George Lucas: A Biography

Lucas received the news with delight. The way Coppola described it to him, the strings attached to Warners’ offer became thistledown. Immediately, he and Coppola, with Korty’s help, began visiting mansions in Marin County, looking for the future headquarters of the company. They made an offer on the Dibble estate in Ross, but while Coppola was raising the money, it went to someone else. The buyer already owned another mansion, and Coppola offered on that too, only to have the zoning commission refuse his application to transform it into a film studio.

Gradually, Coppola turned against the Laterna model. If he couldn’t find a mansion, maybe he should look for something in San Francisco itself – where, in addition, staff and services were more readily available. Dismayed, Lucas argued that the whole point had been to abandon city influences. He cited Korty’s rural retreat. All he wanted, he said, was ‘a nice little house to work in.’ But Coppola bulldozed him. The sound equipment would arrive shortly from Germany, and they must have a place to install it. Anyway, their working capital was all his, raised by selling his Los Angeles house and taking out substantial loans on the promise of a Warners deal.

Korty found a recording studio at 827 Folsom Street, in what locals derisively called the ‘warehouse and wino’ section of San Francisco, and Coppola leased three floors. Once Coppola had persuaded Korty to become the first tenant of their new facility, Lucas threw up his hands. Francis had won again.

Eleanor Coppola conceived and managed the décor of the new facility while Francis toyed with names. His first choice, ‘Transameri-can Sprocket Works,’ traded on the current taste for the Edwardian, which had hippie girls wandering Haight-Ashbury in Pre-Raphaelite braids and gypsy skirts, accompanied by men in crimson pre-World War I military tunics over jeans and sandals. Remembering Laterna’s magic lanterns, Coppola finally chose ‘American Zoetrope,’ after the optical toy of a spinning drum with vertical slits through which one glimpses dancing or running figures.

The Rain People, proudly bearing the American Zoetrope logo, opened on 27 August. Reviews were mixed, but Coppola brushed them aside, consumed by the fulfilment of his dream. The new company’s name not only implied that it could do everything from A to Z, but, once it was launched as a public company, would alphabetically give it a spot near the top of the share listings.

For the moment, however, nobody but Coppola owned any shares – not even Lucas, whom he grandly named vice president. Mona Skarger, one of the producers on The Rain People, became secretary-treasurer. Christopher Pearce was general manager. Jobs were also found for Bart Patton, Bob Dalva and Dennis Jakob, all cronies of Coppola, some going back to high school and Hofstra. Perhaps thinking of insinuating someone more personally loyal to him than to Coppola, Lucas offered the job of head of intellectual property – basically head of development – to Charley Lippincott, who turned him down. He didn’t want to move to San Francisco, nor to give up his ambition to make documentary films.

Being located in San Francisco had one definite advantage for Lucas and Coppola: few films were made there, and the local branch of IATSE, its hands full with mainly theatrical technicians, didn’t look too closely at who did what at Zoetrope. Cameramen could record their own sound, and even direct. The union listed Walter Murch as simply a post-production worker, a flexible term that could encompass editing, sound editing, even scriptwriting.

The day they took over the building, Coppola ordered everyone up on the roof and had them photographed: Korty, Carroll Ballard and an unknown guy – already names were being forgotten – each with a hand-held 16mm camera; Milius in sombrero and bandoliers; Warners’ liaison man Barry Beckerman; Lucas, almost unrecognisable in heavy beard and wide-brimmed black felt hat, like some middle-European anarchist; Bob Dalva, also with camera; Larry Sturhahn, later to be the producer of THX; Al Locatelli, its eventual production manager, incongruously playing a flute; Dennis Jakob, crouched behind an enormous piece of sound equipment. And of course Francis, dressed in a long double-breasted coat and a felt hat with turned-up brim, and clutching a zoetrope under his arm – the model for an allegorical statue in some Sicilian square of the town’s great explorer who had encompassed the world.

The sound equipment arrived, and was installed while carpenters were still sawing in the corridors. Walter Murch arrived on his BMW motorbike to supervise. For him, the chance to work on a state-of-the-art Keller system was more than enough reason to relocate to the Bay area. Able to handle seven separate strips of film in gauges from 8mm to 70mm, and video as well, it was the most advanced piece of equipment of its type in America – so advanced that when it broke down, an engineer had to fly in from Hamburg to fix it.

