George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  The most important workspace, however, was probably at their house on Medway, where Lucas—always an aspiring architect—was reconstructing a second-floor tower using old photographs for reference. In here he would build a cozy office with a fireplace and with windows on three sides, offering a heavily wooded view that gave the room the appearance of being in a treehouse.133 Most of the floor space would be taken up by a gigantic desk Lucas had built himself, using three large doors for the desktop. This was his room for writing, and Lucas was currently laboring over the first drafts of the script for his “Flash Gordon thing.” It was a mishmash, he told Filmmakers Newsletter, “[a] science fiction–Flash Gordon genre, 2001 meets James Bond, outer space and space ships flying in it.” It was “a much more plotted, structured film than [THX] or American Graffiti,” he said. “Since I’ve never done that before, it’s hard to say exactly what it is.”134

  He did, however, have a two-page treatment, handwritten on notebook paper, and a title, scrawled in cursive on the center of the treatment’s cover page: The Star Wars.

  PART II

  EMPIRE

  1973–1983

  6

  Bleeding on the Page

  1973–1976

  I don’t have a natural talent for writing,” George Lucas confessed to Filmmakers Newsletter in 1974. “When I sit down, I bleed on the page, and it’s just awful. Writing just doesn’t flow in a creative surge the way other things do.”1

  No other project would make Lucas bleed more than Star Wars. For nearly three years he would agonize over plots and characters, plumbing science fiction novels, folklore, comic books, and movies for inspiration. He would struggle through draft after draft, writing and rewriting, lifting scenes and subplots he liked from earlier drafts, fussing with the spellings of planets and characters, and trying to make sense of an ever-expanding script that was starting to spin out of his control. And time and time again, he would find both friends and studio executives baffled by his story, skeptical he could ever get any of it on film.

  Lucas would treat the writing of Star Wars as a full-time job, trudging up the stairs to his writing room each morning at 9 a.m., where he would then lower himself slowly into his wooden desk chair and stare at a blank page for hours, waiting for the words to come. “I sit at my desk for eight hours a day no matter what happens, even if I don’t write anything,” he explained. “It’s a terrible way to live. But I do it; I sit down and I do it. I can’t get out of my chair until five o clock or five thirty.… It’s like being in school. It’s the only way I can force myself to write.”2

  Over his desk, he hung a wall calendar to track his progress, vowing to write five pages daily and marking off each day with a big dramatic X. On a good day, he might have one page completed by 4 p.m.—then, with an eye on the clock, he would scramble to write the four remaining pages over the next hour. If he could finish his pages early, he would permit himself to knock off for the rest of the day, and maybe reward himself with a bit of music from one of his most prized possessions: a glowing, garish, fully functional 1941 Wurlitzer jukebox, which Lucas had loaded with his own collection of rock and roll 45s. As The Diamonds’ “Little Darlin’” wailed from the Wurlitzer’s throbbing speakers, Lucas would kick back in his chair, tennis shoes off and shirttail untucked, lost in the music and grateful to be done for the day.

  Most days, however, the jukebox would remain quiet, its neon lights dark—and no words would be written at all. At 5:30 he would tromp downstairs to watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite, glaring with anger over a TV dinner as he stewed about the blank pages he’d left upstairs. “You go crazy writing,” Lucas said later. “You get psychotic. You get yourself so psyched up and go in such strange directions in your mind that it’s a wonder that all writers aren’t put away someplace.”3

  It could be said that Star Wars was partly Coppola’s fault.

  In late 1972, with American Graffiti in post-production, Lucas was ready to begin work on his next project, which he was convinced would be Apocalypse Now. For Lucas, the fact that Coppola still owned the film was just a technicality. “All Francis did is take a project I was working on, put it in a package deal, and suddenly he owned it,” groused Lucas.4 As far as he was concerned, intention was nine-tenths of the law—and he fully intended to make Apocalypse his next film, sending the script around to several studios, and, to his surprise, “pretty much got a deal” at Columbia.5 In November, then, Gary Kurtz was dispatched to the Philippines and Hong Kong to scout suitable locations, “and we were all ready to go,” said Lucas. Ready, that is, until Columbia, still trying to ink an agreement, began to haggle over percentages.

