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George Lucas: A Biography
George Lucas: A Biography
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George Lucas: A Biography

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‘George was chasing girls,’ says Milius. ‘He didn’t catch them, but he was chasing them.’ Richard Walter agrees that Lucas was no Lothario. ‘I’ve read books that claimed George was a ladies’ man. It’s nonsense. He was very, very reticent.’ Randy Epstein’s girl ‘fixed up’ Lucas with a friend of hers, with an unconventional result. ‘He spoke to her on the phone for many hours over many days before he got the courage to ask her out,’ says Epstein, ‘and the fascinating thing is, he asked her to describe herself. Then he did an oil painting of what he thought she would look like. Not a sketch, but an actual oil painting. It was amazingly like her. It was like he’d cheated and got a look at her somehow. The girl was just overwhelmed that he had the talent to do this without even seeing her.’

In his second year, Lucas rented a house off-campus, a rickety wooden building on Portola Drive, in the Hollywood hills. His father grudgingly paid the $80 a month rent. To reach the upper floors of the three-level house, you climbed a ladder, and the furniture was minimal, but Lucas felt secure there. After a few months, Randal Kleiser moved in to share the rent. Both were friendly with another of the Clean-Cut group, Christopher Lewis. Lewis’s mother, Loretta Young, after a fairly lurid youth, had found God in middle age and, with her husband Tom Lewis, embarked on the production of a pietistic TV series, The Loretta Young Show. Since the show ended in 1961, Tom Lewis’s production facilities were often unused, and his son persuaded him to let his USC friends edit and record there. For Orgy Beach Party, an unfinished parody, produced by Christopher Lewis and directed by Don Glut, of the then-popular ‘beach party’ films, Kleiser played the handsome hero and Glut the monster who carries off the girl. Lucas shot stills, and they used the Lewis studio to record the theme song with Glut’s garage band, the Hustlers. In between, Lewis’s friends, including Lucas, often hung out at the sumptuous home of his parents. In their senior year, Lucas and Lewis even formed a production company, Sunrise Films, but it never made a film.

By the start of his second year at USC, Lucas had found his level. His Modesto wardrobe remained, though he’d ditched the unfortunate jackets. He’d also grown a beard, which gave character to his face, and disguised a weak chin, as well as earning him honorary credentials as a radical. At the same time, he remained shrewdly aware of the advantages of good faculty relations. While students like Glut, Milius, and Epstein drew fire from their teachers for turning out pastiches like Superman and the Gorilla Gang, which Glut not only wrote, directed, and edited, but for which he also composed the music, built the models, and did the special effects – which were impressive, given the minuscule budget – Lucas went for solid production values and certified liberal sentiments. For his second-year directing project, Freiheit (‘freedom’ in German), introduced as ‘A film by LUCAS,’ he persuaded Randal Kleiser to play a young man running away from a battle, suggested by sounds of artillery in the distance. He reaches a frontier, evidently that between East and West Germany, but is shot down by a soldier (Christopher Lewis). As he lies bleeding, voices on the soundtrack discuss the significance of freedom and the need to endure sacrifices to protect it.

Whatever else USC taught Lucas, the key concept he absorbed was the importance of teamwork. With so few resources and so little time, nothing got done unless you enlisted people to help you. Projects risked becoming incestuous. Basil Poledouris’s senior film, Glut, wove a fictional story around the character of USC’s most dissident student. Milius wrote it, Lucas recorded sound, and most other students had walk-on parts. It’s an effective and amusing little film from a man who would later become best known as a composer. At the start, Glut, playing himself, tries out for a job as a stuntman with Sam Fuller, who asks him if he can do a back-flip. Glut admits he can’t, but says he can fall off the back of a truck like Dave Sharpe in one serial, or do a fight like Dale van Sickel in another. ‘You’re not a stuntman,’ says Fuller dismissively. Disconsolate, Glut goes to a party wearing his Purple Monster costume. Scorned by everyone, he leaves, complaining, ‘Men don’t feel grandeur any more’ – a classic Milius line – only to achieve his moment of glory by rescuing a girl from a purse-snatcher.

The USC students helped one another because their instructors made it clear from the start that only results mattered. Not ignorance, nor sickness, nor acts of God excused failing to deliver an exercise on time. ‘A student would show his workshop project,’ says Richard Walter, ‘and someone would say, “Gee, that doesn’t make sense to me …” And the film-maker would go into a dissertation of explanations. “Well, that day the sound man didn’t show up, and the landlady came in and ran us out, and I just had time to get this one angle …” And the instructor would say, “Well, put it on a title card at the head of the film. Say, ‘This is why the movie is the way it is – because we had all these problems.’”’ To those in the class really listening, the moral was clear: in the outside world, excuses bought nothing. Later, Lucas would put the lesson into the mouth of Yoda, the Jedi master of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke Skywalker says he’ll try to harness the power of the Force, the sage says, ‘Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.’ What people took for Zen was really USC.

Nobody was more generous with assistance than Lucas. He recorded sound and helped edit Milius’s animated film, Marcello, I’m so Bored, and there were few USC films of the period in which he didn’t take a hand. Some people resented his dismissive manner and impatience with the maladroit. Finding Walter Murch developing film in the lab, Lucas told him he was doing it wrong. A native New Yorker, Murch already had a BA in art history and romance languages from Johns Hopkins before he arrived at USC in 1965 to do his masters in cinema. He’d studied Italian medieval art history in Perugia, and French literature and nineteenth-century art history in Paris. Fluent in French and Italian, tall, solemn, erudite, and irascible, he was, says Gary Kurtz, ‘quite control-freakish; perfect for an editor,’ and didn’t suffer criticism gladly. ‘Who’s this creep?’ he demanded. ‘Get out of here! What do you know?’

But Murch too became a devoted member of the Lucas team. Like Allen Grant before him and Francis Ford Coppola after, Murch was another elder-brother figure from whom Lucas could learn, and in whom in turn he could inspire the kind of personal loyalty that creates effective teams.

Lucas credits Murch for alerting him to the possibilities of sound. Like the new wave film-makers, most USC students didn’t much care about their soundtracks, providing the dialogue was improvised and the background sound recorded ‘wild,’ i.e. on the spot. But Lucas noticed how a good track could lure audiences: ‘The screen for the screening room was positioned against a hallway that led out onto a patio where everyone would congregate,’ he said. ‘The speakers would echo into the hallway and the sound would funnel out into the open space. You knew that if you had a film with a great soundtrack you could draw an audience into the room.’

