected his father’s values in adolescence, but spent the next years attaching himself to surrogate fathers who would tell him the same things: work hard, make money, and use it to buy independence.

With his car wrecked and no chance of financing another, Lucas’s racing days were at an end, unless he took a job as a mechanic servicing someone else’s ride. On the plus side, he had, against the odds, graduated from high school; though this had its negative aspects too, since he now became eligible to be drafted. At the end of American Graffiti, Terry the Toad, the character with whom Lucas is most identified, goes to Vietnam, where he is listed as missing in action – a fate explained in ironic detail in More American Graffiti.

Vietnam posed a potent threat to teenagers like Lucas in 1962. Many, including his future partner Gary Kurtz, served their stint. Some were judged too unhealthy for the army, as Lucas would be, though he didn’t yet know it. Others found a way around it. Steven Spielberg would have been happy to hang out in San Jose, California after his high-school graduation (with grades as poor as Lucas’s), seeing movies and making a few of his own on 8mm, but the arrival of his Selective Service Notice in early 1964 – delivered by his father while he waited in line to see Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – concentrated his mind wonderfully, and he enrolled at California State College at Long Beach, thus gaining a student exemption.

As he convalesced, Lucas decided to continue in school, and enrolled in junior college. These halfway houses between high school and college offered two-year courses, usually vocational. In the fall of 1962, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College, assembling an arts major that even further exasperated his father: astronomy, sociology, speech, and art history – none of them any use in selling office supplies.

Except for speech, which Lucas hoped would improve his limited communication skills and eradicate his warbling croak of a voice (it didn’t; he admits he was ‘terrible in Speech class’), the other courses were those traditionally chosen by adolescents who, having rejected religion, are looking for a new belief system based in rationalism. Reason and science become the new gods. The new believer finds himself worshipping the Divine Order, the Power of the Mind, the Inevitability of Historical Change.

Already, an ambitious science fiction writer named Lafayette Ron Hubbard had cashed in on this thirst for certainties by inventing his own quasi-scientific religion, Scientology, which, with notable shrewdness, he’d launched via an article in the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The same magazine gave generous publicity to the experiences of Dr Joseph Rhine of Duke University in hunting the elusive signs of what he christened ‘psi powers’: telepathy and telekinesis.

Lucas later read the basic works of sociology and anthropology which traced modern religion and morality back to their roots in tribal rituals and earth magic. But though he has been credited, retrospectively, with a near-lifelong interest in cultural studies and science fiction which blossomed in the Star Wars films, nobody can remember him being interested in anything but television and cars until long after he left Modesto.

In 1964 Lucas graduated from Modesto Junior College with an Associate in Arts degree, and an A in astronomy and Bs in speech, sociology, and art history. His grade average hovered around C, but that was enough to get into all but the most demanding colleges. John Plummer urged him to try USC with him. But Lucas decided he didn’t want to move that far from home. Instead he enrolled at San Francisco State, which had the added advantage of being free.

He still had no clear idea of what career he might follow. At junior college he’d drifted back to photography, this time with an 8mm movie camera bought by his father. Though he no longer had ambitions to drive competitively, he also spent time around the race circuits, hanging out with Allen Grant and other old friends, but filming rather than tinkering with their cars. ‘I wasn’t the hot guy any more,’ he recalled. ‘I was sort of over the hill, though I still knew all the guys.’

Lucas discovered the pleasures of watching, ideally through the lens of a camera. People didn’t ask awkward questions when you filmed them; they just let you be. And, seen through the camera, they themselves came into sharper focus. You could observe, comment, categorize, without saying a word.

What Lucas found more interesting than human beings, however, were objects. On occasional visits to Berkeley, he saw films of the new American ‘underground’ – Stan Brakhage’s jittering 8mm diaries, Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees (1961), the abstractions of Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, Robert Breer, and in particular Jordan Belson, who projected his wobbling psychedelic creations on the walls of the San Francisco Planetarium.

The hot documentary from 1960 was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the Newport Jazz Festival, the first and only film by fashion photographer Bert Stern. Stern didn’t bother much with interviews. He preferred to stand back and film faces, or the reflections of yacht hulls on the surface of the water, which he cut to music by Mose Allison. There was no commentary, no point of view except that of the camera, no judgments, no argument, no plot. Lucas must have said to himself with some satisfaction, ‘I can do that.’ A year later, his student film Herbie would be made up entirely of reflections on the hubcaps and polished surface of a car, set to jazz by Herbie Hancock. Lucas’s first film, made as a child, had been of plates, not people, and he didn’t much change as an adult. His early student films would all be about cars. He shot them from a distance and up close, noticing the reflections on a polished fender or a windscreen; or clipped photographs from magazines and cut between them to create a narrative that bypassed performance. The idea of directing actors was, and would remain, distasteful.

No two people agree on how Lucas made the first step in the journey from Sunday cameraman to the most successful film-maker in history, but there’s little doubt that cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Haskell Wexler came into it.

The early sixties saw the arrival of new lightweight 16mm cameras and the documentary movement they engendered, cinéma vérité. The image of the cameraman with a 16mm Arriflex on his shoulder and a Nagra tape recorder close to hand – though not in hand; most professional tape machines still weighed twenty pounds – became a potent one, and even more so when Eclair launched its NPR, a sleek, updated version of the hand-held 16mm camera. With such equipment, a film-maker was independent, able to shoot where he liked, and with as little light as fast new film stocks would accept. Albert and David Maysles began turning out films in what they called ‘Direct Cinema.’ They were soon joined by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, who, as Drew Leacock Pennebaker, set most of the benchmarks with films like Primary, The Chair, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, the 1960 Eddie, about racing driver Eddie Sachs.

Haskell Wexler was thirty-six, and widely respected as a cameraman with a penchant for realism and a strong leftist political commitment. In 1958, Irvin Kershner had persuaded producer Roger Corman to finance Stakeout on Dope Street, a low-budget thriller about three boys who find a case full of drugs, and are pursued by the gang who owns it. Kershner co-wrote and directed. Wexler shot part of the film, adapting hand-held, low-light documentary technique to drama. He also lit Kershner’s The Hoodlum Priest (1961), and A Face in the Rain (1963). In between, he worked on low-budget experimental films like The Savage Eye (1960), and on documentaries. It was one of these that brought him to Modesto.

How he met George Lucas has long been a subject of rival mythologies. Dale Pollock, in the semi-authorized Skywalking, says simply, ‘Wexler took a liking to the weird skinny kid whose head was bursting with ideas. He went so far as to telephone some friends of his on USC’s film school faculty and advised them to watch out for Lucas. “For God’s sake, keep an eye on the kid,” Wexler told one faculty member [presumably Gene Peterson, who had been his assistant and who now taught cinematography there]. “He’s got the calling.” But Wexler did not get Lucas into USC, as legend has it. Lucas had applied to the film school prior to meeting Wexler, and to George’s and his father’s amazement, he was accepted.’

Other sources make a more direct link, and emphasize Wexler’s role. Charley Lippincott, who was at USC with Lucas and who would become his head of publicity and marketing, discounts the later story, encouraged by Lucas, that he had already made up his mind to enter film when he met Wexler: ‘Wexler was up there doing a film about cars [probably The Bus, a documentary Wexler wrote, shot, and directed], and George helped him out, working on the film as production assistant or something.’

As an aficionado of car racing, Wexler inevitably ran into Allen Grant. As they talked, Wexler complained that he was having trouble with his Citroën-Maserati, notorious for its tricky timing. Grant said he knew someone who could help, a guy who’d been his mechanic and co-driver, and who was interested in movies too. ‘George met up with Haskell Wexler,’ says Lippincott, ‘and told him he didn’t know what he wanted to do, but that he was interested in film. And Haskell got him into USC. He’s the one who persuaded him. I don’t think George really knew that much about film at the time.’

John Plummer also played a part. His grades were better than Lucas’s, and he wanted to enter USC in Los Angeles as a business major. He was going to LA to take the admission tests, and asked Lucas to keep him company. In fact, why didn’t he take the test too? ‘So I said, “All right,”’ Lucas recalled, “‘but it’s a long shot, ’cause my grades aren’t good enough to get into a school like that.” So I went and took the test and I passed. I got accepted!’

6 USC

[I want to thank] my teachers from kindergarten through college, their struggle – and it was a struggle – to help me learn to grow …

George Lucas in his speech to the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences, accepting the Irving Thalberg Award,

30 March 1992

Lucas enrolled at USC as a film major. His junior college courses counted toward credit, so he could skip his freshman and sophomore years, and enter as a junior.

Even then, his father still opposed the move, and scorned the whole idea of training for cinema. ‘You’re just going to become a ticket-taker at Disneyland,’ he told him. ‘You’re never going to get a real job.’ He also doubted his son’s will: ‘You’ll be back in a few years.’ George lost his temper. ‘I’m never coming back!’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty.’

Persistence wore Lucas Sr down. In an ingenious compromise, he offered to send his son through USC as an employee of the Lucas Company. He’d pay him a salary equal to his tuition fees, plus $200 a month – a substantial amount at a time when one could rent a very basic apartment for half that. If George didn’t persevere with the course, he could be fired like any stock-room boy. With little choice in the matter, he took the deal.

In the early summer of 1964, he came down to Los Angeles. John Plummer was sharing an apartment in the beachside suburb of Malibu, and Lucas moved in. To fill in before courses and his $200-a-month payment started, he waited tables and did drawings of surfer girls with the wide and dewy eyes of orphan children, which he hawked on the beach.

He also looked for part-time work in the film business. Ventura Boulevard, which ran along the San Fernando Valley side of the mountains separating the city’s sprawling dormitory suburbs from Hollywood and Beverly Hills, was lined with two- and three-story office buildings, most of which harbored at least one film company. Lucas visited scores of them. He was the ten thousandth hopeful to do so, and, like everybody else, he found that the fanciful titles of those companies disguised mostly nickel-and-dime operations: freelance editors, producers of educational documentaries, or distributors of 16mm films. Real producers usually had office space on or near one of the big movie-company lots, walled cities where security guards barred anyone without a pass or an appointment.

Lucas checked into USC for his first semester in fall 1964. The university wasn’t anything like he expected. It had a notable reputation for high academic distinction. One writer called it ‘a citadel of privilege.’ For decades it had supplied Los Angeles with its public officials, doctors, and engineers. But unlike UCLA, set among the lawns and groves of pepper trees in the elegant suburb of Westwood, USC had to content itself with what buildings it could find in its area of east LA, an old residential district through which the campus had metastasized over the years.

The best of USC’s buildings shared the twenties faux-Spanish architecture of the Shrine Auditorium, the area’s most distinctive structure, for many years Hollywood’s village hall, and the site of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. The worst were functional at best, and were usually allocated to courses which stood well down the list from medicine, engineering, and law. On that scale, the film school, part of the theater department, ranked lowest of all.

Lucas, like all new arrivals, asked, ‘Where’s the theater department?’

‘Over there.’

‘But … that’s a little house.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Where are the theaters?’

‘Well, we actually only have one. It’s an auditorium, and it was built in 1902.’

Despite the grandiose Spanish-style gate that led to it, the film department consisted of three single-story wooden buildings in an expanse of open ground. They’d been stables for the horses of cavalrymen stationed there during World War I. In the twenties, it was the school of architecture, then, after 1929, the film school. Following World War II, the college erected two more army-surplus wooden barracks buildings to house an audio-visual unit which mainly trained government and military personnel to use educational film materials. On the side, it produced instructional films. That unit became the nucleus of the USC Cinema School.

The school had a bare minimum of facilities. The old stables became a sound stage, with a screening room next door, always called Room 108, with 35mm and 16mm projection. Editing machines – ancient upright Moviolas – were crammed into single large room, next to a storage space for cameras and other movie equipment. Classrooms, each with its own 16mm projector, occupied the barracks. There was nowhere to hang out, so students congregated in an open space in the middle of the buildings.

Students were required to live on campus for the first year. A high-rise dormitory, one of the college’s few modern buildings, loomed over the cinema department, but it was reserved for female students. Most males, including Lucas, occupied Touton Hall, an older building across campus. It had no cafeteria, so he either had to trudge to the women’s dorm and suffer its famously inedible food, or eat in the neighborhood – not then as dangerous as it became after the 1965 riots in nearby Watts.

To his alarm, he found he wouldn’t have a room of his own. The college did make an effort to match up people of like interests, so he found himself sharing with Randy Epstein. A genial Angeleno, Epstein, now a successful Californian property developer, was used to prosperity, and was surprised by Lucas’s Spartan possessions – which consisted mostly of a Nikon 35mm camera and some clothes. He didn’t even have a stereo, a deficiency which Epstein remedied.

Watching him unpack his wardrobe of plaid shirts, jeans, and a boxy jacket with too-wide lapels, woven from a blanket-like fabric with metallic threads, Epstein wondered where Lucas had got his vision of how people dressed in Los Angeles – from the movies? To another student, Don Glut, who’d come from Chicago trailing a reputation as a motorcycle freak and street-gang member, Lucas was ‘very conservative-looking. Those were the days of the hippie look, but he had short hair. He looked like a young businessman. Somebody working his way up to corporate office.’ Hal Barwood, also in the film school, thought he resembled Buddy Holly. Lucas’s long silences emphasized his air of strangeness. Nervousness increased the tremor in his voice, turning it into a nervous warble. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan says, ‘He’s sort of like a cartoon character. In fact his voice, I think, is like about ten different cartoon characters.’ Each morning, Lucas walked to his USC window and said, ‘Hello, world.’ It sounded, says Epstein, ‘just like Kermit the frog from The Muppets.’

For every USC student doing a course in the humanities, a dozen were on athletics scholarships, including most of the college’s few African-Americans, one of whom, on the 1967 football team, was O.J. Simpson. The majority of these jocks lived as if people like Lucas, Epstein, Glut, and the other arts types didn’t exist. Glut says disgustedly, ‘We were mostly in the company of beer-guzzling, fraternity-type idiots. Lots of football players, who would do isometric exercises by straining against the side of doors, and screaming. It was like they didn’t have heads: their neck and head were the same width, as if the head was just another cervical verterbra, only with hair on it.’ USC still kept up its intimate relationship with the military, and the film school routinely enrolled a large contingent of air force and navy personnel each year for training in camera operation and sound recording – an older, more reserved, and decidedly non-hippie group which stuck together, and represented a further damping influence.

Surrounded by an atmosphere somewhere between Animal House and Full Metal Jacket, the remaining film-school students seldom socialized with anyone else on campus. ‘When people would ask, “Are you in a fraternity or something?’” recalls Randy Epstein, ‘I’d say, “No, I’m basically going to a private school within a private school, and we never see the outside of these four walls.’” Had they been more gregarious, or the atmosphere more welcoming, the history of cinema might have been very different; but the sense of isolation encouraged a feeling of them-against-us that grew into a revolution.

The USC students of 1966–68 reads like a roll-call of New Hollywood. They included John Milius, director of Big Wednesday and The Wind and the Lion, the legendary scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now, and ‘fixer’ on films as various as Jaws and Dirty Harry; Randal Kleiser, director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon; Basil Poledouris, composer of scores for Conan the Barbarian and Iron Eagle; Walter Murch, sound editor on Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, and director of Return to Oz; Howard Kazanjian, line producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and other collaborations between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg; screenwriter Willard Huyck, who, with his wife Gloria Katz, then at UCLA, wrote American Graffiti, parts of the Indiana Jones series, and Howard the Duck, which Huyck also directed; Caleb Deschanel, cinematographer of The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff; and Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who would co-script Sugarland Express for Spielberg – Robbins as a director also made films like *batteries not included, while Barwood, who began as an animator at USC, became a career writer of video games for Lucasfilm. Also in Lucas’s classes were Don Glut, who wrote the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back and directed Dinosaur Valley Girls; and Charley Lippincott, later Lucas’s marketing manager, and a force in the launching of Star Wars. Then, and later, women played little part in what was seen as a man’s business. ‘There were about two women in the whole film program,’ says John Milius. (‘Three’, insists Randy Epstein, ‘but we weren’t sure about one of them.’)

