THX 1138 4EB was the name Lucas gave to the uncut feature he loaded up on the Moviola at Verna Fields’s house some weeks later. It would take him twelve weeks of late-night editing to finish it. THX was pronounced “Thex” and appears to have been a joking reference to “sex,” though Lucas had trouble persuading anyone other than his closest friends to say it that way. The “EB” stood for “Earth Born.” A year later, when the film was wowing audiences at student film festivals, he amended the title—another signature Lucas move—adding Electric Labyrinth.
The result was light years beyond the average student film. Lucas and Murch had warped the sound, making much of the dialogue deliberately unintelligible. All the audience needed to understand was that THX 1138 is a man on the run from some sort of Orwellian government security apparatus. Not much acting was required. THX is seen in close-up only for a second. The surveillance guys hunting him are supposed to be dispassionate, which the navy guys found easy. One wears a numbered helmet that covers his eyes while he pulls levers—the first embryonic Stormtrooper Lucas committed to film.
The major innovation in the movie is what Lucas did in the optical lab: adding numbers and captions to the film, almost at random. He points his camera at TV screens. An organ drones deep discordant notes in the background. Viewers feel like voyeurs, ghosts in the government machine. Today it feels like it’s full of student film cliché, but Lucas practically invented those clichés. Not only did the short win armfuls of awards, but it also won him his first appearance in Time magazine in February 1968. Lucas babbled to the interviewer that THX’s pursuers have a whole backstory, that they are two separate races of “erosbods and clinicbods.”
Suddenly Lucas the odd-bod was making all sorts of interesting friends with this award-winning film as his calling card. “THX was not of this earth,” said a Long Beach film student who was introduced to Lucas at a student screening that included Lucas’s completed short, Steven Spielberg. It was to be another decade before they became collaborators, but they were already well on the way to becoming each other’s biggest fans. “THX created a world that did not exist before George designed it,” Spielberg enthused.
That may be overselling the fifteen-minute version of THX somewhat. “It’s a chase film,” says Charley Lippincott flatly. “It’s about paranoia.” But however you define it, the fact remains that Lucas managed to put a nightmarish future on film years before Hollywood started doing the same thing. The film industry would produce a slate of sour science fiction futures in the 1970s, such as Omega Man in 1971, Soylent Green in 1973, Logan’s Run in 1976. Lucas was to effectively launch that slate with the feature version of THX, and he would effectively bring it to an end with Star Wars.
11. THE EMPEROR
Lucas reentered USC as a graduate student in triumph, a fifteen-minute color film in the can. No other student had ever done such a thing. For an encore, he would crank out his first graduate film on an even tighter schedule, learning just how fast he could push himself. Anyone Lived in a Pretty [How] Town was a five-minute confection named for an E. E. Cummings poem. The plot: a photographer makes his subjects disappear. That’s it. Like most of Lucas’s student shorts, it featured no dialogue and felt a little inhuman—and you weren’t sure how deliberate all of that was.
The final film Lucas shot as a student, The Emperor, was different. For the first time, Lucas focused his lens on a human subject: Burbank radio DJ Bob Hudson, the self-styled “emperor of radio.” It was an interesting choice, and not because the name would be echoed in the prime mover of evil in the Star Wars movies.
Hudson was a self-confessed fantasist. He opened the short by talking about Emperor Norton, an eccentric character in nineteenth-century San Francisco who declared himself emperor and began to be treated as such. Hudson took the example to heart with his grandiose title. Lucas evidently warmed to this notion: someone becoming exactly what he wanted to be, no matter how outrageous it sounded. Like Norton, Hudson declared it and then lived it. This was to become Lucas’s philosophy too: dream yourself an empire. “As corny as it sounds,” Lucas declared years later, “the power of positive thinking goes a long way.”
Perhaps because of such eccentric grandiosity, Hudson got himself ejected from a steady stream of stations. “I’m disagreeable,” he tells the camera, though we only see his whimsicality. These days, Hudson would be an AM radio shock jock; he had the look and the loose mouth of a Rush Limbaugh. But in the 1960s, radio voices were more benign: they played records, told stories and jokes, kept you company.
