When I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, all my friends thought I was crazy. Nobody went into film; the girls all gave a wide berth to film students because they were supposed to be weird.
George Lucas
George Lucas was born into a time of rebellion. The post-war years through to the 1960s saw many social conventions challenged and overthrown, as society and its tastes changed. For most of his teenage years in the late 1950s, Lucas was himself a rebel. This rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak continued as he entered professional filmmaking in the late 1960s, refusing to make movies in the style of the dying studio system, but instead adopting his own approach. However, with the unimaginable success of Star Wars in 1977 – and all that came after it – George Lucas became a rebel who built an empire. He became the very personification of the establishment he had set out to fight against. This is the story of how it all happened.
As a ten-year-old growing up in Modesto, California, the biggest thing in the life of young George Lucas was television. After several years of resisting, his father had finally purchased a set for the family. It opened up a window on a whole new world for George Jr as he no longer had to visit friends’ houses to see what was on TV. His favourite show quickly became Adventure Theater, screened nightly on San Francisco’s Channel 4 KRON-TV. The programme was a compilation of old movie serials from two decades before, including the black-and-white adventures of Tailspin Tommy, Lash La Rue and Spy Smasher: ‘It was a twenty-minute serial chapter, and the left over minutes of the half hour were filled with [the cartoon] Crusader Rabbit. I loved it.’
There was one serial hero in particular that caught Lucas’s imagination. ‘I used to love the Flash Gordon serials,’ Lucas recalled in later years. ‘They were a profound influence on me. The way I see things, the way I interpret things, is influenced by television. Visual conception, fast pace, quick cuts. I can’t help it. I’m a product of the television age.’
Buster Crabbe had played Alex Raymond’s space-faring hero in three chapter-play movie serials made between 1936 and 1940. The character started life in newspaper comic strips in January 1934, following the adventures of polo player Flash Gordon after he and friend Dale Arden are kidnapped by scientist Dr Hans Zarkov. They journey to the planet Mongo, where the evil Emperor Ming attacks Earth with flaming meteorites. The popular strip was rapidly adapted into a movie serial by Universal Studios, spanning thirteen cliff-hanging instalments.
It would be twenty years after they were made before Lucas saw these three serials on television, but they were to have a profound effect on his creativity as a filmmaker and on his future. At the time, the adventures of Flash Gordon were an escape into adventure for a young boy who felt his everyday life was very dull indeed.
As suggested by its name, Modesto in northern California is a very modest town. The town might have been geographically close to San Francisco, but in terms of atmosphere and feel, Modesto was more like a Midwestern American town than one near either of the more socially progressive coasts. Modesto had a long history of nothing much happening at all. The flat landscape was dotted with farms, where every vehicle was worked hard. It was a town where ambitions were neither born nor fulfilled, where little of note ever happened.
It was here that George Lucas Sr ran L. M. Morris, a stationery store. The son of a Californian oilfield worker, Lucas Sr had come from a family that had never seen wealth. However, after years of working there, he’d managed to buy the stationery store from its founder and was determined to make a success of it. As a young man he had lived through the Great Depression of the early 1930s, and he was determined that his own family would not suffer in the same way or want for anything.
Lucas Sr had moved with his widowed mother, Maud, to Modesto in 1929, where he met the frail Dorothy Bomberger at high school. She was the daughter of a local businessman, Paul S. Bomberger. He had turned his father’s property interests into a widely diversified business that took in a car dealership and a seed company, among others. By 1933, the twenty-year-old Lucas had married the eighteen-year-old Dorothy, abandoned his planned law degree and taken up employment in the Modesto stationery business of LeRoy Morris.
The newly married couple swiftly started a family, with a daughter named Ann born in 1934, followed two years later by Katherine (always known in the family as Kate). Following her first two pregnancies, Dorothy’s always-frail health took a turn for the worse. With Lucas prospering in the stationery business, the family moved into a new home on Ramona Avenue in Modesto. After a few years, and despite a doctor’s advice against it, Dorothy became pregnant again. The family’s only son – George Walton Lucas Jr – was born on 14 May 1944. A third and final daughter – Wendy – followed within a year.
