Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Brian Jay Jones
Cover design by Lauren Harms
Cover art © Sunset Boulevard / Corbis
Author photograph by Kia Dupree
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ISBN 978-0-316-25745-9
E3-20161031-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Out of Control March 1976
PART I: HOPE 1944–1973 1. Scrawny Little Devil 1944–1962
2. Geeks and Nerds 1962–1966
3. The Right Horse 1967
4. Radicals and Hippies 1967–1971
5. American Graffiti 1971–1973
PART II: EMPIRE 1973–1983 6. Bleeding on the Page 1973–1976
7. “I Have a Bad Feeling About This” 1976–1977
8. Striking Back 1977–1979
9. Darkening Skies 1979–1983
PART III: RETURN 1983–2016 10. Empty Flash 1983–1994
11. A Digital Universe 1994–1999
12. Cynical Optimism 1999–2005
13. Letting Go 2005–2016
Photos
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Brian Jay Jones
Newsletters
For Barb
(The Force is strong with this one.)
Prologue
Out of Control
March 1976
R2-D2 refused to work.
It wasn’t stubbornness on the part of the droid—a trait that would endear the character to millions of Star Wars fans around the world. Rather, as the first day of filming began on Star Wars in the Tunisian desert on the morning of March 22, 1976, R2-D2 wouldn’t work. His batteries were already dead.
The little droid wasn’t the only one with a problem. Several other robots, operated via remote control by crew members standing just out of sight of the movie camera, were also malfunctioning. Some fell over, others never moved at all, while still others had their signals scrambled by Arabic radio broadcasts bouncing off the desert floor, sending them careening wildly out of control across the sand or crashing into one another. “The robots would go bananas, bumping into each other, falling down, breaking,” said Mark Hamill, the sun-washed twenty-four-year-old actor playing hero Luke Skywalker. “It took hours to get them set up again.”1
The movie’s director, a brooding, bearded thirty-one-year-old Californian named George Lucas, simply waited. If a robot worked properly, even for a moment, Lucas would shoot as much footage of it as he possibly could until the droid sputtered to a stop. Other times, he’d have a malfunctioning unit pulled along by invisible wire, until the wire broke or the droid fell over. It didn’t matter anyhow; Lucas planned to fix everything in the editing room. It was where he preferred to be anyway, as opposed to squinting through a film camera in the middle of the desert.
It was the first of what would be eighty-four long, excruciating days filming Star Wars—twenty days severely over-schedule. And the shoot was a disaster almost from the beginning. “I was very depressed about the whole thing,” Lucas said.2
Lucas’s misery was due partly to the fact that he felt he had already lost control of his own film. He laid the blame at the feet of parsimonious executives at 20th Century Fox, who had nickel-and-dimed him every step of the way, denying him the money he needed to ensure that everything worked. But the suits at Fox were skeptical; science fiction, they insisted, was a dead genre, and the necessary props, costumes, and special effects were expensive. As far as the studio was concerned, Lucas could get by on a shoestring budget, and simply fix his robot problems as he went along. “It was purely a case of Fox not putting up the money until it was too late,” seethed Lucas. “Every day we would lose an hour or so due to those robots, and we wouldn’t have lost that time if we’d had another six weeks to finish them and test them and have them working before we started.”3
It wasn’t just the remote-control robots that were giving him trouble. Anthony Daniels, a classically trained, very British actor who’d been cast in the role of the protocol droid C-3PO, was miserable inside his ill-fitting, gleaming gold plastic costume, and unable to see or hear much of anything. With every movement he was poked or cut—“covered in scars and scratches,” he sighed—and when he fell over, as he often did, he could only wait for someone on the crew to notice and help him to his feet.4 Within the first week of filming, Daniels despaired that he would ever complete the movie in one piece. “It was very, very difficult getting things to work,” Lucas said later. “The truth is that the robots didn’t work at all. Threepio works very painfully.… I couldn’t get Artoo to go more than a few feet without running into something.… Everything was a prototype… like, ‘Gee, we’re going to build this—we have no money, but have to try to make this work. But nothing really worked.”5 Lucas vowed he’d never cede control over his films to executives at the studios again. What did they know about filmmaking? “They tell people what to do without reason,” Lucas complained. “Sooner or later, they decided they know more about making movies than directors. Studio heads. You can’t fight them because they’ve got the money.”6
If Star Wars worked out, one thing would have to change for sure: he’d control the money.
Still, there were some things he’d never control, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. The wildly unpredictable weather in Tunisia, for example, wasn’t making production any easier. During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7
And sand, it seemed, got into everything, stinging eyes, abrading skin, and getting into nearly every crack and crevice. Though Lucas kept his Panavision cameras wrapped in plastic sheeting to prevent any damage from wind and sand, a lens from one camera was still nearly rui
ned. He was plagued by equipment problems as well as just plain bad luck. A truck caught fire, damaging several robots. When trucks failed, Lucas would move equipment on the backs of donkeys.
