George Lucas: A Biography

It was a reminder to Lucas of his student film days, and of his time on the race-car circuit. Nothing could have been more different from the elephantine shoot of Finian’s Rainbow. This was surely the filmmaking of the future, an American nouvelle vague, distinguished by the qualities that François Truffaut had described as typical of American film-making – ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, and speed.’ Walter Murch said, ‘I think for Francis and George, that film was the prototype. If they could operate making a film out of a storefront in Ogallala, Nebraska – and do it successfully – then there was no reason why they should live in Hollywood.’

But Coppola almost immediately chilled Lucas’s enthusiasm. How was the THX treatment going? Lucas confessed he hadn’t looked at it in weeks.

‘You’ve gotta learn to write,’ Coppola told him sternly. ‘Nobody will take you seriously unless you can write.’

Lucas explained that writing exhausted him, both physically and mentally, but Coppola told him he was going about it the wrong way. ‘He said, “Look, when you write a script, just go as fast as you can. Just get it done. Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it, and then go back through as fast as you can, and then go back and fix it – you just keep fixing it. But if you try to make each page perfect, you’ll never get beyond page ten.”’ He also suggested Lucas read Shakespeare, his own personal inspiration.

Coppola persuaded Warners to option THX for $3000, then told Lucas that that would be his salary for working on The Rain People. Throughout the shoot Lucas got up at 4 a.m., laboriously wrote a scene for THX, in pencil, in crabbed capitals in the sort of lined ‘blue books’ he’d used for school exams, then started the day’s work. Not all such stories have happy endings, however. ‘I finished it,’ says Lucas, ‘and showed it to him, and he said, “This is terrible. I think we ought to hire a writer.”’

Coppola found a playwright with some feature-film credentials prepared to work for very little, and set him to work rewriting the screenplay. Meanwhile, Lucas scrounged a 16mm camera and a Nagra tape recorder, and suggested making a documentary on the production. Coppola, a pushover for self-promotion, skimmed $12,000 from the publicity budget to pay for it.

Spending more and more time in New York while Marcia continued to work on commercials in Los Angeles was placing a strain on their relationship, and Marcia finally flew east in February 1968. One of Lucas’s jobs was scouting locations, and on a wet Sunday in February he took Marcia to the next one on his list, in Garden City, Long Island, and proposed to her.

In April 1968 Coppola went back to Hofstra to shoot another football game, and late in the summer the Rain People caravan of seven vehicles and twenty people started to roll across America. Lucas was on board, but not Marcia. At the start of filming, Coppola magisterially banned wives and girlfriends from the shoot, ignoring the fact that a VW van trailing the caravan carried his wife Eleanor, their two children and, as babysitter, a teenager named Melissa Mathison, later the screenwriter of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and wife of Harrison Ford.

As well as the cast, the caravan included a recreational vehicle fitted with a Steenbeck so that editor Barry Malkin could cut the film as they went along. The cameraman was Bill Butler, who later shot Jaws for Steven Spielberg. Everyone kept in touch via two-way radio. Footage was airlifted to New York every day, and rushes normally caught up with them three days later – too late to reshoot if Coppola had second thoughts. In Ogallala, Nebraska, editor Malkin finally called a halt. He needed time to assemble the mountain of material, so the crew camped at the Lakeway Lodge while Coppola occupied an old shoe store downtown as a production office, where Malkin spent five weeks making a preliminary cut.

Lucas persuaded Coppola to hire Marcia as cutting-room assistant. When Lucas rang to tell her, he sensed some resistance. Haskell Wexler had asked her to work on his feature Medium Cool, which he was both directing and shooting against the background of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Once the convention became the focus of riots over the war in Vietnam, he’d had the audacious idea of setting a fictional story about a reporter at the heart of the disturbances, and shooting it with lightweight camera and fast stock, just like the cinéma vérité directors. Wexler’s invitation to work on the film excited and flattered Marcia, but she loved Lucas enough to turn it down and leave for Ogallala. Fortunately, Wexler delayed editing, so she was able to work on both films.

