BUCK ROGERS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The fact that George Lucas wrote out, typed up, and then deleted a “there must be a Force” scene from THX 1138 was just one sign of the turmoil his one true science fiction movie was going through in his mind. He slashed away at anything that sounded like space fantasy: this was to be a dark debut, in a setting at once futuristic and familiar. But translating all that, from the fluid images in his head into static words, would be one of the most painful operations of his life—alongside the writing part of just about every Star Wars movie.
“I bleed on the page. It’s just awful.” That’s how the filmmaker has described his writing style, from his first script onwards. The bleeding began in 1968, when Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take an option on a feature-length version of Lucas’s award-winning THX short. The $150 weekly checks would also serve as Lucas’s salary on the Rain People. That would buy him time to bleed.
Lucas was eager to get his ideas on the screen but desperate to outsource the scripting part. Coppola, however, insisted: a director had to learn how to write. Lucas showed him a draft. “You’re right,” Coppola said, horrified. “You can’t write.” They tried writing a draft together. They tried hiring an experienced screenwriter, Oliver Hailey. Neither result adequately translated the images in Lucas’s head onto the page. And so Lucas struggled forward on his own, as he would so many times in the course of his career. Lucas’s talent, time and again, would boil down to this absolute devotion to his wordless ideas, this obstinate opposition to anything that didn’t look like them. THX would not get made until the script was as much as 70 percent the way he’d imagined it, according to his own estimate. It was to be the second highest such number he’d achieve in his scriptwriting career, after the 90 percent figure he offered for The Phantom Menace.
Lucas scribbled away in motel rooms every morning and evening during the Rain People shoot. Mona Skager, Coppola’s script supervisor, was the designated typist for Lucas’s early drafts. One evening, she said, he was watching television and began to babble about “holograms, space ships, and the wave of the future.” Was this THX trying to work itself out, or something else?
One gets the sense of a coin spinning in Lucas’s head. On one side was science fiction dystopia: a heavy, meaningful film about who we are and what we’ve done to our world. On the other side: that seemingly lost space fantasy utopia of rocket ships and swashbucklers. “I really loved adventures in outer space,” Lucas would say years later, in response to Skager’s recollection. “I wanted to do something in that genre, which is where THX partially came from. [But] THX really is Buck Rogers in the 20th century, rather than Buck Rogers in the future.”
Lucas was quite literal about that Buck Rogers connection. He would open the movie with a trailer for Buck Rogers, the 1939 serial. The announcer’s intonation of “Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century” was familiar to its audience, having been made famous by the earlier radio serial. (Director Chuck Jones had parodied it in a 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon, a favorite of Lucas’s and Spielberg’s, which screened before all 70mm prints of Star Wars in 1977: “Duck Dodgers in the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century!”)
But in the opening seconds of THX, a redubbed announcer can clearly be heard saying, “Buck Rogers in the twentieth century!” Most viewers paid no heed to the date. They simply assumed the trailer was ironic juxtaposition with the dystopian nightmare that followed. Not for the last time, the meaning of a Lucas movie would be buried in plain sight.
Lucas finally finished the THX script with the help of Walter Murch. He didn’t hire Murch just to honor their pact that the winner of the Warner scholarship would help out the loser; Murch was on his weirdness wavelength, he said. They brainstormed scenes and shuffled them like cards. The result was resolutely anti-story, full of disjointed moments and snatches of dialogue. It refused to explain anything to the audience. “The problem that George and I found with science-fiction films was that they felt they had to explain these strange rituals,” Murch said. “A Japanese film would just have the ritual and you’d have to figure it out for yourself.”
Here’s what we figure out: THX 1138 is a citizen in a nameless underground society that has been drugged into sexless happiness by the state. This version of dystopia is far more Brave New World than 1984. No one says the population is unhappy, Lucas later pointed out; it’s just that they’re in a cage. Robot-faced policemen are everywhere—the masked space soldier slowly taking form—as are confessional booths with the face of Jesus from a Hans Memling painting; this is the state deity, OMM. THX spends his evenings in front of the holograms, drugged out, masturbating to erotic dancers, enjoying police beatings. His female roommate, LUH, cuts down her own and THX’s drug supply, which awakens them. They start a tender sexual relationship.
A coworker, SEN, wants THX as his roommate and fixes things so LUH is transferred. THX and SEN turn each other in for crimes against the state. Tried and tortured, they find themselves with other outcasts in a prison of pure whiteness. SEN tries to organize the group with rhetoric: “One idea could get us out of here!” THX simply walks out. SEN tags along. The pair meet a man claiming to be a hologram and emerge from the white limbo into rush-hour human traffic. SEN can’t go on. While waiting to be taken away, he talks poignantly to children, marveling at how small their drug-based learning tubes are these days. THX and the hologram learn that LUH is dead, her name now repurposed for an embryo in a jar.
Cars, of course, provide the escape route. THX is pursued by police robots on bikes. Both crash. THX makes it out into the city’s shell, fends off attacks by strange dwarf creatures, and then starts climbing up a long hatch toward the light. A robot policeman pursues him but is shut down when the chase exceeds its strict budget. In the final shot, THX emerges into we-know-not-what world, a silhouette against a sunset.
