George Lucas: A Biography

JOHN BAXTER

George Lucas

A BIOGRAPHY

DEDICATION

To Marie-Dominique Moveable feast

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The Emperor of the West

2 Modesto

3 An American Boy

4 Cars

5 Where Were You in ’62?

6 USC

7 Electronic Labyrinth

8 Big Boy Now

9 The March Up-Country

10 American Graffiti

11 The Road to the Stars

12 I am a White Room

13 For Sale: Universe, Once Used

14 ‘Put Some More Light on the Dog’

15 Saving Star Wars

16 Twerp Cinema

17 Leaving Los Angeles

18 Writing Raiders

19 The Empire Strikes Back

20 Raiders of the Lost Ark

21 Fortress Lucas

22 Snake Surprise

23 Howard the Duck

24 The Height of Failure

25 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

26 Back to the Future

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.

The computer Alpha 60 in Alphaville, by Jean-Luc Godard

1 The Emperor of the West

The Man in the Panama Hat (years older now) removes the Cross of Coronado from Indy’s belt.

PANAMA HAT: This is the second time I’ve had to reclaim my property from you.

INDY: That belongs in a museum.

PANAMA HAT: So do you.

From Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by Menno Meyjes and George Lucas

As he neared his sixtieth year, George Lucas sat in the shade on the red-brick patio of his home at Skywalker Ranch in Northern California and thought about destiny.

Almost without realizing it, he had become a legend – a man larger than life, magnified by his achievements, but dwarfed by them too. Over forty years, head down, brow furrowed, working every day and most of every night, ignoring discomfort and ill-health, banishing every distraction to the edge of his vision, he had created something remarkable. An empire. A fortune. A myth.

He was not a myth to himself. Only a megalomaniac takes his legend at face value. A sense of his ordinariness was part of the reason he’d succeeded. At first, the awe of his acolytes had puzzled him. Then he’d been amused, but irritated too; he’d been brought up to scorn self-advertisement and conceit.

But as one ages, adulation rests more comfortably on the shoulders. Occasionally, these days, he surrendered to the belief that perhaps he could really achieve anything on which he fixed his energy and instinct.

Other men, less able, less driven than he, paused before embarking on a project, and sometimes wondered, ‘Why am I doing this? What will be its effects, on me and on others?’ They pondered, worried, took advice.

In the beginning, Lucas had sometimes done that, but not lately. Myths don’t hesitate.

There was something presidential, even a touch imperial, in his certainty. Though it wasn’t something he confided to many people, he knew history. He’d read of Julius Caesar looking out on his empire and proclaiming, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ He knew of Napoleon as a young officer surveying a world disordered by revolution and being seized by a vision of mankind united under a single rational mind. Above all, he understood Alexander the Great pausing at the end of his last campaign and weeping because there were no new worlds to conquer.

Yet he, a man less favored in his birth, less wealthy, less powerful, less educated, had achieved more than any of these men. He’d conquered not only this world, but other worlds besides. He was, in his way, master of the universe.

Or so his admirers said.

Was it true? He looked around for somebody to ask, and found only the smiling, alert faces of people anxious to do whatever he ordered, agree with whatever he said, set to work on anything he planned.

A legend is always alone.

On 4 July 1980, while Skywalker Ranch was still scrub and pasture, Lucas hosted his first cook-out on the site. There had been nothing much here in those days: just scrub, some cows, and a few deer which had become over the years the main reason for any stranger venturing this far north in Marin County. The spot where the grills were set up had once been occupied by banks of refrigerators to preserve the carcasses of game slaughtered by hunters.

Twenty-five years of construction and landscaping had transformed the old Bulltail Ranch. Anybody driving up from San Francisco along Route 101 and turning onto Lucas Valley Road at the exit marked ‘Nicasio’ found themselves passing through an expensive housing development, then twisting through an idyllic landscape of rivers and waterfalls. Discreetly, a shining wire fence paralleled the road, just out of sight in the woods. Signs every few yards warned that the fence was electrified – to keep in the deer and other livestock that roamed the estate, explained the custodians of the ranch, though everyone knew of George’s nervousness about strangers, and his fears of kidnap.

After eight miles, a sign so undemonstrative that you might well miss it unless you were looking led to a side road that wound through tall redwoods to a guardhouse. Security staff checked the visitors’ credentials against a list of people deemed persona non grata – ungrateful executives, sceptical critics, invasive journalists, technicians insufficiently respectful of Lucas or his managers. In one famous case, two special-effects technicians had been discovered after a cook-out, ‘drunk as skunks,’ according to one report, in that holy-of-holies, George’s private office. They joined the list of people ‘banned from the ranch’ – a phrase so much in currency within the effects community that one Los Angeles group took it as its business name.

