Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  GEORGE LUCAS

  They released it in August 1973, which is the worst time to be released, and it wasn’t a giant hit. It did okay, making maybe twenty million. Now that’s sort of the lower end of having a hit. If it’s below twenty, forget it. You’re not going to go anywhere. So it made a little over twenty million in its first week, second week maybe twenty-two, third week it made twenty-five and it just kept going for a whole year. It stayed in the theaters for an entire year and it never dropped. So for a $700,000 investment, they made a $100 million return and then suddenly I was very hot. Yet before that, I couldn’t get work anywhere.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Lucas learns a lot of good tricks from American Graffiti about storytelling and narrative and the filmmaking process. I love the stories of him hanging himself off the outside of a car in the middle of the night so he can get the best shot. And then after he says cut, everyone’s milling around later and they’re like, “Did anybody cut George loose?” They go and find him and he’s sound asleep in the harness hanging off the side of the car. This is just him killing himself. Again, it’s funny, because he hates directing. He thinks directing is the absolute most miserable job, but he constantly did it until he finally got to the point where he could hand it over and still control every step of the process. But he made himself physically ill making Graffiti, which he does again during the making of Star Wars.

  * * *

  His anxiety stemmed from his battles with Universal Pictures, including the seemingly arbitrary decision to edit five minutes out of the film prior to its release. After American Graffiti became a huge hit, the studio rereleased it with those five minutes (including a sequence with Harrison Ford) restored in the cut. Decades later, Lucas would even revise the opening shot of the diner in the wake of the Star Wars Special Editions by changing the skyline for the film’s DVD release.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  When you go back and watch American Graffiti with those minutes edited back in, it’s like, “Okay, this thing with the used car salesman, it does feel like padding,” but we write stuff, you write stuff, you’re a writer, you know how it feels. Sometimes you’re like, “I don’t have golden words syndrome, but I put that in there for a reason.” To have the suits again telling him to edit, basically because they can, that is a formative moment in his career as a filmmaker, because that’s the moment when he says, “Fuck you!” He’s not going to let anybody, if he can help it, ever again tell him how to edit his own film. I really do believe that that’s the moment when he becomes George Lucas.

  DALE POLLOCK

  When you go back to THX and American Graffiti, both films were incredibly negative experiences for him. The way he described it to me is that it was as if someone took one of his children and mutilated them. That’s how seriously he took what they did to American Graffiti. I think THX he wrote off to the fact he had been naive. He felt Francis Coppola had screwed him on the deal. I don’t think the film came out being what he wanted it to be, but American Graffiti was his life. So when they started editing his life, that’s what forever turned him against the studio system. He knew that he was going to have to go to a studio to get Star Wars made. Fine. He knew he would never be able to raise the money for it and didn’t make enough on American Graffiti to finance what he thought he would need to do Star Wars. At the same time, he also knew that he would only be going to a studio for the first film, and if this film was successful, he was going to own the rest of them. That was his plan from the outset. The way he looked at Ned Tanen at Universal was the way a Jewish concentration camp survivor views Hitler. It really is, and he never got over it. He even said, “I’ll get the first Star Wars made and that will be the last time I will ever work with a major Hollywood studio.”

  Part Two

  THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY

  1977–1983

  2

  HOPE & GLORY: STAR WARS

  “Never tell me the odds!”

  Director Francis Ford Coppola, of course, followed the one-two punch of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II with 1979’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now for United Artists, which is a project that—on a much smaller scale—Lucas had actually planned on directing, having cowritten the original script with John Milius. The filmmakers had even talked about filming it in Vietnam with 16mm cameras during the war itself. When that was clearly untenable, another war movie manifested itself. Only this war movie took place in space despite having its roots in the Vietnam conflict itself with Lucas’s sympathy being with the Vietnamese, the ill-equipped rebels, fighting against a far superior fighting force, the Americans, the Empire.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  (author, The Making of Star Wars)