As depressing as it is to watch, THX now seems prescient, a glum presaging of America’s medicated, couch-potato consumerism. Nobody says we’re not happy, either—just that we’re spending much of our lives indoors, with a variety of interactive screens rather than holograms. The social commentary was pretty heavy-handed, as you might expect from a small-town twenty-four-year-old living in LA in 1968. Here was a man angry at our drug cultures (prescription and otherwise), at a world that had gone plastic and sterile, at authority figures obsessed with restricting sex, money, and power.* Call it Brave New World meets The Graduate.
A month after Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, as Lucas and Murch were still tweaking the script for THX, Marcia Griffin and George Lucas got married at a Methodist church just south of Monterey (he’d proposed just prior to the Rain People trip). The Lucas family drove down from Modesto to attend. Coppola came, as did Lucas’s closest friends from USC: Walter Murch, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood. For their honeymoon, the bride and groom drove down the California coast to Big Sur before doubling back to San Francisco and across the Golden Gate. Lucas wanted his wife to see the charms of Marin County. He had good reason: Marin was where Lucas had recently glimpsed his future. Toward the end of production for The Rain People in June 1968, Coppola had wriggled out of a commitment to speak on a panel in San Francisco about film and the written word, sending Lucas in his place. There Lucas had fallen under the spell of another filmmaker on the panel, John Korty. Over the previous four years, Korty had made three prize-winning independent films out of a $100-a-month barn in Stinson Beach. His total outlay was $250,000, and he was making a profit.
Once they saw the barn, Lucas and Coppola were converts. They wouldn’t continue to be cogs in the studio system; they would go independent. Coppola was further convinced when he visited a commune of filmmakers on a trip to Europe. He nearly bankrupted himself buying and shipping state-of-the-art editing equipment back to the United States. The instructions were in German. To fix it, an engineer would have to fly in from Hamburg. Still, now they had everything they needed.
It is hard not to be enamored with Marin, even in February when the Lucases arrived. The San Francisco vistas from the Marin headlands, the world-class hikes, the benign gaze of Mount Tamalpais over the whole place—this was so attractive that a developer backed by Gulf Oil was planning to build an entire city in the headlands, called Marincello. “It is probably the most beautiful location in the United States for a new community,” said the developer. The locals hated the idea. By the time the Lucases arrived, Marincello was mired in lawsuits and red tape. It would never be built.
In stark contrast to LA, Marin was perfect for a small-town kid. It was all about bucolic small towns, such as Sausalito, where the hippies lived on houseboats (Murch and his wife would move into one). There was Mill Valley, enshrined in a song by Rita Abrams (Coppola would direct the idyllic music video). In San Rafael, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin Civic Center had just been completed. (The futuristic building with its soaring spire would feature in THX and later in the 1990s science fiction film Gattaca; it also houses Lucas’s divorce papers.)
South of Mill Valley was a tiny neighborhood called Tamalpais–Homestead Valley, full of windy roads, overgrown hedges, and picket fences. Here the Lucases rented a one-bedroom Victorian with a large attic for $120 a month. They moved in that spring. An Alaskan malamute called Indiana, which Marcia would strap into the passenger seat, completed the domestic scene. Marcia wanted kids, but Lucas demurred: they weren’t financially secure yet.
One birth, at least, took place in the Lucas’s new home in the hills. While editing his Rain People documentary, Filmmaker, on a Moviola in the attic, Lucas declared their home the headquarters of a fictitious company, Transamerica Sprocket Works. But on screen, for copyright purposes, he used a more prosaic name: Lucasfilm. This, too, was still technically fictitious. Lucas would not file corporate papers until 1971.
The next month, Coppola and his crew arrived to start scouting locations for their film company, which was slouching toward San Francisco to be born. Lucas led them around Marin like an eager tour guide. Coppola made offers on two separate Marin mansions but couldn’t scrape together the down payment fast enough. Time was tight; the editing equipment was about to arrive. Korty, of all people, the Stinson Beach idealist, found a former recording studio in SOMA, the most urban, warehouse-filled neighborhood of San Francisco. Lucas argued against it—the whole idea was to have a retreat outside of a big city—but Coppola was holding all the cards. Sorry, George, and by the way, the company name is going to be American Zoetrope, not Transamerica Sprocket Works.
American Zoetrope was the epitome of 1969 cool. The offices of Rolling Stone were just around the corner. Jerry Garcia was a frequent visitor. Woody Allen dropped by, as did the mythical Akira Kurosawa himself. Even Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director fresh from 2001, called from self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom, wanting to learn more about these crazy kids and their high-tech editing machine. The market was obviously on their side; Easy Rider, a film by a motley gang of Lucas and Coppola’s contemporaries, was on its way to making $55 million at the box office, on a budget of $400,000. Every studio suddenly wanted a piece of the young filmmaker revolution. Zoetrope was it. Nobody thought they were just stupid kids playing around anymore. Coppola was getting $2,500 a week in seed money from Warner Brothers to set up the new company, part of a proposed $3.5 million deal. Warner would distribute Zoetrope’s first movie, with an option on several more, sight unseen. Zoetrope would be able to produce the movie without Warner interference, at least until it was done. It was a great deal for the time, made in one brief shining moment when the big studios felt lost and desperate for young moviemakers to show them the way. But the problem with the contract was baked in from the start. The money was actually a loan; Coppola would have to pay it back if Warner didn’t like his output. Still, it included a budget for THX, the company’s first picture. Coppola’s lucky number was 7, so he whimsically decided to fix the budget at $777,777.77—a lowball figure for a feature, even then.
