George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  Making things even tougher, Lucas was still working full-time for Verna Fields, sorting and editing footage of President Johnson for Journey to the Pacific during the day before returning to his own film at night. The pace was exhausting; Fields would often catch Lucas asleep at his Moviola, head down, as film slowly unspooled onto the floor. At night, he often barely had the strength to carry the movie camera, opting instead to cradle it in his arms rather than perching it on his shoulder. Much of the time he would leave the camerawork to Zimmerman, preferring to direct from one side. The three-day shoot was going to be the easy part anyway; Lucas would be doing the real work on his film all by himself, in the editing room, where he would add optical effects, on-screen chroma key, and an interesting, aggressive sound track. With filming complete, an exhausted Lucas took his film cans over to Fields’s place, where he planned to spend the next ten weeks editing the film on her Moviolas at night.

  With filming on THX complete—though there were still weeks of editing to be done—Lucas turned to his next project, anyone lived in a pretty [how] town, an arty six-minute film inspired by the e. e. cummings poem of the same name. For the first time, Lucas had full-color 35 millimeter Cinemascope at his disposal, though it hadn’t been easy. “On this one, we weren’t even allowed to shoot in color,” Lucas said. “It was a five-week project and they said we couldn’t possibly do color in five weeks because it took almost a week just to get the dailies back.” But Lucas decided to do it anyway, working again with Paul Golding, his collaborator on Herbie, and a good-sized crew, including several actors, with costumes and props. Lucas shot the film over twelve days—nine more than it had taken to shoot THX—on a budget of only $40, and finished the film in the five-week deadline. “We were one of the only crews to finish,” Lucas said, though he admitted he and his team had received a dressing-down at the hands of instructor Douglas Cox for shooting in color after he had advised against it.22

  Lucas continued to edit THX late into the evenings, paying particular attention to the way the film sounded. He and Walter Murch—who found editing sound “intoxicating”—had talked about the importance of sound often, and both knew that the right sound track could transform a film into an experience.23 They had seen it firsthand at USC, where the screening room was situated in such a way that sound would funnel down the hallway and out onto the open patio—and “when there was a really interesting-sounding film,” Lucas explained, “the whole department would come rushing in to see what it was.”24 Lucas, then, would always want the sound and music in his movies to be as clear and immersive as possible—a campaign he would deftly wage through his entire career, not only choosing the dynamic conductor John Williams to score his films but also successfully advocating for theater sound systems with better speakers and acoustics.

  As Lucas hunched over the Moviola in Fields’s editing room—culling through footage of Lyndon Johnson during the day, then spooling THX 1138 4EB back and forth all night—he found himself talking more and more easily with Marcia. Their casual chatter was still mostly about films, but Lucas liked that she could talk about filmmaking with the same excitement, the same appreciation for the technical side of things, that he could. Until Marcia, the few women Lucas had dated in college were mostly into what he thought were “a lot of dumb things.”25 Here was someone who wanted to talk story lines and film mechanics, and who also shared his disdain for the Hollywood system even as she was trying to work her way up through it. She was smart and easy to talk to—so Lucas finally summoned the nerve to ask her out. Sort of.

  “It wasn’t really a date,” Lucas said of their outing to the AFI headquarters in Beverly Hills to watch a film by a mutual friend. “But that was the first time we were ever alone together.” There were more conversations in their apartments, followed by more movies, and suddenly, before either quite realized it, they were dating. “Marcia and I got along real well,” said Lucas plainly. For her part, Marcia was attracted to his drive and intensity, but she also found him surprisingly “cute and funny and silly.”26

  They seemed an unlikely couple. Whereas Lucas was serious and brooding, Marcia, said classmate Richard Walter, “was very bright and upbeat. Just the loveliest woman you ever saw in your life.”27 Milius, never one to mince words, thought Lucas was clearly outclassed. “We all wondered how little George got this great looking girl,” Milius snorted, though he thought he knew the answer: Marcia was “smart, too, obsessed with films.” And, he added impishly, “she was a better editor than he was.”28 Golding, however, thought they looked great together. “They’re both so little,” he said matter-of-factly.29