While many other USC students goofed off, turned on or dropped out, Lucas continued to create ambitious films, and to win prizes with them in student film festivals all over the country. His enthusiasm for Jean-Luc Godard peaked at about the time Godard made a personal appearance at USC in 1966. His interest then switched to slicker, more professional movies.

Charley Lippincott watched the change at first hand. Lippincott had access to the documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada, then in its heyday, and often screened them. In 1965 the CNFB’s hottest cameraman was Jean-Claude Labrecque, who shot and directed a film about the Tour de St Laurent, a 1500-mile bike race. He called it 60 Cycles. A relentless exercise in style, 60 Cycles emphasized the bikes rather than the men who rode them. Much of it was shot with telephoto lenses that compressed the riders into an apparently motionless mass of furious pedalling humanity, or from a helicopter, so that they appear a single organism, slithering through a town like a snake. The music was mostly hard-driving rock, typified by the pumping organ riff of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker-T and the MGs.

‘I brought down 60 Cycles,’ says Lippincott. ‘I may have shown it in directing class too. People were swept away, and George borrowed it, and flipped out over it. I had a terrible time getting it back. I had it for a week, and finally after a week and a half I pried it out of him. It got me in trouble with the Canadian consulate. But it fit George perfectly. The technical stuff with the lenses was so “George” that it was unbelievable.’ When the college acquired the latest 16mm camera, the Eclair NPR, Lucas seized it as his personal property.

Everyone at USC remembers Lucas’s films abandoning nouvelle vague casualness. He earned a reputation for high production values. ‘I had the feeling he had more money than us,’ says Don Glut, ‘because he was able to do things that we couldn’t do. He could get aerial shots; rent airplanes to get shots of race cars from the sky.’ The money for the ambitious touches in Lucas’s films came from his father, who had attended a student screening, and had been surprised by the respectful reaction of the laid-back and largely stoned audience to his son’s films. When they came on, kids murmured, ‘Watch this, it’s George’s film.’ Driving back to Modesto, George Sr conceded to his wife, ‘I think we may have put our money on the right horse.’

Already, the students were separating into those with grandiose ambitions and those resigned to taking a back seat, or dropping out altogether. During the summer, Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins had gone to England and, ‘in a farmer’s field,’ according to Lippincott, ‘had found an old Rolls-Royce, one of those ones with the open back seat. They brought it back and rebuilt it.’ Lucas surprised John Milius by telling him he’d met a man with a restored World War II P51 Mustang fighter. If Milius could think up a story that included one, he’d help him film it. ‘The rest of them didn’t think big,’ says Milius. ‘They were thinking about meeting some girl, and she was good-looking so they were going to put her in the film, and get to sleep with her. And if not, maybe she’d wear some revealing outfit in the film. Or they would imitate some French film, some avant-garde style. I would try and do it through convincing people. George would do it through nuts and bolts. I’d say, “Join me on this great crusade.” But George would know someone who had a race car, and he’d go out and persuade him to let him put the camera on his race car. The guy just thought he was going to have pretty pictures of his race car. George was thinking, “This is a film about a race car. It’s going to look good, and have great sound, and be in color.”’

Everyone in the senior class was gearing up for their last film, the 480 Project. Instead of the normal five-man crew, Lucas called in favors all over campus, and accumulated a team of fourteen. Getting a camera and sound gear was harder. ‘You’d try to steal film from the other guys, steal equipment,’ says Milius. ‘One thing I did do was steal the camera George loved so much, the Eclair. He was the only one who could use that camera. Everyone else was awed by the technology, but George, being a race-car mechanic and a great great visual guy, understanding light and all this stuff, could very quickly master the technology of anything. He really wanted to use that camera, and I stole it, and hid it in my car, and slept in my car with the camera for a week while we used it.’

Lucas’s car-race film was called 1.42:08, named for the lap time of the yellow sports car which was its subject. His expertise with cars had got him a job as cameraman for Saul Bass, Hollywood’s premiere creator of title sequences. Lucas shot some material for the short film Why Man Creates, one of the few Bass works not attached to a feature. Bass was doing the credits for John Frankenheimer’s epic car-racing movie Grand Prix, and Lucas used his background in car racing to infiltrate the second unit shooting with James Garner at the Willow Springs raceway, north of Los Angeles. Grand Prix provided the impetus for 1.42:08, but 60 Cycles was evident in every frame. Lucas persuaded driver Pete Brook to contribute his car and his time. Edward Johnson, his obliging flyer friend, gave him a single aerial shot looking down on the speeding car. 1.42:08 had no sound except the blare of the car’s engine. Repeated tracks over the racer as it’s gassed up show the enthusiasm for machinery that would typify most of Lucas’s later films, and though we do glimpse Brook as humanly fallible when he spins out in the middle of the practice and grimaces at his error, the film has no character except the car.

7 Electronic Labyrinth (#ulink_6bd858bc-1016-543e-95e9-3633428c6d19)

‘Down there,’ he is inclined to say of Hollywood, ‘down there, for every honest true film-maker trying to get his film off the ground, there are a hundred sleazy used-car dealers trying to con you out of your money.’

Lucas in New York Times, 13 July 1981

Once he graduated from USC, Lucas, outside the protection of his student exemption, was eligible for the draft. With a few other ex-USC people, he was urged to flee to Canada and get a job at the Canadian National Film Board. However, some classmates from the air force contingent counselled him not only to stay in LA, but actually to volunteer. As a college graduate with impeccable film-making credentials, they told him, he’d be immediately sent to Officer Candidate School, then posted to a film-making unit in the US, where he’d gain valuable professional experience far from the front line.

During the summer of his graduation, Lucas, according to legend, tried to enlist, but was turned down because his teenage driving convictions gave him, technically, a criminal record. One is forced to be skeptical about this story. Such minor offences were only taken into account if the offender compounded them by consistently failing to turn up in court, or evaded bench warrants issued by the judge for his arrest; otherwise anyone could have dodged the draft simply by getting arrested for dangerous driving. Had he been accepted for OCS, Lucas might, in fact, have been dismayed by the result. Gary Kurtz, who went through USC from 1959 to 1962, was drafted into the Marines as a cameraman, and didn’t get out until 1969. ‘There were so many photographers killed,’ he says, ‘that we became what they called a Critical MOS, and they kept sending us letters saying, “You have been extended, convenience of the government,” and in theory, I found out later, they could have done that forever.’ Whether Lucas presented himself for military service voluntarily or when he received his Selective Service Notice, he was almost certainly rejected for the same medical reasons that finally kept him out of the forces permanently. The standard physical examination revealed that the diabetes that had killed his grandfather had jumped a generation and reappeared in him. Rating him 4F, the medical board warned him to seek help for what would be a lifetime problem.