That summer, as men walked on the moon, Lucas assembled his cast. Robert Duvall from Rain People would play THX; San Francisco actress Maggie McOmie would play LUH. Not for the last time, Lucas used a renowned older British actor—in this case, Donald Pleasance as SEN. Lucas’s crew scoured the Tenderloin for addicts in treatment programs, forced to shave their heads as a sign of commitment. They’d be useful as extras.
Shooting began on September 22, 1969, and wrapped two months later. Lucas and the crew ran through a hectic schedule of shoots in and around the city. He would have loved to film in Japan, to give THX even more of the sense of alienness (for American audiences) he and Murch craved. But the budget wouldn’t even stretch to a scouting trip. Instead, it was a guerilla movie, much of it shot without permission in the still-empty tunnels of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit. The pace was intense, the work stressful. Lucas talked about his “needle going into the red” on day 1 and staying there. He noticed his crew loading film the wrong way into a camera and had an epiphany: professional crews can be just as clueless as student filmmakers. He built his own special effects with model cars and $10 fireworks. As for the actors, he let them perform the way they wanted, as if he were shooting a documentary. On one night in a closed set, Duvall and McOmie went for it in a sex scene that was risqué even in 1971.*
Lucas wanted his underground world to look a little scuffed and dirty and lived-in. The actors wore no makeup. The whiteness of their uniforms tended to obscure this, but Lucas hoped to achieve the look in later films. He was already thinking about a sequel to THX—after all, he’d spent all this time creating this world, it seemed a shame to limit it to one picture. There was one vague scene he had in mind for the sequel: his hero would be trapped in some kind of giant garbage masher.
As overwhelming as it all was, and as many difficulties as he had with the crew, Lucas was breaking new ground, and the experience invigorated him. “It was the only movie I really enjoyed doing,” he said a decade later. The photo on his THX set pass showed something very unusual in the history of Lucas portraiture: a big, cheesy grin on his face.
American Zoetrope was officially incorporated in November 1969. Lucas was named vice president, but the position was unpaid. To make ends meet, he and Marcia took a variety of freelance assignments. Inspiration and occasional gigs came from Haskell Wexler, who had recently arrived at Zoetrope, fresh from the August release of his movie Medium Cool, a drama-documentary filmed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Lucas and John Milius planned to do something similar, documentary-style, in Vietnam. Milius, mocking a hippie button that said “NIRVANA NOW,” suggested calling it Apocalypse Now; he wanted to base it on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, having been incensed by a teacher’s claim back at USC that the book was unfilmable. It would go through ten drafts. Lucas was to direct it, even though, as Milius later put it, George didn’t know Conrad from Mary Poppins; he just wanted to do a documentary-style Vietnam picture. Before long, Coppola optioned it to Warner without asking either Lucas or Milius. He’d found another parade to jump in front of.
Wexler’s next assignment was to shoot a documentary about a free concert at a racetrack over in the East Bay. Organized by the Grateful Dead, it was to feature Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Rolling Stones. Wexler had been trying to film the Stones for years. Would Lucas like to help capture crowd footage? Rock and roll on a racetrack with a camera, and he’d get paid? It must have sounded like a dream come true.
The racetrack was Altamont. The concert was badly planned and horrifically overcrowded. Hells Angels were running security. During the Stones’ set, a Berkeley student named Meredith Hunter started waving a gun on stage. The Angels tackled and stabbed him. The drug-fueled crowd freaked out. To this day, Lucas says he can’t remember what he shot. But Albert Maysles, director of the Gimme Shelter documentary that used the footage a year later, says Lucas was responsible for the moody moments of concertgoers in silhouette, panicked, trying to find their way out. Said Maysles, with an odd kind of pride: “It’s like a sci-fi scene.”
Lucas spent much of 1970 in his attic in Marin, retreating into his own cautionary tale of sex, drugs, and escape. “It’s a kind of therapy” was how he described editing. Just as well—he despised the regular kind. He had even been irked when Coppola tried to get him to sit down with the crew and discuss difficulties during the THX shoot.
Coppola came to visit and introduced Lucas to Gary Kurtz, an older USC grad just returned from three years as a filmmaker with the Marines in Vietnam, whom Coppola had worked with in his Roger Corman days. Kurtz, a quiet Quaker with an Amish-style beard, was now associate producer on a road movie called Two-Lane Blacktop. Lucas had shot with an unusual film stock, Techniscope, on THX; for a lot of technical reasons, Techniscope makes it easy to make a reel of film last twenty minutes rather than the usual ten. “For low budget pictures, that was perfect,” Kurtz says. “Especially pictures with car stuff.” Coppola had an ulterior motive for getting the two together; Kurtz was the only filmmaker he knew who’d seen action in Vietnam, which would make him a perfect producer for Apocalypse Now.* Given the subject was film and cars and the war, Kurtz and Lucas bonded instantly. Lucas offered to make Kurtz producer on his next picture, whatever that might be—but with the strong presumption it was going to be Apocalypse.