  Coppola refused to hand over any of his own interest in the film; if Columbia wanted a larger piece of the movie, they were going to have to take it out of Lucas’s share. “My points were going to shrink way down,” complained Lucas, “and I wasn’t going to do the film for free.” Lucas would cede Apocalypse Now back to Coppola, at least for the moment—but he wasn’t happy about it. “[Francis] had a right to do it, it’s in his nature,” Lucas said later, “but at the same time, I was annoyed about it.”6

  Had Coppola chosen to negotiate instead of digging in his heels, Lucas’s next project might very well have been Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars would have continued to be a contractual add-on, to be developed at a later time, perhaps—or perhaps not at all. Instead, Lucas grudgingly abandoned the project, grumbling about Coppola’s stinginess. Star Wars, then, would be spawned by Lucas’s need to fill both a creative and a financial void. “I was in debt,” Lucas recalled later. “I needed a job very badly. I didn’t know what was going to happen with [American] Graffiti.”7 With Apocalypse Now shelved, Lucas turned to his only other viable project, the one still embedded in his two-picture deal with Universal. “I figured what the heck, I’ve got to do something,” said Lucas. “I’ll start developing Star Wars.”8

  Only at this point, it wasn’t Star Wars. Not even close.

  As Lucas sat down to write in his little office in Mill Valley in February 1973, all he had was the merest spark of an idea. After a skeptical King Features had declined to sell him Flash Gordon, Lucas decided he could just as easily make up his own characters in a similar vein. “It’s your basic superhero in outer space,” he explained. “I realized that what I really wanted to do was a contemporary action fantasy.”9 As would become his habit, Lucas began the writing process by making lists of names and locations for his fantasy, scrawling Emperor Ford Xerxes XII—a suitably heroic-sounding name—at the top of one of his notebook pages, followed by single names like Owen, Mace, Biggs, and Valorum. After trying various combinations, Lucas then divided his list into names of characters and planets, giving each a brief title or description. Luke Skywalker was on the list from the very start, but he was “Prince of Bebers,” while Han Solo was “leader of the Hubble people.” The planets Alderaan and Yavin were there too, as were locations named after Herald Square and the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.10

  Next, Lucas began inserting his names and places into a short narrative, not much more than a story fragment, called “The Journal of the Whills.” He envisioned borrowing a storytelling device from the old Disney cartoons, showing a storybook—in this case the Journal of the Whills—“falling open in the opening moments of the movie to emphasize that whatever story followed came from a book,”11 he told an interviewer. “This is the story of Mace Windy,” wrote Lucas, underlining the name for emphasis, “a revered Jedi-bendu of Opuchi, as related to us by C. J. Thorpe, padawan learner to the famed Jedi.” Over two densely written pages, Lucas crammed in plenty of names and backstory, and was only just starting to wind himself into the barest hint of a plot—his heroes were “summoned to the desolate second planet of Yoshiro by a mysterious courier from the Chairman of the alliance”—when he trailed off practically in mid-sentence, already out of gas. It was a nonstarter, and Lucas knew it.

  So he began again, making another list of names, scribbling
out bits of plots and scenes he knew he wanted to include. “One of the key visions I had of the film when I started was of a dogfight in space with spaceships—two ships flying through space shooting each other. That was my original idea. I said I want to make that movie. I want to see that.” Trying to get the dogfight in his head down on paper was difficult, however, so Lucas began taping old war movies on television, compiling footage of airplane battles from films like The Bridges at Toko-Ri and Tora! Tora! Tora! “I’d just edit it according to my story,” he said later. “It was really a way of getting a sense of movement of the spaceships.”12 Eventually he would have more than twenty hours of tape, which he would transfer to 16 mm film, then tightly edit down to a reel about eight minutes long. “I would have the plane going from right to left,” explained Lucas, “and a plane coming toward us and flying away from us, to see if the movement would generate excitement.”13 While he didn’t know it yet, the reel of dogfighting, swooping, tailspinning aircraft would be one of the most important bits of film he would ever put together—the wet concrete he would pour into the mold for the cornerstone of his own film empire.

