Weintraub eventually stopped talking about freaks and flashbacks and agreed to let Lucas pare down some of the scenes in the white limbo detention sequence. But Coppola knew that the film was likely in trouble, and that his own capital with Warner Bros. was in rapid decline. It got even worse with the release of The Rain People in late August; while well reviewed, the film landed with a thud. With Warner running out of patience, and Zoetrope hemorrhaging cash, Coppola was in desperate need of money.
Then, in the late summer of 1970, came an offer he couldn’t refuse.
For much of 1970, executives at Paramount had been wooing Coppola to take the helm of a low-budget action film based on one of the biggest books of 1969, a sprawling gangster novel by Mario Puzo called The Godfather. Coppola was with Lucas, recutting THX in the Mill Valley editing room, when Paramount executive Peter Bart called once more to offer him The Godfather. “They’ve just offered me this Italian gangster movie,” Coppola told Lucas. “It’s like a $3 million potboiler based on a best-seller. Should I do it?”135 To Lucas, whose father had always reinforced the concept of staying in the black, the answer was obvious. “I don’t think you have any choice,” he told Coppola. “We’re in debt. You’ve gotta get a job.”136 On September 28, Coppola signed the deal with Paramount to direct The Godfather, with production to begin in the spring of 1971. He was offered $75,000 to direct it, plus 6 percent of the profits—not much, especially if the film didn’t work, and given that Coppola was a lavish spender.137 “It takes no imagination to live within your means,” Coppola liked to say.138 But it was a job.
On Thursday, November 19, 1970—a date that came to be known among Zoetropers as “Black Thursday”—Coppola reported to Warner Bros. to present the final edit of THX, as well as all of the scripts that had been written over the past year, to the Warner top brass. Coppola, knowing he was already on thin ice, wanted to make a good impression, and had twelve copies of each script, bound in leather—one for each executive at the table—which he then put into a long silver box embossed with the American Zoetrope logo. Decades later, Korty still rolled his eyes at the showmanship. “Anyone who came and looked at it would say, ‘gee, that looks like a coffin.’”139
He had no idea.
The screening of THX was up first. The executives’ response was the same as at the May viewing. “[They] went ballistic.… That’s when the shit hit the fan,” said Lucas. “Suddenly it was the crash of ’29.”140 Calley had hated the first cut of THX, and in his opinion, this one was no better. “There was nobody in the room… that thought they knew what to do with THX 1138,” Calley recounted later. “Everybody thought it was a loser.”141 “It was insane,” Lucas said of the screening. “I wish I had filmed it. It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking, ‘Do you know why she’s smiling?’ ‘Sorry, Leonardo, you’ll have to go back and make some changes.’”142
It was over. Ashley and Calley had lost all confidence in Coppola and his band of hippies. They’d still distribute THX under the Zoetrope imprint, but after that, the deal was off. Ashley wanted none of Coppola’s scripts—essentially tossing away The Conversation and Apocalypse Now—and to make things worse, they wanted their $300,000 back. Finally, this time they had no intention of letting the film disappear into the back of a VW bus. They took THX 1138 away.
Coppola left the meeting completely stunned. “Warners didn’t like it and totally dumped on it. They said it didn’t have any appeal,” said Coppola later. “They could’ve helped it a lot if they’d wanted to, but by then they were too mad at us.” He admitted that THX “was unpredictable—it wasn’t a stock science fiction film, but Warners was so angry they broke off all relations.”143 It would turn out to be a staggeringly shortsighted move on the part of the studio. “They had turned down what became the whole 70s cinema movement,” said Coppola.144 “They didn’t get it. And they didn’t get this wonderful group of young people who were going to clearly make the films for the next couple of decades.… They rejected every project we had and then they basically just abandoned us.”145
Lucas was furious. “They don’t respect talent,” he groused to one journalist. “They don’t know what an idea is, and they just walk all over it, and it’s that kind of a thing that really makes you angry.”146 He wouldn’t speak to Ashley again; more than a decade later, when Lucas was shopping around distribution rights for Raiders of the Lost Ark, he demanded an apology from Ashley before he’d even consider giving the rights to Warner Bros. Ashley apologized; Lucas gave the rights to rival Paramount anyway.
