George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  First, Lucas approached Jim Danforth, a stop-motion animator best known for his work on the 1970 film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. But Lucas rubbed the animator the wrong way, and Danforth was unsettled by the seat-of-the-pants nature of the project. “I liked the idea of the film, sci-fi with a sense of fun, but just didn’t want the problems of working with Lucas,” said Danforth. “He was right out front with me, told me, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do all this stuff, maybe we’ll darken a studio and throw models at a camera, but whatever we do, I’ll be right there with you.’ I can’t work like that, so I turned it down.”78

  Next Lucas turned to veteran Douglas Trumbull, who’d overseen special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and The Andromeda Strain. Trumbull, too, said no, most likely to accept a better offer from Steven Spielberg to produce visual effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind—which, unlike Lucas’s movie, actually had a budget and a shooting schedule. Privately, Lucas was likely relieved, as he had quickly come to realize that handing the project to Trumbull would mean losing control altogether. “If you hire Trumbull to do your special effects, he does your special effects. I was very nervous about that,” Lucas said later. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘It must look like this, not that.’ I don’t want to be handed an effect at the end of five months and be told, ‘Here’s your special effect, sir.’ I want to be able to have more say about what’s going on. It’s really become binary—either you do it yourself, or you don’t get a say.”79 So Lucas didn’t get Trumbull either. But Trumbull did recommend one of his assistants from Silent Running, an opinionated and fiercely independent young man named John Dykstra.

  What the twenty-seven-year-old Dykstra didn’t have in years of on-the-job experience he more than made up for with brilliance, enthusiasm, and a belief that no project was impossible. Lucas and Kurtz went to interview Dykstra together in a bungalow on the Universal lot and were immediately impressed. Lucas explained the plot of the newest draft of The Star Wars to Dykstra as best he could (which involved “a lot of hand flying,” Dykstra recalled later) and showed the reel of dogfights he had edited together from old war movies.80 Dykstra was immediately intrigued. “[George’s] initial concept was that he wanted something very quick and dirty,” said Dykstra. “He wanted something we could grind out quickly and cheaply.”81

  Still, as the two of them watched the dogfight reel and talked through some of the visual effects, Lucas was adamant that he didn’t want “men in black suits with models on sticks.” He was already spending money on Colin Cantwell and Ralph McQuarrie to design and build realistic-looking spaceships; he didn’t want that illusion broken the moment the ships took flight. “We’re going to have to make something more sophisticated,” Lucas told Dykstra.82 That was fine with Dykstra, who thought he knew just what Lucas needed. Several years earlier, Dykstra had worked with motion control technology at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at Berkeley, where, as part of a planning project, he had programmed a PDP-11 computer to guide a small 16 mm camera through a model city. Unlike stop-action effects, which require the shutter of the camera to be opened and closed every time a model is moved a fraction of an inch, motion control is all about moving the camera, not the model. Motion control, then, would give Lucas exactly what he needed, allowing the camera, with computer-programmed precision, to do the diving and swooping needed for his space battle. What Lucas really wanted, recalled Dykstra, was “fluidity of motion, the ability to move the camera around so that you could create the illusion of actually photographing spaceships from a camera platform in space.”83 It was almost like documentary-style special effects, with the camera as an observer. No wonder Lucas loved it.

  There was only one real problem: the camera needed to film a project on the scale of The Star Wars—with multiple models requiring multiple passes by the camera—didn’t yet exist. “[Dykstra] was anxious to actually build one,” said Lucas, “because it was an idea that John had had for quite a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to exploit that.”84 But the clock was ticking; Lucas wanted work on effects to start as quickly as possible, and ideally be finished by late 1976 or early 1977 so he could edit them into the live action sequences. In that time, Dykstra would not merely have to produce the visual effects; he would have to develop the technology needed to shoot them in the first place. “At that point,” recalled Dykstra, “I said, ‘This is going to be hard to do in a year, George,’ and he said, ‘I don’t care, kid, just do it.’ So, we did it.”85

  It wasn’t quite as simple as that, however. First, Lucas had to find a building to house his special effects shop. Lucas wanted his facility close to home, preferably near Parkhouse in Marin County, but Dykstra persuaded him to stay close to Hollywood, where they would have ready access to film development and processing. Kurtz, who always seemed to know how to scout for locations, found an unassuming and newly constructed warehouse at 6842 Valjean Avenue in Los Angeles, across from the Van Nuys Airport. The building was essentially a sweltering cavern—“probably 1,300 square feet, and smelled like a gym locker,” as Dykstra put it—with no interior walls, no offices, no equipment, not even air-conditioning.86 Lucas thought it was perfect.