By the end of the first two weeks of filming, Lucas was exhausted. With the constant setbacks caused by bad weather, malfunctioning droids, and ill-fitting costumes, he felt he’d gotten only about two-thirds of what he’d wanted on film—and what he had, he wasn’t happy with. “It kept getting cut down because of all the drama,” said Lucas, “and I didn’t think it’d turned out very well.” He was so upset he even skipped a party he hosted himself to mark the end of the Tunisian shoot, shutting himself into his hotel room to wallow in his own misery. “I was seriously, seriously depressed at that point, because nothing had gone right,” he sighed. “Everything was screwed up. I was desperately unhappy.”8
A little more than a year before it was scheduled to hit theaters, if it ever did, the Star Wars project was a mess, and the movie was going to be terrible.
Lucas was certain of it.
PART I
HOPE
1944–1973
1
Scrawny Little Devil
1944–1962
The victorious underdog—and the more brilliant and unappreciated the better—was a narrative George Lucas would always love. Lucas liked to think there was a triumphant dark horse involved with his ancestors somewhere along their journey, “some criminal or somebody who got thrown out of England or France,” he told an interviewer. But it’s no secret that Lucas enjoys being enigmatic; it’s practically in his blood. “My family came from nowhere,” he once explained. “Nobody knows where we originally came from.”1
As a fourth-generation northern Californian, Lucas could already trace his ancestry back further than most Americans, with the roots of his family tree burrowing down deep into the soil of Modesto, California, after winding through Arkansas and Illinois and Virginia nearly a century before the American Revolution. But “that’s it,” Lucas insisted, going no further. Whether he came from a line of colonial farmers or cobblers or brick masons didn’t matter, and looking back wasn’t his way. “I’m always sort of living for tomorrow, for better or for worse,” he said. “It’s just a personality quirk.”2 There was one thing, however, of which he was certain. “It’s great not to have been born a prince,” Lucas once noted. “I appreciate that. I truly believe in this country, that you can do anything if you apply yourself.”3
Apply yourself. It was the kind of admonition that George Lucas Sr.—Lucas’s small-town Methodist father—could have made. And, waving a finger stridently in his only son’s face, probably had.
George Lucas Sr., as his son later described him, “was a very old-fashioned kind of guy… kind of a classic small-town businessman who you’d see in a movie.”4 As the owner of Modesto’s most successful stationery store—and president of the local Retail Merchants Bureau, no less—George Lucas Sr. was smart, conservative, a pillar of the Modesto community. And he had been working hard—applying himself—practically all his life.
George Walton Lucas Sr. was born in 1913 in Laton, California—then as now little more than a dot on the map just south of Fresno—the only son among the bevy of daughters of Walton and Maud Lucas. Walton, an oil field worker, was also a diabetic, and in 1928, when George Sr. was fifteen, Walton died of complications from the disease—a condition that would leapfrog one generation on its way through to Walton’s famous grandson. Within a year of Walton’s passing, Maud had moved George Sr. and his older sister Eileen twice, first to nearby Fresno, and then more than ninety miles up the San Joaquin Valley to Modesto, where George Sr. would live the rest of his life.
Founded in 1870 among the wheat fields lining the Tuolumne River, Modesto was established as one of the final stops on the Central Pacific Railroad as it wound its way northward from Los Angeles toward the capital at Sacramento. The town forefathers, in fact, had deferentially insisted on naming the new settlement Ralston, after William Ralston, the director of the Central Pacific. Ralston, however, declined to have the town named for him, a touch of humility that allegedly inspired the town’s new designation: Modesto, the Spanish word for modesty.
Despite its name, the little town of Modesto had big ambitions, reflecting California’s can-do attitude as well as its tendency toward immediate gratification. By the time it was formally established in 1884, there were twenty-five buildings on the site, most of them housing businesses whose owners—sensing the ample opportunity that came with living near the railroad—had simply picked up their homes and office buildings and relocated to Modesto from nearby Paradise City or Tuolumne City.
Modesto took its time to become a metropolis—it wouldn’t hit 100,000 residents until the 1980s—but as the town grew, it took its civic pride seriously, and by the early 1900s was boasting of its residents’ well-manicured lawns and colorful rosebushes, as well as its commitment to education and culture. In 1912 its proud residents erected an enormous arch to welcome visitors as they bounced down Ninth Street in their automobiles—a new and exotic invention that no one was quite sure was going to catch on—and passed under the city’s motto in blazing incandescent lights: WATER, WEALTH, CONTENTMENT, HEALTH.5 It was a motto as straightforward as its residents.
