That was probably a fair assessment—and that was the way Lucas wanted it. Lately, Lucas had dismissed several employees who couldn’t or wouldn’t fall in line with his own view of the universe. “You must agree with George, and if you don’t agree with George, then George doesn’t like you,” said one ILMer.101 Even Jeff Berg, the agent who had so diligently shopped the messy fledgling Star Wars script, was dismissed; Lucas, through his team of shrewd attorneys, would take over his duties from this point forward. “I just didn’t need him anymore,” said Lucas without a shred of regret.102
What Lucas really needed was complete independence. “I had to become self-sufficient,” he explained later. “I had to build an empire simply to make the movies the way I wanted to make them. I wanted to make my own future and not have to beg, borrow and steal to get the money to make my movies. I didn’t want to have to listen to the studios and make the films on their terms and, fortunately, Star Wars gave me the opportunity to become independent of the studio system.”103
Exactly what that empire would become Lucas wasn’t yet certain. Initially he envisioned going into business with Coppola again, and excitedly called on his old mentor. “I’m gonna have all this money, we can do all the dreams we always wanted to,” Lucas told Coppola, “and I want to do it with you.” Briefly the two of them considered purchasing the Mann theater chain, or even buying 20th Century Fox. “But now I was clearly in the subordinate position,” said Coppola, “and then about six months later there was less of that talk, and then there was a period of falling out. I never understood what it was about.”104 Most likely, Lucas was growing wary of Coppola’s unpredictable, profligate ways. Several years earlier, when Coppola was flush with money, he had purchased a building in San Francisco, a Learjet, a theater, even a newspaper—all of which he mortgaged to the hilt the moment Apocalypse Now ran into financial trouble. Lucas couldn’t fathom shouldering that sort of debt. “I have never been like Francis and some of my other friends who are building giant empires and are constantly in debt and have to keep working to keep up their empires,” said Lucas.105
Lucas and Coppola were simply different kinds of idealists. Coppola wanted to be a mogul; Lucas wanted to be an artist. “I prefer playing with camera film over becoming the entrepreneur behind a gigantic operation,” said Lucas, who blanched at the very idea of ordering people around, attending meetings, and approving projects. “I want to get away from all of that,” he insisted. “Whereas Francis… wants more and more power, I don’t.… I accept the power to do whatever I like with my camera. But I refuse the power to command other people.”106 Instead of a corporate headquarters, then, or a building in San Francisco, Lucas still envisioned working with his friends in a ranch house “in the middle of nowhere,” similar to the one he’d grown up in. “I wanted a place full of the most advanced technology, where we could sit, see the trees and think about things.”107
For Lucas, the middle of nowhere turned out to be the tiny village of Nicasio, about twelve miles northwest of Lucasfilm’s headquarters at Parkhouse in San Anselmo, and close—though not too close—to San Francisco, about fifty-five miles to the south. Lucas had scouted out an isolated piece of property known as Bulltail Ranch, about 1,700 acres on the serendipitously named Lucas Valley Road, named for nineteenth-century settler John Lucas, who had received much of the surrounding land as a wedding gift in 1882. Nearly a hundred years later, George Lucas walked the property, rolling and shaded, and saw miles and miles of peace and possibility. This was where he would build his ranch. Skywalker Ranch.
“Okay,” he told his accountants, “this is it. I’m buying.”108
By midsummer Kasdan had completed about twenty-five pages of screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, which he and Lucas and Kersh now began poring over, figuring out which ideas were worth pursuing and how they might be realized on-screen. As the creator of his fictional universe, Lucas kept the Star Wars encyclopedia entirely in his head, and he alone would do most of the decision making. It took Kasdan a while to grasp Lucas’s particular brand of passive-aggressive communication. “Actually, the way George works is that he never tells you what he likes, just what he doesn’t,” said Kasdan. “Silence was its own reward.”109
The toughest question still involved the character of Yoda. “Let’s make him small,” Lucas suggested. “Maybe he’s slightly froglike.” But no one was exactly sure how to make a small, froglike character work convincingly on film. For a moment they considered using a monkey in a costume and a mask—a suggestion that test footage revealed as unconvincing, and the monkey was nearly impossible to manage. Lucas thought he had a better solution. During filming of Star Wars at Elstree, Muppet maestro Jim Henson had been taping The Muppet Show directly across the street in the television facilities. He and Lucas had similar artistic tendencies—both were almost defiantly independent—and vowed to find a way to work together. This might be that opportunity: perhaps Yoda would work as a Muppet of some sort. “It would have the personality of a Muppet, only it would be realistic,” Lucas decided.110 He made a note to give Henson a call.