To Lucas, the faculty was no more impressive than the campus. ‘Most of the people were “those who can’t do, teach”-type people,’ says Don Glut. ‘The film-history class was mostly watching movies and talking about them. That was Arthur Knight’s class. His book The Liveliest Art became our textbook-which generated a lot of royalties for Professor Knight. The only person who had ever done anything was Irwin Blacker, who taught screenwriting. He’d written some books and screenplays. Mel Sloan was a professional editor. The animation course was directed by Herb Kossower. There was a guy named Gene Peterson whose big claim to fame was he had been a gaffer on Stakeout on Dope Street.’ (Glut is actually in error here, though the truth is even more improbable. The one film on which Peterson appears to have received a professional credit, indeed as a gaffer, i.e. electrician’s laborer, was The Brain Eaters, a 1958 horror film directed by Bruno Ve Sota.)

‘These people were staff, not professors,’ says Charley Lippincott, who came to USC via its night school, which taught a slimmed-down film course. ‘Dave Johnson taught production management. He’d been there forever; went to school there. He was probably the best-liked teacher. Ken Miura taught sound. A lot of these guys came out of the Second World War, and had been there on the GI Plan.’

Neat in his Modesto clothes, Lucas turned up dutifully at film classes, as well as those in astronomy and English, which he had to take as part of his regular course. He had no idea what kind of movies he was going to see, but those which were shown jolted someone whose limited experience of cinema was almost entirely Hollywood. Inflamed by legends of ‘the Underground,’ the students preferred the films of the French New Wave, which had taken off in 1959 with Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Godard’s 1960 A Bout de Souffle. The fashion for hand-held cameras, natural light, real locations, and sound recorded ‘live’ spread through them like a virus.

Godard’s 1965 science fiction film Alphaville made a particular impression. It followed a secret agent of the future, called ‘Lemmy Caution’ after Peter Cheyney’s detective hero, whom the film’s star Eddie Constantine often played on screen, as he infiltrates, none too subtly, the city of Alphaville, controlled by a computer called Alpha 60, which rigorously suppresses all emotion, keeping the inhabitants numbed by drugs, sex, and violent death. With typical bravado, Godard ignored special effects. Footage of Paris’s bleaker suburbs stood in for Alphaville, and Alpha 60 was just the disembodied voice of a man speaking through an artificial larynx. To Lucas in particular, it was a powerful lesson, which he would put into practice in his major student film, THX1138.

Many of the teachers, particularly those teaching craft courses like camerawork and sound recording, also embraced the nouvelle vague. Its techniques weren’t much different from those used in documentary everywhere. ‘The faculty was into art films,’ says Randy Epstein. ‘If it had sprocket-holes showing, or was a little out of focus, they loved it.’ Richard Walter said scornfully of their attitude, ‘A real film-maker didn’t write his or her film. They put a camera on their shoulder, sprayed the environment with a lens; they Did Their Own Thing, Let It All Hang Out, and anything they did was beautiful, because Hey, you’re beautiful.’

Arthur Knight screened the films praised by his generation of critics: the classics of German expressionism like Metropolis, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible, D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, David Lean. Nobody decreed to be ‘commercial’ received a second look, including later heroes of New Hollywood like Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller. Even Alfred Hitchcock was regarded as having ‘sold out.’

John Milius adulated B-westerns and the films of directors like Fuller, and Don Glut was a fanatic for serials and old science fiction and horror films. As a boy in Chicago, he had made thirty 16mm films, including a version of Frankenstein. Such was his enthusiasm for serials that his mother sewed him a Superman suit and another like that worn by the Martian menace of The Purple Monster Strikes, both of which he brought to USC. His devotion won over Randy Epstein and other students, who held popular late-night screenings of serials until Herb Kossower ejected them – not for misuse of the facilities, but for the nature of the films they showed. Marked as troublemakers, students like Glut and Milius had a tough time at USC. The faculty almost flunked Glut because of his enthusiasm for cheap fantasy films and his habit of reading comic books between classes. He finally had to do an extra year to get his degree. Milius, refused a passing grade in a French course by a professor who regarded him as ‘a savage,’ never graduated at all.

Lucas drove a silver Camaro, and continued to wear his Modesto clothes. The only person in the film classes who looked more square was Randal Kleiser, who moonlighted as a photographic model. In their second year at USC, his beach-boy good looks beamed from billboards all over Los Angeles, advertising Pepsi-Cola. Don Glut, who, despite his raffish background, had some of the same style, formed what he called the Clean-Cut Cinema Club. The members were himself, Kleiser, Randy Epstein, Chris Lewis (the son of film star Loretta Young), and Lucas. The group contrasted starkly with the hippie element of the school, personified by Milius, who wore no shoes, extravagantly praised the then-unfashionable films of John Ford and the almost unknown Akira Kurosawa, lived in a converted bomb-shelter near the beach so he could surf every day, and let it be known that he was only marking time in college until he could enter the Marines, go to Vietnam, and die gloriously in battle. When the Marines turned him down because of his chronic asthma, he directed his frustrated taste for heroics into screenwriting.

USC’s formal requirements were lax. The few papers required were mostly book reports, and as long as Lucas turned up and took at least a perfunctory part in class discussions, he was unlikely to fail any course for academic reasons. He’d also found his mechanical skill much in demand. The Moviolas and ancient clockwork Cine Special cameras were always breaking down, and he was usually the only person who knew how to fix them.

Like all the students, he gravitated to the congenial teachers, and away from those who demanded too much. The least popular was Irwin Blacker, who taught a screenwriting course from which students had been known to emerge in tears. Unlike almost everyone else, Blacker flunked those who didn’t meet his exacting standards, or share his respect for the Aristotelian model of story structure. Those who survived, including Milius and Richard Walter, emerged with a grasp of screenwriting technique that stood them in good stead in Hollywood. Walter, now head of the screenwriting department at UCLA’s film school, called Blacker ‘a cantankerous, obstinate, boorish bull of a guy,’ but ‘my mentor and my inspiration.’

Lucas shunned Blacker’s class, but enjoyed that of Arthur Knight. The antithesis of Blacker, cordial, clubbable, and social, Knight had come to a comfortable accommodation with both academe and the film business. Through his journalism for magazines like the Saturday Review and the Hollywood Reporter, he maintained close contacts with the industry, which he exploited on behalf of USC. He ran a lecture series called ‘Thursday Night at the Movies’ where directors often presented their new films and discussed them with students. Afterwards, Knight liked to invite the guest and some students back to his home for drinks. David Lean previewed Doctor Zhivago at one of Knight’s evenings in 1965, and Jean-Luc Godard spoke the following year. In both cases, Lucas attended. The screening room in which Knight held court became the ad hoc center of film studies at USC, to the extent that when the school was rebuilt in the nineties – largely with Lucas money – a space was named Room 405 in its honor.

Knight’s encouragement of his students went beyond occasional soirées in the Hollywood Hills. His student assistant had a valuable inside view of what was going on and coming up. Charley Lippincott held the job for a while, after which it passed to Richard Walter. Knight also occasionally recommended students for part-time jobs in the industry, or scholarships which came his way via the few USC alumni who had gone on to make careers in the industry. This small and not-particularly-distinguished group included James Ivory, who in those days before A Room with a View and Howards End was living in India and making low-budget features like Shakespeare Wallah and The Guru; cameraman Conrad Hall, a moving force in the setting up of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, NABET, the craft union more sympathetic to low-budget producers and television than the monolithic International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, IATSE; and Denis Sanders, who with his brother Terry had won an Oscar for their short film A Time out of War in 1954, and who had gone on to make low-budget independent features like War Hunt (1961).

The most distinguished USC alumnus, however, and the most typical of the generation before Lucas and his friends, was Irvin Kershner. Tall and bearded, with a goatish profile like that of a Biblical patriarch or an Arab chieftain, ‘Kersh’ had many friends on the faculty of the film school, in particular Mel Sloan and Gene Peterson, and sometimes taught courses there when they went on leave. He had drifted into USC after World War II, following desultory attempts at careers in painting and music. The then-dean of communications asked him to give a course in photography, after which he taught himself cinematography to shoot some of the documentaries the school made as part of a deal to supply instructional material to the US Public Health Service.

Kershner’s experience of the professional film business was instructive, and enshrined the received wisdom about getting a job in movies after graduation: you didn’t have a chance. ‘They wouldn’t let me in the Cameraman’s Union, the Editing Union, or the Art-Director’s Union,’ he told the students, ‘so I said, “There’s only one thing to do – direct.’” He sneaked in the back door, getting jobs as a cameraman on TV documentaries which led to his low-budget and non-union feature Stakeout on Dope Street, made for a bare-bones $30,000.

At every turn, students like Lucas were told they might as well forget a career in Hollywood feature-film-making. ‘Everybody knew there were only three ways to get into the film business,’ says Randy Epstein. ‘You could be born the son or nephew of a famous film personality, or you could marry a producer’s daughter. I forget the third one.’ Even if they got into a union, they faced a tortuous apprenticeship of three to five years before they won their card. Gary Kurtz, later Lucas’s producer and partner, went through USC from 1959 to 1962, and graduated as a cameraman. ‘It was impossible to break into the industry in any of the guilds or unions,’ he says. ‘So we were more or less forced to work in the low-budget or exploitation area, really. A lot of film-school graduates just got tired of that process and did other things. They became teachers at other film schools or universities, or they went into educational or documentary films, which weren’t so rigidly unionized. They started to work for television stations around the country, which didn’t have that problem either.’

The very idea of film school was anathema to Hollywood. Charley Lippincott was warned not to mention that he went to USC if he ever visited a studio lot. ‘We were all brainwashed with the notion that none of us would ever get into the business,’ says Don Glut. ‘We might work in camera shops or as projectionists in theaters, but we were never going to work in the business.’

For the craft classes, film lighting, editing, and animation, the end-of-year examination was a film, culminating, in the senior year, in a graduate exercise in film direction; Course 480 of the curriculum. For the first year, everyone in Herb Kossower’s animation class was given one minute of black-and-white 16mm stock and told to use the Oxberry animation camera to make a film. Most of them animated drawings or manipulated objects in stop-action. Lucas decided to make a film that was both serious and professional. A Look at Life was a collage of photographs from Life magazine. Its zooms, cuts, and pans across contrasting images of girls in bikinis, lovers, babies, politicians, vampires, and civilians being shot in the Congo might have been meant to illustrate the popular slogan ‘Make love, not war.’ Kossower, impressed, urged him to enter it in student film festivals, where its brevity and pace made it a favorite. It won a number of prizes.

Thereafter, Lucas became Kossower’s star pupil, and a faculty favorite, a role he cemented with his second film, Herbie. An exercise for the lighting class, Lucas made the film with Paul Golding, another above-average student who, like so many, left the industry after graduation. They edited together abstract close-ups of night-time reflections in the polished surface of a car. The vehicle isn’t a Volkswagen, though it is normally described as one, since two years later Disney chose the name ‘Herbie’ for the sentient VW of its fantasy The Love Bug. The Herbie of Lucas’s title is jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, whom Lucas approached to supply a few minutes of background music. A voice, presumably Hancock’s, is heard on the soundtrack saying, ‘What can I do for ya?’, then, ‘Not like sittin’ at home, I can tell ya.’ In between, the camera of Lucas and Golding watches light ripple over the car’s gleaming fenders and spotless windscreen. The credit reads: ‘These moments of reflection have been brought to you by Paul Golding and George Lucas.’

Lucas was initially rejected by the film-school fraternity, Delta Kappa Alpha, because of his nerdy image, though once it approved him, he took almost no part in its activities except to grab something from its snack bar when the cafeterias were closed. By day, the editing machines were in almost constant use, but Lucas and others sneaked back at night, missing dinner. A diet of candy and junk food finally undermined his frail constitution and brought him down with mononucleosis.

Even when he wasn’t working, Lucas didn’t mix much, least of all with women. Flirting was integral to college life, and there was a lot of sex about – much, though not all of it, playful. The film-school patio was a short-cut to other parts of the campus, and girls from the nearby women’s dorm passed through constantly, to be hit on by the more aggressive male students. Others borrowed telephoto lenses from the camera store to peek into the dorm windows, at which the girls occasionally staged discreet stripteases, tantalizingly terminated at the last moment, to the chagrin of the watchers.

‘George was chasing girls,’ says Milius. ‘He didn’t catch them, but he was chasing them.’ Richard Walter agrees that Lucas was no Lothario. ‘I’ve read books that claimed George was a ladies’ man. It’s nonsense. He was very, very reticent.’ Randy Epstein’s girl ‘fixed up’ Lucas with a friend of hers, with an unconventional result. ‘He spoke to her on the phone for many hours over many days before he got the courage to ask her out,’ says Epstein, ‘and the fascinating thing is, he asked her to describe herself. Then he did an oil painting of what he thought she would look like. Not a sketch, but an actual oil painting. It was amazingly like her. It was like he’d cheated and got a look at her somehow. The girl was just overwhelmed that he had the talent to do this without even seeing her.’

In his second year, Lucas rented a house off-campus, a rickety wooden building on Portola Drive, in the Hollywood hills. His father grudgingly paid the $80 a month rent. To reach the upper floors of the three-level house, you climbed a ladder, and the furniture was minimal, but Lucas felt secure there. After a few months, Randal Kleiser moved in to share the rent. Both were friendly with another of the Clean-Cut group, Christopher Lewis. Lewis’s mother, Loretta Young, after a fairly lurid youth, had found God in middle age and, with her husband Tom Lewis, embarked on the production of a pietistic TV series, The Loretta Young Show. Since the show ended in 1961, Tom Lewis’s production facilities were often unused, and his son persuaded him to let his USC friends edit and record there. For Orgy Beach Party, an unfinished parody, produced by Christopher Lewis and directed by Don Glut, of the then-popular ‘beach party’ films, Kleiser played the handsome hero and Glut the monster who carries off the girl. Lucas shot stills, and they used the Lewis studio to record the theme song with Glut’s garage band, the Hustlers. In between, Lewis’s friends, including Lucas, often hung out at the sumptuous home of his parents. In their senior year, Lucas and Lewis even formed a production company, Sunrise Films, but it never made a film.

By the start of his second year at USC, Lucas had found his level. His Modesto wardrobe remained, though he’d ditched the unfortunate jackets. He’d also grown a beard, which gave character to his face, and disguised a weak chin, as well as earning him honorary credentials as a radical. At the same time, he remained shrewdly aware of the advantages of good faculty relations. While students like Glut, Milius, and Epstein drew fire from their teachers for turning out pastiches like Superman and the Gorilla Gang, which Glut not only wrote, directed, and edited, but for which he also composed the music, built the models, and did the special effects – which were impressive, given the minuscule budget – Lucas went for solid production values and certified liberal sentiments. For his second-year directing project, Freiheit (‘freedom’ in German), introduced as ‘A film by LUCAS,’ he persuaded Randal Kleiser to play a young man running away from a battle, suggested by sounds of artillery in the distance. He reaches a frontier, evidently that between East and West Germany, but is shot down by a soldier (Christopher Lewis). As he lies bleeding, voices on the soundtrack discuss the significance of freedom and the need to endure sacrifices to protect it.

Whatever else USC taught Lucas, the key concept he absorbed was the importance of teamwork. With so few resources and so little time, nothing got done unless you enlisted people to help you. Projects risked becoming incestuous. Basil Poledouris’s senior film, Glut, wove a fictional story around the character of USC’s most dissident student. Milius wrote it, Lucas recorded sound, and most other students had walk-on parts. It’s an effective and amusing little film from a man who would later become best known as a composer. At the start, Glut, playing himself, tries out for a job as a stuntman with Sam Fuller, who asks him if he can do a back-flip. Glut admits he can’t, but says he can fall off the back of a truck like Dave Sharpe in one serial, or do a fight like Dale van Sickel in another. ‘You’re not a stuntman,’ says Fuller dismissively. Disconsolate, Glut goes to a party wearing his Purple Monster costume. Scorned by everyone, he leaves, complaining, ‘Men don’t feel grandeur any more’ – a classic Milius line – only to achieve his moment of glory by rescuing a girl from a purse-snatcher.

The USC students helped one another because their instructors made it clear from the start that only results mattered. Not ignorance, nor sickness, nor acts of God excused failing to deliver an exercise on time. ‘A student would show his workshop project,’ says Richard Walter, ‘and someone would say, “Gee, that doesn’t make sense to me …” And the film-maker would go into a dissertation of explanations. “Well, that day the sound man didn’t show up, and the landlady came in and ran us out, and I just had time to get this one angle …” And the instructor would say, “Well, put it on a title card at the head of the film. Say, ‘This is why the movie is the way it is – because we had all these problems.’”’ To those in the class really listening, the moral was clear: in the outside world, excuses bought nothing. Later, Lucas would put the lesson into the mouth of Yoda, the Jedi master of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke Skywalker says he’ll try to harness the power of the Force, the sage says, ‘Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.’ What people took for Zen was really USC.