  On April 17, Lucas began writing another treatment, this one titled The Star Wars. This draft contained the dogfight in space that Lucas wanted to see, as well as a more fully realized plot that channeled bits of Flash Gordon and Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Lucas poured everything he had ever loved about the Saturday morning serials into his treatment, with plenty of chases, close scrapes, exotic creatures, and general derring-do. From The Hidden Fortress he borrowed a few key plot points—namely, a princess being escorted through enemy territory by a wise and battle-scarred general and, more important, two bumbling, bickering bureaucrats to serve as comic relief.

  Luke Skywalker makes his first appearance, though in this early draft he’s an aged general guarding a young princess on the planet Aquilae. He and the princess meet two squabbling bureaucrats who have escaped from an orbiting space fortress, and the four of them travel to a spaceport to find a pilot to take them to the planet Ophuchi. Skywalker—handy with a “lazer sword”—recruits and trains a band of ten boys to be warriors before escaping the planet in a stolen ship. There’s a dogfight—there would always be a dogfight—a chase through an asteroid field, and a crash on Yavin, a planet of giant furry aliens. The princess is captured, and Skywalker leads an assault on the Imperial prison, escaping amid yet another spectacular dogfight. There’s an awards ceremony—and there would always be an awards ceremony as well—where the princess is revealed “as her true goddess self.”14

  Even at fourteen handwritten pages, this rather busy proposal still seemed too “vague” to Lucas.15 But he nonetheless had it bound in a black leather binder with The Star Wars embossed in gold on the cover and gave it to agent Jeff Berg to take to United Artists for a look. Berg confessed that he didn’t understand a word of it, and didn’t really know how to pitch it. Lucas did, even if his description was all over the place. “[It’s] a space opera in the tradition of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers,” he explained. “It’s James Bond and 2001 combined—super fantasy, capes and swords and laser guns and spaceships shooting each other, and all that sort of stuff. But it’s not camp,” he insisted. “It’s meant to be an exciting action adventure film.”16 For Lucas, enthusiasm always trumped clarity.

  On May 7 Berg brought Lucas’s treatment to United Artists, putting it in the hands of David Chasman, the same executive who had believed in American Graffiti. Lucas knew the treatment he was giving Chasman was a lot to comprehend—getting the images in his head to come through on the page would always be difficult—so he had included ten pages of illustrations to try to convey the look and feel of what he had in mind: photos of NASA astronauts, amphibious tanks, and drawings of space heroes clipped from comic books. Chasman was intrigued, but he was also on his way to Cannes, and promised Berg he’d review the materials and be in touch shortly. It took three excruciating weeks for Chasman to wire his answer: No.

  Glumly Lucas asked that Berg submit the proposal to Ned Tanen at Universal. “I hated Universal,” said Lucas, “but I had to go to them. Part of my deal to make American Graffiti was that I had to sign my life over to them for seven years.… They owned me.”17 Making things worse, Lucas and Tanen were still bickering over Graffiti, which Tanen was demanding be recut even as Lucas was approaching the studio, hat in hand, with a proposal for his next film. “It was right in the middle of Ned’s most angry period,” said Lucas’s attorney Tom Pollock. “It was not submitted with enthusiasm.”18 Nevertheless, Berg dutifully sent the treatment over to Tanen in early June, promising the film could be made on the cheap. Lucas grudgingly described it as “a $6 million idea, which I’ll make for $3 million.”19 Like Chasman before him, Tanen took the binder from Berg and promised he’d be in touch shortly.

  Even as Tanen was ruminating, Berg had begun an informal discussion with 20th Century Fox and the studio’s new vice president for creative affairs, Alan Ladd Jr. “Laddie,” as he was called by nearly everyone, was the son of actor Alan Ladd. Show business was in his blood and he had an intuitive feel for commercial hits, as well as an appreciation for talent, no matter how quirky. He had recently rescued writer-director Mel Brooks from a panicky Warner Bros. after the studio had lost faith in the unreleased Blazing Saddles, and Berg thought Ladd might appreciate both the talent and travails of his own client, who was fighting a similar creative battle with Universal over the still unreleased American Graffiti. Over drinks one afternoon, Berg offered to show Graffiti to Ladd and sent a smuggled print to his office. “I saw it on the Fox lot at nine one morning, and it absolutely bowled me over,” recalled Ladd. “That’s when I just said to Jeff [Berg] that I’d like to meet George and hear about what ideas he’s working on.”20