With Empire beginning to gel on the page, Lucas began to step up production. Profits from merchandising were flowing regularly into Black Falcon, which would immediately turn around and loan the money to Chapter II, ILM, and a new division Lucas had recently created for Ben Burtt: Sprocket Systems, devoted entirely to sound. Kersh and McQuarrie were dispatched to London, where offices for Chapter II had been opened at Elstree, while more than $1 million was poured into ILM for equipment and employees. But even after that injection of cash, keeping ILM operational was going to run about $400,000 every month, while Chapter II was going to need nearly $2 million per month to cover the costs of production and personnel. Lucas was investing everything he had in The Empire Strikes Back—and already his resources were being stretched precariously thin.
While it seemed there was no detail too small for Lucas to involve himself in—he was still handpicking his staff and approving merchandise—there was one project he had ceded almost entirely to others: a Star Wars holiday special, which CBS planned to air the week before Thanksgiving. Lucas had engaged with the project early, sitting down with television writer Bruce Vilanch to go over a story treatment that provided only some very vague but ambitious basics: it would take place on Chewbacca’s home planet of Kashyyyk, the Wookiee family would overcome Imperials on their way to celebrating the holiday Life Day, and much of the special would involve Wookiees speaking to one another in their own language of grunts and roars—without the help of subtitles.
Vilanch listened carefully, then exhaled slowly. “You’ve chosen to build a story around these characters who don’t speak,” he told Lucas incredulously. “The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm.” Lucas glared back, unamused, and Vilanch threw up his hands in surrender. Lucas, said Vilanch, “had what a director needs to have, which is this insane belief in their personal vision, and he was somehow going to make it work.”111
It didn’t. Lucas, preoccupied with making Empire and building his company, put the special entirely in the hands of its veteran producers, Dwight Hemion and Gary Smith, and opted instead to view video footage of the work as it was completed. But as he watched his characters woven into painfully unfunny comedy bits featuring Harvey Korman with musical interludes by Jefferson Starship, Lucas could see that he had a problem. Even Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, gamely reprising their film roles, couldn’t transcend the material; all three looked miserable, though Fisher was thrilled at the chance to sing a Life Day song set to the tune of Williams’s Star Wars theme—yet another cringe-inducing moment. The only segment that sparked any interest from Lucas was an eleven-minute animated feature by the Canadian company Nelvana Ltd., which would give audiences their first look at Boba Fett. With the wheels coming off, all Lucas could do was let it go—and take his name off the show.
Heavily promoted by CBS, and eagerly awaited by fans—this was Star Wars on TV, after all—T
he Star Wars Holiday Special aired on November 17, 1978, and was an unmitigated disaster. Producer Dwight Hemion called it “the worst piece of crap I’ve ever done”; Lucas called it a “travesty.”112 He had given up control, and Star Wars had ended up looking stupid. It was a mistake he was determined not to make again.
For now, the holiday special would be written off as a creative casualty of Lucas’s laser-like focus on The Empire Strikes Back, which seemed to be straining at its own bottom line before a frame of film had been shot. By December, Lucasfilm number crunchers had estimated Empire’s budget at a whopping $21 million. Lucas, his resources dwindling, loaned his company $20 million of his own money as collateral for a bank loan. Out at Elstree, set construction was proceeding at a cost of $3.5 million. Additionally, he and Kurtz had spent another $2 million to construct a permanent soundstage large enough to accommodate a full-sized Millennium Falcon; there would be no sawing his model in half this time.