In fairness, it wasn’t entirely THX or Lucas that had scuttled the deal. By mid-1970, the film industry had shifted again, pivoting largely on the phenomenal success of overproduced star-studded blockbusters like Airport (dismissed only a year later by star Burt Lancaster as “the biggest piece of junk ever made”) or sentimental treacle like Love Story, which would be the highest-grossing movie of 1970.147 As quickly as they’d tidal-waved in, independent youth-oriented movies like Easy Rider were now decidedly out. “There was a change in the whole industry,” said John Korty. “It was a gamble Francis made when he opened Zoetrope at a time… [when] Easy Rider was the freshest thing on everyone’s mind. Then Airport came along, management policies shifted and the ground beneath Zoetrope started shaking.”148
“When I started the feature THX, we were in a real, real eight-month Renaissance there [at Zoetrope],” Lucas explained in early 1971. “All of a sudden there was freedom, mainly because of Easy Rider.… Easy Rider did a great thing, but it didn’t last very long.… The studio saw [THX] and went crazy because that was when Airport had come out… and then Love Story.”149 Warner “decided not to finance any more youth-oriented, adventurous, crazy movies. They went back to hardcore entertainment films. For them it was a good decision because they made a lot of money on that decision. But they sold us completely down the river.”150
THX 1138 was handed off to veteran editor Rudi Fehr, who excised a little more than four minutes from Lucas’s final cut. It was another move Lucas never forgot or forgave. “This was George’s first experience with ‘studio interference,’” said Murch. “And so George spent a season in Hell because this was his baby, this was his very first film, and he felt the studio was mangling it.”151 Those four minutes turned Lucas’s cynicism toward Hollywood into outright rage. “There was no point for them to do it, other than [to] exercise some power,” he said. “[Their attitude was] ‘We can screw around with your movie, so we’re going to.’… We fought it, and they did it, and I was angry about it.”152 And he had no patience with executives who argued that they had cut only four minutes from a ninety-minute film. “They were cutting the fingers off my baby,” he fumed.153
“It was unbelievable,” said Matthew Robbins. “How is it possible they would have the right to go and tell the filmmaker what to do? It was an injustice.”154 For Lucas, it was more than unjust; it was immoral. “The terrible thing about this country is that the dollar is valued above the individual,” said Lucas. “You can buy another person no matter how talented he is and then tell him he’s wrong. They do not like to trust people.”155 Lucas wouldn’t trust studios again. Ever.
Black Thursday left Zoetrope in a financial and creative free fall from which it wouldn’t recover—“the death of a dream,” lamented Ron Colby.156 “Zoetrope was picked clean,” Coppola said sadly. “Everyone had used it, no one had contributed, and there was a time when I literally was staving off the sheriff from putting the chain across the door.”157
“Everybody scattered to the wind at that point,” said Lucas—including him.158 Coppola was disappointed and somewhat hurt by his followers’ loss of faith. “I had always regarded George as my heir apparent,” Coppola said. “He’d take over Zoetrope for me while I went out and did my personal films. Everybody utilized Zoetrope to get going, but nobody wanted to stick with it.”159
The collapse of Zoetrope—and especially the experience with THX and Warners—would cause s
ome hard feelings between Lucas and Coppola. “I’ve had a very volatile relationship with Francis,” Lucas said later. “It’s on both sides, like we were married and we got divorced. It’s as close a relationship as I’ve had with anybody.”160
Mostly their disagreement was sparked by their differing management styles and attitudes toward money. “I’m very cautious,” said Lucas. “I don’t borrow money. I’m very protective of the things that I build.”161 Lucas, always tight with a dollar, had watched in dismay as Coppola continued to spend money recklessly, sometimes gleefully, on exotic equipment and expensive invitations. “George became very discouraged by my ‘bohemian’ administration,” said Coppola.162