Lucas drove shakily to Modesto, where Roland Nyegaard, the physician who’d married his sister Wendy, confirmed the diagnosis. Nyegaard put him on Orinase, an oral drug that replaced the traditional daily insulin injections of most diabetes sufferers, and warned Lucas to start watching his diet: no drugs, no alcohol, above all no sweets. Farewell to chocolate malts, chocolate chip cookies, and Hershey bars, which he’d consumed in quantity since childhood. It was a rite of passage of sorts. With one of the last great pleasures of adolescence denied him, he had no choice but to grow up.

The discovery of his diabetes freed Lucas to launch his adult career. His first thought was to re-enter USC as a graduate student and get his Master of Fine Arts degree, but he was too late for the 1967 intake. All the same, the faculty was sufficiently impressed with his student work to offer him a part-time job in its night school, running a refresher course for navy and Marine Corps cameramen: ‘The whole idea of the class was to teach them they didn’t have to go by the rulebook,’ Lucas said.

He accepted, then went looking for a day job. Bob Dalva, a USC student who would become one of the moving forces of Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, and who was already adept at keeping his ear to the ground, had a job with Verna Fields, who was compiling a film for the United States Information Agency called Journey to the Pacific, about Lyndon Johnson’s seventeen-country tour of Australia, Korea, and points east in pursuit of consensus on Vietnam. Dalva proposed Lucas as assistant editor, and Fields hired him.

Burly and aggressive, Fields had grown hard and cynical in a business that routinely demeaned women. She’d been sound editor for Fritz Lang and worked on big productions like Anthony Mann’s epic El Cid, but never made it past the eighth or ninth panel of the credits. In between projects, she freelanced from her ranch house in the San Fernando Valley, the garage of which she’d converted into cutting rooms. When Gene Sloan went on sabbatical from USC, she taught his editing class, and got to know Lucas. Early in 1967, shortly after USC confirmed he could enter their 1968 graduate course, Lucas began driving out into the Valley every day to help cut the LBJ documentary.

Also heading there was Marcia Griffin, whom Fields had hired from a private film company, Sandler Films, to find and log the thousands of miles of Johnson footage. Space was tight, so Fields put the two newcomers in the same cutting room. Marcia, even shorter than George, had a clean, pastel prettiness that implied an upbringing in some upper-middle-class San Fernando suburb like Encino or Reseda. In fact, she grew up in air force bases all over America as her father hauled his family wherever he was posted, before finally abandoning them. With maintenance and child support patchy at best, Marcia and her sisters became accustomed to doing without, and to getting what they wanted by their own efforts. During her teens, Marcia went to live in Florida for two years with her father, moved back to Los Angeles, took a clerical job and studied chemistry at night school, then dropped out. Always interested in movies, she fell into a job as an apprentice film librarian at Sandler. After that, she embarked on the eight-year apprenticeship demanded by the Motion Picture Editors’ Guild as the price of a union card.

Though she looked archetypally Angeleno, Marcia had been born in Modesto while her father was stationed at nearby Stockton. It took her some days to discover that Lucas was from the same town, since her presence in the cutting room reduced him to a near-paralysis of shyness.

‘I used to say, “Well, George, where’ya from?”’ she recalled.

‘“Hmmm, California.”

‘“Oh, OK, where in California?”

‘“Ummm … Northern California.”

‘“Where in Northern California?”

‘“Just up north, the San Francisco area …”’

They found common ground in movies, though most of the time they argued about them. Lucas was ruthless at dismissing Marcia’s enthusiasms. ‘He was the intellectual,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was just a Valley girl.’ She responded to Dalva’s and Lucas’s pose of high seriousness by patronizing them too: they were just film students – she was a professional. Lucas put a softer complexion on their early relationship: ‘We were both feisty, and neither one of us would take any shit from the other. I sort of liked that. I didn’t like someone who could be run over.’ But he would consistently underestimate Marcia’s commitment to her craft. ‘I love film editing,’ she said later. ‘I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair. I think I’m even an editor in life.’

The Johnson documentary progressed slowly. Its USIA producer demanded as many flattering shots as possible of the president. Above all, any film showing his thinning hair must be avoided. When Lucas edited footage of LBJ’s visit to South Korea to suggest, through scenes of students being brutally pacified by the police, that the Korean administration was fascistic, the producer demanded he recut it. Furious, Lucas swore never again to edit other people’s films: ‘I realized that I didn’t want other people telling me how to cut a film. I wanted to decide. I really wanted to be responsible for what was being said in a movie.’

His insistence on protecting his films against any interference in the cutting room would become obsessive. Friends would roll their eyes and say, ‘Lighten up, George,’ but on this he was utterly intransigent. Marcia, whom George was now desultorily dating, never came to terms with his emphasis on the sacrosanct nature of editing decisions. It wasn’t her style to walk out on a project. One stuck to it and, little by little, got one’s way. Her persistence would make her one of the most sought-after editors of New Hollywood. Producer Julia Phillips even rated her ‘the better – certainly the warmer – half of the American Graffiti team.’

‘She was an absolutely stunning editor,’ says John Milius. ‘Maybe the best editor I’ve ever known, in many ways. She’d come in and look at the films we’d made – like The Wind and the Lion, for instance – and she’d say, “Take this scene and move it over here,” and it worked. And it did what I wanted the film to do, and I would never have thought of it. And she did that to everybody’s films: to George’s, to Steven [Spielberg]’s, to mine, and Scorsese particularly. He’ll attest to the fact that she was a great editor. She was a genuinely talented film-maker. She should have become a director.’