  Lucas’s next student film was an ambitious black-and-white documentary spotlighting Los Angeles radio personality Bob Hudson, a blowhard of a deejay who called himself “the Emperor.” Lucas, who had spent most of his teens listening to deejays chatter as he cruised Modesto, had wanted to make a documentary about a radio personality for some time. “People develop this relationship with people on the radio,” said Lucas. “They think of them as [being] one way and they create a sort of ambiance about themselves. People get very close to the people on the radio except, of course, they’re not close at all.”30 He had initially wanted to make a film about the enigmatic Wolfman Jack—who in 1967 was burning up American airwaves with 250,000 watts from Tijuana radio station XERB behind him—“but I didn’t know where he was,” said Lucas.31 Hudson, then, had been a happy accident. “[George and I] were both listening to the Emperor Hudson radio show at the time,” said Paul Golding, “and we both tried to call each other at the exact same time that we were listening to his show because we both knew that we had to make a film about this guy.”32

  Lucas and Golding regrouped with their small team from pretty [how] town for their documentary, which was originally to have been ten minutes long, except that Lucas and Golding were “rather ambitious,” and envisioned the film as a kind of half-hour television show, complete with commercials.33 Lucas badgered their instructors for more film, getting into several loud arguments before he succeeded in prying loose enough film to shoot additional footage, on the condition that the final project be edited down to no more than ten minutes. “I got used to shooting a ton of material and making a movie out of it in the editing room,” said Lucas.34 He had no intention of complying with the demand that he limit the film to ten minutes.

  Lucas would shoot The Emperor throughout most of March and April 1967, filming Hudson as he ranted on the air and over the phone, and even getting him to sit for interviews. “He had no idea what was going to happen with us being in his studio,” said Golding, “and he didn’t want anyone in there screwing up his radio show.”35 Hudson eventually came to trust and enjoy Lucas and his film crew, even taking part in an on-screen gag in which Hudson emerges from his car flanked by jackbooted bodyguards played by Lucas and Golding in Hitchcock-style cameos. When they weren’t trailing along after Hudson, Lucas shot fake ads that gave off a whiff of Mad magazine and an even more distinctive scent of pot, including an ad for a Camaro that turns out to be a rhinoceros instead of a car, and bananas that could be smoked—the latter featuring Milius playing a Mexican bandito with smirking relish.

  It was a good experience for everyone involved. “It was filmmaking at its purest,” recalled Golding. “We all worked together wonderfully and we were all very open to each other’s ideas.”36 Milius, too, would always regard The Emperor as one of Lucas’s defining films. “He was a great graphic kind of artist in a way,” said Milius. “He had a definite kind of visual orientation towards things… a great sense of what he wanted to do, you know, and he did unusual things.”37 Indeed, one of The Emperor’s most unusual and jarring moments comes halfway through the film, when the credits begin to roll, seeming to mark the end of the movie. It was actually a fake-out aimed at naysaying USC instructors, making it appear as if Lucas had complied with their demands to end the movie after ten minutes. At the film’s first screening, recalled Golding, “you could hear this wave o
f sadness and disappointment in the crowd, because everyone knew… about the battles that we had been fighting with the school to shoot this, and they had thought that we had caved in on the school’s demands.” When the audience realized that the film continued for another twelve minutes after the credits, the theater erupted with excitement. “Every minute of it past those titles,” said Golding puckishly, “was our deliberate attack on the facility.”38 Lucas soaked in the applause with satisfaction. He’d been right. Again.

  That spring, Marcia moved in with Lucas in his hilltop apartment on Portola. Friends scratched their heads; the two of them seemed so unalike. But both Lucas and Marcia thought that was exactly what made them perfect for each other. “I always felt I was an optimist because I’m extroverted, and I always thought that George was more introverted, quiet, and pessimistic,” said Marcia. Lucas was typically inscrutable. “Marcia and I are very different and also very much alike,” he said. If pressed, he also had to admit he liked that she made him dinner every night. When Lucas’s parents saw the two of them together, they could tell by the relative ease with which he acted around her that she was the one. Cementing the deal in the minds of many Lucas family members, Lucas confessed to his brother-in-law, “Marcia is the only person I’ve ever known who can make me raise my voice.”39 Coming from the low-key Lucas, that was high praise indeed.