Those who passed inspection were directed down the hill into the huge underground parking station, where their cars’ presence wouldn’t intrude on the rural calm. Any who remembered the ranch from the first cook-out didn’t recognise it now. A three-storied fin de siècle mansion clad in white clinker-built planks like a whaling ship, topped with shingled gables and fringed with wide verandahs, stared west across a wide artificial lake and landscaped grounds to a cluster of equally antique-looking buildings on the far side of the valley.

For centuries, European landowners had built ‘follies’ on their estates. One could have one’s own Roman ruins, with carefully shattered pillars, a picturesquely tumbled wall or two, some fragments of sculpture. Or a grotto in the Gothic style, its fountains decorated with old metalwork that might, if you didn’t look too closely, have been looted from some Etruscan tomb. Such buildings bought the owner an instant pedigree, an off-the-hook connection between a nouveau riche family and the ancient world.

Skywalker Ranch went one better. If anyone asked, staff recounted an invented history as carefully constructed as any screenplay. They were told that the property had been a monastery until a retired sea captain bought it in 1869. He built the Main House, which recalled the ‘cottages’ constructed on Newport, Rhode Island, by Vanderbilts and Whitneys at the turn of the century as summer retreats. The captain added a gatehouse the following year, and a stable. In 1880, he was supposed to have diversified into wine-making and built the large brick winery, which was given art moderne additions by a forward-looking descendant in 1934. In 1915, another innovative son erected a house spanning a brook on the estate, using the then-fashionable Arts and Crafts style pioneered by William Morris in the late nineteenth century. Later additions included the two-story library in polished redwood under a dome of art nouveau stained glass, its shelves housing a well-used and comprehensive reference collection.

On the other side of the valley, ‘unwanted relatives’ of the captain occupied conveniently remote guesthouses – named, in a lapse of historical authenticity, for Lucas’s cultural heroes: Orson Welles, John Huston, George Gershwin. After incidents like the encroachment of the drunken effects men, visitors only entered the main house by invitation. To get into the private compound around the Main House, you needed a coded key-card.

The illusion of old money was as meticulous as anything created in Hollywood at the height of its reconstructive powers in the 1940s. The Victorian-style double-hung windows and other fixtures were made in a workshop on the estate, which also maintained a studio for creating stained glass. The library’s well-rubbed redwood came from a demolished bridge in California’s Newport Beach, the books in its glassed cabinets from Paramount Pictures; they’d once been the studio’s reference library. The two thousand mature oaks, bays, and alders spotted around the 235 redeveloped acres of the ranch were trucked in from Oregon.

One visitor who opened a door marked ‘Staff Only’ found herself staring into a bunker filled with video surveillance equipment. Hidden cameras watched every corner of the estate; conduits snaking under the tranquil meadows carried enough electrical, telephone, and computer cables to feed a small town. The extent of the ranch’s electronics could faze even Lucas. In 1997, looking for a socket into which to plug a journalist’s tape recorder, he pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal a tangle of wires. ‘So that’s what’s under there,’ he murmured.

In 1987, Lucas retained the San Francisco firm of Rudolph and Sletten to build a ‘winery.’ A red-brick two-story building with two large wings and an imposing central entrance leading to a three-story atrium with wooden galleries and a glass roof resembled other wine-making facilities in the area. In fact the building housed Skywalker Sound, 150,000 square feet of state-of-the-art post-production studios in the form of eight mixing stages. San Francisco’s avant-garde Kronos Quartet recorded here. So did the Grateful Dead, and singer Linda Ronstadt. The largest facility, Studio A, also known as the Stag Theater, replicated a high-style pastel art deco cinema of the thirties. Its ninety-six-track mixing console was twenty-four feet long, and on a film like Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer demanded eighty-five technicians.

Elsewhere on the ranch, what looked like a two-story barn held the negatives of Lucas’s films and the Lucas Archive. From 1983, Lucasfilm’s first archivist, David Craig, began photographing, documenting, and collecting the models, art-work – ten thousand items alone – costumes, story-boards and accumulated relics of the Lucas legend: ‘objects of artistic, cultural, and historical significance,’ according to the authorized catalog. Donald Bies became archivist in 1988, and helped plan the building, which opened in November 1991.

Lucas’s own office in the Main House held no hint of how he earned the money to build and maintain this empire. Friends like Steven Spielberg filled their offices with framed posters, awards, and signed photographs from presidents and box-office legends. Lucas displayed no souvenirs at all of his film career – no references to film at all, except for a pair of Disney bookends. Opposite his desk was a large painting of the enmeshed gears of a sixteenth-century clock. The artist, Walter Murch, a minor modernist of the thirties, was the father of Lucas’s close friend, also Walter Murch, who edited American Graffiti and with whom, rare for Lucas, he had remained close since they met at college. Elsewhere in the house hung originals by illustrator Maxfield Parrish and Saturday Evening Post cover artist Norman Rockwell, artist by appointment to those who, like Lucas and Spielberg, another Rockwell collector, yearned for the imagined certainties of American small-town life between the wars.