But in 1967 people defined Marcia Griffin, as they defined most women in Hollywood, with reference to their men. She was George’s girlfriend and, eventually, wife, and very little beyond that. In general, Lucas shared that perception, as did most of New Hollywood’s husbands about their wives. Not surprisingly, divorce became the group’s norm. The first marriages of Lucas, Spielberg, Milius, Scorsese and most other newcomers of the sixties ended in divorce, their unwillingness to deal on screen with contemporary human situations replicated in their lives. Many marriages expire in the bedroom, but that of George and Marcia Lucas was rare in coming to grief in the cutting room.

Whatever claims were made later, Lucas had little or no interest in science fiction films until after he graduated from USC in August 1966. He wasn’t alone in his indifference. The doyen of Hollywood sf, George Pal, hadn’t made a movie since The Conquest of Space in 1955. The benchmark of big-budget studio science fiction, MGM’s Forbidden Planet, was a decade old. In Britain, Stanley Kubrick was preparing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that wouldn’t be released for two years. Only starvation producer Roger Corman consistently turned out sf films, though he hadn’t actually shot one for years. It was cheaper to buy Russian or Japanese movies with lavish special-effect sequences, dump their dialogue scenes, then find some hungry young American film-maker to invent a new framing story.

Almost nobody saw these cheap sf movies in the big cities, though they cleaned up in rural drive-ins, where the twelve-to-twenty-five-year-old audience Lucas and Spielberg would inherit had begun to show its muscle. Raised on comic books and television, teenagers wanted sensational stories and gaudy special effects. When they couldn’t find them on screen, they invented them. All over the United States, amateur mask- and model-makers were painstakingly creating their own science fiction and horror films on 8mm. By the time Lucas made Star Wars, they had ripened into a generation of special-effects technicians ready to tinker together the technology he needed to realize his fantasy.

The big films of 1966 – A Man for All Seasons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (shot by Haskell Wexler), The Group and The Sand Pebbles – served an audience as middle-aged as the men who made them. That year’s Oscars honored mainly The Sound of Music. An unexpectedly large number of films came from Britain. In Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni anatomized Swinging London, which was also exploited in Georgy Girl and Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. Alfie introduced Michael Caine to an international audience. With heavy US investment, studios like Shepperton, Pinewood, and Elstree flourished in the outer suburbs of London, fostering teams of technicians who could hold their own against those of Hollywood, without the high salaries and crippling union control that made American films so expensive.

The only science fiction film of any size released in 1966 was Fantastic Voyage, an elaborate adventure in which a group of medics, including Raquel Welch, statuesque in skin-tight neoprene, are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of a leading scientist to repair a brain lesion. In the days before computer technology, the effects were achieved with wires, models, and out-of-scale sets, with some very obvious back projection and matte work.

It wasn’t in cinema that science fiction was taking its steps onto the international stage, but in television. 1966 saw the debuts not only of the live-action Batman, the gadget adventure series Mission: Impossible and Britain’s The Avengers: on 8 September, the world was introduced to a phenomenon, as Captain James Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before.

In the fall of 1966, just after he received his BA from USC, and while he was still working for Verna Fields, Lucas told Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins at a party thrown by Herb Kossower about an idea he’d had for a short science fiction film. As a first step into the fantastic, Lucas’s idea was tentative. He wondered if one could make an sf film without elaborate sets and costumes, using Los Angeles as Godard had used Paris in Alphaville, and simply suggesting the future by manipulating the image as he had in his animated USC films. If Don Glut could make Superman in the Valley, how much better might an avant-gardiste do? Lucas and Murch put together a couple of pages about an escapee from an underground civilization who emerges through a manhole into a new world; but nobody could see where it might go. Murch and Robbins developed another idea, called ‘Star Dance,’ but Lucas persisted, assembling a sort of script for a fifteen-minute film.

At this point he began to immerse himself in science fiction and fantasy. Willow, with its midget hero making an epic journey to confront the mountain fortress of an enchanter, suggests more than a nodding acquaintance with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Lucas told Alan Dean Foster, who novelized Star Wars, that Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was his favorite book. Trying to explain his vision of the Star Wars films, Lucas often quoted that book’s introduction: ‘I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man/Or the man who’s half a boy.’

Frank Herbert’s Dune had a more far-reaching influence on Lucas’s future work. From the moment in December 1963 when the science fiction magazine Analog published the first of three episodes of Dune World, with its cover by John Schoenherr of a stone pinnacle spearing out of a desert landscape against a sky with two moons, the novel caught Lucas’s imagination. Once Herbert finished the longer book version and its sequels, Dune’s story of a universe based on the ‘spice’ Melange that conferred near-immortality but which existed on only one planet in the universe, the desert world Arrakis, aka ‘Dune,’ entered the common experience of his generation. Herbert imagined a universe run by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, ruthlessly defending his declining empire from regional families, in particular that of Duke Leto Atriedes, whose son Paul was destined to overthrow him after acquiring near-godlike powers. Manipulating events from behind the scenes were the quasi-religious Bene Gesserit, an ancient sect of nun-like women with telepathic powers – not unlike Lucas’s monkish Jedi knights.

By comparison with the coming excesses of 1968, 1967, when Lucas rejoined USC as a graduate student, was calm. While he continued to teach the navy and Marine camera class, most of his Masters work consisted of two films, both building on the success of 1.42:08. He made anyone lived in a pretty little [how] town with Paul Golding, his collaborator on Herbie. The film, in CinemaScope and color, used actors and some sophisticated manipulation of images to tell a fable based on the poem of the same name by e.e. cummings. Life in an idyllic town is destroyed when a photographer arrives, each click of his shutter turning living people into dead monochrome images. Despite its greater technical sophistication, the film recalled A Look at Life in its graphic stiffness, its avoidance of character and dialogue, its reliance on flashy editing and photographic effects to disguise a lack of interest in people.

Lucas’s second film, The Emperor, was a documentary, and one of his best. His first idea had been to make a film about Wolfman Jack, but Smith had done such a good job of maintaining his incognito that nobody knew where he could be found. (In American Graffiti, one of the kids would insist that he broadcast from a plane circling over the United States.) Lucas compromised by choosing as his subject Bob Hudson, a deejay at KBLA in Burbank, right in the Valley, who grandiosely christened himself ‘The Emperor.’

