George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  Despite that kind of particularly rocky introduction, Lucas and the film students were a tight group, all roughly the same age, and with the same passion for film. Early on they were committed to helping one another with their films—lending a hand with editing, shooting, acting as extras, or just carrying equipment—no matter what the genre or subject matter. And their specific interests could vary widely. Lucas liked the esoteric art films he’d seen at Canyon Cinema, Murch adored the films of the French New Wave, while another classmate, Don Glut, couldn’t get enough of monsters and superheroes. “Even though I was going into completely abstract filmmaking, I got involved in all kinds of filmmaking,” said Lucas. “And the great thing about being in that film school was there were filmmakers that were interested in comic books, there were filmmakers that were interested in Godard, there were filmmakers that were interested in John Ford, and there were filmmakers that were interested in commercials and surfing movies. And we all got along together.”38 As Caleb Deschanel put it, “We really felt like we were part of a certain select group going in to make movies.”39

  They also felt they were better filmmakers than their crosstown competition at UCLA—a good-natured rivalry that continues to this day. The perception, explained UCLA alum Francis Ford Coppola, was that USC produced documentarians, filmmakers proficient in the technical side of filmmaking, while UCLA’s students were better suited for producing the mainstream “fiction film.”40 That, snorted Walter Murch in mock disdain, was nonsense. “We all knew each other,” said Murch. “UCLA accused us of being soulless sellouts to technology, and we accused them of being drugged-crazed narcissists incapable of telling a story or wielding a camera.”41 Each took great pride in attending movie screenings and hooting at or shouting down films produced at the rival school.

  Like all new students, Lucas was required to live on campus, and was placed in Touton Hall, a worn-out all-male high-rise dormitory in the middle of campus, with no cafeteria. To make things worse, Lucas—who had always had a bedroom to himself—had to share his cracker-box-sized dorm room with a roommate, in this case a genial kid from Los Angeles named Randy Epstein. Lucas got along with Epstein fine, but he vowed to escape from the dorms as soon as he could. In the meantime, he wasn’t planning on spending much time there anyway, preferring to buy his lunches and dinners from the candy machines at the Delta Kappa Alpha cinematography fraternity, and socializing over at the film school’s central patio, where a circle of picnic tables surrounded a tired-looking banana tree. Here, said Milius, he and Lucas “would sit on the grass and try to hustle the girls as they went by.”42 They had little luck. “The girls from the dorms all gave a wide berth to film students, because they were supposed to be weird,” said Lucas.43

  And yet Lucas was weird, even among the film students. He had stopped dressing like a greaser and abandoned the duck’s ass hairstyle, but now he just looked small and somewhat nebbishy in a silver-threaded sports jacket that appeared to be two sizes too large. When he added his thick-rimmed glasses, some thought he looked like a diminutive Buddy Holly. To Don Glut, he was even “conservative looking… like a young businessman.”44 Others thought Lucas looked stuck halfway between hipster and dude, his mistaken version of Los Angeles cool. And he sounded different, too, with a high-pitched, somewhat reedy voice that could arc even higher when he was excited or annoyed. “Just like Kermit the Frog,” snickered Epstein.45

  It is understandable, then, that Lucas was hoping to keep a somewhat low profile at USC. He’d come to work, not to worry about his wardrobe. Like many transfer students, Lucas had to fill his schedule with courses that met USC’s basic requirements for graduation, taking classes such as English, history, and astronomy. In his first semester, his only film classes were a history of film and a history of animation. But it was enough. “Within one semester, I was completely hooked,”46 said Lucas—though he later admitted that he hadn’t known exactly what cinematography was until he actually started taking classes. “I discovered the school of cinema was really about making movies. I thought this was insane. I didn’t know that you could go to college to learn how to make movies.”47