The childhood of the young George Lucas was largely unremarkable. While his father was doing well in business, his was a frugal family where waste and extravagance were frowned upon: everyone was expected to live within limited means and to earn money before they could spend it. Young Lucas spent his money on comic books, including Batman and Superman, and science-fiction story magazines like Amazing Stories. The ‘pulps’ (so-called as they were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper) contained truly amazing stories of space adventure, in which heroes would fly off in sleek, silver rocket ships, battle evildoers and win the hand of intergalactic princesses. They sparked the imagination of young Lucas to the extent that he spent much of his time drawing his own versions of the stories he read rather than studying.
Lucas had never liked school. He was a small, shy boy who often found himself a target for bullies. He lived in fear of being attacked on his way home by a group of bigger, older kids who would steal his shoes or his precious comic books. ‘I was as normal as you can get,’ said Lucas of those years. ‘I wanted a car and hated school. I was a poor student. I lived for summer vacations, and got into trouble a lot shooting out windows with my BB gun.’
Lucas had a way of attracting some kids as friends, thanks to his father’s store. Rechristened The Lucas Company and relocated to new premises, the burgeoning store was one of the first in town to stock the latest toys and games, and young George always had first pick. His favourite toy – and the one that attracted the most admirers from among the neighbourhood kids – was a three-engine Lionel Santa Fe train set, one of the biggest and most impressive available in the mid-1950s. Another attraction was the young boy’s extensive comic book collection: he would eventually have over 500. His father had been forced to install shelves in the garden shed to store them all. The collection was nearly thrown out as Lucas grew up and lost interest in it, but it was saved by one of his sisters and returned to him many years later.
At school Lucas was withdrawn and uninvolved. He wasn’t making as much progress in literacy as would be expected at his age, and his younger sister Wendy would often have to help him with his spelling when he was doing homework assignments. ‘I was never very enthusiastic,’ said Lucas of his school days. ‘I always wanted to learn something other than what I was being taught [so] I was bored.’ Lucas increasingly withdrew into his own world, reading comics, watching TV, creating his own comic strips and constructing elaborate models. ‘He was hard to understand,’ said his father of George Lucas as a young boy. ‘He was always dreaming things up.’ At school one day, Lucas ignored the assigned art project and spent his time instead drawing a pair of armoured space soldiers.
George Lucas’s rebellion began when he discovered rock ’n’ roll. It was 1958 and he was fourteen, and had already reached his full adult height of five feet and six inches. He habitually dressed simply in sneakers, blue jeans, checked shirts and colourful sweaters. It was to become his uniform for life.
Comic books and adventure stories had given way to music. Now he rushed home from school to play his growing collection of records, featuring artists such as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. He grew his hair longer, much to his father’s disapproval. ‘I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant,’ Lucas recalled. ‘I was unhappy a lot of the time – I guess all kids feel depressed and intimidated. My strongest impression was that I was always on the lookout for the monster that lurked around the corner.’
The Lucas family moved into a new ranch-style house built on a one-time walnut ranch in Modesto when George was fifteen. The property was on the outskirts of town, cutting the young man off from his teenage peer group. He would have to return home from school by bus or bike, and then stay home all evening, listening to his records or watching TV. He had developed an interest in photography, encouraged by his father who could get the necessary supplies through the stationery store, but there was one thing the fifteen-year-old George Lucas longed for more than any other: a car.
In the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, teenage car-ownership was a badge of maturity, as well as a guarantee of mobility away from parents. American-made cars were cheap and widely available, and owning one was seen as a social necessity in the later years of high school. The long, straight country roads of Modesto were ideal for racing, and young George Lucas couldn’t wait to get his hands on his own car. ‘When I was ten years old, I wanted to drive in Le Mans, Monte Carlo and Indianapolis,’ said Lucas, establishing a lifelong interest in speed.
The speeds Lucas might achieve would be limited thanks to his father’s safety-first choice of his first car. It was a Fiat Bianchina, with a tiny, two-cylinder engine (disparagingly called a ‘sewing machine’) that made a terrible noise and was less powerful than a modest motorbike. However, it was a car and it provided an avenue of escape and a sense of teen identity for Lucas. He spent so much time working on the engine in an attempt to get it to go faster that his father thought he was destined to become a motor mechanic and so ‘wasn’t going to amount to anything!’