Even more galling, at least in Lucas’s eyes, was that Coppola often had the nerve to act like one of those people, the dreaded Hollywood suits that Lucas loathed. He resented it when Coppola billed some of Zoetrope’s expenses against THX’s budget. To Lucas, that was his money, purely for THX, and not for Coppola’s use. And when Zoetrope administrator Mona Skager discovered that Lucas had been making long-distance phone calls from the Zoetrope offices in an effort to wrangle editing jobs for Marcia, she presented Lucas with a bill for $1,800, since the calls couldn’t be considered Zoetrope business. Even Coppola knew that was going too far. “I would never have done that to a friend,” Coppola said later. “Mona was way out of line. I always believe that that incident was one of the things that pissed George off and caused a breach.”163
For his part, Lucas would never let the demise of Zoetrope be draped around his shoulders. He would never apologize for THX—not then, not ever. “[It was] my one chance to make an avant-garde movie,” Lucas said later. “It almost brought American Zoetrope down… [and] almost destroyed my career. But it was definitely worth it at the time.”164 He made up his mind now to break away from Coppola—who was already on his way to Italy to scout locations for The Godfather—and make it on his own. “I needed to go and develop another project,” Lucas said. “I couldn’t rely on Zoetrope to do that for me. It fell apart.”165
Determined to control his own projects—no studio, he vowed, would ever force him to compromise his vision again—Lucas enlisted the help of entertainment lawyer Tom Pollock to draft the incorporation papers for his own company. In 1971 Lucas officially opened Lucasfilm Ltd., his own independent production company run out of his little house in Mill Valley. Its lone employees were him and Marcia.
Warner Bros. finally released THX 1138 in March 1971. The studio had stuck by its promise to distribute the film, but they didn’t have much hope for it.
Still, the film had its fans, most of whom admired Lucas’s visual sense. “The strength of THX 1138 is its complete faithfulness to a very personal vision,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Washington Post, “a vision strong enough to transform what may sound like a collection of cheap effects into a visually gratifying science fiction film.”166 Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, noted that “Lucas doesn’t seem to have been very concerned with his plot… but as a work of visual imagination it’s special,” and awarded the film three out of four stars.167 Critics for the New York Times were particularly effusive, with one reviewer applauding Lucas’s “technical virtuosity that… achieves exceptional emotional intensity” (finally, someone who got it!),168 while Vincent Canby called the film “a Wow.” THX 1138, wrote Canby, “is practically an iconography of contemporary graphics, in which actors are, intentionally, almost but not quite indistinguishable from the décor.”169 It was a sentiment that would be lobbed at Lucas, sometimes derisively, for most of his career.
Other reviews were tougher. Variety immediately sniped that the film was “likely not to be an artistic or commercial success.”170 A commercial success it definitely wasn’t; positive nuggets aside, reviewers and audiences alike were generally baffled by THX’s theme and its sparse, avant-garde look, and the film landed with a thud. Lucas didn’t even tell his parents about it; they wouldn’t see it until it opened at the Covell Theatre in Modesto in June.
Lucas took it all personally. “Critics are the vandals of our time, like spray painters who mess up walls,” he complained. He vowed to stop caring what critics thought; he lumped them in with those passionless film executives who knew nothing about filmmaking and told him to Put the freaks up front! Who were they to criticize anyway? “I basically said, ‘To hell with reviews.’”171
Friends tried to be supportive and sympathetic. “George thought not only had he managed to make a movie which was visually exciting, but it was really about something,” said Matthew Robbins. “He was disappointed that there was no audience for American art films.”172 Ron Colby thought he understood why audiences had stayed away. THX, said Colby, “was beautifully realized. But it’s a bummer.”173
Marcia thought so too. “After THX went down the toilet, I never said, ‘I told you so,’” she recalled, “but I reminded George that I warned him it hadn’t involved the audience emotionally.” Lucas hated that sort of criticism. “Emotionally involving the audience is easy,” he told her. “Anybody can do it blindfolded. Get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.”174
But Marcia persisted, until George finally threw up his hands in mock surrender.
