Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  DALE POLLOCK

  In the aftermath of Jaws, we got Jaws 2 and Jaws 3. Then there was Star Wars, which was followed by The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, let alone the prequels and sequels. So this idea of continuing blockbuster success that could be spun off into further franchises took root. And right from that point, everyone’s looking for a franchise and how they could make every film in a series profitable.

  JONATHAN KIRSHNER

  Robert Altman was offered a ton of money to make a movie and that movie was called MASH II. That’s the kind of thing the studios wanted, and Altman, to his credit, instead shuttered his studio and that’s when he went into his era of working more in the theater and then doing film versions of some theatrical productions. He emerges ten years later, so in that respect, he’s very admirable. But by then, the tolerance for personal, gritty films that are designed for smaller audiences was not the way to go when the studios were looking to find these franchises. Star Wars is an easy target here, and justifiably so, because it’s a case where the merchandise becomes more important than the movie. Well, for people who care about movies, that’s not okay.

  DALE POLLOCK

  There have certainly been sequels previously in Hollywood, but nothing on the scale considered here where Star Wars proved you could spin off an infinite number of stories set in the universe established in the very first film. He’s got enough characters and enough storylines in the Star Wars universe that you could just keep going forever. Was this change a good thing? Well, I think it certainly geared people towards it. Movies used to open every day during the week and it was only after this era that the Friday night opening became so big, and the opening weekend became big. And clearly the audience was loving it, because they were the ones showing up. That trend continues to this day with the studios looking for franchises, sequels, and remakes. That’s the biggest change in Hollywood in the last fifty years, the death of the one-time movie and the rise of the franchise.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  The George Lucas of the 1970s was a brilliant filmmaker. In a span of about half a decade, he directed three amazing films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. Think about how different each of those films are from the others. Imagine what he might have done had he continued to direct projects that interested him, instead of getting into the franchise-building, toy-merchant business. He changed the world with Star Wars, but he also gave up, essentially, his career as an artist.

  * * *

  George Walton Lucas was born on May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California, then a small town. His life was filled with dreams of venturing off into the big world and becoming a race car driver, while the societal expectations were that he would follow his father into business at the Lucas Stationery Store. His childhood life was changed forever by the family purchase of a television set that was on a rotating table, which would allow the family to watch programs during dinner. A naturally shy boy, who wasn’t particularly gifted at school, the young George Lucas lost himself in the world of comic books, such as Flash Gordon and Walt Disney’s Scrooge McDuck, as well as radio series like the supernatural mystery/suspense show The Whistler. While seemingly unrelated, these three tales made up the cornerstones of the young Lucas’s existence. The thing they all have in common is adventure. Scrooge McDuck, at the time, was almost an Indiana Jones–type, always on the search for adventure and riches, while The Whistler and Flash Gordon dove into the realms of the fantastic that stretched and challenged Lucas’s imagination.

  By 1967, after some flirtations with cinematography and photography in undergraduate programs, Lucas firmly settled upon directing as a field of study, returning to his alma mater of USC as a graduate student in the Film Production Program. While there, he completed several short films, the most important of which to his career being THX 1138 4EB. This short film won him a scholarship from Warner Bros., which awarded him the opportunity to shadow a feature film production of his choosing. He chose Finian’s Rainbow, directed by Francis Ford Coppola—which would turn into the most valuable friendship of his career. Classmates at USC such as Walter Murch, John Milius, and Matthew Robbins made up the “Film School Generation,” a group of filmmakers who dreamed of dismantling the Hollywood studio system and creating their own decentralized, artist-driven industry.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I grew up in a very small town in central California. There were two movie theaters there and we’d go to the movies every once in a while. I enjoyed the movies, but I didn’t become obsessed with them or anything. As I got older, I’d just sort of go to the movies to chase girls; I didn’t actually know there was something on the screen. But I’d always been interested in visual art. In the early years I used to listen to these Disney story records where you’d put on the story, turn the page, and you got to see the pictures as you did it. And I listened to a lot of radio. I loved to imagine what was actually happening, filling in the blanks.

