Space soldiers, in their Tommy Tomorrow and Flash Gordon guises, were far from the only obsession in the young Lucas’s life. Soon enough, they weren’t even the central one. In his teens, Lucas’s attention shifted from drawing and comics to cameras and cars. An auto accident, the most important turning point in Lucas’s entire creative history, led him to rethink his approach to school; he discovered the study of humanity and became fascinated by photography. Only then, belatedly, did he fall into film, take the key classes and meet the key people who would set him off down the path to the stars.
None of these other obsessions ever left Lucas entirely, however. They all informed his most well-known work. So as tempting as it is to detour around Lucas’s turns as boy racer, greasy mechanic, reformed anthropology student, and artsy film school prodigy, this scenic route actually has much to tell us about the Star Wars story. Quite simply, that story would not have developed in the way it did without these twelve key stops along the road.
1. CAR CULTURE
Every Lucas movie features a fast-paced chase or race in some kind of hot rod or pod. The Star Wars films felt faster at the time of their release than anything else on screen, and their speed didn’t just come from Lucas’s years of obsessive TV watching. Rather, it came from that sense of flow and motion, excitement and danger one can only get from behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle. In Star Wars, Lucas would say that he wanted “space ships that people got into and drove around like cars.” This was his version of a magic carpet to Mars.
When Lucas was sixteen, his ever-benevolent father bought him his first car, a tiny Italian supermini called a Bianchina. George Sr. probably figured the kid couldn’t do much damage with this 479cc Fiat-made motor and top speed of 60 miles per hour. Lucas called it a “dumb little car” with a “sewing machine engine.”
But Lucas had a knack for making a little go a long way. He spent his spare hours and his allowance at the Foreign Car Service, a garage for hot-rodders with a go-kart track out back. He made some special modifications himself, adding a straight pipe and a roll bar, and a seatbelt from an Air Force jet, and learned how to hug the curves at top speed. It didn’t look like much, but it had it where it counts. The first time he flipped the car, he tore the roof out rather than repair it. You can almost feel the horror creeping up the spine of George Sr., who still entertained hopes that his son might take over the Lucas Company business someday.
Lucas Jr. acquired a fake ID that said he was over twenty-one; this let him enter autocross contests in parking lots and fairgrounds, winning more than his share of trophies. He became good friends with Modesto’s autocross champion, Allen Grant, who would assume briefly the role of an elder brother figure for the young racer. Grant described a kid who was quiet until he got to know you, and then wouldn’t stop babbling. Who knows what space soldier–filled ramblings got cut short when Grant told Lucas, as he frequently did, to shut up. “He was always jabbering about a story, and what about this and doing this and you know,” says Grant. “We didn’t take him too serious.”
When George Jr. was a teenager, the upwardly mobile Lucas family moved to a walnut ranch on the edge of town. Until he got his car, he was a quiet loner who kept to his bedroom outside of meal times and TV time, ate Hershey bars, drank Cokes, read comics, played rock and roll and jazz 45s, and shot the occasional BB pellet out of the window. But cruising culture put him in the swing of Modesto’s social scene. Tenth and Eleventh Streets on Friday nights were a fascinating parade of chrome. There were ritual courtesies: kids left their cars unlocked so friends could sit in them; if you had a favorite parking spot, other kids would hold it for you.
Lucas slid into a phase of minor juvenile delinquency, filling a glove compartment with speeding tickets and appearing in court after he’d racked up too many. He didn’t join the real-life gang depicted in American Graffiti, the Faros, but he did become their enabler. His job, the story goes, was to lure local toughs into fights by sitting his scrawny self next to them in the local burger joint. When the inevitable challenge came, he would run away, leading his quarry to the Faros. It’s a telling image: George Lucas, young, beardless, with a bowl haircut, five foot six inches in flannel shirt and blue jeans blackened by engine grease, waltzing straight into danger, facing it like a Zen master, secure in the knowledge that he had backup. He never had to put up his fists.
2. THE CRASH
The cracks in the facade of young Lucas’s grease-soaked life appeared at school. For years, his grades had hovered around Cs and Ds. He was only saved from Fs by his younger sister Wendy’s homework help. He knew he was going to be a race car driver or a mechanic, so who cared about grades? Answer: George Sr. and Dorothy Lucas, who had been model students—class president and vice president in their day. They tried encouraging his visual sensibilities, buying him a Nikon camera and constructing a darkroom. Lucas took the camera to the race track.
