Lucas with camera, circa 1966.
The young filmmaker at work on the documentary short subject 6.18.67 (1967)–a poetic look at the making of Mackenna’s Gold, a Western starring Gregory Peck.
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Executive producer and writer George Lucas discusses how his changing perspectives on the Flash Gordon serials sparked his desire to make the Star Wars saga. (Interview by Arnold, 1979)
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BLACK THURSDAY—AND BEYOND!
In 1969, following the release of The Rain People, Coppola and Lucas founded American Zoetrope, an independent film company, on Folsom Street in San Francisco. THX 1138 became its first film. “When I met Francis and started working as his assistant, because he is very much the writer, he really started pushing me toward theatrical drama, acting—and writing,” Lucas says. “He had to force me to write my first script. ‘You want to do a film? You write it.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, we ought to hire a writer to write it. I don’t want to write it. I’m not a writer, I can’t write.’ But he said, ‘You’re never going to be a good director unless you learn how to write. Go and write, kid.’
“So I turned out my first script, THX, and it was terrible,” Lucas continues. “I said, ‘See! It’s terrible. Let’s hire a writer.’ So he hired a writer—but that experience was worse than writing it myself. I may be a terrible writer, but at least I know what I want to say. So I went back and rewrote it with a friend of mine, Walter Murch, and it turned out being what it is.”
Those familiar with the story of American Zoetrope know that what THX 1138 was led to Black Thursday—the day which destroyed the fledgling company in its first incarnation and that could’ve permanently exiled both Coppola and Lucas from the industry.
On Thursday, November 19, 1970, in a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot, the lights went down and THX 1138 was screened for the executives who had bankrolled the film to the tune of $777,777.77 (a tribute to Coppola’s lucky number). After the lights came back up, it quickly became clear that Warner Bros. didn’t understand the film, didn’t like it, and certainly didn’t have a clue as to how they were going to market it. Lucas had anticipated their reaction, and had even planned with his friends to escape with the negative should the executives try to seize it—and they did. Ultimately, Warner Bros. exercised its corporate mind-set by cutting the film by five minutes without really changing or improving anything, though they did succeed in completely alienating the film’s director. They released THX 1138 on March 11, 1971, without knowing what they were selling.
Though it found a small audience and some favorable reviews, the film was no Easy Rider at the box office. The film’s tepid reception and its disastrous screening prompted Warner Bros. to withdraw funding from American Zoetrope; they also asked Coppola to pay back the $300,000 previously loaned for the development of six other films slated for production, among them Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and The Black Stallion. Lucas’s first film couldn’t have been more disappointing from a commercial point of view—and would have aborted the career of a lesser talent. Personally, however, Lucas was happy with THX 1138, with its humor, its stylized visuals, its documentary-style storytelling, and its tale of an individual who steps outside his mental cage to a more liberated existence. Despite the fact that the creation of THX 1138 left Lucas unemployed and penniless, it led to many positives—and, eventually, to Star Wars.
Lucas and driver Tony Dingman, while making Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People in 1968.
Coppola gets a ride astride the vehicles of two motorcycle cops.
While directing his first feature film, THX 1138, in 1969, Lucas shows one of the robot police how to stand.
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Lucas explains how he decided to go to film school at the University of Southern California. (Interview by Alan Arnold, 1979)
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NIGHT OF THE DIRECTOR
While Lucas was at work on THX 1138, Coppola had delivered a second challenge: to make a happier kind of film. The young director took up the gauntlet, deciding to make a movie about his youth in Modesto, California, where teenagers cruised in beautiful hot rods and listened to great music while looking for girls and growing up. The film would be called American Graffiti, a wink to this vanished pastime. However, Coppola’s first challenge—writing—was not something Lucas was eager to face again.
“When I was in college I took a creative writing class,” Lucas says, “but I really didn’t like it. My real thing was art, drawing, visuals. When I went to USC, my primary interest was camera and editing. That was what I really excelled in, so that was what I really liked. I was bored by scripts, and most of the films I did were abstract visual tone poems or documentaries—those were the things I really loved.
“So as I started out with American Graffiti, I said to myself, I don’t want to write this; I can’t stand writing, and I frantically went around trying to get a deal to develop the script.”
His hope was that his friends Willard and Gloria Huyck (the Huycks) would write the script once he had funds to pay them. To raise the development money, Lucas spent more than six months chasing down possibilities, talking with lower-and upper-level studio executives, such as David Chasman, head of development at United Artists in Los Angeles. But he, like everyone else, declined, much to the frustration of an increasingly destitute Lucas.
Having heard that THX 1138 had been chosen as one of the films to be featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at the International Film Festival in Cannes, Lucas and his wife, Marcia, decided to spend their last few dollars on a vacation in Europe during the month of May 1971 (among the other films featured that year were Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre and Volker Schlondorff’s The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach). At the time Walter Murch happened to be going with his wife, Aggie, to visit her mother in England. “I said, ‘If you’re going over there, we’ll come, too—I’ve never been to Europe. I’ll just get a backpack,’ ” remembers Lucas.