All the time, Lucas was shooting his diary of the production, snatching shots of Coppola which, in retrospect, showed him more revealingly than he had either expected or wanted. This Coppola is a blustering, filibustering dynamo, living on his nerves, inventing both the film and himself as he goes along, and relying on his imposing, near-biblical stature and commanding manner to steamroller any opposition.

The documentary shows him hectoring the Warners head office by phone, yelling, ‘The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!’ Later, he moans, ‘I’m tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.’ Lucas also glimpsed the paper-thinness of this persona when Coppola decreed that everyone, himself included, should be short-haired and clean-shaven when they rolled into the midwest. (In Easy Rider, roughly contemporary with The Rain People, long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are blown away by a redneck with a shotgun.) But Coppola without his patriarchal beard proved a different, less imposing person. Nobody took him seriously, not even the crew he’d dominated for so long. Some didn’t even recognize him. So startling was the change that Lucas had to add a line to the commentary of his documentary explaining the radical mass-depilation.

When there was time, Coppola and Lucas kicked around ideas for future projects. One was inspired by Medium Cool. Why not make a film about Vietnam the same way, shot like a documentary, on 16mm, in black and white, while battles were actually taking place?

Nobody now remembers who first thought of it – or, more correctly, everyone is certain that they first proposed basing such a film on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s story, a man goes up the Congo River to investigate reports that Kurtz, the local agent for a Belgian trading company, has gone crazy and set himself up as a sort of god. He finds Kurtz ill and raving, and he dies with the words: ‘The horror! The horror.’

No factor of Coppola’s working methods complicated the making of The Rain People more than sex. It suffused the production. James Caan was a notorious seducer, an habitué of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion who boasted he’d slept with seventeen consecutive Playmates of the Month. Coppola was also, in the words of a friend, a ‘pussy hound.’ He would halt production to fly back to New York, supposedly for conferences but actually to pursue some new mistress.

On one occasion, Coppola abandoned the crew in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in a motel with no phone, TV, or restaurant. ‘I got a little angry about that,’ says Lucas. ‘Francis was saying all this “all-for-one” stuff, and he goes off and screws around in New York. He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.’ Throughout all this, Coppola’s wife Eleanor stood by patiently, bringing up the children and accepting the sympathy of everyone.

Coppola fought too with Shirley Knight, his star. Knight, like her character Natalie, was pregnant, and her nerves were on edge. The semi-nude bedroom scenes, dictated by Coppola’s conception of Natalie as a woman looking to experience sex with other men before she settled down to motherhood, disturbed her. They wrangled over interpretation, over the problems of this kind of shooting. In reaction, Coppola trimmed her part and built up that of Robert Duvall. Knight protested, and the situation deteriorated still further, exacerbated by Coppola’s evident attraction to her.

The tensions increased as production went on. When Marcia came out to Nebraska to work on the film, Coppola took an obvious interest in her. ‘Everybody wanted Marcia,’ says John Milius. ‘Part of [Lucas’s] disagreement with Francis is, I’m sure, because Francis attempted to hit on Marcia, because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody. But that was Francis. What was it Talleyrand said of Napoleon – “He was as great as a man can be without virtue”? Francis was for Francis – but Francis was great; a truly great man. He’s still my Führer.’

The production of The Rain People was as close to a honeymoon as Lucas and Coppola ever got. ‘George was like a younger brother to me,’ said Coppola, ‘I loved him. Where I went, he went.’ But Lucas was less sanguine. ‘My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,’ he mused. ‘I’m his antithesis.’

All this would be grist to the Star Wars mill, but for the moment confidence was in the ascendant. Like everyone else on the unit, Lucas struggled to save The Rain People and Coppola’s reputation. He filmed some of the arguments between Coppola and Knight, but didn’t use them in his documentary. Francis had become his Führer too.

9 The March Up-Country

We could leave, and live in the superstructure.