“I’m gonna show you how easy it is,” he told her. “I’ll make a film that emotionally involves the audience.”175
5
American Graffiti
1971–1973
The weeks following the implosion of Zoetrope had been tough on Lucas. He was feeling abandoned by Coppola, who by early 1971 was already deep in pre-production work on The Godfather, part of his ongoing effort to earn enough to pay Warner back its $300,000. But while Coppola had a job, Lucas didn’t. For now, he and Marcia were getting by, albeit just barely, on what Marcia was making editing Michael Ritchie’s film The Candidate. In the meantime, Lucas was considering taking side jobs as a documentary cameraman, or raising the money needed to make more of the small, arty “tone poems” he loved.
There was also Apocalypse Now, still in free fall since its abandonment by Warner on Black Thursday. It was the only project Lucas had that was actually in script phase, and he still had big plans for it even as he and Milius continued passing the pages back and forth. Lucas had recently brought in another collaborator for the project as well: a serious, soft-spoken thirty-year-old producer named Gary Kurtz.
Like Lucas and Milius, the Los Angeles–born Kurtz was a graduate of USC film school, though he liked to point out that when he graduated in 1963, the film school “was a poor cousin” to the one Lucas and Milius attended a year later.1 Like most film school graduates, Kurtz couldn’t find a job in Hollywood, so he simply stayed at USC as an employee, working on medical information films for the U.S. Public Health Service and running the school’s film library. Eventually he also found a job working for Roger Corman, where he became a jack-of-all-trades, managing sound, cinematography, even special effects.
Unlike Lucas and Milius, however, Kurtz didn’t escape the war; in 1966, Kurtz was drafted by the marines and sent to Vietnam. He was halfway through his basic training, he remembered, when “basically I realized that I was a conscientious objector.”2 A sympathetic and savvy superior advised Kurtz to keep his objections to himself, and put a film camera in his hand instead of a rifle. Kurtz spent two years in Vietnam in a film unit, squinting through the eyepiece of a camera at blood and burning villages, an empty holster on his hip. He returned home in 1968 with a newfound spirituality, carrying himself with the quiet dignity of a Quaker, even growing a chin-curtain beard that gave him a slight resemblance to Abe Lincoln or Captain Ahab.
Kurtz made his way back into film, and by 1970 he was working with director Monte Hellman—another Corman disciple—on the road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. The film was decidedly low-rent, hurriedly financed by Ned Tanen at Universal to surf the Easy Rider wave—and Kurtz, trying to stretch his budget as far as he could, wanted Hellman to shoot Two-Lane Blacktop in the inexpensive 35 mm Technisco
pe format. The only problem was that neither Kurtz nor Hellman had ever worked in Techniscope before. So Kurtz called on Coppola—yet another member of the Corman fraternity—for a bit of help. Coppola, with his typical bombast, told Kurtz that he needed to visit one of his protégés who had just finished shooting his first film, THX 1138, in Techniscope, and was editing the movie in his attic in Mill Valley.
As instructed by Coppola, Kurtz drove out to Mill Valley and knocked on the door. When Lucas answered, Kurtz thought he looked like a film student. “He was just this little guy,” said Kurtz, in jeans and tennis shoes and an untucked dress shirt that seemed two sizes too big for him. But the more he and Lucas talked—and the more he watched Lucas deftly work the controls of the Steenbeck editing table—the more Kurtz liked him. “We both came up in the school of doing everything ourselves,” said Kurtz. “He was my kind of filmmaker.”3 Kurtz left impressed, and went off to make Two-Lane Blacktop in Techniscope, while Lucas continued to wrestle with Warner over THX for the rest of 1970. But it was the beginning of one of Lucas’s most important creative partnerships—Lucas and Kurtz would oversee three gigantically successful films together in the span of ten years—and it was perhaps only fitting that Coppola had been the one to connect Lucas with his next big brother figure. “I knew George Lucas by reputation—I’d seen some of his student films,” remembered Kurtz, “but it was Francis who brought us together.”4
George Lucas Page 14