  Unlike rival film school UCLA, where students were almost immediately given a camera and permitted to begin making films, USC immersed its students in all the details of filmmaking first. “They didn’t teach you a craft, but taught you all the crafts,” said Bob Dalva, a Lucas classmate and later an Oscar-nominated film editor. “You learned how to shoot, you learned how to expose [film], you certainly learned how to edit.”48 In other classes, students would watch movies and talk about them—or, in teacher Arthur Knight’s class, the well-connected Knight would bring in noted directors like David Lean, who discussed his film Doctor Zhivago. Lucas would later compare much of his film school experience to watching a movie on DVD while listening to the various commentary tracks. It was no wonder students in other departments eyed the film students with such disdain. “At the time, studying film was kind of like studying basket weaving,” said Randal Kleiser. “Everyone on campus thought we were just trying to get easy A’s by watching movies.”49

  For Lucas, it actually wasn’t all that easy. “I had to take my film writing classes, but I suffered through them,” he said. “I had to go into the drama department and do drama and stage work, but I hated getting up and acting. I really wanted to be in a real situation with a camera on my shoulder following the action. That was exciting to me.”50 Lucas, like his classmates, was itching to make a film—but they would all have to run the gauntlet of prerequisites first, making it through writing, editing, sound, lighting, even film criticism, before they could begin making their own movies. Eventually they’d make it to Mecca: a 480-level class called Production Workshop, where they’d at last be permitted to make films, though with strict rules on budgets, schedules, locations, and type of film. “The 480,” then as now, was what it was all about.

  Lucas, however, would make his mark well before that—and despite his best efforts to remain under the radar, he’d almost immediately become one of USC’s rising stars before he ever found his way into a film production class. “All the other guys were going around saying, ‘Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I was in a production class,’” said Lucas.51 But he wasn’t inclined to wait; he had already decided that the moment someone dropped a roll of film in his hands, he was going to make a movie, no matter what the assignment might be.

  The opportunity came in his first-year animation class—actually Animation 448—where instructor Herb Kosower gave each student one minute of film for the animation camera and asked that they make a short movie to demonstrate a basic grasp of the equipment. “It was a test,” Lucas recalled. “You had certain requirements that you had to do. You had to make it [the camera] go up and had to make it go down, and then the teacher would look at it and say, ‘Oh yes, you maneuvered this machine to do these things.’”52 While most students diligently put together short stop-action clips or brief hand-drawn cartoons, Lucas had something very different in mind.

  In his short time at USC, Lucas had already become a fan of the work of the Serbian director and montagist Slavko Vorkapich, a former dean of the USC film school who had also been a colleague of the groundbreaking Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Like Eisenstein, Vorkapich preferred psychological impact over straight-ahead narrative, creating complex montages from seemingly random and unrelated images and sounds, some of which conveyed a story while others concentrated more on mood. Lucas, already engrossed by the esoteric films at Canyon Cinema, was captivated, and watched the Serbian’s films again and again. “Vorkapich’s influence was everywhere at the school,” said Lucas. “We focused a lot on filmic expression, filmic grammar. I was not into storytelling.”53

  Vorkapich’s work would have a strong influence on Lucas’s student films. The Serbian excelled at “pictorial fantasies” like the 1941 Moods of the Sea, in which waves crash into rocks, gulls take flight, and seals dive and frolic over the music of Felix Me
ndelssohn. The same year also saw the release of Vorkapich’s Forest Murmurs, eight minutes of bears, trees, mountains, lakes, and chipmunks, all seemingly leaping, waving, and gushing in odd synchronicity with the music of Richard Wagner. But even his more story-oriented pieces didn’t look like anything else; his 1928 film Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra intercut footage of live actors with miniature sets—most of which were cut from cardboard—and a bit of shadow puppetry to tell the story of an aspiring actor consigned to roles as an extra, and referred to by the uncaring Hollywood machine only by an impersonal number stamped on his forehead.

  Lucas responded strongly not only to Vorkapich’s medium but also to his message: he could already relate to the filmmaker’s disdain for the Hollywood system, and the hero with the number-as-name, straining against a passionless society, was a device Lucas connected with strongly enough to borrow later for THX 1138. But at USC, Lucas would look to Vorkapich for inspiration for his one-minute film, searching through issues of Look and Life magazines for images he might sweep the animation camera over and across, up and down, back and forth—complying with instructor Herb Kosower’s assignment, certainly, but far beyond what Kosower, or anyone else, could have expected.

