Nevertheless, on May 30 or June 1, Lucas’s treatment was duly submitted to studio executive Ned Tannen. Under the terms of the agreement, Universal had ten days to say whether or not they were interested. “We sent them a letter saying, this is the movie we want to make, it’s going to cost $3 million. We want this fee, we want this percentage of the profits,” Pollock recalls. “The only official word we ever heard was Ned calling back asking for more time. He couldn’t make a decision in ten days. At the end of the ten-day period, we sent him a letter saying, ‘Since you haven’t said yes, the answer is no.’ ”
Later stories circulated that perhaps Tannen wanted it, but Lew Wasserman, the legendary éminence grise of Universal, had said, “We don’t make science-fiction movies.” Pollock’s recollection, however, is that “Ned was in a waffling state because he was in a waffling state about American Graffiti at the time.”
“The question becomes, Did Universal screw up and let the letter go unnoticed—were they derelict in some kind of procedural area?” Berg says. “The answer is no—Universal works like clockwork. They never screw up in that area. They have the most efficient notification follow-up department of any studio in town. They didn’t proceed with the project because either they didn’t believe in the idea, or they were not comfortable with George making a picture of that size, $3 million, which in 1973 was still regarded as an expensive picture. It was before the advent of the $8 to $10 million movies. Although Universal has a history of making expensive pictures, George had always presented himself as an underground, independent filmmaker. Psychologically, they weren’t prepared.”
Although this last rejection probably didn’t hurt Lucas, the consistently pedestrian behavior of the studios almost certainly sharpened his distaste for Hollywood. “UA was very cool,” Lucas says. “I just think they thought of it as a big, expensive movie and they didn’t understand it. Universal was the same way.” Maybe dreaming of a more ideal studio, Lucas adds, “I think Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt Disney were still alive. Walt Disney not only had vision, but he was also an extremely adventurous person. He wasn’t afraid.”
THE ADVENTURES OF FOX IN THE 20TH CENTURY
While Universal was still scratching its corporate head over The Star Wars, Jeff Berg had already started informal discussions with vice president for creative affairs Alan Ladd Jr. at Twentieth Century-Fox, which is located in Century City, Los Angeles, just west of Beverly Hills. “I’d been talking to Laddie about George Lucas. This was before American Graffiti came out, but Laddie had heard sensational things about it,” Berg says.
Son of the well-known actor Alan Ladd (The Blue Dahlia, 1946; Shane, 1953), Alan Ladd Jr. had been recruited by Jere Henshaw only months before, in January. The result of a merger in 1935 between Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures, the studio in 1973 was operating under the presidency of Gordon Stulberg and the chairmanship of Dennis Stanfill. One of the old-guard Hollywood juggernauts, the studio’s last few years had been rocky under the fading direction of longtime head Darryl Zanuck, who had finally left the company in 1971. According to Warren Hellman, who became one of the eleven directors on the board a few months later, the sole source of viable income in June 1973 was the television show M*A*S*H, which had started airing in 1972.
“Essentially Fox was going broke,” Hellman says. “We were in violation of all the important bank covenants. We were in intense negotiations with Chase, who was the leading bank, and who was being very harsh on us.”
New management was therefore looking for new ways to make hits, and the nearly incomprehensible Sean Connery vehicle Zardoz (1974) was Ladd’s first project.
“I was having drinks one day with Jeff Berg, who was talking about what a fabulous picture Graffiti was,” Alan Ladd Jr. says. “Universal was very unhappy with the picture, but Jeff thought it was a terrific film, so I said that I’d love to see it. Universal didn’t want it off the lot, but I was able to arrange a screening. I saw it on the Fox lot at nine one morning—and it absolutely bowled me over. That’s when I just said to Jeff that I’d like to meet George and hear about what ideas he’s working on.”
Berg arranged the meeting after making sure that Ladd understood that Universal still had right of first refusal. “George said he had this idea about Star Wars,” Ladd continues, “so I said, let’s make the deal. Having met George, I felt that Graffiti was further from what he was really into than Star Wars.”
Moreover, at Fox, the science-fiction genre was currently hot. Their sequels to Planet of the Apes (1968) had been good business. The fifth and last film in the series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, had just opened on June 15, 1973—and the “furry alien” in Lucas’s treatment may have sparked dreams of a similar franchise. “When the Planet of the Apes series did so well for Fox, it’s possible that people’s interest was rejuvenated,” Kurtz says. “I’m sure there were people there who felt that there were other things that could be done in science fiction that also would make money.”
With Ladd’s interest assured and Universal officially out of the picture, Tom Pollock sent Twentieth Century-Fox a letter on July 13, 1973, outlining the same terms they’d proposed to Universal. “It was a very lowball deal,” he says, “with $15,000 for the development, $50,000 to write the script, and $100,000 to direct, some of which was even pledged to the completion of the movie. A $3 million budget and that’s it. We had no negotiating power. They were the only ones that wanted it.”