But Lucas’s alleyway friend John Plummer was going to the University of Southern California for business school, and George Jr. wondered whether college was right for him too. Never above nudging his son with elaborate gifts, George Sr. agreed to send the kid on a backpacking trip to Europe with Plummer if Lucas graduated high school.
That became the goal of the summer of 1962. Lucas hit the books in the local library. It was a grind. His heart wasn’t in it. Bored, he returned early one hot afternoon, making an illegal left turn on the road to the Lucas family ranch. At the same moment a Chevy driven by a Downey High classmate—one Lucas probably couldn’t see in the rearview for his own dust—had run a red light and was trying to overtake him on the left.
The force of the impact flung Lucas through the roof he had made. He only survived because his jury-rigged Air Force seatbelt snapped. A proper belt would have locked him in the car as it wrapped around a walnut tree.
Lucas’s lungs hemorrhaged, but he was extraordinarily lucky. He was out of Modesto’s Kindred Hospital within two weeks, albeit with months of physical therapy ahead of him. The crash had destroyed the Bianchina, wrecked his chances of backpacking around Europe, and garnered one more traffic ticket from the cops for that illegal left turn. But it also gave him a pass: Downey High graduated him without looking at his grades. Still, a profound lesson had been learned. “He became quieter and more intense,” remembered Mel Cellini. The Foreign Car Service tried to cheer him up by bringing him a racing helmet with a roller skate taped on top. Lucas’s head was somewhere else.
The crash changed everything; that is about the only constant when Lucas has told the story of his life over the years. It made him more mindful and more fearless. “It gave me this perspective on life that said I’m operating on extra credit,” Lucas told Oprah Winfrey in 2012. “I’m never afraid of dying. What I’m getting is bonus material.”
If Lucas had died in the crash, what kind of It’s A Wonderful Life alternate universe would we be in? Not just one without Star Wars and its imitators, but also without much of a special effects industry. If we had summer blockbusters at all, they would be more disaster movies in the style of Jaws and less science fiction or fantasy spectaculars. There would probably be no Star Trek on the big screen, and certainly no Battlestar Galactica on the small one. It’s distinctly possible that Twentieth Century Fox would have gone bankrupt after 1977; certainly the pattern of investor takeover would have been different, and Rupert Murdoch might not control it today. We’d have fewer cineplexes and fewer screens for movies overall; we also wouldn’t have The Godfather in its Coppola-directed incarnation, nor Apocalypse Now.
What’s most interesting to consider, however, is whether this Star Wars–less universe would still have come to pass if George Lucas hadn’t made that illegal left turn in the first place, failed to graduate, and gone off in search of glory on the Grand Prix circuit like he’d wanted his whole teenage life. Some stories, it seems, require a blood sacrifice.
3. 21–87
Several months after the accident, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College for the next two years, earning an A in anthropology and a B in sociology. For the first time he was getting an education he craved, one that engaged him, one he was even able to apply to the rituals of the cruising scene around him. He went through that twentieth-century rite of passage for smart adolescents: reading Brave New World and 1984. Both renditions of dystopian futures left their usual indelible mark, especially at a time when the world seemed inches from the brink of suicide—as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis that October 1962. But where were the uplifting, positive stories to counterbalance and help make sense of frightening times? There was, Lucas says he realized at this point, “no longer a lot of mythology in our society.”
More important than his graduation certificate to Lucas—and the Star Wars saga—was a growing interest in art house or “personal” films, kindled on weekend jaunts to Berkeley and San Francisco with Plummer. It was his first taste of the North Beach coffee house scene, where independent artists in black turtlenecks would hang bedsheets from ceilings and project their latest dream. By far the most influential short Lucas ever saw was 21–87. The film’s vital statistics make it sound light years away from Star Wars, and yet there’s a key connection. Lasting less than ten minutes, 21–87 was made in 1963 by a troubled young filmmaker in Montreal, Arthur Lipsett, who used random audio and discarded footage from the National Film Board of Canada.
What Lipsett came up with, however, was the definition of transcendent. The images in 21–87 are mostly of people, up close and personal, looking at the camera, caught in candid moments. Men feed pigeons and stare up at their city, pensive in an everyday sort of way. “There are no secrets, just the plain facts of life,” says one man offscreen. “Why can’t we bring these things out into the open?” Over the faces of old people, a lady declares, “I don’t believe in mortality. . . . I believe in immortality.” The film itself opens with the title over a picture of a skull. It’s a memento mori as well as a memento machina: the title comes from a discussion about the mechanization of society and how it fulfills our need to fit in. “Somebody walks up and says, ‘Your number’s 21–87,’” says the voiceover, twice. “Boy, does that person really smile.”