Introduced by a beautiful girl cooing, ‘It’s his marvellous majesty,’ Hudson, surprisingly middle-aged and incoherent for a deejay with a large teenage following, appears making a triumphal progress through the streets of Burbank in the back of Murch and Robbins’s restored Rolls-Royce, accepting the plaudits of adoring fans, most of them eager girls. ‘Get off the freeway, peasant,’ someone shouts. ‘The Emperor is coming!’ Filmed in wide screen, intercut with helicopter news-shots of jammed freeways, hippie love-ins and facetious commercials with vox pop interviews, The Emperor shows Lucas stretching the limits of the short film and the documentary. The credits appear in the middle, and list the entire staff of the film school as student advisers, superimposed over a close-up of Hudson, pouchy, middle-aged and bored.

Marcia helped Lucas edit The Emperor. It was the first time many of the USC gang had met her, and the general reaction was astonishment that such an attractive and intelligent woman could see anything in a nerd like Lucas, however talented. ‘Marcia was very bright and upbeat,’ said Richard Walter. ‘Just the loveliest woman that you ever saw in your life. They seemed such an unlikely couple. She’s quite adorable.’

Their favorable impression of her strengthened when they saw her work on The Emperor. ‘The Emperor is a superb film,’ says Milius, who, with Richard Walter, appears on the soundtrack impersonating a Mexican bandido. ‘It still holds up today. When you see something like that, you think that maybe one of the great losses is that Marcia never became a film-maker and continued as an editor. But one of the other great losses is that George stopped making movies, and got interested in the sort of stuff that Lucasfilm puts out. Because he was a really dynamic film-maker.’

Lucas drifted back into after-hours campus society with the many old friends who were still at USC, including Milius and Charley Lippincott. Now living with Marcia in the ramshackle Portola Drive house, he had his eyes clearly set on a professional career. With that in mind, he even attended a course on direction taught by the comic Jerry Lewis. ‘George hated that class,’ recalls Charley Lippincott. ‘He sat back in the very last row, and sometimes I’d sit with him. Lewis had such an outrageous ego, it drove you crazy.’ Richard Walter rated Lewis ‘a gigantically talented man, but without taste. It’s as if those circuits just don’t operate. He was still making movies. He was at Columbia, in the midst of a “multi-picture pact.” He would frequently hold the class there, at the old Columbia studios on Gower Street. We’d all meet there on the lot; very exciting. And then he’d ad lib and wing it. It was really rather disorganized. I enjoyed being exposed to this wonderful maniac, but I can’t say I thought it was a tremendously valuable class.’

Lucas, like many others, signed up for only one reason, according to Walter: ‘Lewis encouraged people to believe he could get them into the [Screen Directors’] Guild, and that’s why a bunch of these students were coming. Caleb Deschanel and certainly George and others would come to that class not because they wanted to learn from Lewis. They didn’t appreciate his movies, though they thought it quite appropriate that the French appreciated his movies. But George really believed he could get them into the Guild, which was a hoax.’

Lewis surrounded himself with sycophants. ‘There was a little group of outsiders, tangential to USC, who used to sit in on the course,’ says Lippincott. ‘They included the actress Corinne Calvet, who had been in one of Lewis’s films, and her husband, who was an agent or something. And it was they who brought down a copy of Steve Spielberg’s Amblin’.’

While Lucas was working his way through USC, Spielberg, rejected by USC because of his poor grades, enrolled at the less prestigious University of California at Long Beach. Aware that he needed a calling card to attract the attention of studios, he persuaded Dennis Hoffman, who ran a small special-effects company, to back a twenty-four-minute 35mm widescreen color short about a young couple who meet on the road while hitch-hiking and fall in love. He called it Amblin’. Even Spielberg dismissed the film as a ‘Pepsi commercial,’ with as little intellectual weight as a piece of driftwood, but he was relentless in showing it to anyone who might help his career. Lewis liked it enough to include it in his USC class, and to have Spielberg introduce it.

As historic meetings go, that between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg was unimpressive. Presenting his film, Spielberg, with his open-necked flowered shirt and leather jacket, his high-pitched voice and nervy delivery which caused him to stumble over his words, made an unattractive impression. His naked ambition to succeed in Hollywood also offended the elitist USC audience. Lucas didn’t like Amblin’. He told Lippincott it was ‘saccharine.’ But over the next few months, Spielberg became a fixture at USC, often turning up at ‘Thursday Night at the Movies’ screenings. ‘He became part of the gang right away,’ says Milius. ‘That was a pretty tight-knit group. We hated UCLA and people like that. We were special – though we didn’t think we were going to conquer the world; we didn’t think we had a chance. But that’s also what made us so tight-knit. But he got accepted right away, because he had the same kind of enthusiasm.’ In particular, Spielberg became friendly with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, who shared his ambition to work in studio films. Finally, in 1968, a friend got a copy of Amblin’ to production head Sidney Sheinberg at Universal, who signed Spielberg to a seven-year contract. Later, Spielberg named his company Amblin Entertainment in acknowledgment of the film’s role in his success. Robbins and Barwood would write his first cinema feature, Sugarland Express.

Urged by Milius, Lucas started seeing Japanese films at the Toho cinema on La Brea. He discovered Akira Kurosawa, in particular his period adventures like Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, and Yojimbo. Kurosawa acknowledged John Ford as his master and model. His films have the spaciousness of westerns, and heroes of mythical proportions, often played, in the words of critic Audie Bock, by ‘a filthy, scratching, heavy-drinking Toshiro Mifune who tries to avoid violence but when forced to, enters battle with his breath held.’ Eighteenth-century Japan, when Kurosawa set most of his films, was so alien it could well have been Mars: the ankle-length robes and rural settings, the castles and swordplay, the culture of imperial power and privilege opposed by daring and belief – all recalled Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Lucas particularly admired Kakushi Toride no San Akunin (1958), released in the West as The Hidden Fortress. For the first time, Kurosawa shot in CinemaScope, and the film’s panoramas, even in black and white, conferred a new spaciousness and energy. Unusually for a Japanese film, the main character is a girl. When civil war threatens her family castle, the princess loads up its treasure, dresses as a boy and enlists the wiliest of her father’s retainers (Mifune) as her guide and protector. On the way, they dragoon a couple of peasant soldiers (Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki) into helping them. As played by Misa Uehara, the princess of Hidden Fortress is far from the stereotype of the shrinking, submissive Japanese woman. She’s ruthless in exploiting the peasants, and no less tough with Mifune, whom she criticizes for having put duty ahead of family, leaving his own sister to die while he flees with her and the treasure.

