George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  “I went to marches [in the sixties],” said Lucas, “but I wasn’t an instigator of anything.”65 And yet, with Freiheit, Lucas is clearly and aggressively making a statement. It’s very much a film by a young man who wants to be taken seriously as an artist and insurgent—and to his credit, it sort of works. “He was able to do something that was artistic but also commercial,” noted Kleiser. “It had a lot of slick style to it.”66 In Freiheit, Lucas is working in a more straight-ahead narrative style than in Look at LIFE, using a blue-tinted monochrome to give the film an otherworldly, slightly sinister look. And once again, it’s Lucas’s feel for editing that makes the film pop: as Kleiser waits in the brush for his chance to run for the fence, Lucas holds on the panting Kleiser for almost too long, which makes his failed break for freedom even more excruciating. And as Kleiser sprints, Lucas briefly cuts in a joggling shot from Kleiser’s perspective, making the viewer, for one brief moment, the runner and victim.

  As a political piece, it’s a young Lucas being intentionally provocative, if heavy-handed, from the slow-motion shots of the anguished Kleiser running for the fence, all the way down to a title sequence that solemnly identifies Freiheit as A FILM BY LUCAS. “In the fifties, I was not very aware of the events that were going on around me,” said Lucas. “It wasn’t until Kennedy was killed that I became involved in a lot of things that I hadn’t paid much attention to before.”67 Kleiser recalled Lucas being annoyed by students who romanticized dying in Vietnam in the name of freedom. “George wanted to make a statement about how easy it is to say that, but how in reality people were getting killed.”68 Ultimately, Freiheit’s underlying question—“What price, freedom?”—was one Lucas would explore and struggle with in the decades to follow, both as an artist and as a businessman.

  Inside and outside the classroom, Lucas continued to immerse himself in films by a wide variety of filmmakers. Film school “was a perfect place for me to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of films,” said Lucas. In the days before DVDs or streaming video, a small art film or foreign film “had to come to some art house.” Otherwise “you had to see it at two o’clock in the morning on television, or you could see it in film school.”69 When it came to American directors, Lucas was particularly interested in the films of John Ford and William Wyler, the latter an influential director and cinematographer remembered not only for winning three Academy Awards but also for his inability to relate to actors—a criticism that would later be leveled at Lucas. Godard and Fellini remained Lucas’s foreign gods. He was a particularly big fan of Godard’s latest, the sci-fi film noir dystopian thriller Alphaville, in which the director used modern-day Paris as a stand-in for the futuristic title city. But lately he’d discovered a new idol: Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

  At the encouragement of John Milius, Lucas went to see several Kurosawa films at the La Brea Cinema in Los Angeles, and remembered being “really blown away” by the director’s 1954 film The Seven Samurai. “It really had a huge influence on my life in terms of seeing something that brilliant and something that emotional, and at the same time so exotic,” said Lucas.70 He loved Kurosawa’s style, “so strong and unique,”71 with the horizontal “wipes” to transition between scenes, the rat-a-tat editing, and the dusty, slightly worn look of his sets and costumes. Everything in a Kurosawa movie looked as if it had been used, repaired, then used again—a design aesthetic that Lucas would bring to Star Wars. Lucas also liked that Kurosawa was confident enough in his storytelling to plunk audiences down in the middle of medieval or nineteenth-century Japan without the benefit of backstory. Give audiences a bit of time with the mythology, thought Kurosawa, and the foreign would feel familiar—another conceit Lucas would bring to Star Wars.

  And yet, even with his filmic vocabulary expanding, Lucas would return to the more familiar language of Vorkapich for his third film, Herbie, completed for his Cinema 405 class. This time, instructor Sherwood Omens paired the senior Lucas with junior Paul Golding. Lucas likely grumbled; he was becoming increasingly cranky about the idea of working with others and preferred doing everything himself. He could be easily irritated if he was saddled with crew members who couldn’t keep up with him. “I was really incensed at the democratic process of filmmaking, where we helped the student who couldn’t quite make it,” Lucas said later. “I was into making it a competition, who can get it done first and best. If they couldn’t cut the mustard, they shouldn’t have been there.”72

  Golding, however, would pass the Lucas litmus test; he was an enthusiastic collaborator who also happened to bring to the table the keys to the film school stockroom, thereby ensuring that only he and Lucas had access to the highly coveted Arriflex camera.73 That was the sort of go-getting defiance Lucas could rally behind, and he and Golding—who also prided himself on his editing abilities—would collaborate on several more films at USC.