  In the weeks after the release of The Emperor, Lucas finally completed work on THX 1138 EB. He was pleased with it—“I didn’t expect it to turn out so well,” he admitted—and had worked hard to make the film a senses-swamping experience.40 Visually, Lucas had filled the screen with plenty of high-tech tricks: images are distorted or streaked with static, like the flicker of a barely tuned-in television channel; numbers run down the sides and across the bottom of the screen, giving the viewer a disorienting feeling of watching everything on a video monitor, just as THX’s pursuers do. Some sequences appear to be filmed by a surveillance camera, while others are tinted orange, as seen through the visor of a policeman’s helmet, with an on-screen display indicating we’re seeing the view from PERFECTBOD2180. At one point the date flashes past: 5-14-2187—Lucas’s on-screen nod to Lipsett’s influential film.

  Lucas’s weeks of attention to the sound track had paid off, too, for even today, few other films sound like it. “There was this wild mixture of Bach,” said Walter Murch, “and skittering around in that were the chatterings of almost undistinguishable voices in air traffic control, or something like that.”41 Lucas borrowed interesting music from any place he could find it, using the Yardbirds’ haunting “Still I’m Sad” over the opening credits, and loud organ chords reverberating over THX’s triumphant sprint into the sunset in the movie’s closing moments. Plotwise, Lucas added an additional undercurrent of paranoia, with THX’s mate YYO 7117 being interrogated by the state—represented by a Christ-like figure with 0000 across his forehead—for the crime of “SEXACTE.” There are lots of extended sequences of people pushing buttons and operating machinery, as well as shots of THX running down endless hallways, arms flailing—and yet, with Lucas’s rapid-fire editing, on-screen effects, and surreal sounds, it’s all somehow exciting. Quite simply, THX 1138 4EB works.

  “I was into trying to create emotions through pure cinematic techniques,” Lucas said later. “All the films I made during that time center on conveying emotions through a cinematic experience, not necessarily through the narrative. Throughout my career, I’ve remained a cinema enthusiast; even though I went on to make films with a more conventional narrative, I’ve always tried to convey emotions through essentially cinematic experiences.”42 It was indeed a cinematic experience; its debut was nothing short of a happening. Students cheered from the moment the USC logo appeared on-screen, and elevated to a roar as its color slowly transitioned from yellow to blood red.

  The success of THX also went a long way toward mitigating some of the continuing tension between father and son. While George Lucas Sr. had long accepted that his son was determined to be a filmmaker, that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it. But watching his son’s films at a USC student film festival, with the audience buzzing enthusiastically around him, he could appreciate that his son had not only found his calling but also earned the respect of his peers. “Now, I had been against this thing of his going to the cinema school from day one, but we guessed he had finally found his niche,” said George Sr. “As we drove home, I said to Dorothy, ‘I think we put our money on the right horse.’”43

  Feeling both confident and vindicated by THX 1138 4EB, Lucas applied for a student scholarship offered by Columbia Pictures and writer-producer Carl Foreman, who was overseeing production on the Gregory Peck film Mackenna’s Gold in Utah and Arizona. Foreman was offering an opportunity for four students—two from UCLA, two from USC—to watch his film crew at work and, more important, to spend their time producing short films on the making of Mackenna’s Gold that Foreman could later use to promote the movie. To Lucas’s likely disappointment, he wasn’t one of the two USC students selected; instead, scholarships went to classmates Charley Lippincott and Chuck Braverman. At the last moment, however, Lippincott backed out after landing a job with an assistant director at Columbia Pictures and recommended Lucas as his replacement—and off Lucas went to the Arizona desert to hook up with Foreman and the crew of Mackenna’s Gold. It was the first time he had the chance to see a major motion picture being made—and Lucas, never a patient bystander to begin with, wasn’t impressed.