Nobody was more generous with assistance than Lucas. He recorded sound and helped edit Milius’s animated film, Marcello, I’m so Bored, and there were few USC films of the period in which he didn’t take a hand. Some people resented his dismissive manner and impatience with the maladroit. Finding Walter Murch developing film in the lab, Lucas told him he was doing it wrong. A native New Yorker, Murch already had a BA in art history and romance languages from Johns Hopkins before he arrived at USC in 1965 to do his masters in cinema. He’d studied Italian medieval art history in Perugia, and French literature and nineteenth-century art history in Paris. Fluent in French and Italian, tall, solemn, erudite, and irascible, he was, says Gary Kurtz, ‘quite control-freakish; perfect for an editor,’ and didn’t suffer criticism gladly. ‘Who’s this creep?’ he demanded. ‘Get out of here! What do you know?’

But Murch too became a devoted member of the Lucas team. Like Allen Grant before him and Francis Ford Coppola after, Murch was another elder-brother figure from whom Lucas could learn, and in whom in turn he could inspire the kind of personal loyalty that creates effective teams.

Lucas credits Murch for alerting him to the possibilities of sound. Like the new wave film-makers, most USC students didn’t much care about their soundtracks, providing the dialogue was improvised and the background sound recorded ‘wild,’ i.e. on the spot. But Lucas noticed how a good track could lure audiences: ‘The screen for the screening room was positioned against a hallway that led out onto a patio where everyone would congregate,’ he said. ‘The speakers would echo into the hallway and the sound would funnel out into the open space. You knew that if you had a film with a great soundtrack you could draw an audience into the room.’

While many other USC students goofed off, turned on or dropped out, Lucas continued to create ambitious films, and to win prizes with them in student film festivals all over the country. His enthusiasm for Jean-Luc Godard peaked at about the time Godard made a personal appearance at USC in 1966. His interest then switched to slicker, more professional movies.

Charley Lippincott watched the change at first hand. Lippincott had access to the documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada, then in its heyday, and often screened them. In 1965 the CNFB’s hottest cameraman was Jean-Claude Labrecque, who shot and directed a film about the Tour de St Laurent, a 1500-mile bike race. He called it 60 Cycles. A relentless exercise in style, 60 Cycles emphasized the bikes rather than the men who rode them. Much of it was shot with telephoto lenses that compressed the riders into an apparently motionless mass of furious pedalling humanity, or from a helicopter, so that they appear a single organism, slithering through a town like a snake. The music was mostly hard-driving rock, typified by the pumping organ riff of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker-T and the MGs.

‘I brought down 60 Cycles,’ says Lippincott. ‘I may have shown it in directing class too. People were swept away, and George borrowed it, and flipped out over it. I had a terrible time getting it back. I had it for a week, and finally after a week and a half I pried it out of him. It got me in trouble with the Canadian consulate. But it fit George perfectly. The technical stuff with the lenses was so “George” that it was unbelievable.’ When the college acquired the latest 16mm camera, the Eclair NPR, Lucas seized it as his personal property.

Everyone at USC remembers Lucas’s films abandoning nouvelle vague casualness. He earned a reputation for high production values. ‘I had the feeling he had more money than us,’ says Don Glut, ‘because he was able to do things that we couldn’t do. He could get aerial shots; rent airplanes to get shots of race cars from the sky.’ The money for the ambitious touches in Lucas’s films came from his father, who had attended a student screening, and had been surprised by the respectful reaction of the laid-back and largely stoned audience to his son’s films. When they came on, kids murmured, ‘Watch this, it’s George’s film.’ Driving back to Modesto, George Sr conceded to his wife, ‘I think we may have put our money on the right horse.’

Already, the students were separating into those with grandiose ambitions and those resigned to taking a back seat, or dropping out altogether. During the summer, Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins had gone to England and, ‘in a farmer’s field,’ according to Lippincott, ‘had found an old Rolls-Royce, one of those ones with the open back seat. They brought it back and rebuilt it.’ Lucas surprised John Milius by telling him he’d met a man with a restored World War II P51 Mustang fighter. If Milius could think up a story that included one, he’d help him film it. ‘The rest of them didn’t think big,’ says Milius. ‘They were thinking about meeting some girl, and she was good-looking so they were going to put her in the film, and get to sleep with her. And if not, maybe she’d wear some revealing outfit in the film. Or they would imitate some French film, some avant-garde style. I would try and do it through convincing people. George would do it through nuts and bolts. I’d say, “Join me on this great crusade.” But George would know someone who had a race car, and he’d go out and persuade him to let him put the camera on his race car. The guy just thought he was going to have pretty pictures of his race car. George was thinking, “This is a film about a race car. It’s going to look good, and have great sound, and be in color.”’

Everyone in the senior class was gearing up for their last film, the 480 Project. Instead of the normal five-man crew, Lucas called in favors all over campus, and accumulated a team of fourteen. Getting a camera and sound gear was harder. ‘You’d try to steal film from the other guys, steal equipment,’ says Milius. ‘One thing I did do was steal the camera George loved so much, the Eclair. He was the only one who could use that camera. Everyone else was awed by the technology, but George, being a race-car mechanic and a great great visual guy, understanding light and all this stuff, could very quickly master the technology of anything. He really wanted to use that camera, and I stole it, and hid it in my car, and slept in my car with the camera for a week while we used it.’

Lucas’s car-race film was called 1.42:08, named for the lap time of the yellow sports car which was its subject. His expertise with cars had got him a job as cameraman for Saul Bass, Hollywood’s premiere creator of title sequences. Lucas shot some material for the short film Why Man Creates, one of the few Bass works not attached to a feature. Bass was doing the credits for John Frankenheimer’s epic car-racing movie Grand Prix, and Lucas used his background in car racing to infiltrate the second unit shooting with James Garner at the Willow Springs raceway, north of Los Angeles. Grand Prix provided the impetus for 1.42:08, but 60 Cycles was evident in every frame. Lucas persuaded driver Pete Brook to contribute his car and his time. Edward Johnson, his obliging flyer friend, gave him a single aerial shot looking down on the speeding car. 1.42:08 had no sound except the blare of the car’s engine. Repeated tracks over the racer as it’s gassed up show the enthusiasm for machinery that would typify most of Lucas’s later films, and though we do glimpse Brook as humanly fallible when he spins out in the middle of the practice and grimaces at his error, the film has no character except the car.

7 Electronic Labyrinth

‘Down there,’ he is inclined to say of Hollywood, ‘down there, for every honest true film-maker trying to get his film off the ground, there are a hundred sleazy used-car dealers trying to con you out of your money.’

Lucas in New York Times, 13 July 1981

Once he graduated from USC, Lucas, outside the protection of his student exemption, was eligible for the draft. With a few other ex-USC people, he was urged to flee to Canada and get a job at the Canadian National Film Board. However, some classmates from the air force contingent counselled him not only to stay in LA, but actually to volunteer. As a college graduate with impeccable film-making credentials, they told him, he’d be immediately sent to Officer Candidate School, then posted to a film-making unit in the US, where he’d gain valuable professional experience far from the front line.

During the summer of his graduation, Lucas, according to legend, tried to enlist, but was turned down because his teenage driving convictions gave him, technically, a criminal record. One is forced to be skeptical about this story. Such minor offences were only taken into account if the offender compounded them by consistently failing to turn up in court, or evaded bench warrants issued by the judge for his arrest; otherwise anyone could have dodged the draft simply by getting arrested for dangerous driving. Had he been accepted for OCS, Lucas might, in fact, have been dismayed by the result. Gary Kurtz, who went through USC from 1959 to 1962, was drafted into the Marines as a cameraman, and didn’t get out until 1969. ‘There were so many photographers killed,’ he says, ‘that we became what they called a Critical MOS, and they kept sending us letters saying, “You have been extended, convenience of the government,” and in theory, I found out later, they could have done that forever.’ Whether Lucas presented himself for military service voluntarily or when he received his Selective Service Notice, he was almost certainly rejected for the same medical reasons that finally kept him out of the forces permanently. The standard physical examination revealed that the diabetes that had killed his grandfather had jumped a generation and reappeared in him. Rating him 4F, the medical board warned him to seek help for what would be a lifetime problem.

Lucas drove shakily to Modesto, where Roland Nyegaard, the physician who’d married his sister Wendy, confirmed the diagnosis. Nyegaard put him on Orinase, an oral drug that replaced the traditional daily insulin injections of most diabetes sufferers, and warned Lucas to start watching his diet: no drugs, no alcohol, above all no sweets. Farewell to chocolate malts, chocolate chip cookies, and Hershey bars, which he’d consumed in quantity since childhood. It was a rite of passage of sorts. With one of the last great pleasures of adolescence denied him, he had no choice but to grow up.

The discovery of his diabetes freed Lucas to launch his adult career. His first thought was to re-enter USC as a graduate student and get his Master of Fine Arts degree, but he was too late for the 1967 intake. All the same, the faculty was sufficiently impressed with his student work to offer him a part-time job in its night school, running a refresher course for navy and Marine Corps cameramen: ‘The whole idea of the class was to teach them they didn’t have to go by the rulebook,’ Lucas said.

He accepted, then went looking for a day job. Bob Dalva, a USC student who would become one of the moving forces of Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, and who was already adept at keeping his ear to the ground, had a job with Verna Fields, who was compiling a film for the United States Information Agency called Journey to the Pacific, about Lyndon Johnson’s seventeen-country tour of Australia, Korea, and points east in pursuit of consensus on Vietnam. Dalva proposed Lucas as assistant editor, and Fields hired him.

Burly and aggressive, Fields had grown hard and cynical in a business that routinely demeaned women. She’d been sound editor for Fritz Lang and worked on big productions like Anthony Mann’s epic El Cid, but never made it past the eighth or ninth panel of the credits. In between projects, she freelanced from her ranch house in the San Fernando Valley, the garage of which she’d converted into cutting rooms. When Gene Sloan went on sabbatical from USC, she taught his editing class, and got to know Lucas. Early in 1967, shortly after USC confirmed he could enter their 1968 graduate course, Lucas began driving out into the Valley every day to help cut the LBJ documentary.

Also heading there was Marcia Griffin, whom Fields had hired from a private film company, Sandler Films, to find and log the thousands of miles of Johnson footage. Space was tight, so Fields put the two newcomers in the same cutting room. Marcia, even shorter than George, had a clean, pastel prettiness that implied an upbringing in some upper-middle-class San Fernando suburb like Encino or Reseda. In fact, she grew up in air force bases all over America as her father hauled his family wherever he was posted, before finally abandoning them. With maintenance and child support patchy at best, Marcia and her sisters became accustomed to doing without, and to getting what they wanted by their own efforts. During her teens, Marcia went to live in Florida for two years with her father, moved back to Los Angeles, took a clerical job and studied chemistry at night school, then dropped out. Always interested in movies, she fell into a job as an apprentice film librarian at Sandler. After that, she embarked on the eight-year apprenticeship demanded by the Motion Picture Editors’ Guild as the price of a union card.

Though she looked archetypally Angeleno, Marcia had been born in Modesto while her father was stationed at nearby Stockton. It took her some days to discover that Lucas was from the same town, since her presence in the cutting room reduced him to a near-paralysis of shyness.

‘I used to say, “Well, George, where’ya from?”’ she recalled.

‘“Hmmm, California.”

‘“Oh, OK, where in California?”

‘“Ummm … Northern California.”

‘“Where in Northern California?”

‘“Just up north, the San Francisco area …”’

They found common ground in movies, though most of the time they argued about them. Lucas was ruthless at dismissing Marcia’s enthusiasms. ‘He was the intellectual,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was just a Valley girl.’ She responded to Dalva’s and Lucas’s pose of high seriousness by patronizing them too: they were just film students – she was a professional. Lucas put a softer complexion on their early relationship: ‘We were both feisty, and neither one of us would take any shit from the other. I sort of liked that. I didn’t like someone who could be run over.’ But he would consistently underestimate Marcia’s commitment to her craft. ‘I love film editing,’ she said later. ‘I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair. I think I’m even an editor in life.’

The Johnson documentary progressed slowly. Its USIA producer demanded as many flattering shots as possible of the president. Above all, any film showing his thinning hair must be avoided. When Lucas edited footage of LBJ’s visit to South Korea to suggest, through scenes of students being brutally pacified by the police, that the Korean administration was fascistic, the producer demanded he recut it. Furious, Lucas swore never again to edit other people’s films: ‘I realized that I didn’t want other people telling me how to cut a film. I wanted to decide. I really wanted to be responsible for what was being said in a movie.’

His insistence on protecting his films against any interference in the cutting room would become obsessive. Friends would roll their eyes and say, ‘Lighten up, George,’ but on this he was utterly intransigent. Marcia, whom George was now desultorily dating, never came to terms with his emphasis on the sacrosanct nature of editing decisions. It wasn’t her style to walk out on a project. One stuck to it and, little by little, got one’s way. Her persistence would make her one of the most sought-after editors of New Hollywood. Producer Julia Phillips even rated her ‘the better – certainly the warmer – half of the American Graffiti team.’

‘She was an absolutely stunning editor,’ says John Milius. ‘Maybe the best editor I’ve ever known, in many ways. She’d come in and look at the films we’d made – like The Wind and the Lion, for instance – and she’d say, “Take this scene and move it over here,” and it worked. And it did what I wanted the film to do, and I would never have thought of it. And she did that to everybody’s films: to George’s, to Steven [Spielberg]’s, to mine, and Scorsese particularly. He’ll attest to the fact that she was a great editor. She was a genuinely talented film-maker. She should have become a director.’

But in 1967 people defined Marcia Griffin, as they defined most women in Hollywood, with reference to their men. She was George’s girlfriend and, eventually, wife, and very little beyond that. In general, Lucas shared that perception, as did most of New Hollywood’s husbands about their wives. Not surprisingly, divorce became the group’s norm. The first marriages of Lucas, Spielberg, Milius, Scorsese and most other newcomers of the sixties ended in divorce, their unwillingness to deal on screen with contemporary human situations replicated in their lives. Many marriages expire in the bedroom, but that of George and Marcia Lucas was rare in coming to grief in the cutting room.

Whatever claims were made later, Lucas had little or no interest in science fiction films until after he graduated from USC in August 1966. He wasn’t alone in his indifference. The doyen of Hollywood sf, George Pal, hadn’t made a movie since The Conquest of Space in 1955. The benchmark of big-budget studio science fiction, MGM’s Forbidden Planet, was a decade old. In Britain, Stanley Kubrick was preparing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that wouldn’t be released for two years. Only starvation producer Roger Corman consistently turned out sf films, though he hadn’t actually shot one for years. It was cheaper to buy Russian or Japanese movies with lavish special-effect sequences, dump their dialogue scenes, then find some hungry young American film-maker to invent a new framing story.

Almost nobody saw these cheap sf movies in the big cities, though they cleaned up in rural drive-ins, where the twelve-to-twenty-five-year-old audience Lucas and Spielberg would inherit had begun to show its muscle. Raised on comic books and television, teenagers wanted sensational stories and gaudy special effects. When they couldn’t find them on screen, they invented them. All over the United States, amateur mask- and model-makers were painstakingly creating their own science fiction and horror films on 8mm. By the time Lucas made Star Wars, they had ripened into a generation of special-effects technicians ready to tinker together the technology he needed to realize his fantasy.

The big films of 1966 – A Man for All Seasons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (shot by Haskell Wexler), The Group and The Sand Pebbles – served an audience as middle-aged as the men who made them. That year’s Oscars honored mainly The Sound of Music. An unexpectedly large number of films came from Britain. In Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni anatomized Swinging London, which was also exploited in Georgy Girl and Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. Alfie introduced Michael Caine to an international audience. With heavy US investment, studios like Shepperton, Pinewood, and Elstree flourished in the outer suburbs of London, fostering teams of technicians who could hold their own against those of Hollywood, without the high salaries and crippling union control that made American films so expensive.