Pollock’s letter to vice president of business affairs William Immerman also stipulated that the first-draft screenplay would be written by October 31; that Lucasfilm could hire a secretary at $175 per week; that Gary Kurtz would produce for $50,000; and that Marcia Lucas and Verna Fields were “preapproved as editors and Walter Murch is preapproved as postproduction supervisor”—a logical clause given that they’d all worked well together on American Graffiti. Forty percent of the net profits of the picture would go to Lucasfilm, and 60 to Fox. Another clause addressed the issue of power: “[Twentieth Century-Fox] shall not have the right to assign an executive producer or exercise any other production controls other than standard location auditors.”
“I’m very, very adamant about my creative work,” Lucas says. “Even when I was young I was not that willing to even listen to other people’s ideas—I wanted everything to be my way. Over the years, starting in film school, I did start to work with others, because film is so collaborative, but I was still pretty closed-minded. I didn’t mind getting input from the creative people around me—but not the executives. I grew up in the 1960s. I was very anti-corporation, and I was here in San Francisco, where anti-authority is even more extreme. On my first two movies I was really left alone. No one watched dailies, no one really read the script. And when the studios interfered at the end, I thought it was the end of the world. It really wasn’t, but I felt it was. So I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do.
A letter of July 13 from the law offices of Pollock, Rigrod and Bloom became the basis for the deal memo between Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation for The Star Wars.
As the legal representative of Lucasfilm, Thomas Pollock signed William J. Immerman’s return letter/deal memo of August 20, 1973, including it in his August 24 letter to Fox.
“I’m realistic enough to know that you have to make compromises when filmmaking,” he adds, “but if I can avoid them, I will.”
On August 20 Immerman sent back modifications to Pollock’s eight-page memo. On August 24 Pollock sent a letter with more amendments—including another preapproved Graffiti holdover, Fred Roos, as casting director—along with a note stating that United Artists had agreed to “waive its registration of the title [Star Wars] to any company designated by us.” The “Memorandum Agreement” between Twentieth Century-Fox and Lucasfilm Ltd. was signed retroactively on August 20—just nineteen days after Graffiti was released to surprisingly strong box office—but based on the pre-rele
ase July terms. The timing illustrates another motivating factor for Fox: Besides having faith in Lucas, Ladd, by acting fast, was able to sign up the promising director for very little.
“I actually needed the money in May because I was so far in debt,” Lucas says. “That’s why I made the deal. In September, by the time they sent me a check, Graffiti was already a big hit and I was okay financially. It’s ironic. If I’d just waited until Graffiti came out, I could have made the deal much better.”
A month after signing, Lucas received $10,000; he would receive another $10,000 “upon delivery of the first draft screenplay,” and $30,000 upon commencement of principal photography. The actual making of the film, however, was far—very far—from being assured at this point. The memo represented only an agreement to go to the next step; there was no formal production-distribution contract. The “Election to Proceed—Turnaround” clause made it clear that the studio could withdraw its financial support at any time “until Fox’s next Board of Directors meeting,” at which time they could “elect either to go forward with the project or not go forward with the project.” Lucas’s own commitment, as stated in an additional clause, was subject to his previous three-picture deal with Universal. If that studio elected to proceed with his film Radioland Murders, which Lucas had also been developing with the Huycks simultaneously with The Star Wars, then the former film would take priority.
Fox had simply decided to go ahead with the first phase: the development of the screenplay. They could read it and bow out, or go ahead with a revised draft and then bow out, which is the way any studio deal works.
“As with most companies that go through a lot of problems, the board had become quite obstreperous,” Warren Hellman says. “In theory Ladd reported to Stanfill, but he also had to bring his productions to the board—and it was always a moronic conversation. We were talking budgets and nobody knew anything about movies.” The one semi-exception was real-life princess Grace Kelly, a board member and former mega-star—but from the world of 1950s movies, which meant she had little grasp of the intricate mechanics of large-scale modernized filmmaking. Nevertheless, the board of directors gave Ladd permission to proceed with the first step.
While Berg notified Universal that Lucasfilm had accepted the deal at Fox under the same terms proposed earlier to them, Lucas attended a screening of American Graffiti at USC. A young man named Joe Viskocil was in the audience, and he remembers that “somebody asked George what his next project was, and he said ‘Star Wars’—and bells started ringing in my head because I realized that this was going to be a big show. I just felt it was going to be something really big.”
FIGHTING WORDS
AUGUST 1973 TO JANUARY 1975
CHAPTER TWO
While the story of Star Wars was still just a few key scenes in his mind’s eye, Lucas’s completed film American Graffiti was released on August 1, 1973—but only after Lucas had arranged additional screenings and strategies to garner support for his movie, all of which ultimately persuaded Universal to finally book it into theaters. Probably to the studio’s great surprise, the seemingly disjointed film coalesced into one of the biggest moneymakers of all time—even more so in light of its profit-to-cost ratio, because the film was made for so little. For many kids, seeing Graffiti was a revelation: It was one of the first films to have humor that was for kids, while Lucas’s and Murch’s sound work made the music so alive that thousands of those same kids ran out and bought their first soundtrack ever. American Graffiti also sparked what has now become an American tradition of looking back on its immediate past—the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s—with fond recollections.