This notion would find its reflection in Star Wars—think of how many beings in it, from droids to Stormtroopers, are identified by their number. But it was not 21–87’s greatest contribution to the future movie. About three minutes in, as birds fly over a cityscape and old men watch and feed them, we hear this: “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God.”
Some kind of force, or something. In later years Lucas would point out that religious writers had been using the phrase “life force” for thousands of years. But he also acknowledged a debt to 21–87 and stated that the Force in Star Wars was an “echo” of Lipsett’s film. At film school, he would load 21–87 onto the projector more than twenty times.
4. HASKELL WEXLER
In 1963, while Lucas was still a student at Modesto Junior College, his parents bought him his first 8mm film camera, just like the one he played with back in the alleyway. He took it to speedways around the state, as he had with the Nikon they had given him in high school.
While filming at these racetracks, Lucas worked as a mechanic in the pit with a racing group known as the AWOL Sports Car Competition Club.* If he wasn’t meant to race cars, he could at least tinker with them. That was how, one weekend afternoon at Laguna Seca, Lucas got chatting with a customer who noticed his camera: Haskell Wexler, famed cinematographer. Immediately Wexler could tell the kid had a certain eye, a certain hunger for the visual.
Lucas’s friendship with Wexler would pull his life powerfully in a new direction. Wexler showed the student around his commercial film house; it was the first time Lucas saw the movie industry in the wild and became aware that movie careers existed. Wexler said he would have gotten Lucas a production assistant job—possibly on a documentary Wexler was working on, The Bus—but that it was nixed by film unions. Lucas said that was the point he “turned his back on Hollywood.” In fact, Wexler would keep trying to get Lucas a job within the Hollywood system for the rest of the youngster’s time in school, with little success.
Around the time he met Wexler, Lucas was figuring out his next move beyond junior college. The first to accept him was San Francisco State, where he would have pursued a degree in anthropology. He also applied to do illustration and photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; his father torpedoed that dream by telling his son he’d have to pay for it himself. Lucas says he was too lazy to even consider that. Meanwhile John Plummer was thoroughly enjoying his time at USC and thought Lucas might get a kick out of the film school’s photography program. “It’s supposed to be easier than P.E.,” Plummer told Lucas. That was all the kid needed to hear. Wexler called up a USC instructor called Mel Sloan; legend has it his words were “For God’s sake, watch this kid.” This may have tipped the scales, or Lucas’s newfound aptitude may have shone through on the test. It mattered not. USC accepted Lucas, and the young man continued to be pulled inexorably toward film.
His father came up with a generous solution: he would pay George Jr.’s way through school as an employee of his company. Lucas would get $200 a month. Lucas Sr. may have reasoned that film school would confer a valuable lesson. After all, nobody graduated from film school and immediately found work at a studio. They were first taken on as apprentices. If you made it to the dizzying heights of assistant editor after four years of apprenticeship, you would have to wait another four years until you could edit film.
Hollywood was a closed fortress of nepotism, yet there was always a place where nepotism would work in Lucas’s favor: Modesto. “You’ll be back in a few years,” George Sr. told his son.
“No I won’t, I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m 30,” Lucas shot back. Or at least, so he remembered as a millionaire in his thirties.
When did Star Wars first emerge as a cinematic concept? Where did the love of Flash Gordon transmogrify into the idea of putting some version of it on celluloid? Lucas’s answer is frustratingly imprecise: sometime during film school. “You end up with a little stack of ideas for great movies you’d love to make,” he told Starlog magazine in 1981. “I had this idea for doing a space adventure. . . . It was such an obvious thing that I was amazed no one had ever done it before.”
No student was less likely to have emerged as the star of the class. Lucas began at USC as a junior, and he was a photography major, not a cinema major; he began with only two classes at the film school. Film was not the cool subject it is today, and the department was banished to a spartan building called the Stables on the edge of campus. In his opening address, the dean of the school told students there was still time to get their tuition back. “Conditions were crowded, equipment limited, and scheduling editorial and mixing equipment was challenging,” remembers Lucas’s classmate, Howard Kazanjian. “We learned to work together. We created the feeling of family. The facility was old and funky, but I would have had it no other way.”