Word quickly spread of the radical new venture. Stanley Kubrick, cinema’s most famous recluse, corresponded with Coppola about special effects from his rural hideout in England. John Schlesinger said he wanted to rent space. Mike Nichols intended to invest. One night, Coppola was making coffee in the conference room when Orson Welles rang. He was thinking of making a film in San Francisco, he said. Awed, Coppola talked with him for half an hour, coffee pot in his hand, while the water overflowed from the sink and flooded the room.

American Zoetrope officially became an entity on 14 November 1969, when Coppola’s attorney filed the incorporation papers. The facility, though still far from ready, was opened by San Francisco’s Mayor Joseph Alioto on 13 December. Alioto announced that Coppola had already spent $500,000 on equipment, never mind staff. Except for John Korty, who was cutting his feature Riverrun, the only person actually working there was Haskell Wexler, who was shooting a huge rock concert being held at nearby Altamont with the Maysles brothers. He offered Lucas a few days’ work as a cameraman, and Lucas was there on the day when Hell’s Angels employed as security men murdered a member of the audience, Meredith Hunter. John Milius insists that Lucas shot the scenes of the killing which were later used in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Lucas says he can’t remember.

American Zoetrope became a target of pilgrimage. ‘It all looked too good to believe,’ said one early visitor, ‘terribly chic and terribly sincere, with leggy secretaries in crocheted miniskirts, $50,000 KEM and Steenbeck editing tables, Creative Playthings paraphernalia, bubbly chairs, and blowups of D.W. Griffith on the walls.’ The main reception area was dominated by a pool table and a silver espresso machine. Fabrics from the Finnish company Marimekko draped the walls, their purples, oranges and yellows echoed even in the décor of the freight elevator. Every Thursday night, Coppola screened classic movies, with a buffet of Chinese food. A lavish brochure in faux art-nouveau style promised films and facilities that combined the best of Europe and America, of Hollywood and the Bay area.

Prospective tenants soon found it was too good to believe. Zoetrope could only handle the kind of films Coppola wanted to make: mobile movies shot on location with hand-held cameras. There was no sound stage, and only minimal facilities for wardrobe and props. Coppola had recklessly paid $40,000 for a Mitchell BNCR camera which nobody could afford to rent, and bought a range of the latest lightweight Arri-flexes and portable tape recorders. His old mentor Roger Corman came to take a look. As well as being godfather to Coppola’s son Gio, he was an executor of his will. Coppola asked him what would happen to all this equipment if he died. Corman said, ‘I’ll put it all in a truck and take it down to LA, because you’re in the wrong city, Francis.’

Instead of presiding over a cinematic renaissance, Coppola found himself trying, without success, to supervise a tribe of vigorous young film-makers, all looking out for themselves. ‘Everyone was off in his own little corner, competing,’ recalls Carroll Ballard. $40,000 worth of equipment disappeared in the first year, and a number of company cars were cracked up. Desperate to put the facility in profit from the start, Coppola set rental rates that were high for the time: $175 a month for one of the seven cutting rooms, $240 a month for an editing machine to go in it, and correspondingly more for office services, production facilities and time on the Keller console. He was parsimonious when it came to funding the projects which would be Zoetrope’s lifeblood. To write and direct THX, Lucas would get only $15,000; but even that was not immediately forthcoming.

Lucas, fretting about being able to replicate the clinical emptiness of his student THX, wondered if he could shoot in Japan. ‘The idea was, it was this weird dictatorial society in the future,’ says Gary Kurtz, ‘and if it was totally alien as an environment to the audience, and it was in a foreign language, you might be able to believe in the isolation of the main characters. Well, nobody in Hollywood liked that idea.’ All the same, Coppola truculently announced Japanese locations as an accomplished fact. ‘George is going to direct it in his own way. I’m giving him my strength. I’m saying, “If you want me, you’ve got to give George Lucas his break.”’