Lucas had fun with the format, and viewers of his films got a strong sense of his oddball humor in The Emperor for the first time. He put the credits in the exact middle of the movie, right before the punch line of one of Hudson’s jokes. “It’s fantasy,” Hudson says at the end of the movie, echoing the title card at the beginning. “Radio is fantasy.” He fades out, leaving an empty chair.
Film was fantasy too—that’s what Lucas learned at USC. Film was fantasy; your fantasies could appear on film. And he had the potential to spin that fantasy, to drive that Moviola, like no other filmmaker. Well, almost no other.
12. FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
After Lucas graduated, he retreated into the desert. Classmate Charley Lippincott had turned down a $200-a-week scholarship offered by Columbia Pictures to work on a Western called McKenna’s Gold that was being shot in Arizona, and Lucas took the gig instead. But he became angry at the scholarship, which he later called “a ruse to get a bunch of cheap, behind the scenes documentaries.” Lucas pocketed the cash, withdrew from the shoot, and made a silent film about the desert itself. Still in love with numbers, he called it 6.18.67, for the day he finished shooting.*
The next opportunity was another scholarship—one that Lucas won (on the strength of THX) and Murch lost, but not before they’d made a pact that the winner would help out the loser. This one gave Lucas six months at Warner Brothers at $80 a week. Later, Lucas would spin the fantasy that his first day on the lot was Jack Warner’s last. In fact, Warner would stick around, on and off, for years. But the studio was in a bad way, sold to a business consortium, many of its departments shuttered. One that was in the process of closing was the animation department, home of Looney Tunes, which is where Lucas had wanted to spend his scholarship time. Prior to the scholarship, Lucas had tried and failed to get a job at Hanna-Barbera; he had briefly assisted animator Saul Bass on the Oscar-winning short Why Man Creates. It would take Lucas until 1985 to succeed in becoming a producer of animated fare—having taken the long way ’round.
Instead, Lucas picked up the phone in the moribund animation department and made a fateful call to his classmate Howard Kazanjian, who happened to be on the lot as assistant director on the only movie then in production: a musical called Finian’s Rainbow. Kazanjian told Lucas to come on down so he could introduce him to Francis Ford Coppola, a self-confident wunderkind from UCLA, the only student filmmaker in the country whose star had eclipsed Lucas’s. After a spell working for B-movie maestro Roger Corman, Coppola had landed a Hollywood directing gig. That alone seemed impossible. But the fact that he just happened to be on the Warner’s lot at the same time Lucas was despairing of something to do? That had to be destiny.
Coppola found room in the budget for Lucas to work as an assistant, and their ever-lively relationship was off to the races. Coppola challenged Lucas to come up with a brilliant idea for the film every day. Lucas delivered, but Coppola, four years his senior, still teased his charge mercilessly, calling him a “stinky kid.” Lucas’s second lifelong mentor after his father was also, he said, his tormentor. They were polar opposites: loud and quiet, impetuous and cautious, womanizing and distantly devoted. Lucas once said his career was a reaction to Coppola’s as much as anything else. Still, the two had something crucial in common. “George broke the rules at USC,” Kazanjian would later observe; after all, he literally broke into the editing bullpen. “Francis likes breaking rules.”
On late
nights back at the office with Kazanjian, Lucas and Coppola kept talking about how much they hated the Hollywood scene and wanted to tear down its stodgy structure of unions and old-guard studio bosses. So it was another extraordinary stroke of luck when Coppola got the go-ahead from the studio to film his screenplay The Rain People. He put together a twenty-person road shoot: a caravan across America on a shoestring budget, all handheld cameras and motels. The movie’s heroine was doing a Kerouac, going on the road to find herself. The young filmmakers were doing the same. Lucas came along as a jack of all trades: he would record sound, carry equipment, manage props. He filmed a documentary that captured Coppola’s tempestuousness, as well as the fun and chaos of the road trip, with fireworks being shot from car to car, their drivers wearing Prussian military helmets.