  “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing,” Lucas said later. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for three hundred dollars, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.”44 Lost on Lucas, however, was the fact that he was benefiting from such largesse, for Foreman had provided his four young filmmakers—besides Lucas and Braverman from USC, there were J. David Wyles and David MacDougall from UCLA—with the equipment and transportation they would need to make their own short films, and was even paying each of them a weekly stipend, most of which Lucas would pocket. Lucas could still work in the guerrilla style he preferred, but Foreman was providing him with some of the best equipment of his fledgling career to do it.

  Despite his distaste for the “opulence” on set, Lucas was privately hoping that his experience on Mackenna’s Gold might finally pry open the doors to a job in Hollywood, and he wanted to make a good impression on Foreman. It would be an uphill battle, for Foreman—who had written High Noon and overseen the highly profitable films The Guns of Navarone and Born Free—had a reputation for being prickly. And perhaps for good reason: he had been blacklisted during the Red scare in the 1950s, and had exiled himself to London for more than a decade. Mackenna’s Gold marked his first major project since his return to the United States.

  If Lucas was hoping to ingratiate himself with Foreman, however, he got off to a shaky start. Although Foreman had essentially given his four young filmmakers carte blanche for making their films—they would have no supervision, no one spot-checking their work—he did ask for approval of their subjects. Wyles offered to make a film about the horse wranglers, while MacDougall would shadow director J. Lee Thompson, and Braverman would follow around Foreman himself. Lucas, who admitted to being “a very hostile kid in those days,” wanted nothing that conventional, and offered to make a “tone poem,” in the vein of 1:42.08, instead. Foreman tried to talk him out of it, but the more he objected, the deeper Lucas dug in. “If they were going to give a scholarship to make a movie, then I wanted to make a movie,” Lucas protested. “I wasn’t going to do some promo film to advertise the picture.”45

  Lucas would go off on his own—Foreman would later accuse him of “snubbing” his fellow filmmakers, a charge Lucas denied—filming the desert scenery, the enormous skies, the windmills and prairie dogs, with mere glimpses of the film crew for Mackenna’s Gold in the background, trespassers visible only from afar. Lucas
named his movie for the date he completed filming, calling it 6-18-67—another numerically named film. Part John Ford western, part tone poem, it was also, Lucas told Marcia, “a film about you, because no matter what I’m photographing, I pretend and wish that it is you.” But Foreman wasn’t impressed, complaining that Lucas’s arty four-minute film was in direct defiance of the original assignment and had little to do with Mackenna’s Gold. A year later, however, when 6-18-67 was shown on a Los Angeles PBS station, Foreman grudgingly admitted that Lucas had made a statement. “Life [in the desert] went on before us, and life went on after us,” said Foreman, “and that’s what George’s film was all about.”46

  Lucas returned to Los Angeles in June, where, to his surprise, he found that he and Walter Murch had been nominated for the highly coveted Samuel Warner Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship was another of those opportunities to observe—“watching doesn’t teach you anything,” Lucas grumbled—but it did send the winner to the Warner Bros. studios to work for six months in any department of his choosing, and even paid a weekly stipend of $80. “It was a big deal,” Lucas admitted, and, given his lost opportunity with Foreman, it might even offer another chance to break into the tightly closed Hollywood system. As he and Murch waited on the USC patio for the scholarship’s selection committee to inform them of the winner, the two of them vowed that whoever won the scholarship would somehow use the opportunity to help the other. Lucas won—and, years later, would make good on their pact, hiring Murch to edit sound for American Graffiti. “We were good friends throughout my time at the department, and I was able to help him out later,” said Lucas warmly. “In those days, everybody was helping each other.”47

  As Lucas quickly discovered, it wasn’t a good time to be at Warner Bros. Warner, like most of the major studios, was a dinosaur that appeared to be slowly lumbering toward extinction. Attendance at movies had plummeted over the previous two decades—in the early 1950s, movie theaters in the United States were already selling 34 million fewer tickets each week than they had only three years earlier—largely because of an upstart invention called television that provided viewers with more entertainment options, and made them available in the comfort of their homes. Looking for audiences, studios began making sprawling big-budget films, many of which dragged the studios down when they failed to take hold at the box office—including, most famously, director Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 film Cleopatra, which nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. In 1967, the musical bomb Camelot would cripple Warner in a similar manner.