Lucas was increasingly drawn to the “geeks and the nerds” of his film classes, despite their pariah status. “No one wanted to be around us,” he remembered in 2013. “We were bearded and strange.” He compared his compatriots to modern-day Googlers and Facebookers. Something exciting and new was going on within the Stables, and the kids sensed it.
Lucas shunned the screenwriting class, run by the infamous Irwin Blacker, from which students had been known to emerge in tears. He didn’t care for plot or dialogue. Sound and vision were all he wanted to learn about. He took a history of film class with Arthur Knight, whose enthusiasm was infectious. Knight screened Metropolis, the 1927 masterpiece by Fritz Lang. It imagined a future city where an imperious “master” is challenged by rebel workers. The master’s son ventures into the underworld in pursuit of the female leader of the rebellion, and the master orders a machine made in her image in order to discredit her. Lucas would file that iconic golden robot away in his mind, where it would stay for years, becoming fluent in over six million forms of communication.
6. CLEAN CUT CINEMA
Don Glut arrived at USC the same year as Lucas; he, like George, started as a junior. The two met when Lucas and his dorm roommate, Chris Lewis, along with Glut’s roommate, Randall Kleiser, founded the Clean Cut Cinema Club, where members took turns screening movies. Glut joined too, though he didn’t quite fit in with the club’s deliberately uncool ethos. “I was the only one in the club with long hair,” says Glut. “After the Beatles came out, everyone grew their hair long. That’s what girls wanted, so that’s what we did. But Lucas and Kleiser and Lewis were groomed perfectly.” (Lucas wouldn’t gain a beard until he returned to USC as a graduate student.) Indeed, the CCCC had a reactionary bent aimed at the “beatnik guys dominating the cinema department,” the ones exhorting them to follow Jean-Luc Godard into independent filmmaking and telling them they couldn’t get a job in the industry. Lucas and his cohorts had a different concept of what that industry could be.
The CCCC tended to shy away from screening the then-fashionable works of new-wave French cinema. That’s what the professors were into, so the CCCC wanted to be into something else. Glut was a brash blue-collar Chicagoan who loved comic books and superheroes. A friend at Republic Pictures got him reels of old serial episodes, which is what he screened for the club: Captain Marvel, Rocketman, Spy Smashers, Zorro. Despite his love for Flash Gordon serials, Lucas was seeing most of these other serials for the first time, Glut recalls.*
In his second year, Lucas rented an $80-a-month place up in Benedict Canyon, the name of which may well have inspired Tatooine’s Beggar’s Canyon. Kleiser moved in, and the pair threw a party at which Glut screened an episode of The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Glut loved this stuff, but he also recognized the dumber scenes when he saw them. In one, Captain Marvel is following a car whose driver has been knocked unconscious. The car careens down a winding road, somehow managing to avoid going off the edge. “That’s impossible,” laughed Glut.
Lucas looked at him very seriously. “No,” he insisted. “The car would follow the contours of the road.”
The two shared a love of cheesy serials, but Glut’s passion for them got him into trouble. Each classroom had a 16mm projector; you could screen anything if there wasn’t a class in session. Glut was screening his serials for an audience one night when he was ejected by Herb Kosower, the animation teacher. In 1965, Glut had to take his camera class over again after turning in a movie called Superman vs. The Gorilla Gang for his final assignment. It fulfilled the requirements, but the teacher failed him. Why? “Because it’s a Superman movie.”
Lucas, by contrast, kept his own love for such things out of school bounds, although it ate up his extracurricular life. Kleiser remembered trying to urge him out of his room and go to parties, but Lucas “just wanted to stay in and draw star troopers,” Kleiser said. All those years after art class, he was still picturing space soldiers.
7. LOOK AT LIFE
As a junior, Lucas took Kosower’s animation class. While Glut hated Kosower, Lucas sat in the front row, intent on learning how everything worked, ready to overachieve. Almost immediately, he discovered he had a talent for animation—and how.
In 1965, George Lucas made his first short movie, born of an early homework assignment that couldn’t have been more basic. The students had been instructed to take a minute of 16 mm film, run it through the Oxberry camera, and make something move. What Lucas did with that minute was extraordinary and still holds up today as if it were a great YouTube short (which it now effectively is). It’s called Look at Life. The title referred to the two popular weekly photo magazines Look and Life. Lucas cut out his favorite pictures and strung them together in a collage, in the style of Lipsett’s 21–87.