By the time George Lucas Sr. arrived in Modesto with his mother and sister in 1929, its population had grown to just slightly under fourteen thousand, sprawled out across a well-organized series of flat grids typical of western towns. As the United States began its slump into the Great Depression, George Sr. split his time between classes at Modesto High School and a job as an apprentice to a mechanic in a typewriter repair shop, already plying a trade at the age of sixteen. In the 1930 census, both Maud and Eileen listed their occupation as “none,” making George the lone and much-needed source of support for his sister and widowed mother.6 Earning a living, then, was a responsibility George Sr. took seriously. There would be no frittering away his time, no goofing off, no daydreaming. George Sr. decided he’d study law and become a lawyer, and applied himself in high school to getting good grades. And yet, at Modesto High School, the serious young man—stiff-backed, with a head of dark, wavy hair and a rail-thin body made for buttoned-up suits—fell in love at first sight with a girl in his history class and immediately informed his mother that he was going to marry her—even if he didn’t actually know her name yet.7
After a bit of prying, George Sr. learned he’d been smitten by Dorothy Bomberger, a young woman who belonged to one of Modesto’s oldest and most prominent families. That their famous son could later declare himself a fourth-generation Californian was due entirely to his pedigree as a Bomberger, a family whose roots in America predated the Declaration of Independence. For generations the Bombergers had been quietly making the investments in real estate that would give their family both wealth and reputation. By the 1900s, various branches of Bombergers owned and managed property across the San Joaquin Valley—and Dorothy’s father, Paul, had additional interests in seed companies and car dealerships—making them one of the valley’s best-known and most prosperous families. The comings and goings of Bombergers would be a regular topic on the society pages of the Modesto Bee and News-Herald.
Dorothy was a dark-eyed and dark-haired beauty, wispy and somewhat fragile, but a good catch—and she and George Sr. were a good-looking, popular, and utterly devoted couple. In their senior year, they were co-starring in the class play, a three-act comedy called Nothing but the Truth,8 and George would serve as class president with Dorothy as his vice president. After graduation, they briefly attended Modesto Business College together, where George joined the Delta Sigma fraternity, while Dorothy continued to be active with the Phi Gamma Girls’ Club.9 Soon, George took a job with Lee Brothers, one of Modesto’s newer but smaller stationery stores, serving customers out of a cramped shop on Tenth Street. To his surprise, he found he actually liked the stationery business. “It was pure dumb luck,” he said later. “I wasn’t even sure
what ‘stationery’ meant.”10 His plans for studying law were abandoned.11
On August 3, 1933, George Sr. and Dorothy were married at the local Methodist Episcopal Church. Given the Bomberger connection, it was hailed as a “wedding of widespread interest” by the local newspaper, which dutifully reported on the planning and mailing of invitations to the ceremony.12 George was twenty, Dorothy eighteen—and the young couple set off on their way with the nation officially in the midst of the Depression. But while Dorothy was educated and well connected, George, with his stiff back up and conservative Methodist hackles raised, refused to permit his wife to work. Working—applying oneself—and supporting a family were a man’s obligation. George would work, then, while Dorothy would stay home and look after the children George was certain were all but inevitable.
Shortly after the wedding the Lucases moved to Fresno, where George had landed a job with H. S. Crocker Co., Inc., one of California’s largest stationery stores. The job paid $75 per week, a respectable sum at a time when a new refrigerator could be had for a hundred dollars.13 But Dorothy missed her family—so in early 1934, after only five months in Fresno, back they went to Modesto, where George found work at Modesto’s chief stationery outfit, the L. M. Morris Company.14
L. M. Morris, initially established by a group of brothers in 1904, was one of the oldest stationery stores in the region. LeRoy Morris had bought the business from his brothers in 1918, renamed it the L. M. Morris Company, and made the store a cornerstone of downtown Modesto, where it would remain at its same I Street address for nearly sixty years. By the time George Sr. began his employment there in 1934, the company was proudly celebrating its thirtieth anniversary.15
Morris specialized in office furniture, typewriters, and adding machines, but over the years it had begun to diversify, adding motion picture cameras and projectors, children’s books and toys, and a gift department its owner boasted was “full of the latest novelties.” As usual, George Sr. applied himself with gusto—“I liked the kind of customer I got to serve,” he explained later—and quickly distinguished himself among Morris’s twelve employees.16 Sure enough, when LeRoy Morris placed a gigantic ad in the Modesto Bee in late 1934, there, just below Morris’s own photo, was a picture of George Sr., staring back at readers with just a hint of a smile.17
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