  After the politics of both Look at LIFE and Freiheit, Herbie is positively mellow: gorgeous black-and-white shots of nighttime lights reflected in the curves of cars—finally, Lucas could feature a car!—as the smooth jazz of the Miles Davis Quintet, playing “Basin Street Blues,” fills the sound track. The name Herbie, in fact, comes from pianist Herbie Hancock, who Lucas and Golding mistakenly thought was playing piano on the piece. (It was actually Hancock’s predecessor in the quintet, Victor Feldman.) Like Vorkapich’s “pictorial fantasies,” Herbie enjambs unrelated images and music to create an entirely new yet somehow cohesive piece. It’s film jazz, in every sense—and as the final note of music fades, the lone on-screen credit quietly states that THESE MOMENTS OF REFLECTION HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAUL GOLDING AND GEORGE LUCAS.

  After his first three films, it was becoming impossible for Lucas to keep a low profile, despite his best efforts. “George was always quiet,” said Walter Murch. “He wasn’t one of the people who would always be speaking out in class. He tended to keep his own counsel and to express himself through his films.”74 But now, after his first short productions, “he was recognized as being the star.”75 As Matthew Robbins remembered, Lucas was “highly regarded by all the students and a source of puzzlement to much of the faculty.”76

  Regardless of what the faculty may have thought of the tight-lipped young man, his films got their attention—and it was clear he was also becoming one of USC’s most dexterous editors. While other students griped and complained about bad acting, absent crew members, unreliable equipment, or lack of adequate time to get the shots they wanted, Lucas worked quickly and without complaint; he’d cover up any defects, shortages, or missing shots in the editing room.

  It’s little wonder that Lucas would be at home both in the editing room and on editing equipment. The USC editing room looked like an auto shop class, with high ceilings, buzzing overhead lights, graffiti-covered walls, and equipment taking up most of the floor space. And the Moviola editing machines were Lucas’s kind of contraption, as comfortable for him as sliding behind the wheel of a car, with foot pedals to control the speed of the film, a hand brake, a variable motor switch, and a viewing screen the size of a rearview mirror. Small motors whirred as students spooled film back and forth; discarded snippets of film were simply dropped to the floor to be swept up later. It became as familiar as working on his own car at the Foreign Auto Service. Plus, knowing his way around engines as he did, Lucas didn’t need long to figure out how to fix the notoriously unreliable Moviolas, which broke down with frustrating regularity.

  Some envious members of the DKA fraternity regarded Lucas as little more than a showboat and a dilettante, but DKA president Howard Kazanjian stuck by Lucas and even threatened to resign if Lucas wasn’t voted in. It was an act of friendship and loyalty that Lucas would reward years later, when Kazanjian became a vice president of Lucas’s own company, as well as his go-to producer for films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi. Despite his official status with DKA, though, Lucas’s only real involvement with the fraternity was using it as a source of fuel for his marathon wor
k sessions, as he continued to ransack the vending machines and snack bar for cookies and Cokes.

  Lucas reached the Cinema 480 class in the final semester of his senior year. Here, instructor Douglas Cox would break the class into small crews to complete a ten-minute film, with three-track synchronized sound, in a period of ten weeks. The problem with working in an assigned crew meant, as classmate Don Glut noted testily, “not all of us were granted the esteemed privilege of actually directing a project.”77 Lucas, however, would both write and direct his senior project, heading up a crew that would eventually swell to fourteen, some of whom would receive on-screen credit, some of whom wouldn’t. They’d all be working together closely, sure, but ultimately they’d be doing it Lucas’s way.