Warners weren’t sure they wanted either of them, particularly when they got around to reading the script of THX1138. It had little real plot, aside from the idea of a man fleeing an overpowering society. There was no motivation. Nobody was characterized. The ending was ambiguous, THX climbing from a manhole into a world of which we see nothing except a huge sun and a solitary bird.

Lucas sulked. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at the studio they don’t understand scripts; that they should look more like blueprints than novels. They don’t even know who [Marshall] McLuhan is over there.’ Nevertheless, he asked Walter Murch to help with the script, and they amplified the story where they could. ‘We just threw everything up in the air and watched it come down,’ said Murch. The setting was narrowed down to the twenty-fifth century. They sketched in some social background. Everyone is tranquillized, and their sex drive numbed by drugs. They wear only white, and their heads are shaved. Most, including THX – pronounced ‘Thex’ – who works on a production line assembling robots, have been grown parthogenetically, by artificial insemination, but his girlfriend LUH7117 – ‘Ler’ – is a ‘natural born,’ and therefore suspect.

A god, OMM, dark-eyed, Semitic, with a sensual mouth and a short black beard – the physical antithesis of his predominantly Caucasian subjects – watches unblinking from every wall. He offers benign moral supervision, urging: ‘Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.’ Citizens commune with him in electronic booths that also fulfil the function of psychoanalysts. A taped voice – Murch’s – welcomes them with ‘My time is yours,’ and responds to their pleas for help with anodyne recorded comments, and an absolution that ends in the exhortation to get back to work. Anyone who demands more is likely to be arrested and beaten by police, sometimes to death, on television.

Robots, uniformly tall, dressed in the black leathers and white helmets of Californian Highway Patrol motorcycle cops but with blank chrome faces – another gibe by Lucas at the bêtes noires of his adolescence – impose law and order. During the film we see one of these robots, malfunctioning, walk repeatedly into a wall. Another, ominously, is seen shepherding a tiny child into an elevator.

In the feature version, LUH seduces THX by reducing the medication that suppresses his sexual instinct. Previously satisfied with telecasts of ritual beatings and callisthenic-like dancing by a bald, naked black woman, THX is persuaded to make love to LUH. ‘It manages to have a lot of nudity in it,’ says Richard Walter of the film, ‘but to be anti-erotic. George’s work is extremely non-sexual. He is uncomfortable with sexuality’ – a view borne out by close-ups of LUH and THX’s pale, hairless bodies pressed together in joyless union.

Typical of Lucas’s later work, and of his life, the sexual initiative is taken by the woman. The film also has an undercurrent of homoeroticism. THX’s superior, SEN5241, played by British actor Donald Pleasence, is homosexual. His room-mate has just been ‘destroyed’ for unspecified reasons, and he reprograms the computer to have THX assigned to his living space.

LUH becomes pregnant, and both she and THX are arrested for drug evasion and sexual perversion. In the original screenplay, LUH is raped, then beaten to death on TV, but Lucas never shot these scenes, and we know no more of her fate than the fact that her name is reassigned to one of the countless embryos growing in ranked bottles in the city’s labs.

THX and SEN, convicted of interfering with the computer, are sent to a featureless white prison whose inmates remain out of fear of the surrounding formlessness, expending their energy in aimlessly plotting to escape. Exasperated, THX simply walks out, followed by SEN. In the white emptiness they meet SRT, a large, amiable black man convinced he isn’t real at all, but a ‘hologram’ who couldn’t make it on TV. They find their way back to the crowded corridors of the main complex, but SEN loses his nerve. Stumbling into the TV studio which broadcasts OMM’s image to the psychoanalysis booths, he humbly confesses his shortcomings to the poster-sized picture of the god stuck on the wall.

Awaiting arrest, he watches a group of children playing. All of them have bottles attached to an arm, from which ‘liquid education’ drips into a vein. One asks SEN to reconnect his tube, and he reminisces about the much larger containers through which one acquired knowledge when he was a boy. As the children gape in astonishment, the police arrive to take him away.