Lucas loved the formalized sword-duels of Kurosawa’s historical films: combatants inching minutely as they searched for a weakness, then slashing out with razor-sharp blades. No less attractive were his themes: loyalty to a lord; honor; mutual respect among warriors; fidelity to bushido, the samurai code. The characters, plot and setting of Hidden Fortress all found their way into Star Wars, as did those of Seven Samurai, the story of seven mercenaries who come together to save a village from a predatory warlord. In this case, Lucas’s model was John Sturges’s 1960 western version of the film, The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner as the group’s laconic leader Chris and Steve McQueen as his sidekick Vin. Retrospectively, Lucas claimed nobler models for Star Wars – ‘the Arthurian Quest for the Knight, the Biblical Renewal of Faith and the classic science fiction conflict of Man versus Machine,’ as one writer would put it – but in 1974, Dune, The Magnificent Seven, The Hidden Fortress and Flash Gordon were most on his mind. In February 1975, while he was still on the second draft of the film, he would describe it to Esquire magazine as ‘the first multi-million dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie – with The Magnificent Seven thrown in.’

Lucas’s Navy Production Workshop was now well on the way to becoming an efficient film crew. All at least ten years older than him, and mostly resentful of having anyone teach them their business, the sailors were contemptuous of almost all civilians, but particularly of hippie students. Shrewdly, Lucas divided the group, and set each half to compete with the other. The better of the two became his crew for his last student film. Making a virtue of necessity, he told them it would be an exercise in the use of available light: the sole artificial light would be three photo-floods for fill-ins.

The men responded with enormous effort, and complete loyalty to Lucas. ‘Within a week, those tough navy guys were licking George’s boots,’ said Dave Johnson respectfully. ‘I don’t understand how a low-profile guy like George can do those things. But they were following him around like puppy dogs.’ It was a social model that owed a lot to Japan, and Lucas may well have adapted some of the rules he saw being practiced in Kurosawa. Lucas was the navy men’s daimyo, they his samurai, ready to sacrifice friends, even family, in their loyalty. When Lucas came to make the feature version of THX1138, he even suggested shooting in Japan, to capture that sense of alienness and focused will.

Once he had decided to make the science fiction film as his graduate project, Lucas put his team to work. ‘The navy crew had all the best equipment,’ said Willard Huyck later, ‘all the free film, so it was very shrewd of him to make THX with a navy crew.’ Being on official navy business also won Lucas access to otherwise forbidden locations. Looking for futuristic settings, he persuaded USC’s computer department to let him shoot there, and bluffed his way into the parking stations at LAX and Van Nuys Airport.

‘That was a brilliant piece of generalship,’ says John Milius of THX1138. ‘Everybody wanted the real artistic guys on their crew – guys like Bob Dalva. George went off and got all these navy guys. They were real competent. They knew how to do stuff, and get things done. They got equipment, and they got short ends of film from the navy, so he had five times as much film as everybody else, five times more equipment. That was brilliant. That was real producing.’

Having such a well-organized crew removed some of the strain of directing. But, whether out of genuine illness or because he was aware for the first time of his diabetes, Lucas felt tired most of the time. Hefting a 16mm camera onto his shoulder became increasingly difficult. Equipment was difficult to obtain. They had no dolly: for travelling shots, cameraman Zip Zimmerman sat with the Arriflex on a rolling platform of the sort used to shift loads in a warehouse, and was towed backward.

Most days, Lucas worked for Verna Fields editing Lyndon Johnson material, and shot THX at nights and on weekends. At 4 a.m. most mornings, he could be found slumped over the Moviola. He began to look even more frail, and his nervous voice developed a new crack.

The shooting of what Lucas called THX1138 4EB – the letters ‘EB’ collapsed together so they resembled an ideogram or trademark – was laborious but not complicated. Mostly it consisted of THX1138, played by Dan Natchsheim, a navy man who doubled as the film’s editor, fleeing down empty corridors or through bleak subterranean bunkers, or shots of technicians and police staring into the eyepieces of machines. A cipher throughout, THX, explained Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin after interviewing Lucas on the set of Star Wars, was ‘a Huxleyian man inadvertently given free will [who] tries to flee the nightmare world of tomorrow.’ Joy Carmichael played his girl, LUH7117.

Lucas finished the fifteen-minute film in twelve weeks. The real creativity came in the cutting room and optical lab. Much of the film consists of fuzzy TV images, half obscured by identification numbers and letters along the foot of the screen, and periodically interrupted by the jagged flash of a lens change. Occasionally, the guards’ own eyes look back at them from a similar screen – in this world of total surveillance, someone must also watch the watchers. The characters exist in a susurrus of hissing data that swamps the soundtrack, almost drowning the ominous minor organ chords that signify some residual humanity lurking in this sterile world.

‘I remember when I saw the first cut,’ says Walter Murch. ‘There was this wild mixture of Bach, and skittering around in that were the chatterings of almost undistinguishable voices in air traffic control, or something like that.’ As in Alphaville, the government is a computer. When THX visits a robotic booth doubling as confessional and psychiatrist’s couch, the canned voice monotonously repeats, ‘Yes … yes ….’

Lucas showed the film to Irvin Kershner, who had returned to USC to teach direction. ‘It was really quite unusual,’ says Kershner, dubiously. ‘Very cinematic. It was full of technical gewgaws. It was fun.’ Anyone acquainted with the nouvelle vague recognized the debts to Alphaville and Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a science fiction film in which memory carries a man between a dystopic future and a past of lost opportunities. But whatever its sources, it was an impressive work to have been produced by a university film school, and Lucas emerged even more strongly as USC’s wunderkind.

THX1138 4EB – the subtitle Electronic Labyrinth was added later – was included in a programme of USC films at the Fairfax Theater in Hollywood. One party who went to see it included Fritz Lang; Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland; George Pal, producer of When Worlds Collide and many other science fiction films; and young film journalist Bill Warren. ‘Among the films shown that night,’ recalls Warren, ‘were Glut, The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, by John Carpenter, and THX1138 4EB. Afterwards, we’re all standing on the sidewalk outside the Fairfax, and Fritz says, “All right, which one was the best?”

‘Forry and George Pal look at each other, and Forry says, “I think we liked The Resurrection of Broncho Billy best.’ George Pal agreed with Forry. And Fritz says, “That is why your films all stink, George. The best one …” He turned to me and said, “Which one was it?” I said, “It was THX1138 4EB.” And he said, “Yes! That’s the one. If I ever meet that young director, I want to tell him how great that film was.”’