Even those who knew Lucas well were aghast at his bullheaded determination to finance the entire film himself. Independence was one thing; bankruptcy was another. But those people were missing the point: Lucas wasn’t paying for a movie; he was buying his own creative freedom. “This was the perfect opportunity to become independent of the Hollywood system,” he said. There would be no bean counters nickel-and-diming him, denying him the money he needed to get a shot just right—and even better, there would be no studio executives staring over his shoulder in the editing room, forcing him to make what he saw as arbitrary changes. “That’s the part I wanted to avoid.”113
But even a completely Hollywood-free Empire Strikes Back was still just a means to a greater end. Lucas’s true creative freedom lay in Skywalker Ranch. Already he was scribbling designs for buildings in notebooks and on scraps of paper, much the same way he had doodled cars in high school. The walls at Parkhouse, in fact, were covered with blueprints and concept drawings, and Lucas delighted in showing them off and enthusing about the ranch to anyone who would listen—and that included Irvin Kershner, who visited Parkhouse to talk Empire and ended up talking more about Lucas’s empire. “It was really an extraordinary dream,” said Kershner. “All the billions of dollars ever made in the film business, and no one has ever plowed it back into a library, research, bringing directors together, creating an environment where the love of films could create new dimensions.”114
But as he scanned the drawings and blueprints, Kershner also came to understand the truly unenviable position Lucas had put him in: Empire was about more than just making a sequel strong enough to keep the Star Wars franchise chugging along. “This,” said Lucas, fanning his hand at the drawings of the ranch pinned to the walls, “is why we’re making the second [film]. If it works, I’ll build this. If it doesn’t work, it’s over.”115
9
Darkening Skies
1979–1983
Lucas was having serious problems with his sequel. One of his actors—arguably the breakout star of the first film—had made it clear he was not coming back for the second film without a significant increase in salary. The script was weak—“it’s one of those stories that shouldn’t have a sequel, really,” said Gary Kurtz—and Lucas, despite his promises to the contrary, couldn’t stop meddling in the production.1 When he wasn’t hovering over his handpicked director’s every move, Lucas simply went around him, directing several sequences himself and taking over in the editing room.
The sequel was More American Graffiti, and Lucas had practically been badgered into doing it. “I’m not ashamed I made it,” Lucas would say later, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it.2
Trying to cash in on Lucas’s name in the midst of the Star Wars tsunami, Universal had re-released American Graffiti in May 1978 to considerable success—“even sweeter the second time around,” swooned Gary Arnold in the Washington Post—and Ned Tanen had not too subtly reminded Lucas that he still owed Universal at least one more film.3 To Tanen, a sequel to American Graffiti seemed natural—but Lucas, who was already developing the Star Wars sequel, balked at the idea of going back to that particular well again. Shrewdly, Tanen threatened to produce the sequel without Lucas’s involvement, the very idea of which he knew Lucas would find unacceptable. Reluctantly, Lucas gave in—this was exactly why he had insisted on all sequel rights in his Star Wars contract—and agreed to deliver a follow-up to his first big hit.
It was probably doomed from the start. Lucas had already boxed himself in with the ending of American Graffiti, in which end cards had revealed the fates of each of the four main characters. But he developed a rough story outline anyway and began wooing his cast from the first film, landing most without ever having to show them a story outline or script. Richard Dreyfuss, however, who had played Curt, had gone on to a star-making turn in Jaws in 1975, followed by an Oscar-winning performance in The Goodbye Girl in 1977—and with the parsimonious budget provided by Universal, Lucas never stood a chance of landing him. “Not enough money,” Dreyfuss huffed to the Los Angeles Times. “They offered me one-tenth my [usual] salary and I said no.… I still get along with Lucas, he just won’t be telling the story of Curt Henderson.”4
Lucas turned over the task of finding a screenwriter to another old USC friend, Howard Kazanjian, whom Lucas had recruited to serve as the line producer for More American Graffiti—a throwaway title, indicative of Lucas’s already flagging interest in the project. Kazanjian brought in B. W. L. “Bill” Norton, a classmate of Gloria Katz’s from UCLA who met most of the criteria Lucas was looking for in his scriptwriter: he was a Californian, close to Lucas’s age—and with one bomb, the 1972 drug drama Cisco Pike, on his short list of credits, he was also looking for an opportunity to write and direct again. “George didn’t want to direct it himself,” said Kurtz, “but he wanted someone he could control.”5 Norton was his man.