On the way he and Marcia stopped for about a week in New York City, where they stayed with Coppola, who was on location shooting The Godfather, partially to repay his debt to Warner Bros. While in Manhattan, Lucas took the opportunity to explore deal possibilities. Even though Chasman had turned him down, he was able to talk “directly” with David Picker, president of United Artists, about his ideas for Graffiti. “Picker said, ‘Let me think about this. When are you leaving?’ I said in a couple of days, on my birthday [May 14]. So he said, ‘Why don’t you call me at Cannes when you get to London, and I’ll let you know.’ ”
On a previous visit with Coppola to New York, Lucas had checked out one avenue for his fantasy-space adventure. “I tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon,” Lucas recalls. “I’d been toying with the idea, and that’s when I went, on a whim, to King Features. But I couldn’t get the rights to it. They said they wanted Federico Fellini to direct it, and they wanted 80 percent of the gross, so I said forget it. I could never make any kind of studio deal with that.”
But King Features’ brush-off was key in the crystallization of Lucas’s thinking—at that moment, his project went from being a licensed product to an original screenplay. “I realized that Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established,” he says. “That is, you start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity. I realized that Flash Gordon wasn’t the movie I wanted to do; if I had done it, I would’ve had to have Ming the Merciless in it—and I didn’t want to have Ming the Merciless. I decided at that point to do something more original. I knew I could do something totally new. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them—I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.”
Those memories, of course, hark back to Lucas’s 1950s childhood in Modesto, California. In what was then a rural town he, like millions of other children, had been able to dream along with the fantastic imag
ery of the tail end of the golden age of comic books and cinema. Artists such as Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and Frank Frazetta illustrated fabulous worlds of the future and the past, while many of the swashbuckling films and 1930s serials were being broadcast on television for the first time.
Lucas and Coppola in discussion at a restaurant, circa 1970.
Back with Francis and his wife, Eleanor, in their apartment, Lucas and Coppola no doubt compared notes on their prospective futures, neither of which looked too bright. “Francis was in the middle of severe trauma at the time, and Ellie was pregnant,” Lucas says. “We had to leave at around 7 AM to catch the plane to London—but Francis and Ellie got up at four in the morning, running through the room on their way to the hospital, because she was in labor. She had Sofia that day. When we got to London and our tiny pension, because we were doing Europe literally on $5 a day, I found a pay phone and called David Picker, who said, ‘I’ve thought about this and you can have some money and you can write it. I’m going to be at the Carlton. Come and visit me there and we’ll talk about it.’ So it was my birthday, it was Sofia’s birthday, and I got American Graffiti all on the same day.”
The “money” was $5,000 to develop the script, $5,000 upon delivery, and $15,000 more in the event the movie was actually made. “I immediately called the Huycks and said, ‘I got the deal. We can write the script.’ But they said, ‘Oh, gee, George, we just got a chance to direct our own movie.’ So I said, ‘Okay, look, that’s a great opportunity; I’ll think of something else.’ ”
Using his Eurailpass, Lucas took the train to Cannes, where he met up with Murch, who had bicycled there from England. Sticking to their budget, they stayed in a “beautiful” little hotel far off the beaten path in the hills above the town. “We even had to sneak in to see THX because we didn’t have tickets,” Lucas says. “There was also a press conference that we didn’t go to, because nobody told us about it. But then I got to visit David Picker at the Carlton Hotel in one of those big suites—that was my first big-time movie experience. Before, I’d only been let into underling executive offices.”
After confirming the details of the Graffiti deal, Picker asked Lucas if he had anything else that might interest United Artists. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve been toying with this idea of a space-opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon,’ ” Lucas says. “And he said, ‘Great, we’ll make a deal for that, too.’ And that was really the birth of Star Wars. It was only a notion up to then—at that point, it became an obligation [laughs]!”
FUTURE THX
Lucas didn’t mention to Picker another film he’d been struggling to make for several years, Apocalypse Now, because it had already been turned down by United Artists, after having been rejected by Warner Bros. Born from the tumults of the 1960s, it existed as a script he’d worked on with John Milius and was going to be “Dr. Strangelove in Vietnam,” according to Lucas, filmed in documentary style with handheld 16mm cameras.
“I knew I could barely get off the ground a $500,000 cheap exploitation hot-rods-to-hell movie,” Lucas explains, “so I figured, well at least I’ll get that done. I’d continue to develop Apocalypse Now—it was all ready—but Graffiti would be cheap, it was quick, and I thought it was really commercial.”
After traveling from the south of France to Italy, Lucas made another telephone call to the States—this time from Rome—to Gary Kurtz to discuss hiring Richard Walters to write Graffiti, since the Huycks were busy.
