I was sitting in screening room D waiting for Jedi dailies to begin. George had just taken his usual seat in the center of the second row, just to the right of a small control panel that held a shaded lamp and some lighted pointers that were used by directors and supervisors to point out any details on the projected images that might be up for discussion.
We were all watching VistaVision foreground plates of Admiral Ackbar. We were basically looking over the shoulder of a guy with a rubber head sitting at some kind of spaceship controls as he gazed out into space. Of course, there was no space to look at yet because we hadn’t added it. No stars, no planets, nothing but a giant blue screen. There were miles of this footage and George was looking for a section he wanted to use in Jedi. One of the supervisors, probably Richard Edlund, asked George what the window Akbar was looking out of was made of. George said, “Well, that hasn’t come up. When it does come up, we will figure out an answer.”
So that was it, I thought. That was the whole thing! We were all sitting here participating in a story that George was making up as we went along. When you are telling a made-up story to children, you only add certain details. The others you wait for the children to ask about.
This was the Monday after George had gone to his high school reunion in Modesto, California, where he grew up. Who hasn’t fretted about, or dreamed about, going to their high school reunion? What would it be like to return to your small rural school as one of the richest, most celebrated people in the world?
While we had always joked among ourselves about the movie business being “high school, with money,” with this visit somehow George had tied the two together and I began to wonder, who is this guy, anyway? Why is he so different? How did a D student from Modesto, California, become the biggest director and movie mogul of all time? So I drove down to Modesto one weekend to see what I could find out.
I saw the town, the high school, the family home, etc. But to me it was the store that told the most. There it was in the downtown area, the family business, an office supply store run by George’s father. I had seen the father once out at the Ranch wandering around with a huge smile on his face. He certainly must have been a proud father. I imagined that the Modesto store told the whole story. It could not have been more mid-America looking, run by a hard-working businessman who had spawned a dutiful son.
I had read that George, at first unhappy with college, had called his father asking how long he had to stick it out. It struck me that it was the father who had cast the die for this talented young man. Just as all the male characters in American Graffiti were different facets of George, his father’s rock-solid, small-town business acumen loomed over his creative work and his ability to build what would eventually become a multibillion-dollar empire.
His wife Marcia often said that George was “centered,” meaning he was comfortable with himself and his ability to achieve his goals. But there was much more. After achieving success, he had deliberately left Hollywood and moved to Northern California, away from the creative echo chamber of the studios that were fraught with gossip, celebrity, and trend-followers. That was the opposite of what almost everyone else did.
George also made smart business deals, passing over short-term gains and investing in long-term ones instead. He built his own studio and staffed it with an army of creative people who were happy to work outside the rigid studio systems of Los Angeles. He wrote and developed his own projects, hiring screenwriters to help structure the stories. He invested in new technologies designed to enhance the moviegoing experience as well as simplify the production processes that would speed things up and save money. Above all, he avoided debt like the plague, remembering how it had once brought down and almost destroyed the dreams of his friend Francis Coppola.
In addition, George was able to identify trends and evaluate their worth. I remember one time when there was a lot of talk in Hollywood about bringing interactivity to movies and it being suggested that the audience be allowed to choose, for example, how a film would end. George’s remark was succinct and accurate: “Interactive is games. How hard is that to figure out?” Soon we had a Games Division.
These attributes set him apart from most of Hollywood and the rest of the business world as well. I would argue that not since Thomas Edison and Henry Ford have we seen a more ambitious creative artist. And for these characteristics to be part of an artist is, I think, even more unusual. So far, it seems that Steve Jobs is the one to have received most of the plaudits, but I think the more Lucas’s accomplishments are recognized, the higher his stock will rise.
On top of all this, George was just a good filmmaker. I’ve seen his student films and they all showed talent. It’s true that he barely escaped high school, but once he got to college and found he could make movies, he just got better and better at it.
None of the great directors of the past had gone to film school, yet our generation of filmmakers had. While attending my school I always wondered what effect our little films, and all the underground films, art films, and independent films, would have. Would they survive? Would they be saved and someday be of any note, however small? As yet, they are neither saved nor recognized. However, they did influence Hollywood theatrical movies, especially in the 1970s. The film-school era replaced what were in large part filmed plays with an almost silent-era style of filmmaking that had been lost since the advent of sound. Suddenly we saw camera work, editing, and sound design with the same enthusiasm as that of pioneers like Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, and Erich von Stroheim. There was a reason that on the wall in back of my editorial department bench there hung a huge black-and-white photograph of Eisenstein hard at work editing one of his films.
While George’s locating a motion picture company in Northern California may have seemed like a crazy idea to Hollywood, there was in actuality a precedent. This was where, in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge took his famous series of stop-motion photographs of Leland Stanford’s trotting horse, Occident, that when projected became animated photographic movement, leading eventually to the invention of motion pictures. This was where, in 1916, Leon Douglas invented and patented the first natural-color motion picture method which later became Technicolor. It’s where Charlie Chaplin, also in 1916, filmed the most famous exit in cinema history: the last shot in The Tramp, where he walks away from the camera down that lonely dirt road. Lastly, it is where, in 1927 in San Francisco, Philo T. Farnsworth invented the first television. All of this far from the movie capital of Hollywood and the financial center of New York.
It has been said that George was trying to escape the trade unions by coming north; however, he quickly signed up with the local unions and we were all members. I think it was mostly to get away from the stifling atmosphere of Hollywood. Here in Northern California one was freer to create new things and try out new ideas. Coming to the Bay Area meant entering the triangle of creative technologies that exists between the University of California at Berkeley, the juggernaut of Stanford University and Silicon Valley, and the soon-to-be-center of digital creativity, San Francisco.
The author Rebecca Solnit has observed that “the two industries that have most powerfully defined contemporary life . . . Hollywood and Silicon Valley . . . are responsible for that part of a new world made from an amalgamation of technology and entertainment. We live today in the future launched there.”1
All of these elements led to the birth of digital filmmaking, not in Hollywood or New York, but in the Bay Area, and I think George deserves credit for that. The goal is to always understand the present, not to predict the future.
1. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003).