LUH, in THX1138. Script by Walter Murch and George Lucas

In Ogallala, the locals had been so flattered to have a film crew in town that they offered to convert a local grain warehouse into a sound stage. Despite his memories of those ‘Let’s do the show right here!’ musicals of the late thirties, Coppola declined, but it planted the idea of a decentralized film industry, not tied to Hollywood, in his mind.

Indirectly, Coppola brought the dream a giant step closer to fulfilment when he remembered he’d promised to deliver a speech in San Francisco to a forum of eight hundred high-school English teachers on ‘Film in Relation to the Printed Word.’ Claiming he was needed in Ogallala to tie up loose ends, Coppola persuaded Lucas to do it.

Speaking in public terrified almost all the New Hollywood directors, and Lucas more than most. When he and Spielberg planted their palmprints in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Spielberg, urged by owner Ted Mann to make a speech, said awkwardly, ‘We had snakes in the last picture and bugs in this picture. But supposedly man’s greatest fear is public speaking, and that will be our next picture.’

That his audience would be made up of high-school teachers, of whom he had ambivalent memories at best, increased Lucas’s distaste for the chore; but such was Coppola’s influence that he flew back ahead of the crew to make the appearance, arranging to meet them in Berkeley the following week.

Another speaker at the convention was John Korty. Eight years older than Lucas, he’d worked his way through film school creating animated TV commercials. In 1964 he moved to Stinson Beach, just south of Bolinas, rented a big gray barn for $100 a month, installed some second-hand film equipment, and began making films. He’d produced and directed two independent features, including The Crazy Quilt (1966), for less than $250,000 each. They did well, too, and won festival prizes. After the convention, Lucas visited Korty’s operation, then rang Coppola in Nebraska. ‘You gotta see this,’ he said excitedly.

The Rain People caravan rolled into the Bay area on 4 July 1968. Radio and TV were still full of the news that Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles from gunshot wounds the previous month, less than two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. The deaths of King and Kennedy drove home to Lucas and Coppola the deteriorating nature of big-city American society. As a character remarked in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), ‘Every time you turned around, someone just shot one of the best men in the country.’

Coppola and unit manager Ron Colby made a side trip to Stinson Beach to look over Korty’s operation, and within a week Coppola was the prophet of decentralization. He had seen the future, it worked, and it was in Northern California. ‘We started fantasizing about the notion of going to San Francisco,’ he said, ‘to be free to produce films as we had done on Rain People. It was a beautiful place to live, and had an artistic, bohemian tradition.’

In Korty’s simple enterprise, Lucas too glimpsed a movie business shaped precisely to his personality. Korty’s films were accessible, but not overtly commercial. He was removed from Hollywood, but still connected to the audience by the independent cinemas which had proliferated since the studios relinquished their hold on exhibition. Above all, this was a cinema without big stars and the problems they brought with them – problems Lucas had seen doing their damage on The Rain People.

Coppola, inevitably, was more grandiose. Working in a barn on worn-out Moviolas was bullshit. He had something more baronial in mind. This difference in scale would be another wedge driven between Coppola and Lucas, master and mentor.

Finian’s Rainbow was due for release on 9 October. Nobody expected it to live up to Warners’ inflated expectations. Early in August, Coppola gave a gloomy interview to the Hollywood Reporter, which headlined it: ‘Francis Coppola to Make Only Own Stories in Future.’ Shortly after, he told critic Joseph Gelmis: ‘It’s come to the point where I just want to get out altogether. I’m thinking of pulling out and making other kinds of films. Cheaper films. Films I can make in 16mm.’

With his salary on Rain People at an end, Lucas began editing his documentary about The Rain People, christened Filmmaker – or rather, filmmaker – and subtitled ‘a film diary’. He also picked up the strings of his friendships with people from USC. Charley Lippincott was finishing his PhD and running the USC film society, but many others were already working in the industry. Milius had just had his first script filmed. Coppola commissioned him (with Warners’ money) to write the adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness relocated to Vietnam. Lucas would direct it.

