George Lucas: A Biography

‘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 (#ulink_6bd858bc-1016-543e-95e9-3633428c6d19)

‘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.’