The car may have been small and low-key, like its driver, but it allowed Lucas to join the crowds of teenagers ‘cruising’ the streets of Modesto on Friday and Saturday nights. ‘I had this intense love relationship with cars and motorcycles; it was really all-consuming,’ he recalled. The roots of the film American Graffiti (1973) can be found in Lucas’s teenage exploits on the roads of Modesto in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kids would customize their cars and belonged to rival factions who would race against one another to the amusement and thrill of those watching. Lucas was keen to join the Faros (rechristened the Pharaos [sic] in the movie), a gang of would-be juvenile delinquents who would hang out at a burger bar called the Round Table (depicted as Mel’s Drive-In for the movie). The Faros were more about posing and making noise than any actual criminal activity, but the group had great allure for the newly mobile teen Lucas.
His big problem was the car, which his father had also insisted should be used by Lucas Jr to make delivery runs for the store. ‘It was a dumb little car,’ recalled the filmmaker of his first set of wheels. ‘What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter!’ While waiting for his licence, Lucas was restricted to driving on his father’s ranch property, where he promptly crashed into a walnut tree. It took two attempts to get his driver’s licence as he had trouble remembering all the rules of the road. Once he was able to hit the streets of Modesto, he quickly put the small car into the garage after he rolled it over trying to reach 70 mph.
Lucas had a friend who worked at Modesto’s Foreign Car Service garage, and the pair spent several weeks souping up the tiny Fiat, removing the roof and adding rollbars while beefing up the engine and adding an exhaust that made the car sound fiercer than it really was. Lucas was finally ready to make his mark amid Modesto’s rebellious racing teens.
Hanging out on Modesto’s main drag and occasionally taking part in unspectacular races became the focus for Lucas. It took up all his time out of school, so much so that his other hobbies – like photography – fell by the wayside. His grades continued to be a problem, threatening his chances of graduating. However, the young Lucas didn’t much care.
Feeling his son would never amount to much, Lucas Sr set his sights on bringing him into the family stationery business when he completed his schooling. It was a prospect the younger Lucas came to dread. He was just sixteen and felt that his father’s view of his future didn’t match his own aspirations. ‘I swore when I was a kid I would never do what he did,’ Lucas said of his father. ‘He wanted me to go into the business and I refused. I told him, “There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars . . . and two, that I will never be president of a company!”’
The world that would be reflected in American Graffiti was the one Lucas lived in for the first few years of the 1960s. He’d spend a huge amount of time at local races and demolition derbies, when he wasn’t appearing in court on parking and speeding tickets, accompanied by his disappointed father. He would hang around older, prize-winning racers, unable officially to race competitively himself until he reached the age of twenty-one. His last year at high school was much like all those previously: Lucas knew he had little chance of getting to college and so began to turn his thoughts to life beyond Modesto.
There was one course that Lucas discovered when checking out college prospectuses: a film class at the University of California. Lucas thought that he might be able to get on to a ‘creative’ course like that with his poor grades by presenting a portfolio of his drawings and photography. Graduating school had to be his first priority, though, which would be a struggle with a D-grade average and three incomplete course papers to deliver.
It’s likely that this was where the thoughts of George Lucas were focused on Tuesday, 12 June 1962, as he drove back home from the school library after another day of frustrating study. Arriving outside the driveway to his home just before 5 p.m., he failed to see a Chevrolet Impala attempting to overtake him from behind. The heavy Chevy hit the side of the flimsy Fiat as it made the turn into the driveway. The smaller car rolled over and over, crushed like a child’s toy. Entering a third roll, the seatbelt holding Lucas in place snapped, throwing him clear of the vehicle. He landed with considerable force on his chest as his car hit a nearby walnut tree at around 60 mph. It was just three days before he had to sit his final high school exams.
Eighteen-year-old George Lucas was rushed to Modesto hospital in critical condition. The driver of the Impala, seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, had escaped with barely a scratch. Lucas was suffering from serious internal bleeding and was immediately put on an emergency oxygen supply. A neighbour had called for an ambulance after he witnessed the crash, while his mother and sister inside the house had heard nothing and remained oblivious. They didn’t find out what had happened until young George’s father came to fetch them, having been called by a doctor, and took them to the hospital. Once there, they discovered Lucas hooked up to various medical machines, while doctors examined him for major damage.
Lucas awoke the next morning, only to be reassured by an attending nurse that he would survive the accident more-or-less intact. ‘She said, “You’re okay. All your arms and legs are okay.” It was very reassuring to hear that, as I didn’t know what parts of me were there or not. The fact that I was alive was a miracle.’ That day’s Modesto Bee led with a front-page report of the crash, complete with a photo of the crushed Fiat and the tree that had been moved forward two feet by the impact of the tiny – but fast-moving – Italian car.