Meanwhile, THX and SRT steal jet cars, but the maladroit SRT can’t get his started, and when he does, promptly drives it into a pillar. THX rockets down a series of tunnels, pursued by the motorcycle police. At the end of the line he abandons the car and continues on foot. Lucas shot a scene in which THX falls into a garbage compactor and is menaced by a rat-like creature, but dropped it as unconvincing, only to recycle it in Star Wars. THX has less trouble with some scavenging Shelldwellers – bearded dwarfs, the progenitors of Star Wars’ Jawas, who live in tunnels – and starts climbing a huge ventilation vent towards what he calls ‘the upper positive place.’ Two police are close to catching him when, abruptly, Control calls off the pursuit: it’s exceeded its budget. THX emerges on the surface, where he faces a presumably hopeful sunrise.

Lucas visualized the film in Panavision format, but that would have meant hiring expensive equipment. He compromised with Techniscope, a format popular with cost-cutting European and Asian producers looking to achieve wide-screen without special lenses. It simply cut the frame in half horizontally, producing an image half the height of conventional 35mm and twice the width, which nevertheless could be blown up to normal 35mm in the lab. Its deficiency was obvious: with half of a 35mm frame filling the same screen area as a full frame, the image risked being dark and grainy. But the Technicolor labs could print Techniscope prints direct from the original by using a dye-transfer matrix, avoiding the need to make a negative, so the quality was excellent, and remained so until they abandoned this method.

Other inventors found equally ingenious ways around the patents on various wide-screen systems. Paramount embraced VistaVision (‘Motion Picture High Fidelity!’), in which the film ran horizontally through the camera, offering a larger image than conventional 35mm. The clarity was superb, but the fact that it needed special cameras and projectors limited its use. Special-effects technicians, who loved the system for its large negative size, would rescue and restore Vista-Vision cameras to shoot the next generation of science fiction films, including Star Wars.

Lucas was delighted to be directing his first feature film. His budget might not be much in Hollywood terms, but his family was astonished at his achievement at only twenty-five years old. On the other hand, directing was daily torture, a constant process of revision and improvisation, with the ten-week production period ticking off in his brain every instant.

San Francisco’s new subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), was under construction, and Lucas persuaded them to let him shoot in the completed tunnels. Other sequences were shot in parking stations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre in San Rafael, and at the Lawrence Livermore atomic energy laboratory. The tiny crew moved between locations in one of the vans in which Coppola had crossed the country during the shooting of The Rain People.

Robert Duvall from The Rain People played THX, and Maggie McOmie LUH. Veteran Ian Wolfe was one of the prisoners windily discoursing on the nature of freedom. Knowing Lucas’s discomfort with actors, Coppola told Ron Colby to choose people who wouldn’t need more than a hint from the director, but Lucas still wrangled with them. Using a technique he would continue on American Graffiti, he shot most scenes with two cameras simultaneously. ‘That captures emotional stunts it’s hard to get after the first take,’ says Duvall.

Coppola imposed his crony Larry Sturhahn on the film as producer. If Lucas could ever have been comfortable with any supervisor, it was certainly not Sturhahn, who, he charged, spent most of his time on the phone, and hung up only to interfere. Coppola later confessed that he knew the two men wouldn’t get on. ‘George,’ he said, ‘needed someone to hate.’ As long as he could direct his animosity towards Sturhahn, he wouldn’t be blaming Coppola.

The pressure of too little money and not enough time encouraged improvisation, some of it inspired. Lucas tinkered together models and fireworks to create the film’s few special effects, like an explosion on the robot assembly line. Nobody was happy to have their head shaved, as was required of the whole cast, and there was a shortage of extras until someone thought to approach the drug rehabilitation centres Synanon and the Delancey Street Foundation. Enrolment required addicts to shave their heads as a sign of commitment, and most were happy to earn a few days’ wages as extras in the film.

Working with limited lights and a hand-held camera fitted with a thousand-meter telephoto lens pushed Techniscope to its limits. Warners, who, as the financing company, automatically saw the daily rushes, began muttering about the photographic quality. There was a growing sense that Coppola had sold them a pig in a poke. They held off breaking openly with him for only one reason: Patton. Franklin Schaffner’s film of Coppola’s screenplay opened on 5 February 1970, and, despite reviews which fretted about its jingoism, proceeded to make a fortune. Anyone that good, reasoned some within Warners, was worth cutting a little slack. But only a little. Lucas characterized their attitude as: ‘We’re the king and you’re the serfs.’