As in all subsequent Lucas films, the music was in the driving seat: in this case, the first track from the soundtrack to the Brazilian film Black Orpheus, which happens to be a minute long. It opens with a lilting guitar, over which Lucas zooms out from an eye, a face behind wire mesh. Then an urgent samba bursts in, appearing as rudely as would years later the first chord of John Williams’s Star Wars theme. We see snarling dogs in Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Klansmen, Khrushchev, soldiers in Vietnam, all in rapid succession. Five frames per image: extremely fast for 1964, even a little shocking today. It ends with the title cards “anyone for survival?” and “End?”
That last card may have been a portentous step too far, but there it was: America at the tipping point of the 1960s, anxiety over war and racism, the emotion behind that year’s big protest anthem “Eve of Destruction,” all within a single minute of film. The result was a hit with faculty and went on to win a total of eighteen awards at student festivals around the world. Lucas’s confidence exploded in an instant. “When I did that film, I realized I was able to run circles around everyone else,” he said. “That’s when I realized these crazy ideas I had might work.”
After Look at Life, Lucas went to town on class projects. For lighting class, he and classmate Paul Golding produced a simple meditation on the hood of a car. Set to Miles Davis’s “Basin Street Blues,” it was called Herbie, for the mistaken belief that Herbie Hancock played piano on the track. Hypnotic shots of neon diffusing over chrome were cut to the music. At the snap of a drum you saw, for a second, something that looked like a galaxy being born.
Lucas had the chance to meet and take a class from the mighty French director Jean-Luc Godard; after that, he seems to have had the zeal of a convert about new-wave cinema and the auteur theory. By the time of his third short, Freiheit—the story of a young man, played by Kleiser, escaping across the border between East and West Germany, played by Southern California scrubland—Lucas had veered so far into the avant-garde that he was experimenting with dropping his first name. “A film by LUCAS,” says the title card.
The primary film-editing machine at the time, the upright Moviola, seemed custom-built for a car-loving youth. It had gears and sprockets, it needed to be greased, and it growled. Foot pedals controlled speed and motion. Lucas had to break into the editing room, known as the Bullpen, so he could drive the film all night, cutting a scene just a hair’s breadth before he got bored with it, the whole session fueled by Hershey bars, Cokes, and coffee. He gave himself the supremely geeky nickname “Supereditor.”
For his graduation project, 1:42:08—A Man and His Car, Lucas brought his two main loves together: fast cars and fast films. It was technically excellent but cold: you didn’t see much of the man. Its soundtrack was the roar of the engine. He’d been inspired by another National Film Board of Canada film called 12 Bicycles, which used the same kind of long lenses Lucas would employ in 1:42:08.
Lucas used color film, which students were theoretically barred from using, and took more than a semester to complete the project, another breach of the rules. He was dressed down for breaking into the Bullpen and editing at night. The faculty may have grumbled, but Lucas was basically untouchable at this stage. The award-winning wunderkind had attracted a coterie of student friends, which became known—in retrospect, at least—as the Dirty Dozen. At one end of the spectrum was John Milius: girl-chasing, outlandish, conservative, militaristic, a man who would have joined the Marines but for his asthma. At the other end was Walter Murch, a refined East Coast intellectual. Murch first met Lucas when the young savant told Murch he was developing film all wrong. That kind of approach didn’t seem to stunt relationships in a school that was all about meritocracy: “If you saw an exciting film,” said Murch, “you became friends with the guy who made it.”
Both Milius and Murch would come to have an indirect effect on Star Wars, but Milius’s impact was the most immediate: he insisted on taking Lucas to see the samurai films of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa that played at the Toho cinema on La Brea in Los Angeles. Kurosawa had turned Milius’s life around when he’d been declared 4-F; a weeklong festival of Kurosawa’s movies had convinced him to apply to film school. Lucas only had to see Seven Samurai once to know he was hooked. Kurosawa shared his love of long lenses and wide shots; he told irresistible stories that built slowly to a grand conclusion; he loved to build the audience’s anticipation for something that was about to happen, something just off the edge of the screen.