  Lucas flew to Los Angeles, eager for the conversation. More than any other studio at the time, Fox seemed to know what to do with science fiction. In 1968 it had released the widely popular Planet of the Apes, which it grew into a five-picture franchise. Beyond Apes, however, Fox was in need of a hit. Following the 1971 departure of mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, who had steered the company on and off since 1935, the studio was now being run by Dennis Stanfill, a former Lehman Brothers executive. More accountant than innovator, Stanfill was nevertheless savvy enough to follow a trend when he saw one; in addition to steering Planet of the Apes through its several sequels, he had successfully banked on the disaster movie fad, distributing films like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. But the studio was still losing money rapidly, and morale was low. “It was grim,” said one Fox executive. “A very demoralizing place to go to every day.”21

  For Lucas, it must have been reminiscent of the day six years earlier when he had walked onto the virtually abandoned Warner lot. There he had found Coppola, the supportive but stormy big brother who would encourage, inspire, and infuriate Lucas as he made his way as a young filmmaker. Now at Fox, he would find Ladd, his next big brother, advocate, and defender, who would lead him through the next stage of his career. Unlike with Coppola, however, there was little bombast in the low-key Ladd, which made him a good temperamental fit with the equally restrained Lucas. “He and I together don’t make one-half an extrovert,” remarked Ladd.22 Like Lucas, Ladd didn’t talk very much—and when he finally did speak, he did it so quietly and calmly that some thought he sounded eerily like the rogue computer HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.23 Though Lucas derisively referred to most Hollywood executives as “used-car dealers,” there was something about Ladd that he liked right away.24

  For one thing, he and Ladd both spoke the same language: film. Rather than laying out his photos of astronauts or attempting to describe the plot or mood, Lucas spoke to Ladd about the films they both loved. “This sequence is going to be like The Seahawk,” he told Ladd excitedly, while other scenes would be reminiscent of Captain Blood or Flash Gordon. “I knew exactly what he was saying,” said Ladd. And he liked Lucas, too. “I knew… from spending time with him th
at he was a dead honest person who knew what he was doing.”25 Ladd was interested—but at the moment, Lucas was still contractually bound to wait for the word to come back from Universal. If Tanen and Universal said no to The Star Wars, Ladd and Fox could have it.

  Ladd wouldn’t have to wait long. At the end of June, Universal passed. While Tanen had issues with the proposed budget, mostly he was just baffled by the proposal itself, admitting he had “a very tough time understanding [it].”26 Berg thought that perhaps “psychologically, they [executives at Universal] weren’t prepared” to invest in a big-budget, special effects–heavy movie. More likely, they probably weren’t prepared to invest in Lucas, whose still unreleased American Graffiti was being recut—and, in the minds of many at the studio, seemed destined for failure. Why in the world would they back a $3 million film by an artsy director who had likely bungled a film with a budget of $750,000? Universal’s answer was no.

  With Universal out of the way, Lucas’s agents began negotiating with Fox in earnest in mid-July, passing back and forth an eight-page memo of agreement. Lucas would receive $50,000 to write the script, $100,000 for his duties as director, and $15,000 for “development” of the project, with a filming budget of $3 million. The most important figure in the deal, however, was the $10,000 Lucas would receive upon signing the agreement memo. That was money that would go in his pocket immediately—and he needed it. “I was so far in debt,” recalled Lucas. “That was why I made the deal.”27 Without it, he said later, “I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe take a job. But the last desperate thing is to ‘take a job.’ I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity.”28

  To Lucas, integrity would always be more important than the money, and he defiantly insisted his contract give him as much control as possible over his own film. He explicitly assigned producer duties to Gary Kurtz, gave editing to Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas, and named Walter Murch his post-production supervisor—and further stipulated that Fox couldn’t assign him an executive producer or control production. “I was not that willing to listen to other people’s ideas—I wanted everything to be my way,” Lucas said. “I didn’t mind getting input from the creative people around me, but not the executives.… I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do.”29