The crash came to be the defining moment of the life of young George Lucas, and probably contributed to the creation of the ‘more machine than man’ tragic, scarred figure of Darth Vader. Prior to the crash he was on course to becoming an underachieving drifter, with no particular ambition or goal, except not to become his father. Afterwards, once he’d taken four months to recover, he had a different outlook on things. ‘I realized I’d been living my life so close to the edge for so long,’ he admitted. ‘That’s when I decided to go straight, to be a better student, to try to do something with myself.’
Lucas had described his survival as a miracle. If his seatbelt had not failed and had instead done the job it was designed to do, he would not have escaped the Fiat before it hit the tree. The impact would almost certainly have killed him outright. Despite that, the authorities felt that Lucas had to accept some blame for the crash: while he was in hospital they issued him with a ticket for making an illegal leftturn.
Lucas’s injuries looked worse than they actually were and, following some basic medical treatment and respite care, he was free to return home after two weeks. His worries about graduating high school disappeared when on the Friday of the week of the crash – the day he was expected to graduate if he had passed the course work – his school sent his graduation diploma to the hospital, excusing his non-delivery of his final papers due to the accident. Lucas was severely bruised and spent the four months of the late summer and early autumn of 1962 mainly confined to bed at home.
‘Before the accident, I never used to think,’ said Lucas. ‘When you go through something like that, it puts a little more perspective on things, like maybe you were here for a reason.’ It is during this summer of enforced contemplation that the myth of George Lucas and the story of Star Wars really began.
During his convalescence, Lucas watched more television and read more comic books than ever before. Racing cars and hanging out with other teens in Modesto was simply not an option any longer. ‘After my accident, I knew I couldn’t continue with that,’ remembered Lucas. ‘I was sort of floundering for something [to do]. When I finally discovered film, I really fell madly in love with it. There was no going back after that.’
Confined to home, he watched episodes of The Twilight Zone, then in its third year on air, and animated future-set show The Jetsons. When he wasn’t watching TV, he was listening to radio, catching the raucous broadcasts of Wolfman Jack, the alter-ego of Shreveport disc jockey Robert Weston Smith. Broadcasting from the border of Texas and Mexico, Smith’s noisy, howl-filled presentation of rhythm-and-blues tracks kept Lucas entertained late into the night, and was another influence on his coming-ofage movie, American Graffiti.
George Lucas Sr took the aftermath of his son’s near-fatal crash to be the ideal time to once more attempt to persuade him to join the family firm. However, Lucas was still as set against that as he had been previously: ever the rebel, he simply did not want to become like his father before him. Lucas was looking for another option, an escape from the sleepy, backward small town of Modesto. One downside of graduating school despite the crash was the possibility that he would now be drafted into the US Army to serve in Vietnam (as happens to the Lucas-surrogate character of Toad in American Graffiti). Although he would later be deemed unfit to serve, Lucas’s first action to escape the draft was to enrol in junior college. It was also a way of taking his post-crash ‘second chance’ to apply himself to learning in a more positive frame of mind. A two-year arts major at Modesto Junior College, encompassing art history, speech, sociology and astronomy, was his next step – much to his father’s continuing exasperation.
In 1964, Lucas graduated with an Associate in Arts degree having achieved his rather modest aims. He had done well in astronomy, but by his own estimation he was ‘terrible’ in speech class and failed to improve his rather poor communication skills. His grades were just enough to get him into the fee-free San Francisco State University to study art. He spent his spare time hanging out at racetracks once more, but he no longer drove the cars. ‘I was still interested in racing, so I started doing a lot of photography at the races, rather than driving or being in the pit crew. I had always been interested in art, and I’d been very good at it. My father didn’t see much of a career in being an artist, so he discouraged me from that whole thing,’ admitted Lucas. Making his first steps in creating his own movies, Lucas used an 8 mm film camera his father had bought him to film the weekend races and the drivers, capturing much of the atmosphere, excitement and speed of racing that had thrilled him in the first place.
After just one term at San Francisco State, George Lucas was persuaded to transfer to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, or ‘sin city’ as his ever-disapproving father dubbed the place. Despite his misgivings, Lucas Sr agreed to support his son through university, offering him $200 a month for as long as he was there. However, if he were to drop out, he would have to fend for himself financially.