The only science fiction film of any size released in 1966 was Fantastic Voyage, an elaborate adventure in which a group of medics, including Raquel Welch, statuesque in skin-tight neoprene, are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of a leading scientist to repair a brain lesion. In the days before computer technology, the effects were achieved with wires, models, and out-of-scale sets, with some very obvious back projection and matte work.

It wasn’t in cinema that science fiction was taking its steps onto the international stage, but in television. 1966 saw the debuts not only of the live-action Batman, the gadget adventure series Mission: Impossible and Britain’s The Avengers: on 8 September, the world was introduced to a phenomenon, as Captain James Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before.

In the fall of 1966, just after he received his BA from USC, and while he was still working for Verna Fields, Lucas told Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins at a party thrown by Herb Kossower about an idea he’d had for a short science fiction film. As a first step into the fantastic, Lucas’s idea was tentative. He wondered if one could make an sf film without elaborate sets and costumes, using Los Angeles as Godard had used Paris in Alphaville, and simply suggesting the future by manipulating the image as he had in his animated USC films. If Don Glut could make Superman in the Valley, how much better might an avant-gardiste do? Lucas and Murch put together a couple of pages about an escapee from an underground civilization who emerges through a manhole into a new world; but nobody could see where it might go. Murch and Robbins developed another idea, called ‘Star Dance,’ but Lucas persisted, assembling a sort of script for a fifteen-minute film.

At this point he began to immerse himself in science fiction and fantasy. Willow, with its midget hero making an epic journey to confront the mountain fortress of an enchanter, suggests more than a nodding acquaintance with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Lucas told Alan Dean Foster, who novelized Star Wars, that Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was his favorite book. Trying to explain his vision of the Star Wars films, Lucas often quoted that book’s introduction: ‘I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man/Or the man who’s half a boy.’

Frank Herbert’s Dune had a more far-reaching influence on Lucas’s future work. From the moment in December 1963 when the science fiction magazine Analog published the first of three episodes of Dune World, with its cover by John Schoenherr of a stone pinnacle spearing out of a desert landscape against a sky with two moons, the novel caught Lucas’s imagination. Once Herbert finished the longer book version and its sequels, Dune’s story of a universe based on the ‘spice’ Melange that conferred near-immortality but which existed on only one planet in the universe, the desert world Arrakis, aka ‘Dune,’ entered the common experience of his generation. Herbert imagined a universe run by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, ruthlessly defending his declining empire from regional families, in particular that of Duke Leto Atriedes, whose son Paul was destined to overthrow him after acquiring near-godlike powers. Manipulating events from behind the scenes were the quasi-religious Bene Gesserit, an ancient sect of nun-like women with telepathic powers – not unlike Lucas’s monkish Jedi knights.

By comparison with the coming excesses of 1968, 1967, when Lucas rejoined USC as a graduate student, was calm. While he continued to teach the navy and Marine camera class, most of his Masters work consisted of two films, both building on the success of 1.42:08. He made anyone lived in a pretty little [how] town with Paul Golding, his collaborator on Herbie. The film, in CinemaScope and color, used actors and some sophisticated manipulation of images to tell a fable based on the poem of the same name by e.e. cummings. Life in an idyllic town is destroyed when a photographer arrives, each click of his shutter turning living people into dead monochrome images. Despite its greater technical sophistication, the film recalled A Look at Life in its graphic stiffness, its avoidance of character and dialogue, its reliance on flashy editing and photographic effects to disguise a lack of interest in people.

Lucas’s second film, The Emperor, was a documentary, and one of his best. His first idea had been to make a film about Wolfman Jack, but Smith had done such a good job of maintaining his incognito that nobody knew where he could be found. (In American Graffiti, one of the kids would insist that he broadcast from a plane circling over the United States.) Lucas compromised by choosing as his subject Bob Hudson, a deejay at KBLA in Burbank, right in the Valley, who grandiosely christened himself ‘The Emperor.’

Introduced by a beautiful girl cooing, ‘It’s his marvellous majesty,’ Hudson, surprisingly middle-aged and incoherent for a deejay with a large teenage following, appears making a triumphal progress through the streets of Burbank in the back of Murch and Robbins’s restored Rolls-Royce, accepting the plaudits of adoring fans, most of them eager girls. ‘Get off the freeway, peasant,’ someone shouts. ‘The Emperor is coming!’ Filmed in wide screen, intercut with helicopter news-shots of jammed freeways, hippie love-ins and facetious commercials with vox pop interviews, The Emperor shows Lucas stretching the limits of the short film and the documentary. The credits appear in the middle, and list the entire staff of the film school as student advisers, superimposed over a close-up of Hudson, pouchy, middle-aged and bored.

Marcia helped Lucas edit The Emperor. It was the first time many of the USC gang had met her, and the general reaction was astonishment that such an attractive and intelligent woman could see anything in a nerd like Lucas, however talented. ‘Marcia was very bright and upbeat,’ said Richard Walter. ‘Just the loveliest woman that you ever saw in your life. They seemed such an unlikely couple. She’s quite adorable.’

Their favorable impression of her strengthened when they saw her work on The Emperor. ‘The Emperor is a superb film,’ says Milius, who, with Richard Walter, appears on the soundtrack impersonating a Mexican bandido. ‘It still holds up today. When you see something like that, you think that maybe one of the great losses is that Marcia never became a film-maker and continued as an editor. But one of the other great losses is that George stopped making movies, and got interested in the sort of stuff that Lucasfilm puts out. Because he was a really dynamic film-maker.’

Lucas drifted back into after-hours campus society with the many old friends who were still at USC, including Milius and Charley Lippincott. Now living with Marcia in the ramshackle Portola Drive house, he had his eyes clearly set on a professional career. With that in mind, he even attended a course on direction taught by the comic Jerry Lewis. ‘George hated that class,’ recalls Charley Lippincott. ‘He sat back in the very last row, and sometimes I’d sit with him. Lewis had such an outrageous ego, it drove you crazy.’ Richard Walter rated Lewis ‘a gigantically talented man, but without taste. It’s as if those circuits just don’t operate. He was still making movies. He was at Columbia, in the midst of a “multi-picture pact.” He would frequently hold the class there, at the old Columbia studios on Gower Street. We’d all meet there on the lot; very exciting. And then he’d ad lib and wing it. It was really rather disorganized. I enjoyed being exposed to this wonderful maniac, but I can’t say I thought it was a tremendously valuable class.’

Lucas, like many others, signed up for only one reason, according to Walter: ‘Lewis encouraged people to believe he could get them into the [Screen Directors’] Guild, and that’s why a bunch of these students were coming. Caleb Deschanel and certainly George and others would come to that class not because they wanted to learn from Lewis. They didn’t appreciate his movies, though they thought it quite appropriate that the French appreciated his movies. But George really believed he could get them into the Guild, which was a hoax.’

Lewis surrounded himself with sycophants. ‘There was a little group of outsiders, tangential to USC, who used to sit in on the course,’ says Lippincott. ‘They included the actress Corinne Calvet, who had been in one of Lewis’s films, and her husband, who was an agent or something. And it was they who brought down a copy of Steve Spielberg’s Amblin’.’

While Lucas was working his way through USC, Spielberg, rejected by USC because of his poor grades, enrolled at the less prestigious University of California at Long Beach. Aware that he needed a calling card to attract the attention of studios, he persuaded Dennis Hoffman, who ran a small special-effects company, to back a twenty-four-minute 35mm widescreen color short about a young couple who meet on the road while hitch-hiking and fall in love. He called it Amblin’. Even Spielberg dismissed the film as a ‘Pepsi commercial,’ with as little intellectual weight as a piece of driftwood, but he was relentless in showing it to anyone who might help his career. Lewis liked it enough to include it in his USC class, and to have Spielberg introduce it.

As historic meetings go, that between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg was unimpressive. Presenting his film, Spielberg, with his open-necked flowered shirt and leather jacket, his high-pitched voice and nervy delivery which caused him to stumble over his words, made an unattractive impression. His naked ambition to succeed in Hollywood also offended the elitist USC audience. Lucas didn’t like Amblin’. He told Lippincott it was ‘saccharine.’ But over the next few months, Spielberg became a fixture at USC, often turning up at ‘Thursday Night at the Movies’ screenings. ‘He became part of the gang right away,’ says Milius. ‘That was a pretty tight-knit group. We hated UCLA and people like that. We were special – though we didn’t think we were going to conquer the world; we didn’t think we had a chance. But that’s also what made us so tight-knit. But he got accepted right away, because he had the same kind of enthusiasm.’ In particular, Spielberg became friendly with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, who shared his ambition to work in studio films. Finally, in 1968, a friend got a copy of Amblin’ to production head Sidney Sheinberg at Universal, who signed Spielberg to a seven-year contract. Later, Spielberg named his company Amblin Entertainment in acknowledgment of the film’s role in his success. Robbins and Barwood would write his first cinema feature, Sugarland Express.

Urged by Milius, Lucas started seeing Japanese films at the Toho cinema on La Brea. He discovered Akira Kurosawa, in particular his period adventures like Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, and Yojimbo. Kurosawa acknowledged John Ford as his master and model. His films have the spaciousness of westerns, and heroes of mythical proportions, often played, in the words of critic Audie Bock, by ‘a filthy, scratching, heavy-drinking Toshiro Mifune who tries to avoid violence but when forced to, enters battle with his breath held.’ Eighteenth-century Japan, when Kurosawa set most of his films, was so alien it could well have been Mars: the ankle-length robes and rural settings, the castles and swordplay, the culture of imperial power and privilege opposed by daring and belief – all recalled Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Lucas particularly admired Kakushi Toride no San Akunin (1958), released in the West as The Hidden Fortress. For the first time, Kurosawa shot in CinemaScope, and the film’s panoramas, even in black and white, conferred a new spaciousness and energy. Unusually for a Japanese film, the main character is a girl. When civil war threatens her family castle, the princess loads up its treasure, dresses as a boy and enlists the wiliest of her father’s retainers (Mifune) as her guide and protector. On the way, they dragoon a couple of peasant soldiers (Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki) into helping them. As played by Misa Uehara, the princess of Hidden Fortress is far from the stereotype of the shrinking, submissive Japanese woman. She’s ruthless in exploiting the peasants, and no less tough with Mifune, whom she criticizes for having put duty ahead of family, leaving his own sister to die while he flees with her and the treasure.

Lucas loved the formalized sword-duels of Kurosawa’s historical films: combatants inching minutely as they searched for a weakness, then slashing out with razor-sharp blades. No less attractive were his themes: loyalty to a lord; honor; mutual respect among warriors; fidelity to bushido, the samurai code. The characters, plot and setting of Hidden Fortress all found their way into Star Wars, as did those of Seven Samurai, the story of seven mercenaries who come together to save a village from a predatory warlord. In this case, Lucas’s model was John Sturges’s 1960 western version of the film, The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner as the group’s laconic leader Chris and Steve McQueen as his sidekick Vin. Retrospectively, Lucas claimed nobler models for Star Wars – ‘the Arthurian Quest for the Knight, the Biblical Renewal of Faith and the classic science fiction conflict of Man versus Machine,’ as one writer would put it – but in 1974, Dune, The Magnificent Seven, The Hidden Fortress and Flash Gordon were most on his mind. In February 1975, while he was still on the second draft of the film, he would describe it to Esquire magazine as ‘the first multi-million dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie – with The Magnificent Seven thrown in.’

Lucas’s Navy Production Workshop was now well on the way to becoming an efficient film crew. All at least ten years older than him, and mostly resentful of having anyone teach them their business, the sailors were contemptuous of almost all civilians, but particularly of hippie students. Shrewdly, Lucas divided the group, and set each half to compete with the other. The better of the two became his crew for his last student film. Making a virtue of necessity, he told them it would be an exercise in the use of available light: the sole artificial light would be three photo-floods for fill-ins.

The men responded with enormous effort, and complete loyalty to Lucas. ‘Within a week, those tough navy guys were licking George’s boots,’ said Dave Johnson respectfully. ‘I don’t understand how a low-profile guy like George can do those things. But they were following him around like puppy dogs.’ It was a social model that owed a lot to Japan, and Lucas may well have adapted some of the rules he saw being practiced in Kurosawa. Lucas was the navy men’s daimyo, they his samurai, ready to sacrifice friends, even family, in their loyalty. When Lucas came to make the feature version of THX1138, he even suggested shooting in Japan, to capture that sense of alienness and focused will.

Once he had decided to make the science fiction film as his graduate project, Lucas put his team to work. ‘The navy crew had all the best equipment,’ said Willard Huyck later, ‘all the free film, so it was very shrewd of him to make THX with a navy crew.’ Being on official navy business also won Lucas access to otherwise forbidden locations. Looking for futuristic settings, he persuaded USC’s computer department to let him shoot there, and bluffed his way into the parking stations at LAX and Van Nuys Airport.

‘That was a brilliant piece of generalship,’ says John Milius of THX1138. ‘Everybody wanted the real artistic guys on their crew – guys like Bob Dalva. George went off and got all these navy guys. They were real competent. They knew how to do stuff, and get things done. They got equipment, and they got short ends of film from the navy, so he had five times as much film as everybody else, five times more equipment. That was brilliant. That was real producing.’

Having such a well-organized crew removed some of the strain of directing. But, whether out of genuine illness or because he was aware for the first time of his diabetes, Lucas felt tired most of the time. Hefting a 16mm camera onto his shoulder became increasingly difficult. Equipment was difficult to obtain. They had no dolly: for travelling shots, cameraman Zip Zimmerman sat with the Arriflex on a rolling platform of the sort used to shift loads in a warehouse, and was towed backward.

Most days, Lucas worked for Verna Fields editing Lyndon Johnson material, and shot THX at nights and on weekends. At 4 a.m. most mornings, he could be found slumped over the Moviola. He began to look even more frail, and his nervous voice developed a new crack.

The shooting of what Lucas called THX1138 4EB – the letters ‘EB’ collapsed together so they resembled an ideogram or trademark – was laborious but not complicated. Mostly it consisted of THX1138, played by Dan Natchsheim, a navy man who doubled as the film’s editor, fleeing down empty corridors or through bleak subterranean bunkers, or shots of technicians and police staring into the eyepieces of machines. A cipher throughout, THX, explained Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin after interviewing Lucas on the set of Star Wars, was ‘a Huxleyian man inadvertently given free will [who] tries to flee the nightmare world of tomorrow.’ Joy Carmichael played his girl, LUH7117.

Lucas finished the fifteen-minute film in twelve weeks. The real creativity came in the cutting room and optical lab. Much of the film consists of fuzzy TV images, half obscured by identification numbers and letters along the foot of the screen, and periodically interrupted by the jagged flash of a lens change. Occasionally, the guards’ own eyes look back at them from a similar screen – in this world of total surveillance, someone must also watch the watchers. The characters exist in a susurrus of hissing data that swamps the soundtrack, almost drowning the ominous minor organ chords that signify some residual humanity lurking in this sterile world.

‘I remember when I saw the first cut,’ says Walter Murch. ‘There was this wild mixture of Bach, and skittering around in that were the chatterings of almost undistinguishable voices in air traffic control, or something like that.’ As in Alphaville, the government is a computer. When THX visits a robotic booth doubling as confessional and psychiatrist’s couch, the canned voice monotonously repeats, ‘Yes … yes ….’

Lucas showed the film to Irvin Kershner, who had returned to USC to teach direction. ‘It was really quite unusual,’ says Kershner, dubiously. ‘Very cinematic. It was full of technical gewgaws. It was fun.’ Anyone acquainted with the nouvelle vague recognized the debts to Alphaville and Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a science fiction film in which memory carries a man between a dystopic future and a past of lost opportunities. But whatever its sources, it was an impressive work to have been produced by a university film school, and Lucas emerged even more strongly as USC’s wunderkind.

THX1138 4EB – the subtitle Electronic Labyrinth was added later – was included in a programme of USC films at the Fairfax Theater in Hollywood. One party who went to see it included Fritz Lang; Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland; George Pal, producer of When Worlds Collide and many other science fiction films; and young film journalist Bill Warren. ‘Among the films shown that night,’ recalls Warren, ‘were Glut, The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, by John Carpenter, and THX1138 4EB. Afterwards, we’re all standing on the sidewalk outside the Fairfax, and Fritz says, “All right, which one was the best?”

