George Lucas: A Biography

As cruising petered out in the early hours, more aggressive drivers peeled off and headed to the long, straight roads on the edge of town, where they could prove just whose car was the fastest. A mythology grew up around these dawn races, which Lucas celebrated in American Graffiti. In the film, they take place on Paradise Road – a real Modesto thoroughfare, but too twisty, locals agree, for racing. Dragsters preferred Mariposa Drive, Blue Gum Avenue, or, best of all, Rose Lane, where painted lines marked out a measured quarter-mile. The film showed drivers gambling their registration papers – ‘pink slips’ – though this was almost unknown: even a $20 side bet was daring. Most kids didn’t own the cars anyway: ‘You’re racing your daddy’s car tonight,’ was a favorite gibe – used by Harrison Ford as Bob Falfa in American Graffiti when he challenges John Milner. If parents bought a second car for their kids, they normally retained title. Most kids simply cruised in the family Chevy or Ford, the automatic transmissions of which they wrecked in a few months by intemperate ‘peeling out’ at high speed from the kerb, or by racing.

The bad boys of the car culture were the gangs. Modesto already had a hot-car club, the Century Toppers, which went back to 1947 and was led by Gene Wilder, later a prominent professional customizer. A car modelled on his chopped Mercury, the roof so low that the windscreen is barely a slit, features in American Graffiti, but Lucas preferred to confer immortality on a later and raunchier gang, the Faros, archetypal juvenile delinquents who hung out at a burger joint called the Round Table.

In American Graffiti, the Pharaos (sic) and their slow-talking, gum-chewing leader Joe, played by gangling Bo Hopkins, are every mother’s nightmare, in glitzy satin jackets and skin-tight jeans. They kidnap Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and put him through an initiation rite that involves hooking a chain to a police car and ripping out its back axle.

Surviving Faros reject this characterization, and deny charges that they instigated fist-fights or poured gasoline onto roads and set it afire. ‘We never got in trouble,’ insists Ted Tedesco, one of three brothers, all foundation members of the Faros when the gang formed in 1959. To hear the Tedescos and other ex-members like Marty Reiss tell it, the Faros were just decent kids high on the car culture. ‘I don’t think more than five people smoked cigarettes,’ says Reiss. ‘Nobody was on drugs. Any obscenity, including “Hell” and “Damn,” was punished by a swat from the club paddle, as was spinning your tires within two blocks of the clubhouse.’ They’re silent, however, about Lucas’s accusation that though he was never a member, they used him as a stooge, sending him in to enrage other gangs who, when they chased the pint-sized troublemaker down an alley, found themselves facing the Faros armed with bike chains.

Lucas was right, they agree, about initiations, but they deny ever having done anything as drastic as trashing a police prowler. (Lucas insisted ‘some friends’ did try this trick one Halloween, but without the film’s spectacular result: ‘The car just sort of went clunk, and it was really very undramatic.’) The worst a potential member might endure was being rolled through a supermarket on a trolley, dressed only in a diaper, or being blindfolded and forced to eat dogfood, or a live goldfish – and even then, they insist, the fish was replaced by a piece of peach. ‘That was the big, tough club,’ says Reiss, now a respectable local businessman, like most other members. The Faros’ last president, Marty Jackman, even became the local representative of the Sierra Club.

As a teenager, Lucas wanted to join the Faros, or at least win their acceptance. He let his hair grow even longer, fitted silver toecaps to his pointed boots, and wore black Levi’s that remained unwashed for weeks at a time. Nagging his parents finally got him a car, a tiny Autobianchi, nicknamed, when Fiat bought up the company, the Bianchina. It had a two-cylinder engine, hardly more powerful than a motorbike, and with an appalling clatter. Even then, there was a trade-off: George would become the delivery boy of his father’s business.

Lucas was grateful and resentful at the same time. He had a car, but it was barely a car. It had ‘a sewing machine motor in it. It was a dumb little car. What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter.’ Some of his humiliation would pass to Terry the Toad in American Graffiti, forced to bumble about on a Vespa. The deal with his father to work at the store didn’t last long. George was expected to haul large, heavy boxes of paper in the summer heat, then sweep up the store, clean the toilets, and lock up. After a few weeks he had a blazing fight with his father, who fired him and offered the job to George Frankenstein. ‘The damn kid won’t even work for me,’ he told Frankenstein, ‘after I’ve built this business for him.’ Privately, he called his son ‘a scrawny little devil.’ Lucas later said of American Graffiti: ‘In a way, the film was made so my father won’t think those were wasted years. I can say I was doing research, though I didn’t know it at the time.’