  We got a television when I was about ten years old, though in the beginning there wasn’t that much to watch. There were a lot of Westerns, and most of what I grew up on in the Golden Age of Television was Westerns, so if anything had any influence, it was probably that. But if it hadn’t been for seeing Flash Gordon and Perils of Pauline serials … there is a through-line from them to Star Wars and certainly Raiders of the Lost Ark. But my real interest was art, drawing, photography—those sorts of things. When I was a kid, I drew for companionship. My parents couldn’t afford a babysitter, so if they had to go somewhere to play cards with somebody, they’d take me along. And because I started drawing at four or five, obviously that was something I was comfortable with and was interested in. They would give me paper and a pencil and I’d be off and go draw. So in my head, I guess I assumed I wanted to be an artist and then I had an experience … you know, you have maybe one or two or three moments where something happens that changes the direction you’re going to go in. And it happened to me in third grade in grammar school in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  As he recalls it, Lucas was not interested in what the teacher was saying or the subject. To him, it was just someone standing there talking, so in response, under his desk he would draw things that did interest him to keep his mind occupied during the school day.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I wasn’t paying attention and the teacher caught me. She decided she was going to humiliate me and put me on the spot. She said, “So, what’s going on over there? What’s more important than our class? What’s under the table?” And I just thought, “I’m screwed; I’m just going to be burned.” She said, “Why don’t you bring that up?” and so I brought up the picture that I’d been drawing. She said, “Okay, tell us about it,” and I said, “Okay, well, here’s where the cowboys are and they’re chasing Indians over a cliff, and the cowboys are shooting at the Indians. The Indians are bombing the cowboys”—I really enjoyed that. And she did something pretty amazing. She said, “Okay, we’re going to put newspaper print paper on the easel and every Wednesday we’ll give you fifteen minutes and you come up and draw a story for the class, but then you have to pay attention.” I said, “Okay.” Now had she gone the other way, considering the shape I was in at that time in my life, I don’t know what would have happened.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  What got him to the career he chose, and ultimately how he became the kind of filmmaker he was, is solely through the need to control the narrative. It goes through his entire life. The eventual crash of his car was his wake-up call that he needed to get his shit together.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I didn’t know anything about movies. I didn’t know anything but that I liked to build things. When I was very young, I built houses and clubhouses and soapbox derbies and ball houses, chess sets and all those kinds of things. I was a woodworker and I’d love to do that. Then when I got a little older, I started to build cars and work on cars and go racing and doing all that stuff. Then I was in an accident and figured I should change my l
ife.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  In everything there is controlling the narrative of his life and being in charge and having absolute control. Film really spoke to him, because it was something he found out that he was great at. What I find interesting about Lucas when you compare him with Spielberg, is that Spielberg was the kind of kid that was filming his trains crashing into each other at eight years old. Lucas isn’t doing that. Lucas is the gearhead. He loved cars and he loved motorcycles, and he basically got this career that his father is trying to hand to him on a plate and he’s rebelling, because, right there, he’s not in control of his destiny if he does that. His father is handing him the destiny. It’s Vader and Luke already there. It’s like the father’s got this destiny that he thinks the son is preordained for, and Lucas was pushing back against that. And then he’s a complete fuckup of a student and so on, because it’s kind of a youthful rebellion.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Control was everything for him, and it remained so his entire career. He is the ultimate control freak in Hollywood down to the smallest detail of what a character is wearing. What separates him from the studios is that he is, or was, in control, not millions of shareholders. Just him. I even asked him, “Did you ever consider taking Lucasfilm public?” He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would I do that?” “Well, you’d raise a lot more money that way,” and he said, “Yeah, but I have my own money. Why would I use someone else’s?” And he was right.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  My life is making movies, and I’ve got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up. It’s just a matter of “how can I get through all the stories in the amount of time I have left.” I “serendipitied” into starting companies, and building technology, and doing a lot of other things that are related to me getting to make movies that I want to make. I’ve never had a real plan of, “I want to get from here to there and I’ve got to do this.” The underlying plan to everything is, I’ve got a bunch of movies to tell, and this is the one I’m going to do next. And then I focus on the one at hand.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  The story I love with him is he’s like, “I’m watching these movies in my studio here at Skywalker Ranch, and then I go watch the movies in the theaters out there in Modesto and the sound is awful. What’s going on?” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t have the sound system you do and studio sound systems suck.” He’s like, “Well, every studio, every movie theater, needs to have this sound system,” and he actually gets them to pay for it. That’s a part of the process he should have no control over. Elvis has left the building! I mean, he has no say over that, but he runs the table on it. That, to me, is astounding. That’s the kind of thing I learned about him that just blew me away: his ability to just take absolute control of everything and run the table with it. “You don’t have it? Fine. Fuck you. I’ll build it myself.” He just does this consistently.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  When I went on my own, first we started at my house with a little screening room and then we put in a sound mixer machine and we slowly built up, because we had a place to mix the movies. We had to have a place to cut the movies. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done literally to be in the backwoods by myself creating the capability of making movies. And it was very hard. Then, the equipment was very expensive and the process was very expensive, and that’s why I developed a lot of the technology over the years, to make that more simple and much cheaper. A much simpler process. That was really how the company got created.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  The whole idea of THX Sound to me was stunning, because he was like, “Yes, I have THX.” I always assumed it was the equipment, but it wasn’t. It’s just the specs. And he’s telling these movie theaters, “I have the specs for this and you’re going to pay me for the specs so you can retrofit your system. Oh, and do you want to know what film I have that’s going to sound great in THX? It’s a film called Return of the Jedi.” In a way, he’s using his powers for good so we can make movie theaters sound great, so then not just his film, but other films will sound great in it. So on the one side, you’ve got the film lover, but he’s basically holding Jedi over their heads. And he does it again with digital film later: “Everybody needs to have a digital projector. You should retrofit and put all these digital projectors in. I have a movie called Star Wars Episode I that’s coming out in digital.” What a coincidence. And he does this constantly. That’s what blows me away about him, and those things in particular, because he should, by all rights, have no say over that, yet he insists on it and they agree. Simply unbelievable.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I didn’t want anything to do with Hollywood and I’ve never made a film in Hollywood. As a result, I had to have all my own stuff. I said, “Why should we use the existing equipment when we can make it better?”