Norton was ferried up to Parkhouse to discuss the story lines Lucas had plotted out for his four main characters, some of which “George had already worked out in detail,” remembered Norton, while “others needed fixing.”6 Lucas had devised four parallel stories, taking place over a series of New Year’s Eves, following John Milner, Steve and Laurie, Terry the Toad, and—with Dreyfuss out of the picture—Toad’s accidental girlfriend from the first movie, the earnest Debbie Dunham. Lucas also envisioned shooting each character’s story in four distinct styles, with Debbie’s hippie adventure filmed in a psychedelic split-screen style, for example, while Toad’s exploits in Vietnam would be shot in black and white on scratchy 16 mm film, looking very much the way Lucas had envisioned shooting Apocalypse Now. Lucas stressed to Norton, in fact, that he expected him to work fast, getting the film written, shot, edited, and released before mid-August 1979, when Coppola’s version of Apocalypse Now was due in theaters. When John Milius learned what Lucas was up to, he could only shake his head in disbelief. “He wants to steal Francis’s thunder, you know?”7
Norton wrote quickly, though Lucas had Kazanjian looking over his shoulder, discouraging Norton from creating new characters or straying too far from Lucas’s story.
“The script wasn’t all that wonderful,” said Kurtz, who was likely glad to be free of the project—but the script hardly mattered to Caleb Deschanel, another USC friend whom Lucas had selected as his director of photography. Shooting in multiple formats, Deschanel said later, was “a crazy idea, but we had a great deal of fun. It was really a continuation of the atmosphere at USC.”8
Lucas gave Norton a mere forty-four days to complete principal photography—still an eternity when compared with American Graffiti’s twenty-eight-day shoot back in 1972. Filming began at a California drag strip, the stands crammed with extras lured in by Lucas’s promise of free Star Wars toys. Lucas showed up on the first day, and vowed to leave Norton alone, but found he couldn’t keep his hands off. He would direct nearly all of the Vietnam sequences himself, shooting several military helicopters near Stockton, California, then take over the editing process, further marginalizing Norton
. Lucas knew he had run roughshod over his director, and admitted later that their conflicting approaches to the film hadn’t worked. “My whole idea for a style for More American Graffiti was ultimately unsuccessful, I guess,” Lucas admitted. “Bill’s a more conservative kind of storyteller, and I think I forced him to do things that in his heart he wasn’t comfortable with.”9
The artistic conflict was apparent on-screen as well; on its release in August 1979, More American Graffiti bombed with both audiences and critics, though it was Norton who took most of the heat for Lucas’s decisions regarding the look of the film. The Washington Post called it a “blithe mockery” of the original, suffering “from a terminal case of the cutes.”10 Meanwhile, in a New York Times review, Janet Maslin slammed the film as “grotesquely misconceived” and—in a bit of criticism that must have stung Lucas to the core—compared its Vietnam sequences unfavorably to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.11
Kazanjian was perplexed by the criticism, but Lucas merely shrugged. “There are things I don’t like. There are things I do like,” he said enigmatically.12 But he had to be concerned; regardless of his distaste for the project, his first attempt at a sequel had tanked badly. Now he was in the middle of making another sequel, with every dollar he’d earned at stake, and the experience with More American Graffiti had spooked him. “Everything I own, everything I ever earned, is wrapped up in Empire [Strikes Back],” he said nervously.13 “We don’t really know whether Empire is going to turn out to be another More American Graffiti.… If it should be a [flop], I will lose everything.”14
George Lucas Page 31