For Lucas the success of Graffiti meant many things, not least of which was the ability to pay off his many personal debts. He was also able to pay the mortgage on a home he’d bought in a burst of optimism just before the movie was released. Located in San Anselmo, a small town in Marin County (just north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge), it wasn’t far from a second building he purchased in January 1974—a one-story Victorian house originally built in 1869, which Lucas began remodeling as offices, with its dilapidated carriage house eventually transformed into editing rooms.
The success of the film also led to various obligations and ceremonies, all of which slowed the transformation of the Star Wars treatment into a rough draft. “When I was writing Star Wars, for the first year, there was an infinite number of distractions,” Lucas says. “Graffiti was a huge hit, plus I was restoring my office at the same time. Building a screening room kept me going for nine, ten months.”
Lucas did not hire a writer to work on The Star Wars, despite the myriad preoccupations. It hadn’t worked before, on THX and Graffiti, so there was no reason to try again. Instead, every day he’d walk up the stairs to his writing room at Medway—“it’s like a little tower”—and plug away on a desk he’d built from three doors. “I grew up in a middle-class Midwest-style American town with the corresponding work ethic,” Lucas explains. “So I sit at my desk for eight hours a day no matter what happens, even if I don’t write anything. It’s a terrible way to live. But I do it; I sit down and I do it. I can’t get out of my chair until five o’clock or five thirty or whenever the news comes on. It’s like being in school. It’s the only way I can force myself to write.
Lucas’s office in his former home in San Anselmo, as it appeared in 2006. Sitting at the desk he’d made from three doors (which is still there), Lucas could stare out of 180-degree wraparound windows while writing and suffering through the first drafts of The Star Wars.
Lucas in the early 70s.
“I work with a hard pencil and regular lined paper,” he adds. “I put a big calendar on my wall. Tuesday I have to be on page twenty-five, Wednesday on page thirty, and so on. And every day I ‘X’ it off—I did those five pages. And if I do my five pages early, I get to quit. Never happens. I’ve always got about one page done by four o’clock in the afternoon, and during that next hour I usually write the rest. Sometimes I’ll get up early and write a lot of pages, but that doesn’t really happen much.”
Like most writers, even when not at his desk, Lucas was working. “A writer is, every waking hour, constantly pondering scenes or structural problems. I carry my little notebook around and I can always sit down and write. That’s the terrible part, because you can’t get away from it. I’ll lay in bed before I go to sleep, just thinking—or I’ll wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, thinking of things, and I’ll come up with ideas and I’ll write them down. Even when I’m driving, I come up with ideas. I come up with a lot of ideas when I’m taking a shower in the morning.”
Perhaps to celebrate the release of American Graffiti, Lucas sat down with a group of friends at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973: (from left to right) Gary Kurtz, USC professor Ken Miura, Mona Skager, Bob Hall, Aggie and Walter Murch, filmmaker Michael Ritchie, Lucas, and Kurtz’s wife, Meredith.
Watching television also became part of the screenwriting process in the latter part of 1973, when Lucas began to collect real footage of flying planes in anticipation of creating his movie’s aerial space battle. “Every time there was a war movie on television, like The Bridges at Toko-Ri [1954], I would watch it—and if there was a dogfight sequence, I would videotape it. Then we would transfer that to 16mm film, and I’d just edit it according to my story of Star Wars. It was really a way of getting a sense of the movement of the spaceships.
“Because one of the key visions I had of the film when I started was of a dogfight in outer space with spaceships—two ships flying through space shooting each other. That was my original idea. I said, ‘I want to make that movie. I want to see that.’ In Star Trek it was always one ship sitting here and another ship sitting there, and they shot these little lasers and one of them disappeared. It wasn’t really a dogfight where they were racing around in space firing.”
CHANGING BUREAUCRATS
On January 10, 1974, Lucas signed a necessary if somewhat surre
al legal agreement with himself, whereby Lucasfilm Ltd. loaned out “George Lucas” as director to “The Star Wars Corporation,” a subsidiary formed to facilitate the upcoming budget and legal dealings with Fox.
Lucas videotaped the aerial battle sequences from films such as Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and The Dam Busters (1954) to create his 16mm film.
Throughout the winter of 1973–1974, Lucas worked on the script, writing and living most of the time alone, as Marcia was often in Los Angeles, where she was editing Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Kurtz was busy trying to get Apocalypse Now off the ground and thinking about developing his own films. In the spring of 1974 Lucas sometimes traveled to Tucson, Arizona, when Marcia was on location cutting the same film. He would sit on the patio, perhaps with a book or two, and write during the day. “I’ve done a lot of reading for this picture. It’s not really research so much as mythology and fantasy are taking over my life. I read everything from John Carter of Mars to The Golden Bough, so obviously all of that influences you in a certain way. I’m trying to make a classic genre picture, a classic space opera—and there are certain concepts that have been developed by writers, primarily Edgar Rice Burroughs, that are traditional, and you keep those traditional aspects about the project.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 5