Around this time, Lucas was captured on documentary film cameras himself for the first time, for a segment of a short on new filmmakers that was ostensibly focused on Coppola. Introduced as the director’s assistant—no, no, insists Coppola, his associate—Lucas smiles shyly and looks down at his camera. Then the film cuts to Lucas in thick-framed glasses, the beginnings of a goatee, and a Mao-style military jacket, in full revolutionary flow. “Student films are the only real hope,” he lectures. “I think they [the studios] are starting to realize that students know what they’re doing. You know, they’re not just a bunch of silly kids playing around.”
The Creator-to-be, the self-determined Emperor of film, was about to become much more than a silly kid playing in an alleyway.
But first, he would have to learn to write.
________
* Lucas also edited the AWOL newsletter, known as BS. (Seriously.)
* It should be noted that Glut has an ax to grind against Lucas, who failed to help Glut out of his dire financial straits with further work after he wrote The Empire Strikes Back novelization. He let me interview him with the understanding that he would not be made to appear to say anything positive about Lucasfilm.
* Exactly one decade later, Lucas would be reaping the first rewards of a far more difficult desert shoot.
5.
HOW TO BE A JEDI
The God of the state was a lie. Our hero was determined to find the truth behind all religions.
“There must be something independent,” said THX 1138. “A Force.”
Lucas wrote those lines in 1968, as he was adapting THX 1138 4EB into what would be his first-ever feature film. The echo from Arthur Lipsett’s 21–87 could still be heard. Sometime in the following year, he decided to cut the Force scene from his THX script. But the Force would continue to flow through him, demanding to be born as a concept. In 1977, it would explode into the minds of millions; thereafter, Francis Ford Coppola suggested to Lucas that the two of them actually start a religion using the Force as its scripture. Lucas feared for his friend’s sanity. But it wasn’t out of character for Coppola, a man who once joked that he was modeling his career on Hitler’s rise to power—and who, Lucas often said, had a habit of finding a parade and jumping out in front to lead it.
Even if Coppola had his tongue in his cheek, it wasn’t an unprecedented idea. Science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard had by then spent three decades building his religion, the Church of Scientology. Lucas has more adherents than Hubbard could ever have dreamed of. If he had let the charismatic Coppola build a church of Force-ology, there seems little doubt we’d be living in a different world.
But Lucas’s intent in the movies had been to distill religious beliefs that were already in existence, not to add a new one. “Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side,” Lucas told his biographer Dale Pollock. “You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.”
The Force is so basic a concept as to be universally appealing: a religion for the secular age that is so well suited to our times precisely because it is so bereft of detail. Everyone gets to add their own layers of meaning. Lucas, through a long process of trial and error, seems to have deliberately encouraged viewers’ unique interpretations. “The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward,” Lucas recalled in 1997. “So the real essence was to deal with the Force but not be too specific about it.” In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi explains the Force to Luke Skywalker in just twenty-eight well-chosen words: “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
Other than that, the Force is largely a mystery. We learn that it has a strong influence on the weak-minded; that there is a Dark Side of the Force that seduced Darth Vader. We know that Vader believes the Force to be far superior to the technological power of the Death Star and that he can use it to choke people he disagrees with from across a room. Luke is taught to “let go your conscious mind” and “reach out with your feelings.” He is told the Force “will be with you, always.” Han Solo believes the Force to be a “hokey religion,” no substitute for a good blaster, but later grudgingly wishes for the Force to be with Luke. Obi-Wan disappears when Vader’s lightsaber strikes him; audiences presumed this had something to do with the Force, but it was left unexplained for five more movies. Luke was able to destroy the Death Star because he puts his targeting computer aside and relies on the Force—you might just as well call it intuition.
And that’s all he wrote—Lucas, at least. The explanation provided by Jedi master Yoda in the next movie, much of it written by Lawrence Kasdan rather than Lucas, may have been more poetic, more spiritual (“luminous beings are we, not this crude matter”) and more demonstrative (Yoda lifts an X-wing fighter out of a swamp after explaining that the Force is connected to all things). But we learn little more from this than we did from Kenobi’s twenty-eight words.