For the moment, Lucas had all the backup he needed. Marcia helped edit THX, although she found it emotionally cold even after she was done with it. At night, Walter Murch cut an audacious avant-garde soundscape: less music than distorted noises, feedback, free-floating electronica. For the prison scenes, while Duvall was tortured on screen, Murch got improv actors to record adlibbed lines as if they were bored and casually sadistic air traffic controllers. One of the voices belonged to Terry McGovern, a local DJ and actor who, during his session, would unwittingly create the name for one of the Star Wars universe’s most famous creatures. McGovern was in the army reserves at the time and was running late from his once-a-month training weekend. So he drove to the studio with his best friend and fellow reservist, Private Bill Wookey.
McGovern and Wookey looked pretty ridiculous that day. It was 1970, and like everyone else in their twenties, the two pals had long hair, but for the sake of the army they squeezed it into short-hair wigs. “We had these huge heads,” Wookey remembers. “We must have looked like aliens.” Wookey was a pretty hairy guy in general (he still is, and started growing a long beard to match his hair the moment he got out of the reserves in 1972). He had fuzzy, red-brown locks and stood six foot three inches tall. Believe it or not, that’s all sheer coincidence. Wookey has never met George Lucas. All that happened was that during his ad-libbing, McGovern threw out a line for the benefit of his friend: “I think I just ran over a Wookey back there.” Memories are fuzzy at this four-decade distance, and nobody knows if Wookey was actually in the studio at the time. There’s a good chance the pair were high: “We smoked an awful lot of dope at the time,” remembers Wookey. McGovern says he “probably just dropped his name to be silly.”
The wonderfully silly line didn’t even make it into THX 1138. But Murch was amused by it, as was Lucas when he heard it. The filmmaker filed the name away in his notebook, where it gained an extra couple of vowels and became “wookiee.” McGovern kept on working as occasional voice talent for Lucas. One day in early 1977, he would be paid all of $200 to record another bunch of lines that didn’t make a lot of sense at the time: “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for,” he was told to say in a slightly dazed voice. “You can go about your business.” It was only when he saw Star Wars several months later that he was blown away by the result: “I was paralyzed with joy,” says McGovern. “I’m in a scene with fucking Alec Guinness!”
Similarly, Bill Wookey was blissfully unaware of what had happened until he saw Star Wars with everyone else in 1977. By that time he had a steady job as a clothing salesman in San Rafael and took his two young boys to see the movie their Uncle Terry had been working on. Then he heard the family name on the screen for the first time: “Droids don’t rip people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose; wookiees have been known to do that,” says Harrison Ford of his large hairy friend, who suddenly looked strangely familiar. “I definitely thought right away it was cool,” Wookey said. “It wasn’t until the next few weeks and months that I started getting a little uncomfortable with people making references and assuming I was the role model for Chewbacca.” But the embarrassment soon turned into pride—especially for his sons, who began a Star Wars action figure collection that now fills the family basement. “When my boys went off to school, they just thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” the hirsute clothing salesman, now age seventy, remembers. “They were Wookiees.”
By the time THX was ready, Lucas feared his first feature film would also be his last. He knew the movie was off the wall. In November, Coppola came by to collect the final product. After Murch screened a reel for him, Coppola shrugged: “It’s either masturbation or a masterpiece.” But if George was happy, Francis was happy. He packaged it up for the journey to Warner, together with boxes of Zoetrope screenplays ready for production, including The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. The quirky little THX was supposed to be the appetizer. Even if they didn’t like it, the suits at Warner wouldn’t refuse the main course. Would they?
As it turned out, they would and did. The day Coppola took THX south—November 19, 1970—was so disastrous that Zoetrope employees took to calling it Black Thursday. The suits detested THX 1138 so much they didn’t even glance at the other screenplays. They owned this film whether they liked it or not, but they didn’t intend to support another. On the spot, they cancelled the whole deal and called in Coppola’s loan. Suddenly he owed Warner $400,000.
Lucas’s baby was a hostage to Hollywood. This was the metaphor he offered repeatedly about this formative moment: you raise a child for two or three years, and then someone comes along and cuts one of her fingers off. It’s okay, they say, she’s fine—she’ll live. “But I mean, it hurts.”
Warner forced Lucas to cut four minutes from THX 1138. Lucas ignored the studio’s entreaties to edit more. The studio pushed the movie out in March with little fanfare. Big theaters didn’t book it. It got good but tiny notices in Time and Newsweek. “Some talent, but too much ‘art,’” sniffed the New Yorker, calling the white-suited dystopia “gloomy and blinding.”
The film had left Lucas in a bad way financially, and Zoetrope in an even worse spot. The studio started to turn a small profit by renting its editing machines to makers of commercials, but it wasn’t enough to dig Coppola out of debt. Then he got a call from Paramount, offering $150,000; he was their third-choice director on the adaptation of a Mario Puzo potboiler from 1969 called The Godfather. Coppola refused the first couple of times Paramount asked. That was old Hollywood stuff. But Lucas talked Coppola into it: “We need the money,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”
Off Coppola went for his date with destiny. He threw Lucas a bone by letting him shoot close-ups of the newspaper where Michael Corleone learns his father has been shot. Lucas returned the favor by editing another key Godfather scene, in the hospital, to add more tension.