‘George and I would talk about the battles,’ says Milius, ‘and what a great movie it would make. He loved it because of all the technology, the helicopters, air strikes by Phantoms, the night-vision scopes and devices to detect people walking around at night, and I loved the idea of a war being fought that way. Of course, we hadn’t lost it then, so it was a little easier to be interested in it. We wanted a scene where the guys are doped out of their minds and they call in an air strike on themselves.’ The provisional title was Apocalypse Now, inspired by a button Milius had seen worn by a hippie that said ‘Nirvana Now:’ ‘I loved the idea of a guy having a button with a mushroom cloud on it that said, “Apocalypse Now.”’

Haskell Wexler had hired Walter Murch to mix TV commercials for a company he partly owned. In the autumn, Lucas suggested to Coppola that Murch, whom he hadn’t met, mix The Rain People. He got the two men together, and after one meeting Coppola pointed to the piled-up cans and said melodramatically, ‘Here’s the film. Cut the sound.’ Murch started work in a tiny house in Benedict Canyon. The fact that he didn’t belong to the union worried Murch more than it did Coppola, though he eventually found it an advantage. Too nervous to order sound effects from a library for fear that someone would demand to see his union card, he invented and improvised. The result was a quantum leap in the quality of movie sound. To cover the union problem, Coppola invented some new terms, ‘sound design’ and ‘sound montage,’ which conveniently obscured Murch’s activities.

Kinney Services, a conglomerate which made its millions out of parking lots, had bought Warner Brothers. Coppola mulled over a way of getting them to back his move to San Francisco. He found it in the experience of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who’d made Easy Rider on a few joints and a shoestring, and who were now the hottest talents in Hollywood. As the novelist Joan Didion wrote, ‘every studio in town was narcotisized on Easy Rider’s grosses, and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’ Under ex-agent Ned Tanen, a close friend of editor Verna Fields, Universal had launched a program of ‘youth movies’ for under $1 million each. This initiative was to produce most of the worthwhile and commercially successful post-Easy Rider films by young directors, including American Graffiti.

Coppola was twenty-nine, with one dud to his credit and, if he was any judge, another one waiting to emerge in The Rain People, but he was ready to embrace the Easy Rider ethos if that’s what it took to relocate to San Francisco. He and Ron Colby flew to Cologne in the autumn of 1968 for the Photo-kina exhibition, which showcased the latest in film equipment. Dazzled by high-tech German gear, Coppola impulsively ordered an $80,000 Keller sound-mixing system and some cameras, not knowing where the money would come from to pay for them, nor in what premises he would install them.

In Denmark, they visited a company called Laterna Films. ‘I was thrilled to see a beautiful old mansion with gardens and trees that had been turned into a film company,’ Coppola said. ‘The many bedrooms had been transformed into editing rooms, the garage was a mixing studio; everywhere young people were working on their films, discussing their projects while eating lunch in the garden.’ He was particularly charmed by the collection of rare magic lanterns and early motion toys kept in the house. They illuminated a route back to the cinema’s earliest days, when movies were still a game, and film-makers took to the road whenever it pleased them, setting up studios in barns and improvising stories from the events of the day. He returned to California even more determined to leave Hollywood.

On 22 February 1969, George and Marcia married at the United First Methodist Church in Pacific Grove, near Monterey. John Plummer was best man. Coppola came, as did Murch, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, and even Verna Fields. The newlyweds left for a honeymoon in Big Sur in Marin. Driving into Marin County, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, they fell for sleepy Mill Valley, a typical Northern California town, with redwoods and a river, and rented a small hilltop house on Vernal Road for $120 a month. Any thought of a career in Hollywood was forgotten. The future was here. Lucas was sure of it.

America was moving toward a more sensual, self-gratifying society, where sex and drugs were more important than rock’n’roll. 1969 saw the publication of I’m OK – You’re OK, The Sensuous Woman, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and Portnoy’s Complaint. The year’s top tunes were songs from the show Hair. Its theme, sung by the Cowsills, and the 5th Dimension’s version of ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in’, like the Beatles’ ‘Come Together,’ and Blood, Sweat and Tears’ ‘You’ve Made Me so Very Happy,’ promoted peace, happiness, free love and dope. In August, a six-hundred-acre pasture in upstate New York became the site of the cultural phenomenon called Woodstock. It was a good time to be alive, and there was no place better in which to be alive than Marin County.