It was documentary film cameraman Haskell Wexler (then aged thirty-six) who had persuaded Lucas to take up a proper film course. Lucas had worked on Wexler’s racing car, and the older man became aware of his amateur filmmaking efforts around the racetracks. Wexler, who had worked with Roger Corman and Irvin Kershner on 1958’s semi-documentary drug thriller Stakeout on Dope Street, was credited with spotting the potential in Lucas and would become something of a mentor to the young filmmaker. Another incentive was the fact that Lucas’s school friend, John Plummer, was travelling to Los Angeles to take the admission test to become a business major: here was an opportunity to go on a road trip with a pal and take a chance on applying for USC while he was there. The outcome surprised Lucas: ‘I went, I took the test, and I passed. I got accepted!’
Enrolling at film school had never been a particular ambition for George Lucas, and his father doubted the outcome would be much more than his son becoming a ticket-taker at a theatre or at nearby Disneyland. However, Lucas found himself among a like-minded group of people, all of whom, like him, didn’t quite fit into mainstream society. He was among a group of young and driven rebels. For them all, film was a form of creative expression that played to their individual, unique strengths and gave them a direction in life beyond taking up whatever low-level jobs their home towns had to offer. Lucas’s father told his son he expected him to return home within a few years, little better off. Lucas, full of defiance, replied: ‘I’m never coming back! I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty.’
Even when learning the basics of filmmaking, Lucas had trouble containing his rebellious streak. USC set its students assignments with limitations: movies made as student exercises were to be shot in black-and-white and kept very short. Lucas’s classmate Howard Kazanjian recalled the newcomer’s reaction. ‘I’m gonna shoot my film in colour,’ declared Lucas. ‘I’m not gonna be limited to the footage I’m given or limited to the length of my completed film.’
Some of the earliest filmmaking efforts of George Lucas reflected his still strong interest in cars. Although he was no longer racing, he was still fascinated by that world. However, it wasn’t the people, the drivers themselves, that he chose to make his student films about, but the vehicles. His dynamic film of a race was titled after the lap time, 1:42:08, while another, called Herbie (long before Disney’s The Love Bug movie of 1968), consisted of extreme close-ups of the gleaming bodywork of a Volkswagen, scored with the music of Herbie Hancock. These films immediately marked Lucas out from his contemporaries as a director who had a unique eye. Even a seemingly more conventional topic, like his documentary, The Emperor – about local disc jockey Emperor Hudson – was innovative, with its titles coming halfway through the short, and the film peppered with adverts.
As 1964 became 1965, this group of USC students came to know each other and their ambitions a little better. As well as Kazanjian (later executive producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi, as well as a President of Lucasfilm), Lucas was classmates with Walter Murch (sound editor on The Conversation and Apocalypse Now for Francis Ford Coppola), John Milius (screenwriter for Apocalypse Now and director of surfing movie Big Wednesday), Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins (respectively director and writer of Dragonslayer) and Lawrence Kasdan (writer, The Empire Strikes Back). Others who Lucas encountered were Don Glut (novelist, The Empire Strikes Back), Randal Kleiser (More American Graffiti), Basil Poledouris (composer, Conan the Barbarian), and Willard Huck and his wife Gloria Katz (writers, American Graffiti). Lucas was also a friend of Charles Lippincott, later credited with the smart, awareness-raising pre-publicity campaign for Star Wars.
These budding ‘new Hollywood’ filmmakers were among the first formally to be taught ‘cinema’. They came to prominence just as the much vaunted studio system that had produced classic Hollywood’s biggest successes since the 1930s was drawing to a close, thanks to corporate takeovers and the rise of rebellious youth culture. There was no guarantee any of them would actually get to make movies or take up any other role within Hollywood, given the changes that were underway. Perhaps, as Lucas’s father feared, he might amount to nothing more than a cinema ticket-taker after all. One thing was sure: if he was to succeed George Lucas would have to create his own future.