‘Forry and George Pal look at each other, and Forry says, “I think we liked The Resurrection of Broncho Billy best.’ George Pal agreed with Forry. And Fritz says, “That is why your films all stink, George. The best one …” He turned to me and said, “Which one was it?” I said, “It was THX1138 4EB.” And he said, “Yes! That’s the one. If I ever meet that young director, I want to tell him how great that film was.”’

Of all the people in Old Hollywood with whom George Lucas might have been expected to become involved next, Carl Foreman was among the least probable.

After writing some earnest Hollywood adaptations in the late forties, like Champion, Home of the Brave, and The Men, Foreman was named as a Communist in 1950, and placed on the studios’ covert blacklist. Unable to work in America, he relocated to Europe, leaving behind a western screenplay that Fred Zinnemann turned into High Noon. Retrospectively, the film seems to deal with many issues raised by the blacklist: the herd mentality, the unwillingess of people to live up to professed ideals. In fact, Foreman had no such ambitions for it, but happily basked in his unearned reputation as a socialist ideologue.

‘Carl Foreman wasn’t a very nice guy,’ said Mickey Knox, one of the many scriptwriters he employed during an erratic career as writer, director and producer. The opinion was general. In Paris and London, Foreman produced stodgy money-makers like Born Free and The Virgin Soldiers, and moonlighted on screenplays. By 1967 the political climate in Hollywood had thawed sufficiently for him to return. In 1968 the Writers’ Guild would launch a project to uncover the work of blacklisted writers obscured by the names of ‘fronts’ or deleted altogether, and to restore their rightful credits to the screen. Foreman’s first script after his return was Mackenna’s Gold, based on a Will Henry western novel about a mismatched party of adventurers seeking buried gold. Hoping to attract even a few teenagers to the film, Columbia’s publicity department offered to fund two students each from USC and UCLA to make ten-minute films about the production, to be shot on and around its desert locations in Arizona and Utah.

USC, on the recommendation of Arthur Knight, put forward Charles Braverman and Charley Lippincott. Braverman accepted, but Lippincott had been offered a job he preferred, as assistant to a director at Columbia who was planning a film, eventually unmade, on student film-makers. He suggested Lucas.

Lucas accepted the Mackenna’s Gold job, but without illusions. ‘I thought the whole thing was a ruse to get a bunch of cheap, behind-the-scenes documentary films made,’ he said, ‘and they were doing it under the guise of a scholarship.’ But he wanted to direct, and once he graduated, USC would no longer be picking up the bill.

He and Braverman joined David Wyles and David MacDougal from UCLA, and headed for Kanab, Utah. Lucas had one advantage: the project was being supervised by Saul Bass, for whom he’d worked on the credits of Grand Prix. Each student crew got a station wagon, film equipment and $200 a week to live on. Given his ascetic tastes, Lucas thought – rightly – that he could save most of that, and arrived back from the trip $800 richer.

He was appalled by the prodigality of a Hollywood unit on location. Nobody could drive anywhere, not even in their own car, without a Teamster at the wheel; hot meals had to be served three times a day; and a full crew of local technicians was kept on salary doing nothing while the imported Hollywood technicians shot the film. ‘We had never been around such opulence,’ said Lucas; ‘zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing. It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste – that was the worst of Hollywood.’

For his film, Braverman interviewed Foreman; MacDougal covered the director, J. Lee Thompson; Wyles the stunt riders and horse-wranglers. Within two days, Lucas was bored with the film-making process. As nervous as ever around people, he made a film without them: one that stood back and saw the production as it might appear to a god – a ripple in time, as insignificant and evanescent as the movement of clouds over the landscape, unnoticed by the insects and animals that struggled to survive in this wilderness. Sixteen years later, he would recognize the same long view in a film by avant-garde documentarist Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi even had some of the same images, like the speeded-up passage of clouds. Francis Coppola had backed Koyaanisqatsi, and Lucas would join him as guarantor of Reggio’s second (and less successful) Powaqqatsi (1988).

Lucas finished shooting his film on 18 June 1967, and called it just that – 6.18.67. Foreman detested it. He’d tried to dissuade Lucas from making it, and once it was finished, did his best to see it didn’t get shown. But PBS made a program about the project and the four films, and Foreman, interviewed for it, had little choice but to smile and say he loved Lucas’s work. He was placed even more on the spot when the third National Student Film Festival showed it, along with The Emperor and THX1138 4EB. THX won the drama category; the other two were honorably mentioned. Milius took the animation prize for Marcello, I’m so Bored. Time magazine featured the two winners from USC and NYU’s Martin Scorsese in an article about young filmmakers. The photographer asked Milius to sit on the edge of the Steenbeck editing table in a New York cutting room. There was a double irony in this: Milius had never cut a film in his life, and didn’t know how – Lucas always helped him – and the flatbed Steenbeck, soon to be the standard editor’s tool, and already so in Europe, was shunned by the Hollywood establishment, fanatically loyal to the upright Moviola. At the time, there wasn’t a single Steenbeck in the whole of California.

8 Big Boy Now

I pattern my life on Hitler. He didn’t just take over the country. He worked his way into the existing fabric first.

Francis Ford Coppola, Newsweek, March 1967

One of the crumbs from the Hollywood table that occasionally fell into the eager hands of institutions like USC was the Samuel Warner Scholarship. The winner spent six months at the studio on a salary of $80 a week, doing what he wanted, learning what he could. He could even nominate the department in which he interned.

In 1967, the shortlist for this perk comprised Lucas and Walter Murch. On the day the decision was announced, they hung out on the USC patio and discussed what they’d do if they won. Whoever got the job, they agreed, the other would do everything he could to help. That was the trouble with Old Hollywood, Lucas argued: its primary directive was ‘divide and rule.’ It would never be like that with the next generation, he assured his friends. At USC, everyone worked with everyone else on every project. That’s how it would be in New Hollywood too.

Lucas won, and in June 1967 he drove his Camaro to Burbank and checked in at the gate. Traditionally, he has said he wanted to spend his six months with the legendary animator Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and Speedy Gonzales. Directed to the animation department, he found it reduced to a single office with ‘one guy, who was sort of head of the department, and he would just sit in his office and twiddle his thumbs all day.’ The department had been closed.

Legend also claims that Lucas arrived on the Warners lot on the very day that Jack, last of the four Warner Brothers, cleared out his office. ‘From my point of view, the film industry died in 1965,’ says Lucas, amplifying this story. ‘It’s taken this long for people to realize the body is cold. The day I won my six-month internship and walked onto the Warner Bros. lot was the day Jack Warner left and the studio was taken over by Seven Arts. I walked through the empty lot and thought, “This is the end.” The industry had been taken over by people who knew how to make deals and operate offices but had no idea how to make movies. When the six months was over, I never went back.’

The skinny, bearded kid in jeans and running shoes ambling across the lot, passing the dapper, impeccably suited Jack Warner with his hairline mustache and insincere smile, trudging into oblivion, is such a Hollywood moment that one wishes it were true. Unfortunately for myth, when Lucas arrived, Warners’ animation department had been closed for five years. Since 1962, Chuck Jones had been attached to MGM, turning out versions of Tom and Jerry which even he himself rated as inferior. As for Jack Warner, his departure from the lot was as prolonged as a soprano’s farewell performances. He sold his stock to Seven Arts in November 1966, but the company encouraged him to stay on in his old office as an independent producer. Long after Steve Ross’s Kinney Services bought out Seven Arts in 1969, Warner remained on the lot. Only when Kinney told him they wanted to convert his private dining room into offices did the last of the Warners move over the hills into Century City, on what had been part of the old Twentieth Century-Fox, and set up Jack L. Warner Productions.

Lucas found the Warners lot a ghost town. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz commented soberly of that time, ‘I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that any minute I’d look out and see tumbleweeds come rolling past.’ Only one film was shooting: Finian’s Rainbow. Howard Kazanjian from USC was second assistant director, and got Lucas onto the set. He stood at the back and watched a man with a beard and a loud voice order people about and wave his arms a lot. If this was the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, the first film-school student of their generation to penetrate the Hollywood establishment, Lucas wasn’t impressed.

In 1968, Coppola, in the estimation of everyone who knew him, had the bucket in his hand and was headed for the well. Before he’d even finished his postgraduate degree at UCLA film school, this ebullient voluptuary with a thick black beard and a tendency to corpulence had directed two soft-core porn films, The Peeper and The Belt Girls and the Playboy, written both music and lyrics for a musical, finished a feature screenplay, and worked in Roger Corman’s film factory, turning foreign sf films into fodder for the drive-ins.

Producer Ray Stark recognized Coppola as someone he could use, and offered him a job as hired gun and script fixer at Seven Arts, for which he was then head of production. Lured by promises of an eventual directing credit, and Stark’s flattering assurances of his genius, Coppola accepted. The day he did so, an anonymous sign went up on the UCLA bulletin board. It said simply, ‘Sellout.’

In between fixing broken-down movies for Stark, Coppola turned out at least three screenplays a year, in the hope that Stark would let him direct one. Each time, however, Seven Arts assigned them to someone else. Grown cold and canny, Coppola optioned a 1963 British novel called You’re a Big Boy Now, offering author David Benedictus $1000 if the film was ever made. He scripted it as a wise-ass comedy with music about a shy boy who spends his days roller-skating round the stacks of the New York Public Library, replacing returned books, and who falls into the bizarre world that surrounds a febrile young library user.

Half flower-power comedy, half pop-art musical, You’re a Big Boy Now evolved into an American version of Richard Lester’s films with the Beatles, with a mobile camera (critic Rex Reed called Coppola ‘the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera’), musical numbers erupting into the action, and characters as much comic-strip as Actors’ Studio. Seven Arts was sufficiently impressed to sign a new deal with Coppola. He would write three films for them – two, The Conversation and The Rain People, from his original stories, and the third, The Scarlet Letter, from Nathaniel Hawthorne. In return, he could direct the fourth.

You’re a Big Boy Now lost every penny of the $800,000 invested in it. In fact, Seven Arts estimated it lost over $1 million, once they counted advertising and print costs. But by the time it came out, the company’s mind was elsewhere. Having just bought a tottering Warner Brothers, it wanted something in production quickly. Dusting off the 1947 E.Y. Harburg/Burton Lane Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, a whimsical tale of an eccentric Irishman wandering the rural Southern United States looking for a leprechaun’s buried pot of gold, Warners-Seven Arts, as it was now known, exercised an outstanding option on the services of a tottering Fred Astaire, assembled a low-cost supporting cast led by British unknowns Petula Clark and Tommy Steele, and assigned the film to their cheapest and hungriest director – Coppola.

In June 1967 he started shooting Finian’s Rainbow on Warners’ Burbank lot. Distracted, he didn’t look around for a few days. When he did, ‘I noticed this skinny kid watching me. I was curious who this young man was, and I think I went over to him and said, “Hi. See anything interesting?” and he said, “Not much.” That was the first time I met George Lucas.’

This first encounter between two men who were to become pivotal not only in each other’s careers but in the growth of New Hollywood typified their relationship. Coppola never ceased to think of Lucas as that grubby boy watching from the shadows. ‘Actually,’ said Lucas, ‘he calls me a stinky kid. He says, “You’re a stinky kid. You do what you want.”’

Each day, Lucas came in and stood about on Coppola’s set, a thin, silent guy, habitually dressed in a white T-shirt, black pants and sneakers. The crew ignored him, and even Coppola, once he’d established who he was, only spoke to him in passing. It didn’t escape Lucas’s notice, however, that he and Coppola were the only people on the crew under fifty, and the only ones with beards.

After two weeks, Lucas had had enough. He thought the animation department might have a 16mm camera he could borrow to shoot a film. Also, Carl Foreman had suggested that if he wrote a treatment for a feature version of THX1138 4EB, he would see if he could interest Columbia in it. Either way, he felt he had nothing more to learn by watching Coppola.

‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ Coppola blustered when Lucas told him. ‘Aren’t I entertaining enough? Have you learned everything you’re going to learn watching me direct?’

Lucas shrugged.

Coppola found he would be sorry to see the kid go. ‘I was like a fish out of water among all these old studio guys,’ he said. With Lucas, he could talk about movies – something Old Hollywood never did, except to discuss what they cost and what they earned. To keep him around, Coppola put him on the payroll as his ‘administrative assistant.’ On 31 July 1967, Lucas signed a contract for six months’ work at a total salary of $3000. His first job was to shoot Polaroid pictures of the set to check that props and furniture stayed in the same place between set-ups. Once there was footage to edit, he spent his time in the cutting room with the studio’s longtime head of editing, Rudy Fehr. The THX treatment went into the bottom drawer.

Just before Thanksgiving, 1967, Coppola confided to Lucas that he was starting work on his next film for Seven Arts, and that he had a spot for him in the crew.

The shoot on Finian’s Rainbow was expiring in a gaudy sunset of mutual congratulation. For $3.5 million, Coppola had delivered a film that looked as if it could well have cost $15 million. But he knew the film would fail. The important thing was to get another one up and running before anyone at Seven Arts realized it too. Fortunately, his stock stood so high with the company that they agreed not only to produce his original screenplay, The Rain People, but to let him direct it as well. Armed with their backing, Coppola persuaded IATSE to waive its rules and let him shoot the film his way, with a small crew, moving from location to location as the mood took him. Technically, a unit shooting outside Los Angeles was supposed to hire men from the district branch, or ‘Local.’ If they insisted on using their own technicians, they still had to pay a local crew, as had happened on Mackenna’s Gold, even if the men simply sat about playing pinochle.

Coppola told IATSE his film was actually a documentary, and so should be exempt from union rules. The union cautiously agreed to at least discuss giving Coppola special consideration. Taking this for carte blanche, he wheedled some money out of Seven Arts and assembled a scratch crew with an old friend, Bart Patton, who became the film’s line producer.

Coppola based The Rain People on an incident from his childhood when his mother, after a family argument, left home and checked into a motel for two days. His heroine, Natalie Ravenna, is a married woman who, finding she’s pregnant, goes on the road to ‘discover herself She drives across country, picking up hitch-hikers, falling into relationships with people, only to shed them and move on. She discovers something about herself, but only at the expense of others. ‘Killer’ Kilgannon, a brain-damaged football player she picks up, calls her ‘a rain person.’ In one of Coppola’s more portentous lines, he explains, ‘The rain people are made of rain, and when they cry, they disappear, because they cry themselves away.’ In the end, after having been unable to help Killer, and watching him cheated and humiliated, Natalie stands by helplessly as he battles with Robert Duvall, a cop with whom she has become involved sexually, and Duvall’s daughter shoots him.

Killer was played by James Caan, who’d been at Hofstra University with Coppola, and had gone on to Hollywood stardom in Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 and El Dorado, and Robert Altman’s Countdown. Coppola flew Caan to Hofstra to shoot a crucial sequence: the football game in which Killer is injured. The trip delighted Lucas, as did the way Coppola brushed away the problems of guerrilla filmmaking as if they were fluff on his jacket. They couldn’t afford a cinematographer or lights? Why not shoot everything with a 16mm Bell & Howell, hand-held? It would look more authentic anyway. No sound recordist? Didn’t matter – George could record sound. George, as it turned out, could also carry the camera equipment, find props for the few staged scenes, act as production manager, and almost everything else.

It was a reminder to Lucas of his student film days, and of his time on the race-car circuit. Nothing could have been more different from the elephantine shoot of Finian’s Rainbow. This was surely the filmmaking of the future, an American nouvelle vague, distinguished by the qualities that François Truffaut had described as typical of American film-making – ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, and speed.’ Walter Murch said, ‘I think for Francis and George, that film was the prototype. If they could operate making a film out of a storefront in Ogallala, Nebraska – and do it successfully – then there was no reason why they should live in Hollywood.’

But Coppola almost immediately chilled Lucas’s enthusiasm. How was the THX treatment going? Lucas confessed he hadn’t looked at it in weeks.

‘You’ve gotta learn to write,’ Coppola told him sternly. ‘Nobody will take you seriously unless you can write.’

Lucas explained that writing exhausted him, both physically and mentally, but Coppola told him he was going about it the wrong way. ‘He said, “Look, when you write a script, just go as fast as you can. Just get it done. Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it, and then go back through as fast as you can, and then go back and fix it – you just keep fixing it. But if you try to make each page perfect, you’ll never get beyond page ten.”’ He also suggested Lucas read Shakespeare, his own personal inspiration.