  Following the opening title card reading LOOK AT LIFE, Lucas made his intentions immediately clear with his first on-screen credit. This was no student assignment; it was A SHORT FILM BY GEORGE LUCAS. Furthermore, Lucas had chosen to set his film to music—in open defiance of Kosower’s instructions—selecting Antônio Carlos Jobim’s furious percussion piece “A Felicidade-Batucada” from the sound track of the 1959 film Black Orpheus. Over the next fifty-five seconds, in perfect sync with an explosion of drums and other percussion instruments, Lucas barraged viewers with a machine-gun fire of images hurtling across the screen one after another. The images are mostly of unrest and disorder: Race riots. Police dogs attacking protesters. Gesturing politicians. Dead bodies.

  For a moment, the whoosh of images of protesters and riots gives way to the word LOVE, followed by couples kissing and young women dancing. Images seem to throb and pulse with the rhythm of the drums—a page right out of Vorkapich’s book—until Lucas finally pulls slowly back from a photo of a young man with his hands up, blood streaming from his nose, as a preacher loudly quotes from Proverbs: “Hate stirreth up strife / While love covereth all sins.” Lucas ends on an equivocal downbeat, with a clipping reading ANYONE FOR SURVIVAL, which fades first into END and then trails off into a lone question mark, which slowly recedes into a blur. Finis.

  Even fifty years later, Look at LIFE is an impressive debut: aggressive, political, and utterly confident. “As soon as I made my first film, I thought, ‘Hey, I’m good at this. I know how to do this,’” said Lucas. “From then on, I’ve never questioned it.”54 Even in his first sixty seconds of film, Lucas’s talent for astute and clever editing is on full display: he cuts from one figure’s upward-pointing finger immediately to another’s waving hand; moments later, he follows a photo of a kissing couple with a still of Dracula sinking his teeth into a woman’s neck. At other times, Lucas gives the illusion of movement by panning his camera quickly across a photo of fleeing protesters or of a young woman dancing. “[With this film] I was introduced to film editing—the whole concept of editing,” said Lucas, “and I think ultimately that film editing was where my real talent was.”55

  His animation class was stunned. “It completely energized the class just looking at this thing,” said Murch. “Nobody expected anything like this.… Everyone turned around and said, ‘Who did that?’ And it was George.”56 Lucas was suddenly the Boy Wonder. “Nobody there, including all the teachers, had ever seen anything like it,” he recalled. “It made my mark in the department. That was when I suddenly developed a lot more friendships, and the instructors said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a live one here.’”57 It was the first time, too, said Murch, when “we saw that spark that George had that nobody else had in quite the same way.”58

  Lucas finished his first year at USC in triumph, but the work had taken a toll on his health; he came down with mononucleosis. It probably hadn’t helped that most of his meals still came from the DKA vending machines and snack bar, but it’s unlikely he had contracted mono in the usual way college students do. “George was chasing girls,” said Milius cheekily. “He didn’t catch them, but he was chasing them.”59 While the USC Mafia may have tittered over Lucas’s coming down with the so-called kissing disease, they all knew it was stress, and not smooching, that had worn their young friend out.

  With his first year behind him, Lucas could finally abandon dorm life, and he literally headed for the hills, renting a three-story, two-bedroom wood-frame house at 9803 Portola Drive, in the hills of Benedict Canyon, about a half-hour drive from USC. The place was low-rent in every sense of the word, perched at the top of a steep set of concrete steps poured into the hillside, with cramped bedrooms, closet-sized bathrooms, and a top-floor bedroom accessible only by an outside ladder. Lucas’s father grudgingly agreed to pay the $80 monthly rent—and Lucas, feeling slightly guilty, eventually decided to bring in Randal Kleiser as his roommate, thereby splitting the costs and reducing his father’s out-of-pocket expenses.