George Lucas made the most of the opportunities afforded him on the USC campus in the mid-1960s. Film history was studied, with many movies watched and discussed. Screenwriting was taught, an art Lucas never really adequately mastered, reflecting the poor literacy that had dogged him since high school. Lucas would later describe the process of writing for him as being ‘terrible; it’s painful, atrocious’. Editing was his forte, but he also had an interest in animation. Many a long night was spent in front of the Moviola machine, reviewing and editing material for his student films. Lucas became so caught up in his work during this period that he neglected his health, a tendency he had inherited from his mother. Laid low with a variation of glandular fever, he was diagnosed as diabetic, probably connected with his seemingly non-stop student diet of Hershey chocolate bars. His commitment to education and his health status resulted in an exemption from military service in Vietnam, which is ironic considering he had initially planned to direct the military-focused, Vietnam-set drama Apocalypse Now.
Lucas’s student short films displayed a command of style and pace, thanks to his editing skills and tight control of his material. His second-year directing project was Freiheit (German for ‘freedom’), billed as ‘A film by LUCAS’. It featured fellow student Randal Kleiser as an unnamed fugitive attempting to cross a frontier, only to be shot down. The soundtrack featured distant gunfire and concluded with various abstract voices discussing aspects of freedom and the sacrifices necessary to maintain it. This short movie was in stark contrast to the work of others, like Don Glut, who were turning out genre pastiches based on their love of 1950s monster movies.
Lucas often helped out on others’ movies, especially when it came to editing. Many of the student projects produced during this period were cooperative efforts, with everyone lending their growing expertise to achieve the finished results. He edited an animated film made by John Milius (Marcello, I’m So Bored), and he learned some of the subtleties of sound manipulation for film from Walter Murch. Many of the people he met and worked with at USC became lifelong friends and would find themselves involved in various capacities in his future empire-building.
Lucas graduated from USC in 1966, and he now faced some serious choices about his future direction. He thought of re-enlisting at USC as a graduate student, but missed the deadline for the 1967 intake. He did, however, secure part-time employment at USC running a refresher course for Navy cameramen. It was not quite what he wanted to be doing, but it kept him attached to the film school and put off any bigger moves into employment. With his re-entry to USC to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree confirmed for 1968, Lucas took a job early in 1967 editing a project for the United States Information Agency. The film was Journey to the Pacific, a chronicle of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s tour of the Far East. He worked in the San Fernando Valley home of director Verna Fields, who had converted the basement of her home into an editing suite. While working there, he met Marcia Griffin, another talented editor working with Fields. Although Lucas was generally shy with women, discovering Griffin had been born in Modesto broke the ice between the pair. Their common interest in movies formed the basis of the majority of their conversations while they both worked on Fields’s project. Through their enforced proximity, they drifted into dating.
Lucas was looking to launch his own project with an idea for a short science-fiction film he thought he could shoot with the help of some of his friends, before returning to USC full time in 1968. While at film school he had attended a screening of Alphaville (1965) introduced by its director, Jean-Luc Godard. Lucas had been impressed by Godard’s low-budget attempt at science fiction, presenting modern Paris as if it were a high-tech future. Lucas felt he could apply a similar minimalist approach to his idea about a fugitive escaping an oppressive underground civilization (echoing Freiheit). He worked with Walter Murch in coming up with a suitable story, but the pair got stuck and the film was put on hold.
In thinking up ideas for his science-fiction short, Lucas had returned to his teenage world of comics and fantasy fiction, something he had largely abandoned while at film school. In the United States in the 1960s, J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings had become very popular with the ‘stoner’ crowd, while Frank Herbert’s Dune had been published as a novel following an early 1960s serialization in Analog magazine. Many of the specifics of these titles would feed into Lucas’s creation of Star Wars a decade later.
Returning to USC as a graduate student, Lucas continued to teach his Navy refresher class while working on new short subjects. He made a film with Paul Golding with the unwieldy title of anyone lived in a pretty little [how] town (based on an e. e. cummings poem) using trained actors for the first time. He also moved in with Marcia, and attended a ramshackle and freewheeling directing class given by Hollywood clown Jerry Lewis (the main attraction being that attendance got the students on to the Columbia lot, where Lewis was then making movies).
One day in class, Lucas met another young filmmaker who was presenting his twenty-four-minute short called Amblin’. The movie was Steven Spielberg’s calling card to the industry, and it told the slight tale of a pair who meet and fall in love while hitchhiking. Spielberg had been rejected as a student by USC, instead attending University of California at Long Beach. He’d had a similar upbringing and had similar interests to Lucas. Admitting he didn’t like Amblin’ much, Lucas told Lippincott that he thought it was ‘saccharine’. Spielberg, however, seemed to hit it off with other members of Lucas’s USC group, and began attending their regular Thursday night movie screenings.