Coppola persuaded Warners to option THX for $3000, then told Lucas that that would be his salary for working on The Rain People. Throughout the shoot Lucas got up at 4 a.m., laboriously wrote a scene for THX, in pencil, in crabbed capitals in the sort of lined ‘blue books’ he’d used for school exams, then started the day’s work. Not all such stories have happy endings, however. ‘I finished it,’ says Lucas, ‘and showed it to him, and he said, “This is terrible. I think we ought to hire a writer.”’

Coppola found a playwright with some feature-film credentials prepared to work for very little, and set him to work rewriting the screenplay. Meanwhile, Lucas scrounged a 16mm camera and a Nagra tape recorder, and suggested making a documentary on the production. Coppola, a pushover for self-promotion, skimmed $12,000 from the publicity budget to pay for it.

Spending more and more time in New York while Marcia continued to work on commercials in Los Angeles was placing a strain on their relationship, and Marcia finally flew east in February 1968. One of Lucas’s jobs was scouting locations, and on a wet Sunday in February he took Marcia to the next one on his list, in Garden City, Long Island, and proposed to her.

In April 1968 Coppola went back to Hofstra to shoot another football game, and late in the summer the Rain People caravan of seven vehicles and twenty people started to roll across America. Lucas was on board, but not Marcia. At the start of filming, Coppola magisterially banned wives and girlfriends from the shoot, ignoring the fact that a VW van trailing the caravan carried his wife Eleanor, their two children and, as babysitter, a teenager named Melissa Mathison, later the screenwriter of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and wife of Harrison Ford.

As well as the cast, the caravan included a recreational vehicle fitted with a Steenbeck so that editor Barry Malkin could cut the film as they went along. The cameraman was Bill Butler, who later shot Jaws for Steven Spielberg. Everyone kept in touch via two-way radio. Footage was airlifted to New York every day, and rushes normally caught up with them three days later – too late to reshoot if Coppola had second thoughts. In Ogallala, Nebraska, editor Malkin finally called a halt. He needed time to assemble the mountain of material, so the crew camped at the Lakeway Lodge while Coppola occupied an old shoe store downtown as a production office, where Malkin spent five weeks making a preliminary cut.

Lucas persuaded Coppola to hire Marcia as cutting-room assistant. When Lucas rang to tell her, he sensed some resistance. Haskell Wexler had asked her to work on his feature Medium Cool, which he was both directing and shooting against the background of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Once the convention became the focus of riots over the war in Vietnam, he’d had the audacious idea of setting a fictional story about a reporter at the heart of the disturbances, and shooting it with lightweight camera and fast stock, just like the cinéma vérité directors. Wexler’s invitation to work on the film excited and flattered Marcia, but she loved Lucas enough to turn it down and leave for Ogallala. Fortunately, Wexler delayed editing, so she was able to work on both films.

All the time, Lucas was shooting his diary of the production, snatching shots of Coppola which, in retrospect, showed him more revealingly than he had either expected or wanted. This Coppola is a blustering, filibustering dynamo, living on his nerves, inventing both the film and himself as he goes along, and relying on his imposing, near-biblical stature and commanding manner to steamroller any opposition.

The documentary shows him hectoring the Warners head office by phone, yelling, ‘The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!’ Later, he moans, ‘I’m tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.’ Lucas also glimpsed the paper-thinness of this persona when Coppola decreed that everyone, himself included, should be short-haired and clean-shaven when they rolled into the midwest. (In Easy Rider, roughly contemporary with The Rain People, long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are blown away by a redneck with a shotgun.) But Coppola without his patriarchal beard proved a different, less imposing person. Nobody took him seriously, not even the crew he’d dominated for so long. Some didn’t even recognize him. So startling was the change that Lucas had to add a line to the commentary of his documentary explaining the radical mass-depilation.

When there was time, Coppola and Lucas kicked around ideas for future projects. One was inspired by Medium Cool. Why not make a film about Vietnam the same way, shot like a documentary, on 16mm, in black and white, while battles were actually taking place?

Nobody now remembers who first thought of it – or, more correctly, everyone is certain that they first proposed basing such a film on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s story, a man goes up the Congo River to investigate reports that Kurtz, the local agent for a Belgian trading company, has gone crazy and set himself up as a sort of god. He finds Kurtz ill and raving, and he dies with the words: ‘The horror! The horror.’

No factor of Coppola’s working methods complicated the making of The Rain People more than sex. It suffused the production. James Caan was a notorious seducer, an habitué of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion who boasted he’d slept with seventeen consecutive Playmates of the Month. Coppola was also, in the words of a friend, a ‘pussy hound.’ He would halt production to fly back to New York, supposedly for conferences but actually to pursue some new mistress.

On one occasion, Coppola abandoned the crew in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in a motel with no phone, TV, or restaurant. ‘I got a little angry about that,’ says Lucas. ‘Francis was saying all this “all-for-one” stuff, and he goes off and screws around in New York. He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.’ Throughout all this, Coppola’s wife Eleanor stood by patiently, bringing up the children and accepting the sympathy of everyone.

Coppola fought too with Shirley Knight, his star. Knight, like her character Natalie, was pregnant, and her nerves were on edge. The semi-nude bedroom scenes, dictated by Coppola’s conception of Natalie as a woman looking to experience sex with other men before she settled down to motherhood, disturbed her. They wrangled over interpretation, over the problems of this kind of shooting. In reaction, Coppola trimmed her part and built up that of Robert Duvall. Knight protested, and the situation deteriorated still further, exacerbated by Coppola’s evident attraction to her.

The tensions increased as production went on. When Marcia came out to Nebraska to work on the film, Coppola took an obvious interest in her. ‘Everybody wanted Marcia,’ says John Milius. ‘Part of [Lucas’s] disagreement with Francis is, I’m sure, because Francis attempted to hit on Marcia, because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody. But that was Francis. What was it Talleyrand said of Napoleon – “He was as great as a man can be without virtue”? Francis was for Francis – but Francis was great; a truly great man. He’s still my Führer.’

The production of The Rain People was as close to a honeymoon as Lucas and Coppola ever got. ‘George was like a younger brother to me,’ said Coppola, ‘I loved him. Where I went, he went.’ But Lucas was less sanguine. ‘My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,’ he mused. ‘I’m his antithesis.’

All this would be grist to the Star Wars mill, but for the moment confidence was in the ascendant. Like everyone else on the unit, Lucas struggled to save The Rain People and Coppola’s reputation. He filmed some of the arguments between Coppola and Knight, but didn’t use them in his documentary. Francis had become his Führer too.

9 The March Up-Country

We could leave, and live in the superstructure.

LUH, in THX1138. Script by Walter Murch and George Lucas

In Ogallala, the locals had been so flattered to have a film crew in town that they offered to convert a local grain warehouse into a sound stage. Despite his memories of those ‘Let’s do the show right here!’ musicals of the late thirties, Coppola declined, but it planted the idea of a decentralized film industry, not tied to Hollywood, in his mind.

Indirectly, Coppola brought the dream a giant step closer to fulfilment when he remembered he’d promised to deliver a speech in San Francisco to a forum of eight hundred high-school English teachers on ‘Film in Relation to the Printed Word.’ Claiming he was needed in Ogallala to tie up loose ends, Coppola persuaded Lucas to do it.

Speaking in public terrified almost all the New Hollywood directors, and Lucas more than most. When he and Spielberg planted their palmprints in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Spielberg, urged by owner Ted Mann to make a speech, said awkwardly, ‘We had snakes in the last picture and bugs in this picture. But supposedly man’s greatest fear is public speaking, and that will be our next picture.’

That his audience would be made up of high-school teachers, of whom he had ambivalent memories at best, increased Lucas’s distaste for the chore; but such was Coppola’s influence that he flew back ahead of the crew to make the appearance, arranging to meet them in Berkeley the following week.

Another speaker at the convention was John Korty. Eight years older than Lucas, he’d worked his way through film school creating animated TV commercials. In 1964 he moved to Stinson Beach, just south of Bolinas, rented a big gray barn for $100 a month, installed some second-hand film equipment, and began making films. He’d produced and directed two independent features, including The Crazy Quilt (1966), for less than $250,000 each. They did well, too, and won festival prizes. After the convention, Lucas visited Korty’s operation, then rang Coppola in Nebraska. ‘You gotta see this,’ he said excitedly.

The Rain People caravan rolled into the Bay area on 4 July 1968. Radio and TV were still full of the news that Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles from gunshot wounds the previous month, less than two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. The deaths of King and Kennedy drove home to Lucas and Coppola the deteriorating nature of big-city American society. As a character remarked in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), ‘Every time you turned around, someone just shot one of the best men in the country.’

Coppola and unit manager Ron Colby made a side trip to Stinson Beach to look over Korty’s operation, and within a week Coppola was the prophet of decentralization. He had seen the future, it worked, and it was in Northern California. ‘We started fantasizing about the notion of going to San Francisco,’ he said, ‘to be free to produce films as we had done on Rain People. It was a beautiful place to live, and had an artistic, bohemian tradition.’

In Korty’s simple enterprise, Lucas too glimpsed a movie business shaped precisely to his personality. Korty’s films were accessible, but not overtly commercial. He was removed from Hollywood, but still connected to the audience by the independent cinemas which had proliferated since the studios relinquished their hold on exhibition. Above all, this was a cinema without big stars and the problems they brought with them – problems Lucas had seen doing their damage on The Rain People.

Coppola, inevitably, was more grandiose. Working in a barn on worn-out Moviolas was bullshit. He had something more baronial in mind. This difference in scale would be another wedge driven between Coppola and Lucas, master and mentor.

Finian’s Rainbow was due for release on 9 October. Nobody expected it to live up to Warners’ inflated expectations. Early in August, Coppola gave a gloomy interview to the Hollywood Reporter, which headlined it: ‘Francis Coppola to Make Only Own Stories in Future.’ Shortly after, he told critic Joseph Gelmis: ‘It’s come to the point where I just want to get out altogether. I’m thinking of pulling out and making other kinds of films. Cheaper films. Films I can make in 16mm.’

With his salary on Rain People at an end, Lucas began editing his documentary about The Rain People, christened Filmmaker – or rather, filmmaker – and subtitled ‘a film diary’. He also picked up the strings of his friendships with people from USC. Charley Lippincott was finishing his PhD and running the USC film society, but many others were already working in the industry. Milius had just had his first script filmed. Coppola commissioned him (with Warners’ money) to write the adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness relocated to Vietnam. Lucas would direct it.

‘George and I would talk about the battles,’ says Milius, ‘and what a great movie it would make. He loved it because of all the technology, the helicopters, air strikes by Phantoms, the night-vision scopes and devices to detect people walking around at night, and I loved the idea of a war being fought that way. Of course, we hadn’t lost it then, so it was a little easier to be interested in it. We wanted a scene where the guys are doped out of their minds and they call in an air strike on themselves.’ The provisional title was Apocalypse Now, inspired by a button Milius had seen worn by a hippie that said ‘Nirvana Now:’ ‘I loved the idea of a guy having a button with a mushroom cloud on it that said, “Apocalypse Now.”’

Haskell Wexler had hired Walter Murch to mix TV commercials for a company he partly owned. In the autumn, Lucas suggested to Coppola that Murch, whom he hadn’t met, mix The Rain People. He got the two men together, and after one meeting Coppola pointed to the piled-up cans and said melodramatically, ‘Here’s the film. Cut the sound.’ Murch started work in a tiny house in Benedict Canyon. The fact that he didn’t belong to the union worried Murch more than it did Coppola, though he eventually found it an advantage. Too nervous to order sound effects from a library for fear that someone would demand to see his union card, he invented and improvised. The result was a quantum leap in the quality of movie sound. To cover the union problem, Coppola invented some new terms, ‘sound design’ and ‘sound montage,’ which conveniently obscured Murch’s activities.

Kinney Services, a conglomerate which made its millions out of parking lots, had bought Warner Brothers. Coppola mulled over a way of getting them to back his move to San Francisco. He found it in the experience of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who’d made Easy Rider on a few joints and a shoestring, and who were now the hottest talents in Hollywood. As the novelist Joan Didion wrote, ‘every studio in town was narcotisized on Easy Rider’s grosses, and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’ Under ex-agent Ned Tanen, a close friend of editor Verna Fields, Universal had launched a program of ‘youth movies’ for under $1 million each. This initiative was to produce most of the worthwhile and commercially successful post-Easy Rider films by young directors, including American Graffiti.

Coppola was twenty-nine, with one dud to his credit and, if he was any judge, another one waiting to emerge in The Rain People, but he was ready to embrace the Easy Rider ethos if that’s what it took to relocate to San Francisco. He and Ron Colby flew to Cologne in the autumn of 1968 for the Photo-kina exhibition, which showcased the latest in film equipment. Dazzled by high-tech German gear, Coppola impulsively ordered an $80,000 Keller sound-mixing system and some cameras, not knowing where the money would come from to pay for them, nor in what premises he would install them.

In Denmark, they visited a company called Laterna Films. ‘I was thrilled to see a beautiful old mansion with gardens and trees that had been turned into a film company,’ Coppola said. ‘The many bedrooms had been transformed into editing rooms, the garage was a mixing studio; everywhere young people were working on their films, discussing their projects while eating lunch in the garden.’ He was particularly charmed by the collection of rare magic lanterns and early motion toys kept in the house. They illuminated a route back to the cinema’s earliest days, when movies were still a game, and film-makers took to the road whenever it pleased them, setting up studios in barns and improvising stories from the events of the day. He returned to California even more determined to leave Hollywood.

On 22 February 1969, George and Marcia married at the United First Methodist Church in Pacific Grove, near Monterey. John Plummer was best man. Coppola came, as did Murch, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, and even Verna Fields. The newlyweds left for a honeymoon in Big Sur in Marin. Driving into Marin County, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, they fell for sleepy Mill Valley, a typical Northern California town, with redwoods and a river, and rented a small hilltop house on Vernal Road for $120 a month. Any thought of a career in Hollywood was forgotten. The future was here. Lucas was sure of it.

America was moving toward a more sensual, self-gratifying society, where sex and drugs were more important than rock’n’roll. 1969 saw the publication of I’m OK – You’re OK, The Sensuous Woman, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and Portnoy’s Complaint. The year’s top tunes were songs from the show Hair. Its theme, sung by the Cowsills, and the 5th Dimension’s version of ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in’, like the Beatles’ ‘Come Together,’ and Blood, Sweat and Tears’ ‘You’ve Made Me so Very Happy,’ promoted peace, happiness, free love and dope. In August, a six-hundred-acre pasture in upstate New York became the site of the cultural phenomenon called Woodstock. It was a good time to be alive, and there was no place better in which to be alive than Marin County.

The rewritten screenplay of THX arrived, and Lucas didn’t like it: ‘It may have been a good screenplay, but it wasn’t at all what I wanted to make into a movie.’ He shuffled together the exercise books containing his draft, and had them typed up in a legible form.

The Lucases’ Mill Valley house was small, with only one bedroom, but they had plenty of visitors from Los Angeles, curious to see what drew the smartest of their contemporaries to the rural wilderness. Richard Walter and his wife visited. So did Milius: ‘I remember going up there with my first wife, and sleeping on the floor, and eating this wonderful San Francisco bread, and the food, and all of us going out together and having a great time. They didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t a bad life. They didn’t suffer.’ But not suffering wasn’t the same as doing well, and Lucas felt the current was leaving him behind, especially when Marcia began getting work. She would have preferred to have a baby, but he shied away from any such commitment.

To open a production company in San Francisco, Coppola needed a film contract. He persuaded the new administration at Warners that he wasn’t to blame for the failure of Finian’s Rainbow. It was a product, he argued, of the old and outdated system fostered by Jack Warner, now swept away. The Rain People, on the other hand, was a movie for the new Warners.

It was a shrewd strategy. Warners-Seven Arts visualized itself as a studio for the decade of Easy Rider. Its boss, Steve Ross, was a silver-haired, smooth-tongued operator who had taken Kinney out of the mortician business into car hire by renting out at night the limos used for funerals by day. They moved into parking lots, despite the fact that this was a territory that had been associated with organized crime, and then diversified into movies. The studio head was Ted Ashley, a hot talent agent taking his first turn behind an executive desk. John Calley was his lieutenant. Their department for youth films and products was run by Fred Weintraub, who’d made a fortune selling clothing and entertainment to college audiences and running a chain of campus coffee shops.

