George Lucas: A Biography

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 (#ulink_43fb8dbb-3164-57bf-8246-2371bc3f226c)

[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.