Years before, when Gary Kurtz had been drafted, he’d been one of the first conscientious objectors in the marines. Instead of being thrown into the brig, however, Kurtz had been assigned to the photographic unit. After serving his time, Kurtz worked with Coppola for the king of bargain-basement exploitation flicks, Roger Corman. Years later, when Coppola mentioned to Kurtz that Lucas was filming THX 1138 in Techniscope—a cheap, grainy, but sometimes appropriate anamorphic wide-screen format—Kurtz traveled to Marin County to meet the director and watch a reel of his film, because he was thinking of doing a movie using the same technique.
“Later I came back to San Francisco to get an idea of what the dubbing room was like for THX,” Kurtz says, “and at that time I talked with George at great length.”
Returning from Europe to the United States a few weeks later, Lucas had lunch with Kurtz in the commissary on the Universal lot, across the street from where Monte Hellman was cutting his film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), which Kurtz was line-producing. Kurtz had been hired in the same capacity by Coppola for Apocalypse Now, which he was producing, but because that film was stalled Kurtz segued into the same position on American Graffiti. Lucas spent the summer of 1971 and most of the following year working on the Graffiti screenplay, first with Richard Walters, then by himself.
George W. (Walton) Lucas Jr.’s signature on his agreement with the United Artists Corporation to write the script for American Graffiti and to eventually develop “a second picture.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s signature on Universal Pictures’ “Inducement Letter,” which enabled Lucas to make American Graffiti after United Artists passed on it, and which gave Universal an option on the “second picture.”
On December 28, 1971, the financing agreement between Lucasfilm and United Artists for the development of two films—American Graffiti and “a second picture”—was made legal. Oddly, even though United Artists had registered the title “The Star Wars” with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on August 3, 1971, it is not named as such in the agreement (perhaps because the studio’s contract department wasn’t talking with whatever department was responsible for the trademarking of titles).
Representing Lucas in the negotiations was the law office of Tom Pollock, Jake Bloom, and Andy Rigrod, which had helped the writer-director incorporate his own company, Lucasfilm, earlier that year. The trio had met years earlier during weekly poker games. They joined forces in 1970, eventually evolving their practice into one specializing in the entertainment field, with Rigrod handling contracts, Pollock studio negotiations, and Bloom merchandising—three areas that would be crucial for Lucas in the years to come.
“I worked as the lawyer for the American Film Institute for three years, as their business manager and putting together their new film school,” Pollock says. “Many of my first clients were the filmmakers that I met there. Among them were two young writers named Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, and they had a friend who needed a lawyer, who was just in the process of making his first feature film, THX 1138. So they introduced me to George, and that’s how we started our relationship.”
Barwood, Robbins, and Lucas had met at USC. The former two had gone on to become filmmakers in their own right, and they all kept in touch. After collaborating with Lucas on the script for his student film, Robbins had even doubled for Robert Duvall when the actor was unavailable for the last shot of THX against the setting sun. Through Coppola, Lucas met Jeff Berg, who had seen THX 1138 and been impressed. Berg became Lucas’s agent—last of the key players brought to Lucas via his first film. The help of all parties was going to be needed to get Graffiti going, despite Picker’s initial enthusiasm.
“I ended up writing Graffiti, and it wasn’t that bad,” Lucas says. “But UA read the script and said, ‘No, it’s not our movie.’ So that meant another six months of taking it all over town trying to get it sold.”
By this time, however, Coppola had recovered from his consecutive traumas. The Godfather had been released in March 1972 to critical and box-office mega-success, reversing the director’s fortunes and elevating his deal-making clout to that of the divine. “Finally, Universal said they’d do Graffiti if I could get somebody like Francis involved,” Lucas says. “So I brought Francis in as the producer.”
The deal was for three pictures: American Graffiti and two future films. The “Lucas Option Contract” and “Inducement Letter” were signed on April 6, 1972. In addition to spelling out that American Graffiti’s production budget was not to exceed
$775,000—even less than that of THX—it also stipulated that the two other pictures automatically had priority over any other projects Lucas might develop in the future.
“We were on our way,” Lucas says. “I was starting to get into production, but I still felt the script needed work. By this time the Huycks had finished their movie, so I said, ‘Look, I’m going to start shooting in eight weeks, come and work on my script.’ ” Not really doing a rewrite, the Huycks worked primarily on the dialogue and the relationship between Steve and Laurie, two of the film’s teenage protagonists.
Principal photography for Graffiti began on June 26 and wrapped on August 4, a twenty-nine-day schedule. It was a quick, grueling night shoot, with Lucas directing, Coppola producing, and Kurtz as the line producer/production manager. Harrison Ford, who plays Bob Falfa in the film, recalls his meetings with Kurtz: “He was the guy who told me no more drinking beer on the streets, and then no more drinking beer in the trailer, and then no more drinking beer. Those were my three basic contacts with him. He explained it was a matter of insurance. He was real nervous.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 3