Of all the people in Old Hollywood with whom George Lucas might have been expected to become involved next, Carl Foreman was among the least probable.

After writing some earnest Hollywood adaptations in the late forties, like Champion, Home of the Brave, and The Men, Foreman was named as a Communist in 1950, and placed on the studios’ covert blacklist. Unable to work in America, he relocated to Europe, leaving behind a western screenplay that Fred Zinnemann turned into High Noon. Retrospectively, the film seems to deal with many issues raised by the blacklist: the herd mentality, the unwillingess of people to live up to professed ideals. In fact, Foreman had no such ambitions for it, but happily basked in his unearned reputation as a socialist ideologue.

‘Carl Foreman wasn’t a very nice guy,’ said Mickey Knox, one of the many scriptwriters he employed during an erratic career as writer, director and producer. The opinion was general. In Paris and London, Foreman produced stodgy money-makers like Born Free and The Virgin Soldiers, and moonlighted on screenplays. By 1967 the political climate in Hollywood had thawed sufficiently for him to return. In 1968 the Writers’ Guild would launch a project to uncover the work of blacklisted writers obscured by the names of ‘fronts’ or deleted altogether, and to restore their rightful credits to the screen. Foreman’s first script after his return was Mackenna’s Gold, based on a Will Henry western novel about a mismatched party of adventurers seeking buried gold. Hoping to attract even a few teenagers to the film, Columbia’s publicity department offered to fund two students each from USC and UCLA to make ten-minute films about the production, to be shot on and around its desert locations in Arizona and Utah.

USC, on the recommendation of Arthur Knight, put forward Charles Braverman and Charley Lippincott. Braverman accepted, but Lippincott had been offered a job he preferred, as assistant to a director at Columbia who was planning a film, eventually unmade, on student film-makers. He suggested Lucas.

Lucas accepted the Mackenna’s Gold job, but without illusions. ‘I thought the whole thing was a ruse to get a bunch of cheap, behind-the-scenes documentary films made,’ he said, ‘and they were doing it under the guise of a scholarship.’ But he wanted to direct, and once he graduated, USC would no longer be picking up the bill.

He and Braverman joined David Wyles and David MacDougal from UCLA, and headed for Kanab, Utah. Lucas had one advantage: the project was being supervised by Saul Bass, for whom he’d worked on the credits of Grand Prix. Each student crew got a station wagon, film equipment and $200 a week to live on. Given his ascetic tastes, Lucas thought – rightly – that he could save most of that, and arrived back from the trip $800 richer.

He was appalled by the prodigality of a Hollywood unit on location. Nobody could drive anywhere, not even in their own car, without a Teamster at the wheel; hot meals had to be served three times a day; and a full crew of local technicians was kept on salary doing nothing while the imported Hollywood technicians shot the film. ‘We had never been around such opulence,’ said Lucas; ‘zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing. It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste – that was the worst of Hollywood.’

For his film, Braverman interviewed Foreman; MacDougal covered the director, J. Lee Thompson; Wyles the stunt riders and horse-wranglers. Within two days, Lucas was bored with the film-making process. As nervous as ever around people, he made a film without them: one that stood back and saw the production as it might appear to a god – a ripple in time, as insignificant and evanescent as the movement of clouds over the landscape, unnoticed by the insects and animals that struggled to survive in this wilderness. Sixteen years later, he would recognize the same long view in a film by avant-garde documentarist Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi even had some of the same images, like the speeded-up passage of clouds. Francis Coppola had backed Koyaanisqatsi, and Lucas would join him as guarantor of Reggio’s second (and less successful) Powaqqatsi (1988).

Lucas finished shooting his film on 18 June 1967, and called it just that – 6.18.67. Foreman detested it. He’d tried to dissuade Lucas from making it, and once it was finished, did his best to see it didn’t get shown. But PBS made a program about the project and the four films, and Foreman, interviewed for it, had little choice but to smile and say he loved Lucas’s work. He was placed even more on the spot when the third National Student Film Festival showed it, along with The Emperor and THX1138 4EB. THX won the drama category; the other two were honorably mentioned. Milius took the animation prize for Marcello, I’m so Bored. Time magazine featured the two winners from USC and NYU’s Martin Scorsese in an article about young filmmakers. The photographer asked Milius to sit on the edge of the Steenbeck editing table in a New York cutting room. There was a double irony in this: Milius had never cut a film in his life, and didn’t know how – Lucas always helped him – and the flatbed Steenbeck, soon to be the standard editor’s tool, and already so in Europe, was shunned by the Hollywood establishment, fanatically loyal to the upright Moviola. At the time, there wasn’t a single Steenbeck in the whole of California.

8 Big Boy Now (#ulink_64e249c5-8325-5fbf-80aa-80e13787ddd8)

I pattern my life on Hitler. He didn’t just take over the country. He worked his way into the existing fabric first.

Francis Ford Coppola, Newsweek, March 1967

One of the crumbs from the Hollywood table that occasionally fell into the eager hands of institutions like USC was the Samuel Warner Scholarship. The winner spent six months at the studio on a salary of $80 a week, doing what he wanted, learning what he could. He could even nominate the department in which he interned.

In 1967, the shortlist for this perk comprised Lucas and Walter Murch. On the day the decision was announced, they hung out on the USC patio and discussed what they’d do if they won. Whoever got the job, they agreed, the other would do everything he could to help. That was the trouble with Old Hollywood, Lucas argued: its primary directive was ‘divide and rule.’ It would never be like that with the next generation, he assured his friends. At USC, everyone worked with everyone else on every project. That’s how it would be in New Hollywood too.

Lucas won, and in June 1967 he drove his Camaro to Burbank and checked in at the gate. Traditionally, he has said he wanted to spend his six months with the legendary animator Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and Speedy Gonzales. Directed to the animation department, he found it reduced to a single office with ‘one guy, who was sort of head of the department, and he would just sit in his office and twiddle his thumbs all day.’ The department had been closed.