  Jim Nelson, a post-production ace and old friend of Kurtz’s from Two-Lane Blacktop, was put in charge of banging the warehouse into shape, and spent six hot weeks outfitting three major departments: model building, camerawork, and optical compositing, where all the shots would eventually be combined. As far as hiring staff, “we approached the visual effects as a grand experiment,” said Kurtz, “[asking ourselves,] ‘Can we do this with a lot of people who work on architectural models and commercials and had never made feature films before?’”87 Finding employees would never be a problem; every model maker, artist, and film geek who loved science fiction—especially those who had seen THX 1138—wanted to work for Lucas. Cinematographer Richard Edlund and effects artist Dennis Muren had made only short films and a few commercials, and done some TV work. Storyboard artist Joe Johnston and animator Peter Kuran were both still in college, and Kuran wanted the job so badly he offered to work for free. It was “a lot of young kids, basically,” said Lucas. “Very few of them had worked on a feature film.”88

  Nelson, while technically in charge, was really just one of the inmates running the asylum, and he and Dykstra openly encouraged an atmosphere of goofball collegiality that sparked both inspiration and collaboration. “I hired people who were young, people who had not really had a lot of industry experience, but were talented people, people that I’d worked with before,” said Dykstra. “And we formed a group that was cooperative.… I can’t stress that enough: cooperative.”89 It helped, too, that Lucas had actively discouraged hiring from the unions; they had always left a bad taste in his mouth anyway, and he had no patience with the rules they would have imposed on a production that had no time to get bogged down in process. “Everybody sort of could cross-train and work in different techniques,” as Dennis Muren put it. “That was different than a Hollywood system that had very strict union rules. There was no way this work could be done that way or no way that the Hollywood unions could understand what we were doing.”90

  Not that the unions didn’t try. Later that fall, as Dykstra and his team were beginning to build their computerized motion control camera—which everyone was already referring to as the Dykstraflex, a name the wily Dykstra made no effort to change—union representatives stopped by to argue that Lucas should be hiring effects experts from inside the industry. Dykstra insisted that he had tried, but, “quite frankly, [I] didn’t find anybody that I wanted.” Lucas chose to simply ignore the unions. “George was absolutely adamant that we wanted to set up our own shop with our own people,” explained lawyer Tom Pollock. “That was one of the control things that we’d been fighting about from the beginning.”91

  At the moment, however, special effects were yet another expense in which a nervous Fox was unwilling to invest. Lucas had assured L
add that he could do the effects work for a little more than $2 million—a number that, in reality, wouldn’t even come close to his costs—but Fox had continued to waffle, insisting Lucas cut his effects budget down to $1.5 million. “They just assumed that it would all get done somehow,” sighed Lucas. “They just figured that we could do it for a million and a half, and that it was our problem, not theirs.”92 As Dykstra and his effects wizards went to work, Lucas continued to pour his American Graffiti money into the unassuming warehouse across from the Van Nuys Airport, spending nearly $88,000 in its first three weeks of operation.93

  Lucas claimed later that the name for his new special effects company had simply “popped into his head” as he was drafting the organization’s articles of incorporation.94 “We said, ‘What are we going to call this thing?’” They were in an industrial park, Lucas explained. “They were building these giant Dykstraflex machines to photograph stuff, so that’s where the ‘Light’ came from. In the end I said, ‘Forget the Industrial and the Light—this is going to have to be Magic. Otherwise we’re doomed, making a movie nobody wants.’”95 “Industrial Light and Magic” it would be, then, an official subsidiary of Lucasfilm Ltd. Born of necessity, seeded with his own money, and feeding off Lucas’s need to control every aspect of production, ILM would stand as one of the cornerstones of Lucas’s film empire—an investment that would set him well on the way to becoming a multibillionaire. “How many people think the solution to gaining quality control, improving fiscal responsibility, and stimulating technological innovation is to start their own special-effects company?” Ron Howard said admiringly. “But that’s what he did.”96

