George Lucas: A Biography

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 (#ulink_64e249c5-8325-5fbf-80aa-80e13787ddd8)

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.