Coppola played on Warners’ greed to sell them a radical proposal. Once his new company was up and running, he would guarantee them seven feature films, none costing more than a million dollars, the first of which would be the long version of THX1138, which he budgeted – seven being his lucky number – at $777,777. This would be followed by The Conversation, a Coppola original about surveillance experts, probably starring Marlon Brando as ‘the best bugger on the West Coast.’ He threw in scripts by Huyck and Katz, and Robbins and Barwood. Scratching for ‘go’ projects, he also offered Lucas and Milius’s Vietnam film Apocalypse Now.

For the make-or-break meeting, Coppola flew down to Los Angeles, but, Easy Rider-like, rode onto the lot astride a huge Harley Davidson. He was well prepared, with the help of Lucas, who gave Charley Lippincott $100 to create a montage of ‘underground’ films to show the Warners board. ‘We put together this presentation showing that it was going to be futuristic,’ said Lucas, ‘and outlining how we were going to be shooting it on location and such. And we put in there that we were going to develop this very unusual reality using “rotary-cam photography.” Fortunately nobody at the studio asked us what it was, because it was nothing.’

After this, Coppola moved in. He had a new movie ready to go, he told the suits. Here’s the script – he slammed down a draft of THX1138, which he’d barely read. Here’s the cast – except for Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, all were unknown, and none had yet been asked if they wanted to appear. ‘Where is the money?’ he asked them rhetorically. He departed in a roar of exhaust, leaving them to chew on his proposal. The next day, when he still hadn’t received the green light, he wired them: ‘PUT UP OR SHUT UP’ – or, in some versions, ‘SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT.’

Warners did put up, but not as whole-heartedly as Coppola had hoped. They offered to lend – not advance or invest – $3.5 million, part of it in the form of $2500 a week seed-money while Coppola was setting up his company. If they liked THX1138, this sum could become a down-payment on the package. If they didn’t, Coppola would have to refund every penny. Given that he had no other offers, Coppola agreed.

Lucas received the news with delight. The way Coppola described it to him, the strings attached to Warners’ offer became thistledown. Immediately, he and Coppola, with Korty’s help, began visiting mansions in Marin County, looking for the future headquarters of the company. They made an offer on the Dibble estate in Ross, but while Coppola was raising the money, it went to someone else. The buyer already owned another mansion, and Coppola offered on that too, only to have the zoning commission refuse his application to transform it into a film studio.

Gradually, Coppola turned against the Laterna model. If he couldn’t find a mansion, maybe he should look for something in San Francisco itself – where, in addition, staff and services were more readily available. Dismayed, Lucas argued that the whole point had been to abandon city influences. He cited Korty’s rural retreat. All he wanted, he said, was ‘a nice little house to work in.’ But Coppola bulldozed him. The sound equipment would arrive shortly from Germany, and they must have a place to install it. Anyway, their working capital was all his, raised by selling his Los Angeles house and taking out substantial loans on the promise of a Warners deal.

Korty found a recording studio at 827 Folsom Street, in what locals derisively called the ‘warehouse and wino’ section of San Francisco, and Coppola leased three floors. Once Coppola had persuaded Korty to become the first tenant of their new facility, Lucas threw up his hands. Francis had won again.

Eleanor Coppola conceived and managed the décor of the new facility while Francis toyed with names. His first choice, ‘Transameri-can Sprocket Works,’ traded on the current taste for the Edwardian, which had hippie girls wandering Haight-Ashbury in Pre-Raphaelite braids and gypsy skirts, accompanied by men in crimson pre-World War I military tunics over jeans and sandals. Remembering Laterna’s magic lanterns, Coppola finally chose ‘American Zoetrope,’ after the optical toy of a spinning drum with vertical slits through which one glimpses dancing or running figures.

The Rain People, proudly bearing the American Zoetrope logo, opened on 27 August. Reviews were mixed, but Coppola brushed them aside, consumed by the fulfilment of his dream. The new company’s name not only implied that it could do everything from A to Z, but, once it was launched as a public company, would alphabetically give it a spot near the top of the share listings.

For the moment, however, nobody but Coppola owned any shares – not even Lucas, whom he grandly named vice president. Mona Skarger, one of the producers on The Rain People, became secretary-treasurer. Christopher Pearce was general manager. Jobs were also found for Bart Patton, Bob Dalva and Dennis Jakob, all cronies of Coppola, some going back to high school and Hofstra. Perhaps thinking of insinuating someone more personally loyal to him than to Coppola, Lucas offered the job of head of intellectual property – basically head of development – to Charley Lippincott, who turned him down. He didn’t want to move to San Francisco, nor to give up his ambition to make documentary films.

Being located in San Francisco had one definite advantage for Lucas and Coppola: few films were made there, and the local branch of IATSE, its hands full with mainly theatrical technicians, didn’t look too closely at who did what at Zoetrope. Cameramen could record their own sound, and even direct. The union listed Walter Murch as simply a post-production worker, a flexible term that could encompass editing, sound editing, even scriptwriting.

The day they took over the building, Coppola ordered everyone up on the roof and had them photographed: Korty, Carroll Ballard and an unknown guy – already names were being forgotten – each with a hand-held 16mm camera; Milius in sombrero and bandoliers; Warners’ liaison man Barry Beckerman; Lucas, almost unrecognisable in heavy beard and wide-brimmed black felt hat, like some middle-European anarchist; Bob Dalva, also with camera; Larry Sturhahn, later to be the producer of THX; Al Locatelli, its eventual production manager, incongruously playing a flute; Dennis Jakob, crouched behind an enormous piece of sound equipment. And of course Francis, dressed in a long double-breasted coat and a felt hat with turned-up brim, and clutching a zoetrope under his arm – the model for an allegorical statue in some Sicilian square of the town’s great explorer who had encompassed the world.

The sound equipment arrived, and was installed while carpenters were still sawing in the corridors. Walter Murch arrived on his BMW motorbike to supervise. For him, the chance to work on a state-of-the-art Keller system was more than enough reason to relocate to the Bay area. Able to handle seven separate strips of film in gauges from 8mm to 70mm, and video as well, it was the most advanced piece of equipment of its type in America – so advanced that when it broke down, an engineer had to fly in from Hamburg to fix it.

Word quickly spread of the radical new venture. Stanley Kubrick, cinema’s most famous recluse, corresponded with Coppola about special effects from his rural hideout in England. John Schlesinger said he wanted to rent space. Mike Nichols intended to invest. One night, Coppola was making coffee in the conference room when Orson Welles rang. He was thinking of making a film in San Francisco, he said. Awed, Coppola talked with him for half an hour, coffee pot in his hand, while the water overflowed from the sink and flooded the room.

American Zoetrope officially became an entity on 14 November 1969, when Coppola’s attorney filed the incorporation papers. The facility, though still far from ready, was opened by San Francisco’s Mayor Joseph Alioto on 13 December. Alioto announced that Coppola had already spent $500,000 on equipment, never mind staff. Except for John Korty, who was cutting his feature Riverrun, the only person actually working there was Haskell Wexler, who was shooting a huge rock concert being held at nearby Altamont with the Maysles brothers. He offered Lucas a few days’ work as a cameraman, and Lucas was there on the day when Hell’s Angels employed as security men murdered a member of the audience, Meredith Hunter. John Milius insists that Lucas shot the scenes of the killing which were later used in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Lucas says he can’t remember.

American Zoetrope became a target of pilgrimage. ‘It all looked too good to believe,’ said one early visitor, ‘terribly chic and terribly sincere, with leggy secretaries in crocheted miniskirts, $50,000 KEM and Steenbeck editing tables, Creative Playthings paraphernalia, bubbly chairs, and blowups of D.W. Griffith on the walls.’ The main reception area was dominated by a pool table and a silver espresso machine. Fabrics from the Finnish company Marimekko draped the walls, their purples, oranges and yellows echoed even in the décor of the freight elevator. Every Thursday night, Coppola screened classic movies, with a buffet of Chinese food. A lavish brochure in faux art-nouveau style promised films and facilities that combined the best of Europe and America, of Hollywood and the Bay area.

Prospective tenants soon found it was too good to believe. Zoetrope could only handle the kind of films Coppola wanted to make: mobile movies shot on location with hand-held cameras. There was no sound stage, and only minimal facilities for wardrobe and props. Coppola had recklessly paid $40,000 for a Mitchell BNCR camera which nobody could afford to rent, and bought a range of the latest lightweight Arri-flexes and portable tape recorders. His old mentor Roger Corman came to take a look. As well as being godfather to Coppola’s son Gio, he was an executor of his will. Coppola asked him what would happen to all this equipment if he died. Corman said, ‘I’ll put it all in a truck and take it down to LA, because you’re in the wrong city, Francis.’

Instead of presiding over a cinematic renaissance, Coppola found himself trying, without success, to supervise a tribe of vigorous young film-makers, all looking out for themselves. ‘Everyone was off in his own little corner, competing,’ recalls Carroll Ballard. $40,000 worth of equipment disappeared in the first year, and a number of company cars were cracked up. Desperate to put the facility in profit from the start, Coppola set rental rates that were high for the time: $175 a month for one of the seven cutting rooms, $240 a month for an editing machine to go in it, and correspondingly more for office services, production facilities and time on the Keller console. He was parsimonious when it came to funding the projects which would be Zoetrope’s lifeblood. To write and direct THX, Lucas would get only $15,000; but even that was not immediately forthcoming.

Lucas, fretting about being able to replicate the clinical emptiness of his student THX, wondered if he could shoot in Japan. ‘The idea was, it was this weird dictatorial society in the future,’ says Gary Kurtz, ‘and if it was totally alien as an environment to the audience, and it was in a foreign language, you might be able to believe in the isolation of the main characters. Well, nobody in Hollywood liked that idea.’ All the same, Coppola truculently announced Japanese locations as an accomplished fact. ‘George is going to direct it in his own way. I’m giving him my strength. I’m saying, “If you want me, you’ve got to give George Lucas his break.”’

Warners weren’t sure they wanted either of them, particularly when they got around to reading the script of THX1138. It had little real plot, aside from the idea of a man fleeing an overpowering society. There was no motivation. Nobody was characterized. The ending was ambiguous, THX climbing from a manhole into a world of which we see nothing except a huge sun and a solitary bird.

Lucas sulked. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at the studio they don’t understand scripts; that they should look more like blueprints than novels. They don’t even know who [Marshall] McLuhan is over there.’ Nevertheless, he asked Walter Murch to help with the script, and they amplified the story where they could. ‘We just threw everything up in the air and watched it come down,’ said Murch. The setting was narrowed down to the twenty-fifth century. They sketched in some social background. Everyone is tranquillized, and their sex drive numbed by drugs. They wear only white, and their heads are shaved. Most, including THX – pronounced ‘Thex’ – who works on a production line assembling robots, have been grown parthogenetically, by artificial insemination, but his girlfriend LUH7117 – ‘Ler’ – is a ‘natural born,’ and therefore suspect.

A god, OMM, dark-eyed, Semitic, with a sensual mouth and a short black beard – the physical antithesis of his predominantly Caucasian subjects – watches unblinking from every wall. He offers benign moral supervision, urging: ‘Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.’ Citizens commune with him in electronic booths that also fulfil the function of psychoanalysts. A taped voice – Murch’s – welcomes them with ‘My time is yours,’ and responds to their pleas for help with anodyne recorded comments, and an absolution that ends in the exhortation to get back to work. Anyone who demands more is likely to be arrested and beaten by police, sometimes to death, on television.

Robots, uniformly tall, dressed in the black leathers and white helmets of Californian Highway Patrol motorcycle cops but with blank chrome faces – another gibe by Lucas at the bêtes noires of his adolescence – impose law and order. During the film we see one of these robots, malfunctioning, walk repeatedly into a wall. Another, ominously, is seen shepherding a tiny child into an elevator.

In the feature version, LUH seduces THX by reducing the medication that suppresses his sexual instinct. Previously satisfied with telecasts of ritual beatings and callisthenic-like dancing by a bald, naked black woman, THX is persuaded to make love to LUH. ‘It manages to have a lot of nudity in it,’ says Richard Walter of the film, ‘but to be anti-erotic. George’s work is extremely non-sexual. He is uncomfortable with sexuality’ – a view borne out by close-ups of LUH and THX’s pale, hairless bodies pressed together in joyless union.

Typical of Lucas’s later work, and of his life, the sexual initiative is taken by the woman. The film also has an undercurrent of homoeroticism. THX’s superior, SEN5241, played by British actor Donald Pleasence, is homosexual. His room-mate has just been ‘destroyed’ for unspecified reasons, and he reprograms the computer to have THX assigned to his living space.

LUH becomes pregnant, and both she and THX are arrested for drug evasion and sexual perversion. In the original screenplay, LUH is raped, then beaten to death on TV, but Lucas never shot these scenes, and we know no more of her fate than the fact that her name is reassigned to one of the countless embryos growing in ranked bottles in the city’s labs.

THX and SEN, convicted of interfering with the computer, are sent to a featureless white prison whose inmates remain out of fear of the surrounding formlessness, expending their energy in aimlessly plotting to escape. Exasperated, THX simply walks out, followed by SEN. In the white emptiness they meet SRT, a large, amiable black man convinced he isn’t real at all, but a ‘hologram’ who couldn’t make it on TV. They find their way back to the crowded corridors of the main complex, but SEN loses his nerve. Stumbling into the TV studio which broadcasts OMM’s image to the psychoanalysis booths, he humbly confesses his shortcomings to the poster-sized picture of the god stuck on the wall.

Awaiting arrest, he watches a group of children playing. All of them have bottles attached to an arm, from which ‘liquid education’ drips into a vein. One asks SEN to reconnect his tube, and he reminisces about the much larger containers through which one acquired knowledge when he was a boy. As the children gape in astonishment, the police arrive to take him away.

Meanwhile, THX and SRT steal jet cars, but the maladroit SRT can’t get his started, and when he does, promptly drives it into a pillar. THX rockets down a series of tunnels, pursued by the motorcycle police. At the end of the line he abandons the car and continues on foot. Lucas shot a scene in which THX falls into a garbage compactor and is menaced by a rat-like creature, but dropped it as unconvincing, only to recycle it in Star Wars. THX has less trouble with some scavenging Shelldwellers – bearded dwarfs, the progenitors of Star Wars’ Jawas, who live in tunnels – and starts climbing a huge ventilation vent towards what he calls ‘the upper positive place.’ Two police are close to catching him when, abruptly, Control calls off the pursuit: it’s exceeded its budget. THX emerges on the surface, where he faces a presumably hopeful sunrise.

Lucas visualized the film in Panavision format, but that would have meant hiring expensive equipment. He compromised with Techniscope, a format popular with cost-cutting European and Asian producers looking to achieve wide-screen without special lenses. It simply cut the frame in half horizontally, producing an image half the height of conventional 35mm and twice the width, which nevertheless could be blown up to normal 35mm in the lab. Its deficiency was obvious: with half of a 35mm frame filling the same screen area as a full frame, the image risked being dark and grainy. But the Technicolor labs could print Techniscope prints direct from the original by using a dye-transfer matrix, avoiding the need to make a negative, so the quality was excellent, and remained so until they abandoned this method.

Other inventors found equally ingenious ways around the patents on various wide-screen systems. Paramount embraced VistaVision (‘Motion Picture High Fidelity!’), in which the film ran horizontally through the camera, offering a larger image than conventional 35mm. The clarity was superb, but the fact that it needed special cameras and projectors limited its use. Special-effects technicians, who loved the system for its large negative size, would rescue and restore Vista-Vision cameras to shoot the next generation of science fiction films, including Star Wars.

Lucas was delighted to be directing his first feature film. His budget might not be much in Hollywood terms, but his family was astonished at his achievement at only twenty-five years old. On the other hand, directing was daily torture, a constant process of revision and improvisation, with the ten-week production period ticking off in his brain every instant.

San Francisco’s new subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), was under construction, and Lucas persuaded them to let him shoot in the completed tunnels. Other sequences were shot in parking stations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre in San Rafael, and at the Lawrence Livermore atomic energy laboratory. The tiny crew moved between locations in one of the vans in which Coppola had crossed the country during the shooting of The Rain People.