Legend also claims that Lucas arrived on the Warners lot on the very day that Jack, last of the four Warner Brothers, cleared out his office. ‘From my point of view, the film industry died in 1965,’ says Lucas, amplifying this story. ‘It’s taken this long for people to realize the body is cold. The day I won my six-month internship and walked onto the Warner Bros. lot was the day Jack Warner left and the studio was taken over by Seven Arts. I walked through the empty lot and thought, “This is the end.” The industry had been taken over by people who knew how to make deals and operate offices but had no idea how to make movies. When the six months was over, I never went back.’

The skinny, bearded kid in jeans and running shoes ambling across the lot, passing the dapper, impeccably suited Jack Warner with his hairline mustache and insincere smile, trudging into oblivion, is such a Hollywood moment that one wishes it were true. Unfortunately for myth, when Lucas arrived, Warners’ animation department had been closed for five years. Since 1962, Chuck Jones had been attached to MGM, turning out versions of Tom and Jerry which even he himself rated as inferior. As for Jack Warner, his departure from the lot was as prolonged as a soprano’s farewell performances. He sold his stock to Seven Arts in November 1966, but the company encouraged him to stay on in his old office as an independent producer. Long after Steve Ross’s Kinney Services bought out Seven Arts in 1969, Warner remained on the lot. Only when Kinney told him they wanted to convert his private dining room into offices did the last of the Warners move over the hills into Century City, on what had been part of the old Twentieth Century-Fox, and set up Jack L. Warner Productions.

Lucas found the Warners lot a ghost town. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz commented soberly of that time, ‘I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that any minute I’d look out and see tumbleweeds come rolling past.’ Only one film was shooting: Finian’s Rainbow. Howard Kazanjian from USC was second assistant director, and got Lucas onto the set. He stood at the back and watched a man with a beard and a loud voice order people about and wave his arms a lot. If this was the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, the first film-school student of their generation to penetrate the Hollywood establishment, Lucas wasn’t impressed.

In 1968, Coppola, in the estimation of everyone who knew him, had the bucket in his hand and was headed for the well. Before he’d even finished his postgraduate degree at UCLA film school, this ebullient voluptuary with a thick black beard and a tendency to corpulence had directed two soft-core porn films, The Peeper and The Belt Girls and the Playboy, written both music and lyrics for a musical, finished a feature screenplay, and worked in Roger Corman’s film factory, turning foreign sf films into fodder for the drive-ins.

Producer Ray Stark recognized Coppola as someone he could use, and offered him a job as hired gun and script fixer at Seven Arts, for which he was then head of production. Lured by promises of an eventual directing credit, and Stark’s flattering assurances of his genius, Coppola accepted. The day he did so, an anonymous sign went up on the UCLA bulletin board. It said simply, ‘Sellout.’

In between fixing broken-down movies for Stark, Coppola turned out at least three screenplays a year, in the hope that Stark would let him direct one. Each time, however, Seven Arts assigned them to someone else. Grown cold and canny, Coppola optioned a 1963 British novel called You’re a Big Boy Now, offering author David Benedictus $1000 if the film was ever made. He scripted it as a wise-ass comedy with music about a shy boy who spends his days roller-skating round the stacks of the New York Public Library, replacing returned books, and who falls into the bizarre world that surrounds a febrile young library user.

Half flower-power comedy, half pop-art musical, You’re a Big Boy Now evolved into an American version of Richard Lester’s films with the Beatles, with a mobile camera (critic Rex Reed called Coppola ‘the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera’), musical numbers erupting into the action, and characters as much comic-strip as Actors’ Studio. Seven Arts was sufficiently impressed to sign a new deal with Coppola. He would write three films for them – two, The Conversation and The Rain People, from his original stories, and the third, The Scarlet Letter, from Nathaniel Hawthorne. In return, he could direct the fourth.

You’re a Big Boy Now lost every penny of the $800,000 invested in it. In fact, Seven Arts estimated it lost over $1 million, once they counted advertising and print costs. But by the time it came out, the company’s mind was elsewhere. Having just bought a tottering Warner Brothers, it wanted something in production quickly. Dusting off the 1947 E.Y. Harburg/Burton Lane Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, a whimsical tale of an eccentric Irishman wandering the rural Southern United States looking for a leprechaun’s buried pot of gold, Warners-Seven Arts, as it was now known, exercised an outstanding option on the services of a tottering Fred Astaire, assembled a low-cost supporting cast led by British unknowns Petula Clark and Tommy Steele, and assigned the film to their cheapest and hungriest director – Coppola.

In June 1967 he started shooting Finian’s Rainbow on Warners’ Burbank lot. Distracted, he didn’t look around for a few days. When he did, ‘I noticed this skinny kid watching me. I was curious who this young man was, and I think I went over to him and said, “Hi. See anything interesting?” and he said, “Not much.” That was the first time I met George Lucas.’

This first encounter between two men who were to become pivotal not only in each other’s careers but in the growth of New Hollywood typified their relationship. Coppola never ceased to think of Lucas as that grubby boy watching from the shadows. ‘Actually,’ said Lucas, ‘he calls me a stinky kid. He says, “You’re a stinky kid. You do what you want.”’

Each day, Lucas came in and stood about on Coppola’s set, a thin, silent guy, habitually dressed in a white T-shirt, black pants and sneakers. The crew ignored him, and even Coppola, once he’d established who he was, only spoke to him in passing. It didn’t escape Lucas’s notice, however, that he and Coppola were the only people on the crew under fifty, and the only ones with beards.

After two weeks, Lucas had had enough. He thought the animation department might have a 16mm camera he could borrow to shoot a film. Also, Carl Foreman had suggested that if he wrote a treatment for a feature version of THX1138 4EB, he would see if he could interest Columbia in it. Either way, he felt he had nothing more to learn by watching Coppola.

‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ Coppola blustered when Lucas told him. ‘Aren’t I entertaining enough? Have you learned everything you’re going to learn watching me direct?’

Lucas shrugged.

Coppola found he would be sorry to see the kid go. ‘I was like a fish out of water among all these old studio guys,’ he said. With Lucas, he could talk about movies – something Old Hollywood never did, except to discuss what they cost and what they earned. To keep him around, Coppola put him on the payroll as his ‘administrative assistant.’ On 31 July 1967, Lucas signed a contract for six months’ work at a total salary of $3000. His first job was to shoot Polaroid pictures of the set to check that props and furniture stayed in the same place between set-ups. Once there was footage to edit, he spent his time in the cutting room with the studio’s longtime head of editing, Rudy Fehr. The THX treatment went into the bottom drawer.