Lucas badly needed a new project. Columbia Pictures was going to bankroll Apocalypse Now but got cold feet at the last minute. He and Marcia were down to $2,000 in savings. At one point Lucas and Kurtz discussed adapting a Kurosawa movie, just as The Magnificent Seven had recently remade Seven Samurai. Hidden Fortress, perhaps. Why that particular Kurosawa flick, the favorite of neither filmmaker? “Because it’s a fairly straightforward action adventure through hostile territory,” says Kurtz. “It’s a handful of characters and it’s elegantly told”—perfect for a low-budget picture. Not that Lucas and Kurtz didn’t dream about bigger-budget fare. One night the new friends were at a diner and looked in the paper to see what was playing at the local theaters. There was nothing they wanted to see. They enthused about how great it would be to see Flash Gordon on the big screen, in color.
Nobody can remember at a forty-year remove what was said in that conversation or who started it (Lucas and Kurtz were both Flash Gordon fans). Kurtz says they were talking in more general terms about how science fiction pictures hadn’t really been enjoyable since Forbidden Planet in 1955. “They all seemed to go downhill towards either genre horror, Creature from the Black Lagoon–type movies, or alien invasions, or just dystopian stories about post apocalyptic societies,” Kurtz says. “And none of that was fun. It was just the idea of capturing the energy of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers–style space opera, really, which hadn’t been done for so long.”
Whatever was said in the diner seems to have lit a fire under Lucas. On a visit to New York in early 1971, “on a whim,” he says, Lucas went to visit King Features to inquire about the film rights to Flash Gordon. The King executives agreed to meet with him because they were thinking about the film rights too; they mentioned Frederico Fellini as a possible director. The Italian maestro was also known to be a Flash Gordon fan.* There was no way Lucas could compete with Fellini at this point in his career.
This seems to have been Lucas’s lightbulb moment. The vague space movie idea he’d been running through the projector in his head for years—there was no reason that couldn’t be better than Flash Gordon. After his meeting at King Features, he and Coppola dined at the Palm Restaurant in Manhattan, and Coppola could sense his friend’s disappointment—but also his new outlook. “He was very depressed,” Coppola would recall in 1999, over lunch with Lucas and producer Saul Zaentz. “And he says, ‘Well, I’ll just invent my own.’”
Coppola paused to consider. “What a limitation, if they had sold him Flash Gordon.”
“I’m glad they didn’t,”† concluded Lucas. Years later, he reflected on why that was. “Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established. You start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity. . . . I would have had to have had Ming the Merciless in it, and I didn’t want to have Ming. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them—I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.”
In the meantime, though, Lucas needed a more bankable movie. If Fellini was to take Flash Gordon, maybe Lucas could take something from Fellini—for instance, the idea behind the movie I Vitelloni, about four teenagers in a provincial town who talk about leaving for Rome but never do. What if you followed a bunch of guys, on the cusp of leaving a small town, and follow them through one night of cruising—a ritual that had died out in the last decade?
Lucas would set his version in the summer of 1962, the moment everything changed for him, and end it with a car crash. He came up with a semi-Italian title: American Graffiti. It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn’t intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever.
The title aside, Graffiti was intended as a very mainstream, commercial project. Lucas was determined to combat the perception that he was an emotionless science fiction nerd. It had become the butt of jokes around Zoetrope. “Everyone thinks you’re a real cold fish,” Coppola told him. “Why don’t you do something warm?” Muttered Lucas as he wrote: “I’ll give you warm.” He worked up a fifteen-page treatment with another pair of USC friends, Willard Hyuck and his wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas put the word “MUSICAL” in capital letters on the title page; it was a confusing way of emphasizing the rock and roll soundtrack he imagined for the film.
Meanwhile, the world was starting to call him. That spring, Lucas appeared in both Newsweek and a PBS documentary in which he railed against the Hollywood system while walking below the Hollywood sign. Lucas’s first major newspaper profile, published in the San Francisco Chronicle around the same time, nailed him in its very first line: “Those who know George Lucas say that he has the temperament of an artist who works alone in his attic, plus a keen business sense aimed at the preservation of his work.” Those two essential facets of his personality were now locked in place and would not change for the rest of his career.
Then, in May 1971, Lucas learned THX had been officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Lucas was the beneficiary of circumstance: a revolt by young European filmmakers, demanding that more films by under-thirties be screened at the festival. George and Marcia cashed in their savings—no one was paying for him to attend the event—and took off for Europe. They stopped off in New York for a week, staying with Coppola (who was at his lowest ebb while shooting The Godfather) and his long-suffering wife, Eleanor, who was nine months pregnant. The Lucases slept in the Coppolas’ living room and just so happened to leave for JFK the same early morning Sofia Coppola was born.
Even before he arrived at Cannes, Lucas could see his luck changing. While in New York he met David Picker, president of United Artists, to pitch American Graffiti. Arriving in London on his twenty-seventh birthday, Lucas called Picker from a pay phone around the corner from a dingy flat costing less than $5 a night. Picker made a $25,000 deal for Graffiti on the spot.
Elated, the Lucases took a ferry to France and the train to Cannes on their Eurail passes. They had to sneak into one of the two THX screenings, which were sold out. They didn’t show up at a hastily arranged press conference; nobody even knew they were there. It didn’t matter; only one meeting at Cannes, with Picker, was to have any consequence. They met at Picker’s suite in the Carlton—Lucas’s “first big-time movie experience,” a nice change from the offices of underlings. Picker confirmed the Graffiti deal and asked Lucas if he had anything else for UA.
Lucas sensed his opening, and he took it. “I’ve been toying with this idea of a space-opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon,” he said. Picker agreed to take an option on that too.