Robert Duvall from The Rain People played THX, and Maggie McOmie LUH. Veteran Ian Wolfe was one of the prisoners windily discoursing on the nature of freedom. Knowing Lucas’s discomfort with actors, Coppola told Ron Colby to choose people who wouldn’t need more than a hint from the director, but Lucas still wrangled with them. Using a technique he would continue on American Graffiti, he shot most scenes with two cameras simultaneously. ‘That captures emotional stunts it’s hard to get after the first take,’ says Duvall.

Coppola imposed his crony Larry Sturhahn on the film as producer. If Lucas could ever have been comfortable with any supervisor, it was certainly not Sturhahn, who, he charged, spent most of his time on the phone, and hung up only to interfere. Coppola later confessed that he knew the two men wouldn’t get on. ‘George,’ he said, ‘needed someone to hate.’ As long as he could direct his animosity towards Sturhahn, he wouldn’t be blaming Coppola.

The pressure of too little money and not enough time encouraged improvisation, some of it inspired. Lucas tinkered together models and fireworks to create the film’s few special effects, like an explosion on the robot assembly line. Nobody was happy to have their head shaved, as was required of the whole cast, and there was a shortage of extras until someone thought to approach the drug rehabilitation centres Synanon and the Delancey Street Foundation. Enrolment required addicts to shave their heads as a sign of commitment, and most were happy to earn a few days’ wages as extras in the film.

Working with limited lights and a hand-held camera fitted with a thousand-meter telephoto lens pushed Techniscope to its limits. Warners, who, as the financing company, automatically saw the daily rushes, began muttering about the photographic quality. There was a growing sense that Coppola had sold them a pig in a poke. They held off breaking openly with him for only one reason: Patton. Franklin Schaffner’s film of Coppola’s screenplay opened on 5 February 1970, and, despite reviews which fretted about its jingoism, proceeded to make a fortune. Anyone that good, reasoned some within Warners, was worth cutting a little slack. But only a little. Lucas characterized their attitude as: ‘We’re the king and you’re the serfs.’

The attic at Mill Valley became a cutting room, and Lucas spent most nights there with Marcia, editing. At the same time, Walter Murch cut the sound – ‘Not,’ Lucas agrees, ‘the way things usually were done.’ Traditionally, movie mixers aimed for clarity, arguing that most cinemas had such poor sound systems that the audience was lucky to hear anything. Lucas wanted THX1138 to have a ‘musical’ quality, which Murch took to mean a sense of continuous ambient sound, sometimes almost inaudible. The layering of sounds had always fascinated Murch, and he’d developed a technique called ‘air-balling,’ in which one sound envelops but never quite obscures another. Renaissance composers for the unaccompanied voice routinely employed this effect, which may be where Murch got the idea, but nobody had yet applied it to film. Murch’s experiments spurred Lucas to pioneer better cinema sound. The new system would be called ‘THX Sound,’ and its slogan would be, ‘The Audience is Listening.’

For the soundtrack of THX, Murch created, in his phrase, ‘a Dagwood sandwich of sound and music, with no clear split between them.’ Recorded music was slowed down, speeded up, played backward, mixed with natural sounds or those of machines. For the prison scenes, he used the bass note of a large room humming with machinery.

The credits of THX1138 ascend the screen, suggesting a steady descent underground, an idea borrowed from an inter-title in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Before them, Lucas inserted one minute from a trailer for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Over scratchy, poorly-copied images of spaceships fizzing like firecrackers and a blond Buster Crabbe straight-arming aliens as if they’re the Notre Dame defensive line, the voice-over urges audiences to see how this American football hero copes with the threats of the twenty-fifth century – an implied comment that the future might be very different from the one imagined by Hollywood.

Lucas, probably coaxed by Murch, later justified the elaboration of THX1138 by calling it ‘a Cubist film – the story, the sound and the images were all views of the same thing simultaneously.’ He defended its didactic tone: ‘Everyone else calls it science fiction,’ he said. ‘I call it documentary fantasy. The film is the way I see LA right now; maybe a slight exaggeration. Duvall comes off drugs and discovers he’s been living in a cage all his life with the door open. It’s the idea that we are all living in cages and the doors are wide open and all we have to do is walk out.’

Marcia for one didn’t buy these justifications. She found the film cold, humorless, and arrogant – a summary of the negative elements of Lucas’s character. Coppola agreed. He would later tell Lucas to ‘write something out of his own life; something with warmth and humor that people can relate to.’ Even Lucas got the message. When he shot a few pick-up scenes in a Los Angeles studio and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz came to watch, he told them, ‘I have an idea I’d love you guys to do. It’s a rock’n’roll movie and it takes place in the fifties and it’s about music and cruising and deejays.’ He sent them his notes, and over the next month they worked up a five-page outline of what Lucas had first entitled ‘Another Quiet Night in Modesto,’ but now preferred to call American Graffiti.

Preoccupied with the slide of American Zoetrope into anarchy and bankruptcy, Coppola took only a fitful interest in the progress of Lucas’s film. The first time Marcia showed him a completed reel, he simply shook his head and murmured, ‘Strange. Strange.’ After that, he didn’t see any more until the whole film was edited.

He was more concerned about extracting a long-term commitment to Zoetrope and its program from Warners, which summoned him to a meeting of the studio management on 21 November 1969. Ever the showman, Coppola created a ‘black box’ for each executive containing the screenplays for all seven proposed films, bound in black with the emblem of American Zoetrope. These boxes in turn went into a crate, ominously coffin-like, which two men carted into the Warners office.

They carted it out almost as quickly. Warners wanted no part of the projects, or of Coppola. His frantic pitch, handing round cigars and assuring them that he and he alone had the secret of making successful films, only alarmed them more. Even before he had seen any of THX1138, Frank Wells, head of business affairs, told Coppola they wouldn’t be putting up any more money, and they expected him to refund the $300,000 already spent. ‘Warner Brothers not only pulled the rug out from Francis,’ said Walter Murch grimly, ‘they tried to sell it back to him.’

10 American Graffiti

There’s no message or long speech, but you know that, when the story ends, America underwent a drastic change. The early sixties were the end of an era. It hit us all very hard.

George Lucas

The impact on American Zoetrope of Warners’ rejection was immediate. The weekly screenings and Chinese buffets ceased. Nescafé replaced espresso. The mini-skirted secretaries evaporated. Just as rapidly, support for projects drained away. Humiliatingly, Coppola had to tell Orson Welles he couldn’t make the film they planned. Stanley Kubrick no longer returned his calls. Without being asked, people packed up their offices and left. When those who stayed, like John Korty, found their rent soaring from $200 a month to $1000, they departed too.

Paradoxically, once Coppola abandoned his ambitious production plans and slashed his overheads, American Zoetrope began to turn a small profit. Film-makers on location in the area hired its cutting rooms, equipment, and vehicles. An advertising division made TV commercials for cooking oil and instant paella, and another department, Tri-Media, produced educational films; but none of these enterprises showed enough profit to eat into the mountain of personal debt.

When Coppola did occasionally make one of his grand gestures, it had a rueful overtone. He held a reception to coincide with the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival, but when the Lucases received their lavish invitation, Coppola had attached a note: ‘This letter cost $3 to print, type and send to you.’ Such comments were motivated less from self-pity than an amused truculence, a gambler’s wonder at the ways of chance, but they exasperated the people who’d believed in him and his dream of San Francisco as a new movie capital. Lucas and Milius were particularly incensed, since in the break with Warners the studio kept the rights to Apocalypse Now.

Though more than inclined to bear grudges, Lucas didn’t immediately vent his frustrations on Coppola, whom he still regarded as a surrogate elder brother. San Francisco magazine published a full-page composite photographic portrait, one side Lucas, the other Coppola. The spectacles, the watchful eyes behind them, the pursed lips, the black beard, the open-necked shirt were identical.

To some extent, Lucas felt responsible for Coppola. ‘He was constantly jumping off cliffs,’ said Lucas, ‘and I was always shouting, “Don’t do it, you’ll get yourself killed!”’ John Milius too found Coppola even more operatic and admirable in defeat. He and Coppola agreed to give each other a gun when they directed their first movie: ‘Paper is not honorable,’ decreed Milius. ‘The exchange of weapons is honorable.’ They decided to do the same for Lucas after THX, and chose a .22 rifle at Abercrombie & Fitch. ‘Francis went to charge it,’ says Milius, ‘and of course they had cut him off. We went back to Zoetrope, and they were trying to turn the lights off, because he had no money. Francis said, “That doesn’t matter.” Nothing ever changed Francis. He was in debt. He had no money. He had all these people running around, all these hippies, working for him, and all of us, but he was chasing girls … Nothing slowed Francis down. It was no different than when he had money, except there was more of it.’

Lucas kept working on the script of American Graffiti, fumbling through different approaches and combinations of characters. Radio was at the heart of it: ‘Graffiti is an Italian word,’ he explained, ‘meaning a drawing or inscription on walls, glib, funny, immediate. Everybody has a different way of checking out a culture. Some look at clothing, others at cars. My way is to examine rock radio, which is an American graffiti.’ Occasionally he veered off into other aspects of radio, like the old suspense programs such as Inner Sanctum and I Love a Mystery he’d listened to as a boy. Lucas made notes for a possible mystery story set in a radio station. He called it ‘The Radioland Murders’.

In May 1970, the Warners brass demanded to see THX1138. The day before Coppola was to take the first rough copy to Hollywood, Walter Murch screened it for him. ‘Well, it’s either a masterpiece or masturbation,’ Coppola sighed. That night, he called Murch, Matthew Robbins, and cameraman Caleb Deschanel to an emergency meeting. He’d decided the screening would be a disaster, and briefed them accordingly.

In Warners’ Theater ‘A’ next morning were president Ted Ashley, production head John Calley, Richard Lederer, head of marketing, Frank Wells from business affairs, and the studio’s day-to-day liaison man with Zoetrope, Barry Beckerman. As expected, they loathed the film. ‘This isn’t the screenplay we said we were going to do,’ complained one. ‘This isn’t a commercial movie.’ Coppola feigned ignorance: ‘I don’t know what the fuck this is.’ As they walked out of the theater, talk was only of taking the film away from Lucas and recutting it.

Outside, Murch, Robbins, and Deschanel, as ordered by Coppola, were waiting near the foot of Warners’ landmark watertower. As the executives and Coppola emerged from the front door, they burst into the projection box, claiming to be from the studio editorial department, grabbed the film, loaded it into the back of Robbins’s van, and drove away.

Kidnapping the work print only delayed the inevitable. Warners put Fred Weintraub, its ‘youth’ expert, in charge of cutting THX1138, and Frank Wells dictated what should be done. Weintraub was convinced that the Shelldwellers, as the film’s only ‘creatures,’ must appear in the first reel. ‘If you hook the audience in the first ten minutes,’ he told Lucas, ‘they’ll forgive anything. You gotta put your best stuff up front … Put the freaks up front.’

In the midst of these discussions, the original THX1138 4EB, now with the added subtitle Electronic Labyrinth, was included in Take One, three programs of student films, half of them from USC, shown in New York, a fact which gave Lucas a melancholy satisfaction. If the feature version never saw the light of day, at least his first draft would survive.

Lucas and Coppola continued to meet in San Francisco, and to discuss the fate of Zoetrope. To add to its problems, the company was embroiled in a complicated lawsuit brought against local unions by the left-wing film-makers to whom Coppola had incautiously given house room the previous year. They’d formed their own union, and Zoetrope’s productions, such as they were, became the battlefield on which they struggled for jurisdiction. It cost Coppola another $40,000 to extricate himself from the firefight.

Patton brought Coppola numerous offers from Hollywood to script and direct films, but he turned all of them down. The most insistent came from Paramount, who wanted him to film Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The Godfather. Coppola thought it a potboiler, and refused repeatedly. Eventually Peter Bart, a Paramount staffer and, later, editor of the trade paper Variety, rang one last time.

Lucas was in the office that day, and Coppola, covering the mouthpiece, asked, ‘George, what should I do? Should I make this gangster movie or shouldn’t I?’

‘Francis, we need the money,’ Lucas said. ‘And what have you got to lose?’

While Coppola was away filming The Godfather, Lucas moved into the Zoetrope offices. He was constantly on the phone, setting up American Graffiti and finding editing work for Marcia. None of the calls were on behalf of Zoetrope, so after a few weeks office manager Mona Skarger presented him with a phone bill for $1800. With only $2000 in the bank, Lucas had to borrow the money from his father. He was so angry and humiliated that he shunned the offices and sent Marcia in with the check. Coppola later claimed he hadn’t authorized Skarger to demand payment: ‘I would never have done that to a friend.’ Lucas didn’t believe him. Their friendship inched one step nearer a break, though really it was just another aspect of the general withdrawal from personal relationships which paralleled Lucas’s abandonment of Los Angeles. ‘George feels,’ says Willard Huyck, ‘that he made enough friends at USC, and doesn’t need any more.’

One new friend Lucas did accept was a calm, indeed grave young man a few years older than himself named Gary Kurtz. Kurtz wore his beard even shorter than Lucas’s, and cut it back severely from his chin in a style usually associated with the Amish. In fact, Kurtz was raised as a Mormon, and refused to fight in Vietnam from religious conviction. Having graduated from the USC film school in 1962, he was made a combat cameraman with the Marines and served three years ‘in country.’

Kurtz was the same age as Coppola, whom he knew from their days with Corman, but in his gravity, stability, and morality the direct antithesis. ‘I worked for Roger Corman as a student on lots of little films,’ he says, ‘most of which I can’t even remember the titles of now; some of which we didn’t even know the titles of then. Shooting little bits and pieces. That’s how I met Francis. I was on Dementia 13, his first film. He shot most of it in Ireland but we did little bits of it in Los Angeles.

‘When I got out of the Marines in 1969, I went back to doing a few low-budget films and doing odds and ends, and another friend of mine whom I’d worked with with Roger, Monte Hellman, wanted to do this film, Two Lane Blacktop. We got Universal to buy into it under their under-$1 million-budget program. I went up to talk to Francis about using his Techniscope equipment for Two Lane Blacktop. He said, “We’ve just finished shooting this film on Techniscope. I’ll take you out to meet George, and he’ll show you some of the material on the Steenbeck.” We went out to Mill Valley. George was editing in his attic. He was very gracious. He showed me the footage, and we had a chat about Techniscope, and I went back to San Francisco. I called George a couple of other times about technical aspects of using Techniscope in the next week after that.’

Aside from Radioland Murders and American Graffiti, Lucas had one more idea: a science fiction story, a movie comic-book inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Flash Gordon serials and Dune, but shot in a style inspired by old Hollywood action films. At some point, wearying of turning images into words, he created an outline in collage, with images cut from comic books and science fiction magazines.

Lucas didn’t aspire to compete with Hollywood science fiction like Forbidden Planet or Planet of the Apes. Another kind of science fiction film had always existed parallel to them. This strain was disreputable, catchpenny, its plots vulgar, its costumes cheap. It encompassed Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, Roger Corman’s The Beast with a Million Eyes and Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Japanese imports like Godzilla. Its market was revival houses or drive-ins, its audience teenagers with one hand up their girl’s skirt and the other clutching a Coke.

Whenever Hollywood got more money for a science fiction film, it splurged on state-of-the-art special effects, good mainstream writers, well-known stars. Forbidden Planet was directed by the director of Lassie Come Home. Its scriptwriter wrote Tarzan the Ape Man. Its cameraman photographed Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant. It starred Walter Pidgeon, one of MGM’s oldest and most respected leading men. To do what Lucas proposed with his science fiction film, i.e. spend money not on making the product more intellectually respectable or scientifically authentic, but on amplifying the sleaziness and vulgarity, seemed absurd to Hollywood. One might as well take some cheap old car, give it a lustrous paint job, and tart it up with chrome and flashing lights …

In 1971, Lucas wasn’t pushing the sf project too hard. He still hoped he might acquire the rights to the Flash Gordon comic strip and incorporate his ideas into a remake of the serial version. At the same time, he began looking at some of the work being done by new people at the edge of the sf movie world. Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, trying to find backing for a science fiction script called ‘Star Dance,’ had asked an artist named Ralph McQuarrie to create some concept paintings in the hope of interesting possible investors. The film never got made, but Lucas spent an afternoon in McQuarrie’s tiny garage apartment going through slides of his work. As a technical artist at Boeing, McQuarrie had drawn the illustrations for the company’s parts catalogue. After that, he did ‘artist’s impressions’ of space and other planets for NASA and CBS News, and worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica

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