Indeed, later attempts to examine the Force in more detail seemed out of keeping with the movie’s space fantasy origins. The moment Lucas decided to add a kind of rational, scientific component to Jedi knowledge of the Force, in Episode I—the infamous “midi-chlorians,” microscopic organisms that are supposed to help the Force bind to living beings—long-time fans revolted. It didn’t matter that, as Lucasfilm protested, the midi-chlorians are not supposed to be what the Force is actually made of—just a biological indication of its presence. If you dig deep enough into the Lucasfilm archives, you’ll find Lucas talking about midi-chlorians as early as August 1977. “It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than others,” he said during a role-playing exercise designed to help him flesh out Star Wars concepts after the original movie. “Their brains are different; they have more midi-chlorians in their cells.” This didn’t matter either. What fans actually want, it seems, is as little detail as possible. They want twenty-eight words, and nothing more.
Lucas, by that stage, may have been trying to use his powers for the good of science education; as much is suggested by the midi-chlorians’ homonymity with mitochondria, the energy source for most of our cells. That’s commendable, but if we want to see the Force of the movies manifest in real life, you have to look to religion and art, not biology. The Force is a Navajo prayer, an echo of a comment in an art-house film, and many more things besides. “The grandest form of active force / from Tao come, their only source,” says the Tao te Ching. The Tao, like the Force, is the basis for a form of martial arts. So are the concepts of chi, or energy, prevalent in traditional Chinese Buddhist culture, and prana in India, Sanskrit for “life force.”
The Force is all of these things; it is none of them. The Force has been embraced by Jews and Hindus and Wiccans. Everyone sees what they want to see in it, especially if—like those kids watching Flash Gordon—they first encountered the Force at the right age.
Just how widely the Force has been embraced by people from different walks of life became clear in 2004, when Dr. Jennifer Por
ter, a religious studies professor from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, conducted a survey at a Disney World Star Wars Weekend. “When I was 12, something about that universal connection to the Force really grabbed something within me,” said one Jewish respondent. “That and the concept of the Jedi respecting and protecting all life and developing mind, body and soul reflected my own path in life. From that point I made it my personal journey to become a Jedi. I wasn’t counting on being able to move objects with my mind and the thought of creating a true functioning lightsaber didn’t even cross my mind, but I did seek to control my emotions, to be more aware of the consequences of my actions, to honor and respect all life in both people and creatures, and to find peace and serenity and beauty in everything around me.”
That was a surprisingly representative sentiment. “The theme that emerges most strongly in the comments,” says Porter, “is that of the Force as a metaphor for godhood that resonates and inspires within them a deeper commitment to the godhood identified within their traditional faith.” In other words, the Force is like an Instagram filter through which to view any established religion. It isn’t oppositional enough to even appear to attempt to supplant any traditional religion, the way John Lennon had his brief flirtation with the notion that the Beatles had more active supporters than Christianity. The Force is friendly and enhancing to all. Therefore, the Force conquers all.
Christianity could easily have set itself up in opposition to a theology that appeared to embrace Eastern culture. Instead, for the most part—except for isolated locations like Albin Johnson’s Sunday School—Christians embraced the Force. It was ethereal enough to be construed as the Holy Spirit. “May the Force be with you” sounded an awful lot like the dominus vobiscum of traditional liturgy: “the Lord be with you.”* Indeed, the earliest attempt to layer a contemporary earthly religion over the Force—one of the earliest books written on Star Wars, period—was a Christian one. In 1977, Frank Allnutt, a former Disney publicist (he worked on Mary Poppins) turned evangelist, rushed out a book called The Force of Star Wars. Rather than being an escape from reality, Allnutt wrote, Star Wars was a signpost to something more real. “It says to the viewer, ‘Listen! There’s something better in life than wallowing in the mud of pornography, dope, materialism and vain philosophies. You have a higher calling—a calling to be somebody, to do something. You have a date with destiny. You have potential in you that you haven’t begun to develop. There is a Force in the universe that you need to be plugged into.’” Lucas was pointing toward Jesus, Allnutt wrote, “perhaps unknowingly.” He said that when Kenobi talked about the Force, “his eyes sparkled like he was talking about a dear old friend, not an impersonal Force.” He compared Kenobi’s sacrificial moment of death to the crucifixion. (In later years Allnutt would refine his philosophy, pointing out that “Jedi” could be a contraction of “JEsus DIsciple.”)
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 10