  Originally, [Apocalypse Now] was George and John Milius’s idea. It’s very different than the Coppola one. George really wanted to make it, he shopped it around all over Hollywood. You could argue that’s the one film Lucas didn’t get to make, except Coppola did get to make it.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  It’s interesting that people are stunned when you tell them that Lucas was actually working on the first draft of Apocalypse Now, and that in Lucas’s mind that was his film to make. So when he gets done with American Graffiti, the film he’s kind of got in the queue, he thinks to do next, is Apocalypse Now. He wants to make this Vietnam movie and, of course, Francis has it locked up in his deal with Warner when he went in and gave them seven scripts for films, and Apocalypse is one of them. Lucas thinks that that’s terribly unfair, and it’s another nail in Francis Ford Coppola’s coffin as far as he’s concerned. But I think there was already a rift growing just over the way that Coppola was running American Zoetrope. It was kind of like Coppola’s own version of the Beatles with Apple, with all these zealots and hanger-ons using all the money and Coppola’s like, “Oh, but we’re independent filmmakers,” and everyone’s taking the money and playing pool and drinking espressos.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  There were rumors that there had been a falling-out between Coppola and Lucas regarding Apocalypse Now. [I heard] George say no to that. He’d always supported Coppola in the making of it. There might’ve been competition, but that’s it. George wanted to film it in 16mm and do this whole hand-held look [at the Vietnam War] and make it a dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove–type version for Apocalypse Now. And he ended up using some of those ideas for the Vietnam sequence in More American Graffiti with the Toad storyline.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Watching Francis be very careless with his money made Lucas crazy, and created another thing where he was like, “I’m not doing that with my money. If I’m spending my money, it’s at least going back into the system,” whereas he didn’t think Coppola was doing that. So the Zoetrope experience was already dividing them a little bit. Again, the seams are showing, and then once he gets ready to make Apocalypse Now and starts expressing interest, Coppola is like, “Well, that film’s kind of locked up and I want to make that.” Lucas is super pissed at him about that and I know Lucas didn’t think that was fair, but that was Coppola’s deal to make. I think Lucas would have made a similar deal when he’s trying to get his films financed. It’s so interesting in that you’ve got Zoetrope coming in right after Easy Rider and you’ve got that whole independent film cresting moment, and then it’s gone in a second. And here’s Coppola trying to stand at the front of the line, waving his hand and no one’s following him now. It’s like the independent film movement was kind of up and then gone immediately. Like in the nineties when Tarantino and Kevin Smith come along with these huge independent films, and it only survives, finally, because they get studio-wise in a way that the studios didn’t do back in the late sixties.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  Have you ever heard the story of the reporters who asked Lucas and Coppola, midway through their careers, “What would you do if you had a billion dollars?” I don’t remember their exact response, but it was something like—Coppola’s r
esponse was, “I’d spend it all on something gigantic, and then I’d need to borrow another billion dollars!” And Lucas was like, “I’d put half of it in the bank, then I’d very calculatedly figure out how to use the other half as wisely as possible.”

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, Star Wars)

  [With Star Wars] I had an idea to do this kind of film about psychological motifs that are in mythology, and if they’re still accurate today. The great thing about mythology is that it was an oral medium up until we learned how to write. Before that with Homer and everybody, they would just tell the story. They would go to people’s houses and tell a story and get a free dinner and that’s how they made their living, and then those stories were passed down from father to son who told people what the rules are. It’s the same thing as the church and all the things we’ve got that make us a community that we all believe in. They used to go from a family to a tribe and from a tribe to a city and then to a country. So I asked myself, “I wonder if people still think the way they thought then.”

  RAY MORTON

  (senior editor, Script magazine)

  Lucas’s most significant creative decision in crafting the script for Star Wars was to purposefully infuse his narrative with a mythic structure—the classic “hero’s journey” plot identified by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces as one that has recurred in the legends, folk tales, and fairy stories of every culture across the globe. Lucas then enhanced this decision by peopling his story with archetypal characters resembling those who have appeared in the narratives of all of the world’s storytelling traditions. In my opinion, it was this choice by Lucas to deliberately construct his B-movie narrative around these universal prototypes and archetypes from the collective myth that made it possible for Star Wars to connect with so many different people in so many different countries in the deep and meaningful way that it did and continues to do. Audiences in every part of the world could and can watch the film and find something familiar and resonant in it.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  It was quite a bit of research—it went on for two years. I was writing, and doing research at the same time. It was really studying a lot about mythology and about fairy tales, and general sociology and psychology.

  DALE POLLOCK

  (author, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas)

  He deserves credit for having the ability to take elements within yourself and find the common ground for millions of people across the world who identify with those elements. It’s pretty staggering that he was able, in the structural and mythic elements of the first Star Wars film, to attract a global audience with people whose lives could not be more different than his or the characters he’s conveying.