It was the first time Lucas had pitched his dream movie, and he was shocked to find it pivot so fast from fantasy to reality. “That was really the birth of Star Wars,” Lucas remembered later. “It was only a notion up to then; at that point it became an obligation.”
Picker, sadly, can’t remember anything about the encounter now. For him, it was one of many deal-or-no-deal meetings he had in that hotel. “You can imagine how many meetings I had on that terrace,” Picker says. “More deals were made, more hearts were broken than any level of the business anywhere.” What he does remember is that Lucas has never let him live down his eventual divestment from the project. The filmmaker has needled Picker thusly on every subsequent meeting: “Hey, David, you could have had Star Wars.”
On August 3, 1971, United Artists officially registered the name “The Star Wars” as a trademark with the Motion Picture Association of America. The definite article, as strange as it sounds to our ears, would remain oddly attached to those two more famous words for the next five years.
The origin of this historic name—whether it harkened back to the space soldiers or was inspired by a more recent phenomenon, Star Trek—is frustratingly unclear. All we know for sure is that Lucas had the name long before he had the slightest inkling of a story. “The discussion about [the title] was that it was Flash Gordon–like, space-opera-type adventure about wars in outer space,” says Kurtz, “and then that kind of gestated into The Star Wars.” Patrick Read Johnson, a filmmaker who became the first kid in the world to see the movie when he covered it as a fifteen-year-old cub reporter for American Cinematographer in 1977—Gary Kurtz calls him “fan 1”—is convinced that there’s no way you could write about that title and not think about the elder science fiction franchise. “The name, before it came out, always got a laugh from my friends,” Johnson told me. “It sounded goofy. Like someone had tried to make Star Trek but just added the word ‘Wars’ at the last minute.”* Kurtz says that was a “fairly common reaction” at the time.
Lucas was certainly a fan of Star Trek. He took afternoon breaks, during the long years of writing Star Wars, to watch Trek reruns. “I liked the idea that you could gallivant around the galaxy,” he told Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s son in 2004. He was attracted to the show because it “got rid of the mundane boring action of real space, and said let’s just get out and go where no one else dared to go.” (Roddenberry Jr. was, ironically, a far greater fan of Star Wars than Star Trek as a child.)
The original Star Trek series debuted on television in 1966. It was canceled in 1969 after a seventy-nine-episode run, short of the hundred episodes normally needed for syndication—but, by 1972, Paramount had syndicated it to 125 local TV stations around the United States. Network executives called it “the show that won’t die.” In January 1972, some three thousand eager fans crowded the first annual Trek convention in New York, snapping up Vulcan dictionaries, books of Vulcan songs, and more than one hundred fanzines. By 1975, fans were holding two conventions a year in the city, attracting fourteen thousand visitors between them; by 1976, there were four Star Trek cons a year around the country, with the cast gratefully plucked from obscurity into superstardom. Legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov reported from these cons as one might report on Beatlemania, describing “teenage girls screaming for Spock.”
Lucas went to some of these early Trek conventions, at a crucial time when he was struggling to turn Star Wars into reality. “He did talk about Star Trek quite a bit,” remembers Gary Kurtz. The show was “inspiring in a way. It freed up the mind to think about what it would be like to travel to distant galaxies and encounter other species.”
Before fans of either franchise get too apoplectic, let me clarify: it would of course be an exaggeration to say that Star Wars is just Star Trek with a facelift. The concepts behind the two franchises are pretty much diametrically opposed. Star Trek, as we know from its opening sequence, is about a starship on a five-year mission of exploration. Many of the plots are fantastical, but it is science fiction, not space fantasy. It is our own galaxy, in our own future, using the tools of science to further the progress of a rational Federation. “Star Trek was more intellectual,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t action-oriented.”
Still, there’s more than a passing resemblance between Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk—and between Lucas and Roddenberry. Both creators used speculative fiction to make political points. “If I went to a strange planet I could talk about war and race and all the things you couldn’t talk about on television,” Roddenberry told the AP in 1972. “Kids today are growing up at a time when people are saying there is no tomorrow, that it may all be over in 20 years. Star Trek said there is a tomorrow and that it can be just as challenging and exciting as the past. It said that we shouldn’t interfere in the lives of other people. Maybe the kids saw something about Vietnam in that.”
In 1971 Vietnam was hard to avoid, even for a young couple like the Lucases, bumming around Europe on a Eurail pass post-Cannes, mostly visiting Grand Prix racetracks. That summer’s biggest album, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, has a song called California—about bumming around Europe, longing for the US West Coast, but being horrified by the news from home: “more about the war and the bloody changes.” Later, Lucas would wax lyrical about how the war might have been avoided: the vast numbers of decent Americans who could have spoken out against it but chose not to. “To not make a decision is to make a decision” is how he was putting it by 1976. “By not accepting the responsibility, people eventually have to confront the issue in a more painful way.” He was extremely sensitive to the fact that the war had knocked the country off balance. Lucas referred to that balance as “the poetic state.”
Lucas was determined now to make movies about the war in three modes: past, present, and future; absence, reality, and allegory. American Graffiti would take people back to a time before Vietnam ripped America apart. Apocalypse Now, which Lucas hoped to direct before or after The Star Wars, would show it in the present tense. If THX was the movie he expected to get him banned from Hollywood for life, Apocalypse Now was the movie he felt would lead to the government running him out of the country.