The attic at Mill Valley became a cutting room, and Lucas spent most nights there with Marcia, editing. At the same time, Walter Murch cut the sound – ‘Not,’ Lucas agrees, ‘the way things usually were done.’ Traditionally, movie mixers aimed for clarity, arguing that most cinemas had such poor sound systems that the audience was lucky to hear anything. Lucas wanted THX1138 to have a ‘musical’ quality, which Murch took to mean a sense of continuous ambient sound, sometimes almost inaudible. The layering of sounds had always fascinated Murch, and he’d developed a technique called ‘air-balling,’ in which one sound envelops but never quite obscures another. Renaissance composers for the unaccompanied voice routinely employed this effect, which may be where Murch got the idea, but nobody had yet applied it to film. Murch’s experiments spurred Lucas to pioneer better cinema sound. The new system would be called ‘THX Sound,’ and its slogan would be, ‘The Audience is Listening.’

For the soundtrack of THX, Murch created, in his phrase, ‘a Dagwood sandwich of sound and music, with no clear split between them.’ Recorded music was slowed down, speeded up, played backward, mixed with natural sounds or those of machines. For the prison scenes, he used the bass note of a large room humming with machinery.

The credits of THX1138 ascend the screen, suggesting a steady descent underground, an idea borrowed from an inter-title in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Before them, Lucas inserted one minute from a trailer for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Over scratchy, poorly-copied images of spaceships fizzing like firecrackers and a blond Buster Crabbe straight-arming aliens as if they’re the Notre Dame defensive line, the voice-over urges audiences to see how this American football hero copes with the threats of the twenty-fifth century – an implied comment that the future might be very different from the one imagined by Hollywood.

Lucas, probably coaxed by Murch, later justified the elaboration of THX1138 by calling it ‘a Cubist film – the story, the sound and the images were all views of the same thing simultaneously.’ He defended its didactic tone: ‘Everyone else calls it science fiction,’ he said. ‘I call it documentary fantasy. The film is the way I see LA right now; maybe a slight exaggeration. Duvall comes off drugs and discovers he’s been living in a cage all his life with the door open. It’s the idea that we are all living in cages and the doors are wide open and all we have to do is walk out.’

Marcia for one didn’t buy these justifications. She found the film cold, humorless, and arrogant – a summary of the negative elements of Lucas’s character. Coppola agreed. He would later tell Lucas to ‘write something out of his own life; something with warmth and humor that people can relate to.’ Even Lucas got the message. When he shot a few pick-up scenes in a Los Angeles studio and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz came to watch, he told them, ‘I have an idea I’d love you guys to do. It’s a rock’n’roll movie and it takes place in the fifties and it’s about music and cruising and deejays.’ He sent them his notes, and over the next month they worked up a five-page outline of what Lucas had first entitled ‘Another Quiet Night in Modesto,’ but now preferred to call American Graffiti.

Preoccupied with the slide of American Zoetrope into anarchy and bankruptcy, Coppola took only a fitful interest in the progress of Lucas’s film. The first time Marcia showed him a completed reel, he simply shook his head and murmured, ‘Strange. Strange.’ After that, he didn’t see any more until the whole film was edited.

He was more concerned about extracting a long-term commitment to Zoetrope and its program from Warners, which summoned him to a meeting of the studio management on 21 November 1969. Ever the showman, Coppola created a ‘black box’ for each executive containing the screenplays for all seven proposed films, bound in black with the emblem of American Zoetrope. These boxes in turn went into a crate, ominously coffin-like, which two men carted into the Warners office.

They carted it out almost as quickly. Warners wanted no part of the projects, or of Coppola. His frantic pitch, handing round cigars and assuring them that he and he alone had the secret of making successful films, only alarmed them more. Even before he had seen any of THX1138, Frank Wells, head of business affairs, told Coppola they wouldn’t be putting up any more money, and they expected him to refund the $300,000 already spent. ‘Warner Brothers not only pulled the rug out from Francis,’ said Walter Murch grimly, ‘they tried to sell it back to him.’

10 American Graffiti

There’s no message or long speech, but you know that, when the story ends, America underwent a drastic change. The early sixties were the end of an era. It hit us all very hard.