  On Friday, June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws opened in 409 theaters and changed movies forever. As Lucas had predicted, Spielberg had a colossal hit on his hands—one that surprised even Spielberg, who had brought the film in over budget and a hundred days late, and nearly had a nervous breakdown, all but convinced he’d just made a spectacular dud. But Jaws was more than just a great film; for the first time, a Hollywood studio—in this case Universal—had recognized that distribution and advertising mattered, especially advertising on television. Instead of opening in only a few theaters in select cities, Jaws opened in hundreds of theaters nationwide. And with nearly $2.5 million in marketing and promotion behind it—double the amount spent for most films—Jaws was an unavoidable presence in the summer of 1975, with terrifying prime-time television spots, a memorable poster, and marketing that included board games and beach towels.

  Like the film’s titular character, Jaws just kept slowly trolling along all summer, drawing crowds week after week. Spielberg remembered reading the returns each weekend and “waiting for the next weekend to drop off and it didn’t, it went up and it went up.”97 In its first release, Jaws would set a record of $129 million in rentals. Studios watched with envy as Universal counted its profits. But those profits had come at a cost. Advertising was expensive, as were the prints needed for a nationwide release, and studios wanted those costs recovered as quickly as possible. The way to recover those costs? More advertising and release to even more theaters. It was a snake—or in this case a shark—devouring its own tail. The modern blockbuster was born.

  While Spielberg savored his success, Lucas was hunkered down again, working his way through revisions to his script. As he read through the most recent draft, Lucas realized he had no leading female characters—he had shuffled Leia off to secondary status too quickly—and therefore decided that Luke was now a girl, a decision that lasted only long enough for McQuarrie to complete one painting with a female hero. By May, Luke was male again, and Lucas submitted to Ladd a new, hastily written six-page synopsis in which he’d added a new character, a mystical old man he had lifted straight out of the pages of Carlos Castaneda’s 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Castaneda, an anthropologist educated at UCLA, was in the midst of writing a series of books describing his own apprenticeship to the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, and Lucas soaked up all the Castaneda he could as he struggled with themes of father-son and master-apprentice relationships in his script. “Old man can do magic, read minds, talk to things like Don Juan,” Lucas wrote in his May 1975 treatment.98 By the time Lucas completed the next draft in August, the old man even had a name: General Ben Kenobi.

  In fact, by the third draft, completed in August 1975, Lucas had tightened and improved the script even further, moving Luke more firmly to the center of the script as the hero, and making Leia—instead of Deak—the character who gets captured and needs rescuing. Lucas still had the Kiber Crystal in the script but was beginning to realize that pursuing the stolen plans for the Death Star made for a much more interesting story. “I find plots boring,” Lucas insisted, “because they’re so mechanical.”99 Mechanical or not, the plot we generally recognize as Star Wars is falling into place here. After more than two years of writing, of bleeding on the page, Lucas knew he was finally close to getting it right. “Each story was a totally different story about totally different characters before I finally landed on the story,” he said later with near-palpable relief.100

  And yet even his own progress depressed him. While Lucas saw Star Wars as his response to a weary world in need of new heroes and mythologies, his friends saw it as a juvenile exercise unworthy of his talent. Wasn’t this the boy wonder whose experimental films and “tone poems” had dazzled intellectuals and amazed audiences? “They said, ‘George, you should be making more of an artistic statement,’” Lucas grumbled. “People said I should have made Apocalypse Now after Graffiti.… They said I should be doing movies like Taxi Driver.”101 Marcia finally pulled aside one of Lucas’s newer friends, the director Brian De Palma—who, like Lucas, had started in arty documentary-type films and was now trying for a more mainstream hit with an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 novel Carrie—and begged De Palma to cheer George up. “George thinks he has no talent,” she told him flatly. “He respects you. Tell him he does.”102