Downstairs, inside the front door, a few items, battered relics of Captain Lucas’s film-faring days, were displayed behind glass. They included Indiana Jones’s stained felt hat and whip; an ewok, one of the cuddly forest animals from Return of the Jedi, whom Lucas modeled on his then-two-year-old daughter Amanda; a heavily nicked light saber from Star Wars; and a creature from Willow. The case next to it was empty – for trophies of future triumphs? Or because reality has not kept pace with the growth of the illusion? Because, disguised by all this celebration of past triumphs was the puzzling fact that Lucas had not until 1999 actually directed a film in almost twenty years.

The one aspect of Lucas’s activities not relocated to Skywalker by the late nineties was Industrial Light and Magic, which still operated out of San Rafael, outside San Francisco. In 1988, Lucasfilm had opened negotiations with Marin County to develop more of the ranch as a production facility, and to move in ILM. When the supervisors bridled, Lucas offered to set aside most of the remaining thousand acres for ‘conservation,’ while continuing to own and patrol it. Meanwhile, he kept buying surrounding properties, though not without a fight from local farmers and the zoning authorities. By 1996, he owned 2500 acres and was negotiating for more.

The battle with his neighbors was typical of Lucas’s tentative hold on his retreat. In a quarter-century, more than the ranch had changed. Lucas was the second-largest employer in the county. Power calls to power; money draws money. Skywalker had become a focus for the hopes, ambitions, and needs of millions. There was magic in this place, but also greed, resentment, and fear.

Around dawn on any fourth of July during the mid-1990s, hundreds of people would have been on the road heading for Skywalker Ranch, and Lucas’s annual cook-out.

The first of them had flown up from Los Angeles on the early shuttle and collected rented cars at San Francisco airport – or been collected, if they had that kind of clout, as many did; there are some invitations that even the highest executives disregard at their peril.

Leaning back in their limos, the agents, producers, and stars skimmed Variety and Hollywood Reporter. It would be a long trip, and the headlines reminded them why they were making it. ‘Star Wars’ All-Time Boxoffice Force,’ shrilled Variety. ‘Lucas’ Series Paid off in Spades.’ The story spelled out the news, happy for their host, that the three Indiana Jones films he’d produced and helped write, the Star Wars trilogy he’d conceived and the first of which he’d written and directed, the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and the animated films in the series The Land Before Time were all making money.

So were his other enterprises. LucasArts Licensing was earning millions from franchising toys, clothes, drinks, candy, comic books, and games inspired by his films. One manufacturer alone, Galoob, would sell $120 million-worth of Star Wars toys that year, and the original licensee, Kenner, which still owned some rights, could also have survived comfortably on nothing but Star Wars light sabers, Imperial stormtrooper helmets, and models of Han Solo’s ship the Millennium Falcon and the series’ characters. ‘Since the first film came out,’ noted one report, ‘Star Wars merchandise sales have totaled more than $2.5 billion. It’s safe to say, in fact, that Star Wars single-handedly created the film-merchandising business.’ So expert was LucasArts Licensing that outside enterprises like the TV series Saturday Night Live and the environmental Sierra Club had become clients.

Industrial Light and Magic, founded by Lucas in suburban Los Angeles in 1975 to produce the special effects for Star Wars, was now worth $350 million, and had become the world’s premier provider of movie special effects. It created Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs and arranged for Tom Hanks to shake hands with Jack Kennedy in Forrest Gump. THX Sound, developed by Lucas engineers, was gaining ground in theaters across the world, and his recording complex, Skywalker Sound, had a reputation as the best in America. LucasArts Games, LucasArts Learning … Whatever George Lucas touched turned to gold. And the gold stuck to his fingers. No financial pages listed these companies. Lucas owned every share of stock himself.

That the staid Sierra Club trusted him with its merchandising wasn’t surprising. Lucas radiated probity – too much probity, thought some. Though the movie journal Millimetre lauded Lucasfilm as ‘a profitable multi-departmental corporation that defines the cutting edge of American film-making,’ the Boston Globe detected an omnipresent fogey-ism in its creations. A Lucas production, it wrote, ‘always seems to be about something like pre-war adventurers or pre-Vietnam teenagers or pre-television broadcasting. Even Star Wars is set in the far past, not the far future, and its style famously turned American movies back to old-fashioned (critics say old-hat) narrative strategies.’