  MARK HAMILL

  (actor, “Luke Skywalker”)

  I thought he was an incredibly gifted filmmaker. I knew his work from American Graffiti and I thought the script for Star Wars was fantastic. It said “by George Lucas,” and I didn’t know that Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck helped him with it. They wrote a lot of the comic dialogue, the banter. But I thought George was an incredibly brilliant filmmaker. He’s second to none at doing the kind of thing he does better than anybody else, so I had a deep respect for him.

  * * *

  And Lucas had a deep respect for and friendship with a fellow young wunderkind, writer/director Francis Ford Coppola, his mentor, who would prove key to launching his career. Coppola was born on April 7, 1939, to father Carmine Coppola, a flutist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and mother Italia Coppola. The young Francis led an admittedly privileged life, with a bohemian lifestyle, with art and culture as the highlight of his existence. Francis was stricken with polio at an early age. As such, much of Coppola’s early life was led in his imagination, as he was bedridden for a good portion of his childhood. But as polio became a treatable disease, the hopes, aspirations, and ambition for a better future came to light. In contrast to his future friend George Lucas, Francis was always encouraged to pursue a career in the arts.

  In the 1960s, Coppola moved to Los Angeles to pursue graduate studies in Cinema from the UCLA Film School. When he won the annual Samuel Goldwyn Award for the best screenplay written by a UCLA student, Pilma, Pilma, Seven Arts hired Coppola to adapt the late Carson McCullers’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye as a vehicle for Marlon Brando. This led to an assignment on Patton (with Edmund H. North), the film for which he won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Francis is about five years older than I am, but he was the first film student to actually make it into the film industry. He started working for a Canadian company called Seven Arts as a writer, because he’d won the Samuel Goldwyn writer scholarship at UCLA. And so they hired him, saying, “We just bought this book. Turn it into a screenplay. We want it done in two weeks.” And that’s basically what he did for a living. Out of that, he talked them into letting him direct a movie and he got to do some writing on some good movies, like Paris Is Burning and Patton. Of course, then they’d give it to another writer and say, “We’ve got a script. It’s done, but it needs another rewrite.” Out of that, though, he got a job to direct Finian’s Rainbow. But then, one of the quirky realities is that Seven Arts bought Warner Bros.

  HOWARD KAZANJIAN

  (producer, Return of the Jedi)

  George and I met each other at USC Cinema, now the School of Cinematic Arts. George was a year behind me, but back in the sixties, there were fewer than seventy-five full-time cinema majors. We knew everyone, had classes together and did things together. I graduated and went into the very first Assistant Directors Training Program. Eighteen months later George and I met at Warner Bros. Studio where he had won the USC/WB six-month scholarship. I was an assistant director on Finian’s Rainbow. George called me on the set and asked if he could visit and natu
rally I invited him down. I introduced him to Francis Coppola and the rest is history.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I had gotten the Warner Bros. scholarship for the summer, a work scholarship for six months where you go to Warner Bros., they assign you to a department—script, photography, editing—and you spend six months there working with professionals. Well, as it turns out, they’d just closed down. Jack Warner was leaving and there was nothing going on. All the departments had been closed. There was nobody there. In fact, the day I arrived Jack Warner was moving out. I said, “What’s going on?,” and they said, “We’re moving Jack Warner out of his office.” It was literally the week that Seven Arts was taking over and they said to me, “We don’t know what to do with you, because there are no departments that are open.”