The third mode that Lucas intended to use to depict Vietnam—the allegorical, futuristic lens—was only just taking shape, but already it was being influenced by Lucas’s thinking about the present tense.* Lucas was fascinated by the notion of how a tiny nation could overcome the largest military power on Earth, and this was baked into The Star Wars right from its earliest notes in 1973: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”
Back in California following his Cannes trip, Lucas officially incorporated his own brand of freedom fighters: Lucasfilm Ltd., the name he’d copyrighted back in 1969. It was just a shell corporation for the moment, and friends were confused by the British-style name; why “Ltd.” and not “Inc.”? The alliteration just sounded better, says Kurtz—and it looked better too, because the pair were sketching out logos on paper and had the notion that they’d make a big, brassy, Cinemascope-style graphic in which the letters went from large to small to large again. They never got around to it.
Whatever it was called, Lucasfilm was barely a zygote at this stage, let alone an embryo. Lucas and Kurtz hired their first two secretaries, named Lucy Wilson (who also did accounts) and Bunny Alsup respectively, and that was it for employees. Lucasfilm’s first legal headache concerned the Graffiti draft Lucas had assigned to a USC classmate of his, Richard Walter, who had grown up in New York and didn’t understand car culture. Kurtz had already paid Walter most of what Lucas had received up front; Walter fought for weeks to get paid for his desultory second draft. Lucas resigned himself to writing the third draft from scratch—time to bleed on the page again.
There was a way out. Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, had been trying to sell him as a contract director for months, and now there was an offer: a crime picture called Lady Ice. It would pay $100,000. He could take the money, pay off all the money he’d borrowed over the years from his dad, make a name for himself, and achieve financial security. But he would have to postpone the dream of those three movies. The dreams were just too big. He decided to plow on in penury.
In December 1971, the UA development deal was sealed into a memo. It described The Star Wars only as “a second picture” after Graffiti, despite the fact that the company had just registered “The Star Wars” as a trademark. Lucas’s space fantasy project, it seems, was still at such a protean stage that even the placeholder name wasn’t certain.
Lucasfilm’s first movie deal was incredibly short-lived. Shortly after the UA deal memo was issued, Lucas sent Picker his third draft of Graffiti. He asked for more money for a fourth draft, and promised he would cowrite with Hyuck and Katz. Picker says he loved it, but his boss at UA didn’t get it. The Graffiti deal was dead, but Picker still had the option to produce The Star Wars whenever Lucas got around to writing a treatment.
There followed four months of rewriting and shopping Graffiti. Finally, Ned Tanen, head of the “youth division” set up to fund low-budget independent pictures in the wake of Easy Rider, agreed to take it on. He was a former cruiser himself; he got that part of it. He didn’t get the title. Gary Kurtz still has a letter from Tanen complaining that American Graffiti made him think of “an Italian movie about feet.” Universal had a half-dozen suggested titles. Lucas was writing about his hometown; why not call it “Another Quiet Night in Modesto”? Lucas and Kurtz thought that ridiculous. “The way we solved that was by saying, ‘You come up with a better title, because we don’t love this one but it’s better than anything we’ve heard,’” remembers Kurtz. It was good practice, as it turns out; a year later, he would use the exact same line with another set of studio bosses over the title Star Wars.
Tanen conceded the title fight but had one other stipulation: the film had to have a star actor or a star producer. What about that guy who just directed that amazing movie, The Godfather? Coppola readily agreed.
Lucas’s space fantasy project was shopped a second time. When Universal agreed to take on Graffiti, Lucas sold his other ideas as part of the deal: the contract gave Universal options on Apocalypse Now and The Star Wars, although it would only have a chance to pick up the latter project if UA declined its option.
The Star Wars was now named in a legal contract, not just a trademark document. Lucas was to get $50,000 for cowriting and directing Graffiti—a pay cut compared to THX. The budget was $650,000, also lower than that of THX. For enduring that ignominy, however, Lucas would get 40 percent of any profits.
The American Graffiti shoot, in July 1972, was a frenzied month of vampire hours, dusk till dawn. That one night the movie is set in would, for the cast and crew, happen sixty times: a nocturnal Groundhog Day. Lucas was not a night person. Nor was he keen on dragging his crew back to Modesto; instead he chose San Rafael and then, when it became clear the city was too noisy to stand in for the quiet town of his youth, the small farming town of Petaluma further up in Marin. At first Lucas tried to be the cameraman as well—he really thought he could do it all. But the results looked terrible. So Haskell Wexler flew up from LA to help out, gratis.
The story was simple: Two friends, Curt and Steve, are class stars trying to decide if they are going off to college in the morning. Their other two pals are polar opposites: a hot-rodder, Milner, who gets lumped with someone’s kid sister for the night and is being pursued by an out-of-town hotshot driver, and a hapless scooter rider, Terry the Toad, who borrows Steve’s car for a night and picks up a cute but demanding date. Lucas later suggested three of the friends represented aspects of his Modesto life. Terry was Lucas the dorky comic-reading kid. Milner was Lucas the Bianchina boy racer. Curt was the junior college version, the Lucas who had knuckled down and was moving on to bigger and better things.