Few of the people who distributed Lucasfilms’ products, worked on them, bought or sold their merchandise or otherwise derived a living from the group, had any such criticisms. True, British actress Jean Marsh, who played Queen Bavmorda in the fantasy Willow, did remark tartly that none of its actors relished being merchandised – ‘We would all pay not to be on the T-shirts and things’ – but she was in the minority. Most felt that, as long as it filled the coffers, Lucas could dramatize Pollyanna, or film Aesop’s Fables.

The cars took at least thirty minutes to skirt downtown San Francisco, cross the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, with giant tankers creeping out to sea so far below that they looked like models in a special-effects sequence, and climb the curve of the cliff onto Highway 101, the sole autoroute north into Marin County, and another world.

The social misfits and renegades who fled here in the late sixties, seeking to preserve the spirit of the Summer of Love from a San Francisco inhabited by panhandlers, dope addicts, porn-movie producers, and prostitutes, discovered a haven in old and sleepy towns like San Anselmo, San Rafael, Mill Valley, and Bonitas. Locals found themselves patronizing the hardware store along with long-haired, bearded men, ethereal-looking women in ground-brushing muslin, and barefoot babies. Teepees and geodesic domes mushroomed in the woods, fringed by private gardens of organic vegetables, with, just a few yards down the track, a patch of marijuana, exclusively for private use.

To the relief of locals, the newcomers weren’t particularly anxious to share their new lifestyle. When the town council of Bonitas, on the Pacific Coast, erected signs saying ‘Welcome to Bonitas,’ the hippies took them down. Most felt they already had just as many friends and neighbors as they needed. ‘The ideal in those days,’ said one refugee from the midwest who briefly settled there in the 1970s, ‘was a narrow road winding through the woods without any signs, and a little house at the end. I couldn’t stand it. That’s no way to live – without people. I moved to San Francisco.’

Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate, gave the first clue to Lucas’s guests that they’d moved into this new world. Once San Francisco’s yacht port, a cluster of boatyards and little dockside bars, its waterside warehouses now belonged to companies making models for movies, or sound designers like Ear Circus, the company of Randy Thom, who’d won an Oscar for the sound recording of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and who’d worked too on Lucas’s ill-starred production Howard the Duck.

Thom, large, bear-like, and, like most of the people behind the scenes of special-effects films, shy and soft-spoken, was also on the road, heading north to the ranch. He’d had an office there while he was working on Howard the Duck, but after that he’d gradually moved away, until now he hardly visited the place. Like a lot of people who’d joined Lucasfilm in the heady days of its crusading energy, he’d made his own way. Except for Dennis Muren, now head of Industrial Light and Magic, none of the people who’d started ILM under John Dykstra still had jobs there. Nor did most of those who worked on Star Wars in other capacities.

Lucas’s wife Marcia had gone too, divorcing him in 1983. It surprised many people that the marriage had lasted so long. Marcia edited Lucas’s early films, and was good enough to be asked by Martin Scorsese to cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Taxi Driver, and New York New York. In George’s conflicts with the studios and with Francis Coppola, she’d remained loyal, even when she didn’t share her husband’s obsession. Life with George was no picnic. The narrowness of his vision could be overpowering. ‘I heard this story,’ says Harley Cokeliss, second-unit director on The Empire Strikes Back, ‘that Marcia wanted a particular painting for her birthday. She dropped hints and dropped hints and dropped hints, until she was sure even George had got the message. On her birthday, he said, “I’ve got a nice surprise for you.” As Marcia looked around for her painting, George said, “I’m going to have the roof fixed.”’

John Milius was on the road, and wondering why he bothered. He and George went back longer than almost anyone. Before Star Wars, before American Graffiti and THX1138, back to 1963, when Lucas was a weedy, close-mouthed kid from upstate California, sitting through the same courses at the film school of the University of Southern California. In the famous malapropism of producer Samuel Goldwyn, they had all passed a lot of water since then – and, in Milius’s case, put on a lot of weight. Except that his beard was gray, George still looked the same. But then, he would probably look the same when another twenty years had passed.

Milius assumed that their oldest mutual friend Francis Coppola wouldn’t be at the cook-out. The excuse would be the standard one – he was on location on some film. But everyone knew that the two men were no longer close, and that, even though Coppola’s vineyards were only a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, George and he seldom saw one another. With Lucas, some rivalries never went away: ‘I bear grudges,’ he has said.

Coppola had led the move away from Los Angeles. His company American Zoetrope in San Francisco was meant to create a new Hollywood in Marin County. For a while after its collapse, Milius and the rest of the group half-believed that Lucas might pick up where Coppola left off. The mansion he and Marcia bought on Parkway in San Anselmo as headquarters for Lucasfilm might have been the beginning of an atelier, a collaborative film enterprise like Laterna, the Swedish studio-in-a-mansion which inspired Francis to found Zoetrope. But once Star Wars started earning, George bought the 1700-acre Bulltail Ranch. In 1979, he received planning permission to begin creating Skywalker.