Still a few months shy of the date on which he could get his license, Lucas could only drive on the family ranch. Once, trying to make the Bianchina behave like a high-powered rod, he swung its back end into a walnut tree. He got his license after one failure, for forgetting traffic rules, but promptly drove the Fiat so fast that he rolled it at seventy miles an hour going round a bend.

Lucas had the car towed forlornly to Modesto’s Foreign Car Service. Fortunately, his friend John Plummer worked there. Also into cars, he’d rescued and restored an old MG, and offered to help George fix up his Fiat. For weeks, the two boys worked side by side in the garage, which was also the local Renault dealership. After hours, they turned the Fiat into at least an approximation of a lean, mean machine. They cut away the mashed roof entirely, fitted a new low windscreen, and a rollbar. They souped up the engine and put in a silencer, the ominous growl of which belied the feebleness of the motor. Better shock absorbers improved the suspension and minimized the chance of another roll, and Lucas also installed extra-wide professional seat-belts. The Fiat, never very attractive, now looked ungainly and foreshortened – a ‘weird little car,’ in the words of one friend – but George loved it. He had wheels at last, and he was ready to roll.

He began to explore the pleasures of driving fast. He and Plummer raced on an old go-kart track behind the garage. Plummer inclined to heftiness, but George was light, like the Fiat. He found he could take turns faster than larger cars and still not spin out, which made up for his lack of speed on the straightaways. The experience was exhilarating: ‘The engine, the noise, being able to peel rubber through all four gears with three shifts, the speed. It was the thrill of doing something really well. When you drift through a corner and come up at just the right time, and shift down – there’s something special about it. It’s like running a very good race. You’re all there, and everything is working.’

What wasn’t working was everything else. George’s camera lay unused, the environment box his father built him was discarded. His schoolwork limped along at a D+ average, barely high enough to graduate. Worst of all from the perspective of George Sr, he showed no inclination to take over the Lucas Company. ‘I was a hellraiser,’ Lucas conceded. ‘My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. My parents – not my mother: mothers never write off their sons – but my father wrote me off.’ He overstates the case, but not by much. Even when George began his film career, his father was pessimistic. ‘He kept telling me he wanted his son to go into his business,’ recalled a friend, Modesto city councilman Frank Muratore, ‘and didn’t think he would do very well in movies. I recall how sad George [Sr] was about that.’ George Sr confessed later, ‘Frankly, we just didn’t understand George. I’d try to get my point across and he’d just sit there and look at me. I’d just run out of breath. He wouldn’t pay any attention.’

At sixteen, the gap between Lucas and his father seemed an abyss, but over the next twenty years George would become more and more recognizable as the son of a small-town Methodist businessman. ‘It’s sort of ironic,’ he muses about his father, ‘because I swore when I was a kid I’d never do what he did. At eighteen, we had this big break, when he wanted me to go into the business and I refused, and I told him, “There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars … and two, that I will never be president of a company.” I guess I got outwitted.’

Almost as soon as he won his license, George started getting traffic tickets. For the police, hot-rodders were anathema, and trapping them something between a sacred calling and a sport. Most of the local cops were young themselves, had grown up with the low-riders and hot-rodders, and envied their lawless opposite numbers. In More American Graffiti, Lucas brings back Bob Falfa, the rodder defeated by John Milner in the first film, as a California Highway Patrol cop on a motorcycle, booking the people who used to be his rivals. Called into traffic court, Lucas went with his father, who insisted his son get a haircut and wear a suit – the only time anyone ever saw George in collar and tie. Business clothing became the symbol of everything his generation despised: functionaries of all sorts came to be dismissively called ‘suits.’

The car culture thrust Lucas into a new, pragmatic world. All that counted were your skills, your capacity for action. Life wasn’t for reflection: it was for use, like the landscape around Modesto. ‘George has this idea about a used universe,’ says sound engineer Randy Thom. ‘He wanted things in his films to look like they’ve been worn down, rusted, knocked about. He didn’t want things to look brand new.’

It’s not hard to trace this vision to those days in 1960 and 1961 when Lucas kicked around the world of Northern Californian car racing. Plenty of fairgrounds had installed raceways. They staged demolition derbies on weekends, preceded by auto-cross – racing sports and stock cars against the clock. Like hot-rodding, auto-cross was a first step into the pro world of the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR), or Class C sports car competition. Detroit was already taking an interest in what happened at circuits in Stockton, Goleta, Willow Springs, Cotati, and Laguna Seca, just outside Monterey. New tires, new fuels, new engines could be tested to destruction by these rural daredevils, some of whom might make it to the sponsored big time, as had Junior Johnson and Freddie Lorenzen, backed by Chevrolet, Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear. Lucas delved into this world in More American Graffiti, where John Milner, having made his reputation as a hot-rodder, tries to break into big-time drag racing, with its professional teams sponsored by big automotive companies.