The rewritten screenplay of THX arrived, and Lucas didn’t like it: ‘It may have been a good screenplay, but it wasn’t at all what I wanted to make into a movie.’ He shuffled together the exercise books containing his draft, and had them typed up in a legible form.

The Lucases’ Mill Valley house was small, with only one bedroom, but they had plenty of visitors from Los Angeles, curious to see what drew the smartest of their contemporaries to the rural wilderness. Richard Walter and his wife visited. So did Milius: ‘I remember going up there with my first wife, and sleeping on the floor, and eating this wonderful San Francisco bread, and the food, and all of us going out together and having a great time. They didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t a bad life. They didn’t suffer.’ But not suffering wasn’t the same as doing well, and Lucas felt the current was leaving him behind, especially when Marcia began getting work. She would have preferred to have a baby, but he shied away from any such commitment.

To open a production company in San Francisco, Coppola needed a film contract. He persuaded the new administration at Warners that he wasn’t to blame for the failure of Finian’s Rainbow. It was a product, he argued, of the old and outdated system fostered by Jack Warner, now swept away. The Rain People, on the other hand, was a movie for the new Warners.

It was a shrewd strategy. Warners-Seven Arts visualized itself as a studio for the decade of Easy Rider. Its boss, Steve Ross, was a silver-haired, smooth-tongued operator who had taken Kinney out of the mortician business into car hire by renting out at night the limos used for funerals by day. They moved into parking lots, despite the fact that this was a territory that had been associated with organized crime, and then diversified into movies. The studio head was Ted Ashley, a hot talent agent taking his first turn behind an executive desk. John Calley was his lieutenant. Their department for youth films and products was run by Fred Weintraub, who’d made a fortune selling clothing and entertainment to college audiences and running a chain of campus coffee shops.

Coppola played on Warners’ greed to sell them a radical proposal. Once his new company was up and running, he would guarantee them seven feature films, none costing more than a million dollars, the first of which would be the long version of THX1138, which he budgeted – seven being his lucky number – at $777,777. This would be followed by The Conversation, a Coppola original about surveillance experts, probably starring Marlon Brando as ‘the best bugger on the West Coast.’ He threw in scripts by Huyck and Katz, and Robbins and Barwood. Scratching for ‘go’ projects, he also offered Lucas and Milius’s Vietnam film Apocalypse Now.

For the make-or-break meeting, Coppola flew down to Los Angeles, but, Easy Rider-like, rode onto the lot astride a huge Harley Davidson. He was well prepared, with the help of Lucas, who gave Charley Lippincott $100 to create a montage of ‘underground’ films to show the Warners board. ‘We put together this presentation showing that it was going to be futuristic,’ said Lucas, ‘and outlining how we were going to be shooting it on location and such. And we put in there that we were going to develop this very unusual reality using “rotary-cam photography.” Fortunately nobody at the studio asked us what it was, because it was nothing.’

After this, Coppola moved in. He had a new movie ready to go, he told the suits. Here’s the script – he slammed down a draft of THX1138, which he’d barely read. Here’s the cast – except for Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, all were unknown, and none had yet been asked if they wanted to appear. ‘Where is the money?’ he asked them rhetorically. He departed in a roar of exhaust, leaving them to chew on his proposal. The next day, when he still hadn’t received the green light, he wired them: ‘PUT UP OR SHUT UP’ – or, in some versions, ‘SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT.’

Warners did put up, but not as whole-heartedly as Coppola had hoped. They offered to lend – not advance or invest – $3.5 million, part of it in the form of $2500 a week seed-money while Coppola was setting up his company. If they liked THX1138, this sum could become a down-payment on the package. If they didn’t, Coppola would have to refund every penny. Given that he had no other offers, Coppola agreed.