Lucas made another contact during his second stint at USC that was to be even more important in his immediate future. Francis Ford Coppola was slightly older and already working in Hollywood when Lucas met him. Lucas had won a student film scholarship awarded by Warner Bros. to USC’s most promising student (he’d been in competition with Murch for the award). This involved a six-month work experience period on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where Lucas could attach himself to one of the professional production departments to further his understanding of how Hollywood filmmaking worked. Lucas joined Warner Bros. just as the last of the founding brothers, Jack Warner, was leaving as a result of one of the many corporate takeovers that were happening in Hollywood in the 1960s and that would eventually see the end of the studio system.
Looking to work in the animation department (famous for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck), Lucas found the foundering studio to be uncannily quiet. The cartoon production unit had been closed down many years before, and the crisis in studio film production meant that there was not much actually going on. There was only one film in active production on the lot: the musical Finian’s Rainbow, directed by twenty-seven year-old newcomer Coppola. Sneaking on to the set, hoping to watch the production in action, he was soon spotted by the young director. Coppola had come to Hollywood through the practical-focused University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) film course, seen as a rival to the more esoteric USC course. He had worked for exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman and had made the low-budget thriller Dementia 13 (1963). As seemingly the only people on the lot under the age of forty, Lucas and Coppola quickly struck up a friendship. It was to become a master–apprentice relationship, with Lucas becoming Coppola’s assistant during his time at Columbia.
Lucas continued his film education, discovering the work of Akira Kurosawa, especially his film The Hidden Fortress (1958) that followed the misadventures of two lowly peasants who escape a battle and rescue a princess from captivity. For his final student film, Lucas returned to his loosely worked out idea for a science-fiction film and co-opted his Navy students as an ad-hoc film crew. The result was Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967), a fifteen-minute tale of a fugitive (Navy man Dan Natchsheim) fleeing an oppressive society that puts its people under constant surveillance. Lucas commandeered an impressive amount of resources, drawing on Navy-supplied equipment, film stock and locations as well as USC material to make his film in just twelve weeks (while he was also editing the Lyndon Johnson documentary). Much of the important work was done in post-production, with clever editing and photographic effects adding hugely to the impressive short’s impact on the viewer. The use of screens and surveillance images gave the film an oppressive nature that reflected the society depicted, accompanied by a discordant and disruptive score and soundtrack (Lucas having learned much from Murch). Tightly edited, the film won the praise of one of Lucas’s USC tutors, filmmaker Irvin Kershner. THX 1138 4EB was screened in a programme of student shorts at the Fairfax Theater in Hollywood, where eminent German director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) was in attendance. He acclaimed Lucas’s movie as the best.
Lucas screened his film for Coppola, who saw the potential in it. He knew that Lucas had ambitions to become a director, but Coppola was convinced that the best way to achieve that was to write your own material. He suggested that the young, aspiring filmmaker should think of expanding his short film to feature length. Writing a full-length screenplay was going to be a challenge for Lucas, who did not find it easy to turn his visual ideas into coherent words on paper. When Coppola embarked upon production of his melodrama The Rain People in 1968, he brought Lucas along as his assistant cameraman, sound recordist and production manager. Despite this commitment, Lucas found time (and a spare camera and film) to make a surprisingly frank behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Rain People, called Filmmaker. He had suggested the idea to Coppola and it would be his first professional directorial credit. During the work on the documentary, Lucas and Coppola would shoot the breeze, developing a joint dream of setting up an independent filmmaking utopia away from Hollywood. These chats were to sow the seeds that would spring into life as American Zoetrope for Coppola and, later, Lucasfilm for Lucas, both eventually based in Northern California far away from Hollywood.
The work with Coppola had taken Lucas away from Marcia Griffin. Determined not to give up on their blossoming relationship that easily, Marcia made the trip out to where the movie’s location shooting was taking place. While scouting locations in Garden City, Long Island, that February, Lucas took Marcia along with him and proposed marriage. By April 1968, Lucas had left Marcia behind once more as the Coppola caravan of film vehicles made its way across America to complete The Rain People. He made up for it later by having Coppola hire her as assistant editor on the film.
As the 1960s drew to a close – and just as youth rebellion was erupting across the nation – George Lucas had made the transition from teenager to adult, and from small-town dreamer to professional filmmaker. Now, all he needed was a project to call his own.