  Cox also imposed some terms and conditions on the project, most of which Lucas shrugged off or disregarded entirely. Teams could film in either color or black and white, for instance, but if they chose color, they’d receive only half the amount of film. “They discouraged us from shooting color,” said Lucas, “because it takes so long to get it developed.”78 Challenge accepted: Lucas would shoot in color. Cox also required teams to shoot their films close to campus; Lucas would ignore that one altogether and take his team out to a location eighty miles away. The rules were of no concern to him. “I broke them all—all of us did,” said Lucas. “Whenever I broke the rules, I made a good film, so there wasn’t much the faculty could do about it.”79

  The rule breaking even extended to a bit of pilfering, as well as some breaking and entering. With only a limited amount of time and equipment, competition was fierce for the best cameras and editing machines. Lucas, said Matthew Robbins, “was very resourceful. He always would find a way to get what he needed in terms of equipment and bodies to put together a crew.”80 Paul Golding had hoarded the Arriflex for Lucas to use on Herbie; this time it was John Milius, always game for a bit of delinquency, who broke into the equipment room and “borrowed” for Lucas the Éclair NPR camera that Lucas loved. “He really wanted to use that camera,” said Milius, “and I stole it, and hid it in my car, and slept in my car with the camera for a week while we used it.”81 And once it came time to edit, Lucas didn’t want to limit his use of the equipment to the building’s regular hours either. “We’d shimmy up the drain spout, cross over the roof, jump down into the patio, and then break into the editing rooms so we could work all weekend,” said Lucas.82

  For his film, Lucas would combine two of his passions, one old—racing—and one new. “Cinéma vérité was just coming in at that point,” said Lucas. “We studied that a lot.”83 Cinéma vérité (French for “truth cinema”) was a new kind of documentary filmmaking in which the camera observed real people, in uncontrolled situations, with no preconceived notions or scripted outcomes. At its purest, it involved little more than using a camera and sound-recording equipment to shoot and then present raw, nearly unedited footage. Most of it, however, had a little more flash than that—and Lucas was strongly influenced by the films coming out of the French unit of the National Film Board of Canada, which produced cinéma vérité with verve and attitude.

  Lucas was particularly fond of director Jean-Claude Labrecque’s 1965 film 60 Cycles, following bicyclists in the Tour de St. Laurent as they wound their way through 1,500 miles of Canadian countryside to the music of Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Lucas “flipped out over it,” said classmate Charley Lippincott, who had procured the film from the Canadian consulate.84 Part documentary, part slice of life, part experimental film, at sixteen minutes it did all the things that Lucas wanted to do with his 480 film: long shots, aerial shots, crowds, and—best of all, in the spirit of genuine cinéma vérité—no actors. Lucas couldn’t get enough of it, borrowing it from Lippincott and watching it over and over again until Lippincott finally had to return it, long overdue, to the impatient Canadians.

  For his own bit of flashy cinéma vérité, then, Lucas took his crew to Willow Springs Race Track in Rosamond to film driver Peter Brock as he put his yellow Lotus 23 through its paces. Lucas captured it all from carefully chosen angles; sometimes the car seems incidental, glimpsed only as it speeds behind a series of signs, in an aerial shot, or seen off in the distance, where the chirp of birds is almost louder than the roar of the engine. Other times, Lucas puts the camera in the car for Brock’s perspective from behind the wheel, one eye on the speedometer, or turns the camera on Brock as he works the stick shift, or—in one glorious, unscripted moment—grimaces as he cranks the engine after the Lotus spins out and stalls. Finally, Lucas closes in on the face of a stopwatch as a member of the pit crew snaps it to a stop with an audible mechanical click, its hands frozen on Brock’s best lap time: 1:42.08. Lucas would use it as the title of his film.