And there was something more in those samurai films, something that would have been obvious to any child of the 1950s: Kurosawa loved Westerns. Asked once where he received his inspiration, the Japanese director responded: “I study John Ford.” Ford, the multiple-Oscar-winning director of movies such as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is considered the past master of the Western. Although born to an Irish family in Maine, Ford was able to find and frame the spirit of the American West. His characters struggled against vast, rugged terrain, reached for far horizons, and spoke only when necessary. Kurosawa translated Ford’s Westerns to medieval Japan. Star Wars would owe significant debts to both directors. Lucas may have taken a circuitous foreign route to the Western influences that would show up on Tatooine, but was hardly impoverished for doing so. It was like learning about American rock and roll by listening to the Beatles.
9. GOVERNMENT WORK
On graduating in August 1966, Lucas got the draft letter he’d been expecting. The Vietnam War was sucking an entire generation into the major maelstrom of the Cold War. He considered following the exodus to Canada; friends who had been drafted had weighed that option, but thought better of it when they heard back from homesick classmates. The best Lucas could hope for was Officer Candidate School, perhaps leading to assignment with a military filmmaking unit.
When he reported for medical inspection, however, Lucas got a nasty shock: he was diabetic. Not only did that rate him 4-F, but he also had to quit his constant companions: Hershey bars and Cokes. John Plummer said Lucas compared the diagnosis, once it was confirmed by his doctor back in Modesto, to a second car crash. But it was to give him a heroic dose of self-discipline and a leg up on his contemporaries. Desperate to outrun the need for insulin injections, he would remain substance-free for the rest of his career: no smoking, no drugs, no sugar, barely any drinking. Such choices would set him apart from many other filmmakers of his generation, and not in a bad way. In 1977, the year the first Star Wars film was released, Martin Scorsese admitted he was too coked up to face the challenge of making much-needed changes to the disastrous New York New York; Francis Coppola sat amid a haze of pot smoke on the horrifically over-budget, long-delayed Apocalypse Now while friends feared for his sanity. Meanwhile, Lucas—boring old Mr. Clean—churned out the year’s top movie on a tight budget, then turned around and started its sequel.
Since he was spared from military service, Lucas’s next obvious step was USC graduate school, but he was too late to apply for the fall. While he waited for the next year’s admissions process to begin, he cut movie reels for the US Information Agency, working in the living room of editor Verna Fields.
This first taste of professional moviemaking forced Lucas to rethink his aspirations. After being told that he’d made a story about a crackdown on an anti-government riot in South Korea look “too fascist,” he had an epiphany: he didn’t want to be an editor. He wanted to be the one telling the editors what to do.
His year off from school afforded Lucas another revelation. Fields hired a second editor to work alongside him. Her name was Marcia Griffin. She was as shy and willful as Lucas, and they had both been born in Modesto. (Griffin was a military brat from a nearby base.) “Neither one of us would take any shit from the other,” Lucas said. They began to date. And it didn’t take long for George to start telling Marcia about an idea he had for a space fantasy. “That damn movie was whirring through the editing machine in George’s head on the day we met,” she would say two decades later, from the other end of a bitter divorce. “He never doubted it would get made. . . . He spent a lot of his time thinking of ways to get those spaceships and creatures on the screen.”
Those spaceships and creatures were to change her life forever, too—and not necessarily for the better.
10. THX 1138 4EB
The dream of spaceships and space soldiers seems to have been entangled with the dream of an easier-to-make movie—more science fiction than space fantasy—whirring through the editing machine in Lucas’s head. Walter Murch and another classmate, Matthew Robbins, had come up with a treatment for what was originally called Breakout: a man escaping from an underground lair in a dystopian future. Lucas loved the concept. How to make it, though? He wasn’t in film school at the time. He didn’t have access to equipment, and he certainly couldn’t afford to buy any on his own.
But these obstacles were surmountable with a little bit of lateral thinking. Lucas realized that if he took a second job as a teaching assistant in a USC class for navy cadets (USC trained military filmmakers) in return for the lease, he would have access to their color film. He organized the navy guys into two teams, framing the class as a competition to see who could shoot a film with the best natural lighting. He took charge of one team. His guys had access to military installations. Hey presto: instant film crew, instant locations. It wouldn’t have failed to remind Lucas of Jean-Luc Godard’s own strange dystopian film Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965), filmed in the strangest, most fascist-looking locations he could find around Paris.
THX 1138 4EB was the name Lucas gave to the uncut feature he loaded up on the Moviola at Verna Fields’s house some weeks later. It would take him twelve weeks of late-night editing to finish it. THX was pronounced “Thex” and appears to have been a joking reference to “sex,” though Lucas had trouble persuading anyone other than his closest friends to say it that way. The “EB” stood for “Earth Born.” A year later, when the film was wowing audiences at student film festivals, he amended the title—another signature Lucas move—adding Electric Labyrinth.