  Kleiser was a good influence on Lucas—clean-cut, self-effacing, outgoing, and inclined to bring Lucas into social situations, whether Lucas liked it or not. Kleiser, in fact, made Lucas a founding member of what he dubbed the Clean Cut Cinema Club, also bringing in Don Glut, former Lucas roommate Randy Epstein, and a young man named Chris Lewis—the son of Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress Loretta Young—as the club’s first members. While it was set up mostly as a support group for talking about and working on one another’s film projects—“George’s relationship with his friends was more about making films,” Lucas’s first wife would later remark—it was still the most outgoing Lucas had been… well, pretty much ever.60

  Still, Kleiser wasn’t going to be able to change Lucas too much. Despite his best efforts, Kleiser found that Lucas preferred shutting himself in his top-floor bedroom, sitting at the drawing board, planning his films, and sketching out ideas. “I would always try to go out to parties and to clubs and stuff,” said Kleiser, “and George would usually stay upstairs in his room,” drawing “these little star troopers.” But for Lucas, that was even better than partying. “I’d be working all day, all night, living on chocolate bars and coffee,” said Lucas. “It was a great life.”61

  Even as drugs were becoming more prevalent on college campuses, chocolate bars and coffee—as well as chocolate chip cookies and Coca-Cola—would be the worst junk Lucas put into his body. “I had all that young enthusiasm, and I was too busy to get into drugs,” he said. “After a while, I could see it was a bad idea anyway.”62 For Lucas, movies, not marijuana, were his addiction, and if he had a moment to spare, he—and most of his film school friends, actually—thought the films of Akira Kurosawa and George Cukor provided the best kind of high. “We were passionate about movies.… It was like an addiction,” he said. “We were always scrambling to get our next fix, to get a little film in the camera and shoot something.”63

  Lucas was even working on projects that went beyond those assigned in class; during his senior year, he, Kleiser, and Lewis would form their own production company, Sunrise Productions, “with offices on Sunset Boulevard,” Kleiser stressed—and in the spirit of the cinéastes they imagined themselves to be, Kleiser made up “snappier stage names” for himself and Lucas. “I was ‘Randal Jon,’” said Kleiser, “and he was ‘Lucas Beaumont.’”64 Sunrise Productions would produce exactly one short film, Five, Four, Three—the title was a self-aware nod to the countdown seen at the front end of a film—a “mockumentary” on the making of a satirical teen beach movie called Orgy Beach Party. Lucas shot in a documentary style, following Kleiser around as he rescued his bikini-clad girlfriend from Don Glut’s monster, while on the sound track, studio executives hooted at the film. It was self-referential and self-deprecating, and never comp
leted.

  Lucas began his senior year in the autumn of 1965. With most of the preliminary requirements out of the way, he could at last immerse himself entirely in film-related classes. Finally, he could enroll in Cinema 310—a film production class with the arty name “The Language of Film”—where he would be able to make real films, using real film equipment, rather than hijacking an animation camera as he had with Look at LIFE. Students were permitted to assemble small teams to serve as their film crews, and Lucas—already determined to do as much of the work himself as he could—looked no further than the Clean Cut Cinema Club, tapping Kleiser and Lewis to perform mostly as actors and equipment managers.

  Lucas’s Cinema 310 film was a three-minute Cold War thriller cum political statement called Freiheit, the German word for “freedom.” Filmed entirely in Malibu Canyon, Freiheit starred Kleiser—in shirtsleeves and loafers, necktie askew, glasses slightly crooked—as a terrified young man being chased by unseen pursuers as he makes his way toward the line of fence separating communist East Germany from democratic West Germany. With the border and freedom in sight, Kleiser’s student sprints across an open space, only to be cut down agonizingly by machine-gun fire within feet of his destination. As a voice-over oozes platitudes—“Freedom’s a thing you have to deserve,” says one voice. “You have to work for it”—Kleiser makes one last lunge for the fence before being brought down by another hail of bullets. As the credits roll, Chris Lewis, decked out like a Soviet soldier, stands over the fallen Kleiser, weapon in hand. “Of course freedom’s worth dying for,” intones an off-screen voice. “Because without freedom, we’re dead.”