  Lucas called 1:42.08 a “visual tone poem,”85 reflecting his interest in cars as well as “the visual impact of a person going against the clock”—a theme he would take up later in THX 1138.86 At its heart, it’s also about man and technology—another theme Lucas would explore—and our efforts to master technology without letting it master us first… even if we do spin out once or twice. To Lucas’s surprise, too, he found he had enjoyed working with a crew, and was proud they had brought their project in right on time. “We had only ten weeks to make the film, from the point that you start the script to the point where you actually have to have print,” he said. “For students, that’s quite an achievement.”87 And that wasn’t all that happened out at Willow Springs. While there, Lucas had run into another film crew, an advance team for the racing film Grand Prix, trailing along after star James Garner as he trained with a stunt driver. With only a minimal amount of sweet-talking, Lucas landed a job as a camera operator on the film’s second unit, picking up a few bucks, and his first professional Hollywood credits, for a few additional days’ work at the track.

  In the end, 1:42.08 might have been a group effort, but Lucas had made his mark by breaking the rules and doing it his way. Again. The film didn’t wow Lucas’s professors quite as much as his previous work, but he was in good shape; instructor Douglas Cox was a fan of art films—he would clash with Glut over making pulpy monster movies like Wrath of the Sun Demon—and appreciated what Lucas was trying to do.88 Cinéma vérité aside, 1:42.08 shows Lucas finding his own style as a director, content to let a well-placed camera almost casually catch the action. And Lucas is almost too creative an editor to ever really do pure cinéma vérité; he can’t resist using a rapid series of flickering cuts to make Brock’s Lotus seem to move even faster, or inserting a brief shot of a sign advertising a restaurant named George & Aggie’s—a cameo so coy that if you blink, you’ll miss it. And in his first true sound film, Lucas already takes great pleasure in seat-rumbling audio as Brock’s Lotus screams by again and again like one of Star Wars’ TIE fighters.

  Lucas graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in cinema on August 6, 1966, and he would always have warm feelings toward USC. “I discovered my talent here,” he said during a ceremony at the university in 2006.89 His future, however, was uncertain. “I assumed I would make the kind of avant-garde films that were being made in San Francisco at that time,” he recalled. “You can’t make a living making those films, so I figured I’d also work as a documentary cameraman. That’s really what I wanted to do anyway. I would be a documentary cameraman for my livelihood, and make movies on the side. That was going to be my life.”90 Or so he thought.

  Like most film school graduates, Lucas found the doors of mainstream movie studios closed to him. “It was impossible to break into the industry in any of the guilds or unions,” said Gary Kurtz, who had graduated from USC in 1962 and by 1966 was still working on low-budget films like Beach Ball. “A lot of film school graduates just got tired of that process and did other things.… [T]hey went into educational or documentary films, which weren’t so rigidly unionized.”91

  The military loomed as well. As an unemployed college graduate, Lucas was eligible for the draft, with a very rea
l possibility of being sent to Vietnam. Lucas considered himself an activist—“I was angry at the time, getting involved in all the causes,” he said—and was opposed to the war, but his friends told him that with his degree and skill set, he could likely be an officer in the air force photography unit. Lucas found the idea creatively intriguing. Unlike his classmate John Milius, Lucas saw nothing romantic in the military or war, but he did have to admit that Vietnam had filmic possibilities; if he went to war and survived, the stories of what he saw and did there would make a hell of a film. “I was going to spend two years somewhere slogging around in the mud,” he figured, “hoping to get assigned to something reasonable, and using the experience to write about in later years.” Still, he admitted: “I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about going in the first place. I was just doing it out of desperation.”92

  Enthusiastic or desperate, it never happened. Lucas reported for his induction physical, where, to his utter astonishment, he was rated 4-F; he had failed his physical. Doctors had found diabetes, the same disease that had killed his grandfather Walton. Lucas was put on Orinase and would have to manage his disease with medication for the rest of his life. That also meant no drugs or alcohol, a condition he could easily handle; his clean-cut image would now be true out of necessity. But diabetes also meant giving up the chocolate chip cookies, Hershey bars, and Cokes that he had lived on for pretty much the last ten years. That would be tougher.

  With any chance of a military career now off the table, Lucas let his hair grow out—which for him meant it tended to pile up higher on his head rather than trail down his back. He also grew a beard, a dark and neatly trimmed Vandyke that surrounded his mouth. While he looked more beatnik than hippie, he also looked cool—even with his ears still sticking straight out from his head. Lucas was finding his look.