  RAY MORTON

  Lucas enhanced Star Wars’ cultural universality even more by peppering his narrative with numerous elements culled from high-end genre literature, various philosophies and religions, and pop culture vehicles such as movies, TV shows, comic strips, and comic books. He took this process even further when he shot the movie and incorporated many visual references and quotes from movies and otherwise into the picture and utilized filmmaking techniques from every era of cinema from the silent days to the present. All of these familiar references gave viewers additional ways to connect with the film on both conscious and subconscious levels.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I think I proved that they were interested, because a psychological motif is the same kind of thing, even though it’s not in Star Wars. But when you’re telling a story that is a boring part and everybody’s sleeping, you say, “Well, let’s cut that out.” And so you do. And then you say, “Wow, this thing where he’s puzzled over his mother and wants to kill his father—everybody likes that part.” So then you keep that part in. But they didn’t really know what they were doing. They were just getting responses from the audience and it wasn’t until Freud came along that people realized, “Oh, these are psychological stories.” He’s been around for a long time and those stories are just as strong today. But it’s a lot about good and evil, and a lot about heroes.

  RAY MORTON

  And it’s fun. Star Wars is a really entertaining movie: it’s exciting, thrilling, funny, imaginative, suspenseful, and sometimes scary. Whatever Lucas’s other intentions, he wanted to give audiences a great time and at that he more than succeeded. I’m certainly not the first to make this observation, but after a decade of gritty, realistic, and often quite downbeat films, bringing pure, optimistic entertainment back to the movies was both startling and refreshing and certainly one of the major reasons for Star Wars’ incredible success.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Lucas has got his hands in a lot of different projects at the time, but he keeps coming back to the Star Wars project that he can’t really explain to anybody. The mythology on that is that he wanted to do that movie his entire life. When I spoke to Randall Kleiser, his college roommate at USC, he says, “Lucas was upstairs and I always remember he was drawing these little star troopers…” Randall Kleiser has recited the story constantly for like, the last forty years. I was tracing that story back and one of the very first times it’s told, Lucas immediately knocks it down. Lucas immediately says, “Not at that time. I would probably have been drawing cars.” So at one point, Lucas busted his own mythology, whether he meant to or not, because it was like, 1978. It’s not one of the things that, if you were going to do this movie, you would have the young George Lucas waking up in his bedroom and the light would be shining in and he would see the ghost of Ben Kenobi standing in the closet saying, “Young George, you will make a movie…” You would romanticize this. And Lucas actually doesn’t really romanticize his desire to make that movie for a long time. Once he finally decides to make it, he’s a dog with a bone and then the narrative does change constantly after that.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Originally I wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie with all the trimmings, but I couldn’t obtain the rights to the characters. So I began researching and went right back and found where Alex Raymond (who had done the original Flash Gordon comic strips in the newspapers) had gotten his idea from. I discovered that he’d gotten his inspiration from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and especially from his John Carter of Mars series of books. I read through the series, then found that what had sparked Burroughs off was a science-fantasy called Gulliver on Mars, written by Edwin Arnold and published in 1905. That was the first story in this genre that I have been able to trace. Jules Verne had gotten pretty close, I suppose, but he never had a hero battling against space creatures or having adventures on another planet. A whole new genre had developed from that idea.

  GARY KURTZ

  (producer, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back)

  We wanted to see a space opera, but science fiction had taken this turn of being postapocalyptic, very depressing. There hadn’t been a rousing space opera movie since Forbidden Planet in 1956.

  RAY MORTON

  One of Lucas’s great innovations was to give his space opera the feel and form of an old-time movie serial—specifically by opening the script and film with a crawl similar to the ones that opened the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe serials to explain the narrative’s backstory and then by structuring his plot so that there was an exciting action sequence (often containing a cliffhanger element) every ten or fifteen minutes, thus giving audiences the feeling that they were binge-watching a bunch of episodes of some long-forgotten chapter-play in quick succession.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  So Star Wars is about good and evil and what makes a hero. What’s friendship? What’s the idea of sacrificing yourself for something larger? They’re all really basic things and a movie about that was very obvious. But it’s actually not that obvious to a lot of people unless you have somebody tell you every generation that this is what our country believes in, this is what we believe in. Star Wars was taken and put into a form that was very easy
for everybody to accept, so it didn’t fall into a contemporary mode where you could argue about it. It went everywhere in the world, because they could say, “Oh, the things I believe in are the same as that.” Most people in the world believe exactly the same thing and share the same beliefs.

  * * *

  Playing an important part in the genesis of Star Wars in Lucas’s imagination was a seminal conversation he had with his mother when he was eight years old, asking her why, if there was only one God, were there so many religions?

  GEORGE LUCAS

  It’s a question that has fascinated me ever since. If you really look at it and most people say, “Well, what’s the difference between a Shia and a Sunni? What about a Catholic and a Protestant, or we’re all believing in a Jewish God? But what about the Jewish god and the gods that came before?” Buddha’s a little bit different, but in the end, if you just think of it as one God, everybody may express it differently, but it’s still the same ideas: don’t kill people, be compassionate and love people. And that’s basically all Star Wars there.