  Lucas began casting in August. De Palma was at his side, for both personal and practical reasons: De Palma wanted to begin casting Carrie, and he and Lucas—who was casting the parts of Luke, Leia, and Han—needed actors in roughly the same age bracket. Working out of the Zoetrope offices Coppola kept at the Goldwyn Studios in Los Angeles, Lucas and De Palma—along with Fred Roos, Lucas’s shrewd casting director from American Graffiti—saw “thousands of kids,” with auditions starting at 8 or 9 in the morning and running until well after 8 in the evening.103 At that pace, most actors spent little more than a few minutes in front of the directors. “Brian did all the talking,” remembered Carrie Fisher, “because George didn’t talk then.”104 Most of those who auditioned assumed Lucas was De Palma’s assistant.

  Lucas may have been quiet, but he was taking casting seriously. He intended for there to be a love triangle involving the three main characters—an intergalactic Casablanca—so the chemistry among the three leads was critical. It mattered even more, in fact, in a film in which most of the cast were robots and aliens, or covered in full body armor. As in any of the countless Road movies of the 1940s, in which the interplay among Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour could carry a film when the plot sagged, Lucas needed his leads to help ensure the audience suspended its disbelief and didn’t get bogged down in details. There would be no ham acting or knowing winks at the camera; Star Wars might have been an affectionate nod to the old science fiction serials of the 1930s and 1940s, but it wasn’t camp. His actors, then, had to play it straight. Looks mattered, too. For a director, “your first impression of them is the same impression more or less as the audience’s when they meet them,” said Lucas.105 As Mark Hamill put it, “They weren’t going to [just] let us read. You had to look right first.”106

  Nearly every young actor in Hollywood and New York, it seemed, wanted to audition. John Travolta, Nick Nolte, and Tommy Lee Jones all came in during the first week. Lucas would immediately pass on all three, though De Palma would pick Tra
volta for a role in Carrie. Twenty-three-year-old Mark Hamill, who had a long résumé of small television parts, showed up to audition only after some prodding from his friend Robert Englund, who had unsuccessfully tried out for the part of Han Solo. (Despite missing out on the part of Han, Englund would take on another iconic role years later, playing Freddie Krueger in countless Nightmare on Elm Street films.) As a lifelong science fiction and comic book nerd, Hamill loved the idea of being the hero in a sci-fi film but had only barely sat down to introduce himself before Lucas waved him out of the room. Hamill—who had also unsuccessfully auditioned for American Graffiti—thought he had blown it again. Lucas seemed much more interested in Robbie Benson and Will Seltzer, both of whom he asked to come back.

  Casting for Leia was harder, at least to the mind of Marcia, who only half-jokingly teased her husband about auditioning every young actress on the West Coast. “I knew he was going to be looking at the most beautiful eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls in Hollywood for Princess Leia, and I felt so insecure,” she recalled. “I said, ‘George, are you going to be a good boy when you’re down there?’” Lucas grimaced. “My first vow when I came to a film studio was never to date an actress,” he said. Lucas saw himself as “just a funny kid. [A]nd someone like a Playmate of the Month is coming after [me]? Life is too short for that.”107 Marcia didn’t have a thing to worry about; Lucas was essentially a brain in a jar, sitting stoically through casting sessions, and eventually passing on Amy Irving—another actress De Palma would nab—Jodie Foster, and Linda Purl. While he was skeptical about casting any of his American Graffiti stars in his current project, he loyally sat through an audition with Cindy Williams before scratching her off the list of possibilities as well. Williams later heard that Lucas told others he was looking for “a young Cindy Williams.” “I just about died,” she sighed. “Every actress waits in anticipated horror to hear those words.”108 After several weeks of auditions, Lucas thought he’d found the perfect princess in a young actress named Terri Nunn, who’d only just turned fourteen in June, though she looked much older, and in fact often added several years to her age when out on auditions.109