Graffiti’s story threads were united by Wolfman Jack—an actual contemporary DJ whose location no one knew (just as they didn’t back in Modesto—it turned out Wolfman was broadcasting from a powerful tower down in Tijuana). The four stories intercut, an unusual idea at the time, as if viewers were bouncing between cars on radio waves. Wolfman himself appears at the end to help Curt contact a mystery blonde he had glimpsed through a car window. It is the DJ as benign force, the voice that answers prayers: like Lucas’s student film The Emperor, but from the point of view of the radio audience.
Coppola was wrapped up in Godfather publicity at the time, and barely took part in the film he was nominally producing with Kurtz. But thanks to Fred Roos, a friend of Coppola’s who also did casting for The Godfather, Lucas was gifted what may be the best cast of unknowns any second-time director has ever had. Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss stole the show. Then there was the guy playing Bob Falfa, the mystery driver who challenges Milner. He was a former bit player for Columbia who’d gotten out of the business and taught himself carpentry, which paid better. His name was Harrison Ford, and Kurtz had a set-to with him about how much he had been drinking at the crew’s Petaluma motel before shooting the crucial drag race scene at dawn. “Don’t show up like this again,” Kurtz remembers chiding Ford, who stayed sober on the set from then on.
Lucas wasn’t about to stop the party, or give his cast much of anything in the way of direction. “The set was very wild, very loose,” remembers Terry McGovern, who played a teacher. “George is not an actor’s guy.” McGovern had his hair cut hours before playing his scene opposite Dreyfuss when someone pointed out that teachers didn’t have long hair in 1962. Another member of the cast, Charlie Martin Smith, remembers Lucas getting much more animated in describing his next movie than discussing the one at hand. “It sounded great to me,” recalled Smith. “A big science fiction adventure with these short furry creatures called Wookiees. Richard Dreyfuss and I kept begging George to let us play them. . . . Then he turned around and made the Wookiees seven feet tall, which knocked [us] out of the running for that part.”
But for the most part, Lucas faded into the background like Wolfman Jack. He hid from the actors in most every scene—jammed under a diner’s counter-top, prostrate atop a car—and let the cameras capture what they would. He frequently fell asleep during a take. “I’m really going to direct this in the editing room,” he told Ron Howard. And so he did, but not in his attic this time. He talked Coppola into buying a house in Mill Valley and turning its granny flat into an editing studio. Verna Fields was the main editor, but Marcia played a major role after Lucas pleaded: “I made it for you.” It was a tough needle to thread. The crosscutting between stories had to work perfectly, never losing the delicate mood of teenage fantasia. Getting the sound right was just as challenging. Lucas and Murch spent hours moving speakers to and fro in the garden of Coppola’s Mill Valley house, trying to perfect the sound of a song heard from a passing car. (The film’s soundtrack would be drawn from the songs Lucas had listened to in 1962—all except those by Elvis, who wouldn’t give up the rights.) They worked through cans marked with reel (R) and dialogue (D) numbers. One night Murch called out: “I need R2, D2.” Lucas was amused; he was still a fan of curious letter-number combinations. “R2D2,” the friends repeated, laughing. Lucas wrote it down in a notebook he’d started carrying around.
By January 1973, Graffiti was ready for its preview. The Universal executives were invited to the screening, which was held in front of a packed house at the Northpoint Theatre in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Most of the audience loved the film, laughing throughout, but Universal’s Ned Tanen hated it. A self-confessed manic depressive, he genuinely didn’t see the warmth or the comedy. He wanted cuts. He threatened to release it as a TV movie. Coppola stepped in to defend his friend, offering to buy the movie from Tanen on the spot, at cost, reaching into his pocket for a nonexistent checkbook.
As gallant a gesture as that was, it didn’t work. Tanen refused to make a decision about releasing the movie; he seemed determined to keep Graffiti in limbo. Lucas was inconsolable. Once again, his child had been kidnapped by Hollywood. Again he was deep in debt to his parents, to Copolla, to everyone. He went home and refused to return Universal’s calls. Kurtz, meanwhile, had gone on scouting trips to the Philippines and South America to find the country most suitable as a stand-in for Vietnam on Apocalypse Now, as well as a country that could supply the maximum number of helicopters. While he was waiting, Lucas said, he might as well start “whipping up this treatment for my little space thing.”
It was time to bleed on the page like never before.
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* Some of SEN’s rhetoric—“We need dissent, but creative dissent!”—was lifted verbatim from Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign speeches.
* So much so that it earned a review in Playboy.
* Kurtz too had an ulterior motive: he wanted to borrow Coppola’s fancy French Éclair cameras.
* Indeed, Fellini was said to have drawn a Flash Gordon substitute for an Italian paper during World War II, when Mussolini banned Flash. No comic strips have ever been brought forward to substantiate this rumor. Comic book and Flash Gordon expert Edward Summer is skeptical.
† Not least because at that very moment in 1971, unbeknownst to Lucas or King Features, a production company in LA was shooting a campy pornographic parody called Flesh Gordon, which would eventually see release in 1974. The company’s name, in another odd coincidence: Graffiti Productions.
* In the early 2000s, Johnson would turn his experience of seeing Star Wars before anyone else into an independent movie called 5–25–77 (Star Wars’s release date) for which Gary Kurtz acted as producer. It has still not been released.
* Though Star Wars was ultimately set “a long time ago,” Lucas’s earliest plan was to set it in the thirty-third century.