The result was light years beyond the average student film. Lucas and Murch had warped the sound, making much of the dialogue deliberately unintelligible. All the audience needed to understand was that THX 1138 is a man on the run from some sort of Orwellian government security apparatus. Not much acting was required. THX is seen in close-up only for a second. The surveillance guys hunting him are supposed to be dispassionate, which the navy guys found easy. One wears a numbered helmet that covers his eyes while he pulls levers—the first embryonic Stormtrooper Lucas committed to film.
The major innovation in the movie is what Lucas did in the optical lab: adding numbers and captions to the film, almost at random. He points his camera at TV screens. An organ drones deep discordant notes in the background. Viewers feel like voyeurs, ghosts in the government machine. Today it feels like it’s full of student film cliché, but Lucas practically invented those clichés. Not only did the short win armfuls of awards, but it also won him his first appearance in Time magazine in February 1968. Lucas babbled to the interviewer that THX’s pursuers have a whole backstory, that they are two separate races of “erosbods and clinicbods.”
Suddenly Lucas the odd-bod was making all sorts of interesting friends with this award-winning film as his calling card. “THX was not of this earth,” said a Long Beach film student who was introduced to Lucas at a student screening that included Lucas’s completed short, Steven Spielberg. It was to be another decade before they became collaborators, but they were already well on the way to becoming each other’s biggest fans. “THX created a world that did not exist before George designed it,” Spielberg enthused.
That may be overselling the fifteen-minute version of THX somewhat. “It’s a chase film,” says Charley Lippincott flatly. “It’s about paranoia.” But however you define it, the fact remains that Lucas managed to put a nightmarish future on film years before Hollywood started doing the same thing. The film industry would produce a slate of sour science fiction futures in the 1970s, such as Omega Man in 1971, Soylent Green in 1973, Logan’s Run in 1976. Lucas was to effectively launch that slate with the feature version of THX, and he would effectively bring it to an end with Star Wars.
11. THE EMPEROR
Lucas reentered USC as a graduate student in triumph, a fifteen-minute color film in the can. No other student had ever done such a thing. For an encore, he would crank out his first graduate film on an even tighter schedule, learning just how fast he could push himself. Anyone Lived in a Pretty [How] Town was a five-minute confection named for an E. E. Cummings poem. The plot: a photographer makes his subjects disappear. That’s it. Like most of Lucas’s student shorts, it featured no dialogue and felt a little inhuman—and you weren’t sure how deliberate all of that was.
The final film Lucas shot as a student, The Emperor, was different. For the first time, Lucas focused his lens on a human subject: Burbank radio DJ Bob Hudson, the self-styled “emperor of radio.” It was an interesting choice, and not because the name would be echoed in the prime mover of evil in the Star Wars movies.
Hudson was a self-confessed fantasist. He opened the short by talking about Emperor Norton, an eccentric character in nineteenth-century San Francisco who declared himself emperor and began to be treated as such. Hudson took the example to heart with his grandiose title. Lucas evidently warmed to this notion: someone becoming exactly what he wanted to be, no matter how outrageous it sounded. Like Norton, Hudson declared it and then lived it. This was to become Lucas’s philosophy too: dream yourself an empire. “As corny as it sounds,” Lucas declared years later, “the power of positive thinking goes a long way.”
Perhaps because of such eccentric grandiosity, Hudson got himself ejected from a steady stream of stations. “I’m disagreeable,” he tells the camera, though we only see his whimsicality. These days, Hudson would be an AM radio shock jock; he had the look and the loose mouth of a Rush Limbaugh. But in the 1960s, radio voices were more benign: they played records, told stories and jokes, kept you company.
Lucas had fun with the format, and viewers of his films got a strong sense of his oddball humor in The Emperor for the first time. He put the credits in the exact middle of the movie, right before the punch line of one of Hudson’s jokes. “It’s fantasy,” Hudson says at the end of the movie, echoing the title card at the beginning. “Radio is fantasy.” He fades out, leaving an empty chair.
Film was fantasy too—that’s what Lucas learned at USC. Film was fantasy; your fantasies could appear on film. And he had the potential to spin that fantasy, to drive that Moviola, like no other filmmaker. Well, almost no other.
12. FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
After Lucas graduated, he retreated into the desert. Classmate Charley Lippincott had turned down a $200-a-week scholarship offered by Columbia Pictures to work on a Western called McKenna’s Gold that was being shot in Arizona, and Lucas took the gig instead. But he became angry at the scholarship, which he later called “a ruse to get a bunch of cheap, behind the scenes documentaries.” Lucas pocketed the cash, withdrew from the shoot, and made a silent film about the desert itself. Still in love with numbers, he called it 6.18.67, for the day he finished shooting.*
The next opportunity was another scholarship—one that Lucas won (on the strength of THX) and Murch lost, but not before they’d made a pact that the winner would help out the loser. This one gave Lucas six months at Warner Brothers at $80 a week. Later, Lucas would spin the fantasy that his first day on the lot was Jack Warner’s last. In fact, Warner would stick around, on and off, for years. But the studio was in a bad way, sold to a business consortium, many of its departments shuttered. One that was in the process of closing was the animation department, home of Looney Tunes, which is where Lucas had wanted to spend his scholarship time. Prior to the scholarship, Lucas had tried and failed to get a job at Hanna-Barbera; he had briefly assisted animator Saul Bass on the Oscar-winning short Why Man Creates. It would take Lucas until 1985 to succeed in becoming a producer of animated fare—having taken the long way ’round.
Instead, Lucas picked up the phone in the moribund animation department and made a fateful call to his classmate Howard Kazanjian, who happened to be on the lot as assistant director on the only movie then in production: a musical called Finian’s Rainbow. Kazanjian told Lucas to come on down so he could introduce him to Francis Ford Coppola, a self-confident wunderkind from UCLA, the only student filmmaker in the country whose star had eclipsed Lucas’s. After a spell working for B-movie maestro Roger Corman, Coppola had landed a Hollywood directing gig. That alone seemed impossible. But the fact that he just happened to be on the Warner’s lot at the same time Lucas was despairing of something to do? That had to be destiny.
Coppola found room in the budget for Lucas to work as an assistant, and their ever-lively relationship was off to the races. Coppola challenged Lucas to come up with a brilliant idea for the film every day. Lucas delivered, but Coppola, four years his senior, still teased his charge mercilessly, calling him a “stinky kid.” Lucas’s second lifelong mentor after his father was also, he said, his tormentor. They were polar opposites: loud and quiet, impetuous and cautious, womanizing and distantly devoted. Lucas once said his career was a reaction to Coppola’s as much as anything else. Still, the two had something crucial in common. “George broke the rules at USC,” Kazanjian would later observe; after all, he literally broke into the editing bullpen. “Francis likes breaking rules.”
On late nights back at the office with Kazanjian, Lucas and Coppola kept talking about how much they hated the Hollywood scene and wanted to tear down its stodgy structure of unions and old-guard studio bosses. So it was another extraordinary stroke of luck when Coppola got the go-ahead from the studio to film his screenplay The Rain People. He put together a twenty-person road shoot: a caravan across America on a shoestring budget, all handheld cameras and motels. The movie’s heroine was doing a Kerouac, going on the road to find herself. The young filmmakers were doing the same. Lucas came along as a jack of all trades: he would record sound, carry equipment, manage props. He filmed a documentary that captured Coppola’s tempestuousness, as well as the fun and chaos of the road trip, with fireworks being shot from car to car, their drivers wearing Prussian military helmets.
Around this time, Lucas was captured on documentary film cameras himself for the first time, for a segment of a short on new filmmakers that was ostensibly focused on Coppola. Introduced as the director’s assistant—no, no, insists Coppola, his associate—Lucas smiles shyly and looks down at his camera. Then the film cuts to Lucas in thick-framed glasses, the beginnings of a goatee, and a Mao-style military jacket, in full revolutionary flow. “Student films are the only real hope,” he lectures. “I think they [the studios] are starting to realize that students know what they’re doing. You know, they’re not just a bunch of silly kids playing around.”
The Creator-to-be, the self-determined Emperor of film, was about to become much more than a silly kid playing in an alleyway.
But first, he would have to learn to write.
________
* Lucas also edited the AWOL newsletter, known as BS. (Seriously.)
* It should be noted that Glut has an ax to grind against Lucas, who failed to help Glut out of his dire financial straits with further work after he wrote The Empire Strikes Back novelization. He let me interview him with the understanding that he would not be made to appear to say anything positive about Lucasfilm.
* Exactly one decade later, Lucas would be reaping the first rewards of a far more difficult desert shoot.