The Bianchina was a toy in the high-powered world of auto-cross, but even if Lucas had had a better car, Californian law forbade anyone to race until they were twenty-one. Always the team player, he attached himself to a winner and insinuated himself into his group until he made himself indispensable, much as he would do with Francis Coppola a few years later.

The winner in this case was Allen Grant, a coming sports-car driver whom Lucas met at Laguna Seca. Four years older than Lucas, he had graduated from Downey in 1958 with grades almost as poor as Lucas’s. Now he drove a dazzling Ford Mustang Cobra and was attracting attention from big sponsors. Good-looking, well connected, successful with women, Grant had already embarked on a business career which would make him, for a while anyway, one of the richest entrepreneurs in Northern California.

Grant offered a potent role model. Lucas became his mechanic, and a conveniently light co-driver. He also joined the Ecurie AWOL Sports Car Competition Club, and began editing its newsletter, BS. His drawings of sports cars and caricatures of drivers appeared in BS, and he sold or gave the originals to his friends, including Grant. Through Grant, Lucas began to sense that another life existed outside Modesto; but he wasn’t sure how to exploit this knowledge. He was well into his last year at high school, but didn’t delude himself that his grades would get him into junior college, let alone either of California’s two main universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with its main campus in Westwood, a luxury suburb of Los Angeles, or the University of Southern California (USC), situated in a funkier corner of the city, on the edge of the old downtown area. UCLA, the official state college, required no tuition fees, but its academic requirements were high. USC had lower requirements, but demanded fees.

Lucas and John Plummer pored over college prospectuses. ‘We wanted a school,’ says Plummer, ‘that didn’t have a lot of requirements in math or anything else, but that would let us go into more of the creative side.’ If they didn’t find one, they had more or less decided to go to Europe together, though with Dorothy Lucas in hospital again and three other children to put through school, George Sr showed no inclination to fund such a trip. Nor could he countenance his son going to study in Los Angeles, which he ridiculed as ‘Sin City.’

George persisted. Of the two universities, USC looked the more promising. It even offered a film course, one of the first in the country. ‘In those days, film school wasn’t like it is now,’ says Willard Huyck, the screenwriter who would graduate from USC and, with his wife and writing partner Gloria Katz, script American Graffiti. ‘Nobody knew about it, and they sort of stood outside the door of film school and grabbed you as you walked by, and asked if you’d like to become a film major.’

The USC course included animation and photography, and Lucas wondered if he could bluff his way in with a portfolio of drawings and his skill with a 35mm camera. First, however, he had to graduate from Downey – and with a D average, that was anything but assured. School ‘commencement,’ the end of the academic year, was on a Friday in the middle of June. As the day approached, he still had three ‘incompletes,’ and unless he delivered the papers necessary to finish the coursework, he could fail to graduate.

These things were on his mind when, on a hot Tuesday, 12 June 1962, he drove the Bianchina out of the gate of the walnut ranch and headed for town. His mother was resting, having just returned from another spell in hospital, weak and emaciated: she and her son now both weighed the same, eighty pounds. He’d tried to persuade his sister Wendy to come to the library with him, as she often had before, to help with his spelling and sentence structure, but she preferred to stay by the pool and keep an eye on her mother.

George spent a few hours at the library, but did little work. He would always hate writing, and on a hot day like this, he hated it more than usual. At around 4.30 p.m. he left, and roared the little Fiat back along the road home. He arrived outside his home at 4.50, and swung the car to the left to enter the dirt track leading to the house. He never saw the Chevrolet Impala driven by seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, a classmate from Downey, coming up fast behind him. It tried to overtake just as Lucas swung across the road. The heavier Chevy slammed into the side of the Fiat, level with the driver’s seat, and sent it bounding like a toy. On the third roll, Lucas’s seatbelt snapped and he was thrown clear, flying high into the air before landing with stunning force on his chest and stomach. The car bounced twice more, showering dust and pebbles of safety glass, crashed into a walnut tree at sixty miles an hour, and stuck there, wrapped around the trunk. So great was the impact that the tree, roots and all, shifted two feet.

5 Where Were You in ’62?

I should have been killed, but I wasn’t. I’m living on borrowed time.

Lucas on his accident

Lucas’s survival was miraculous. Had the seatbelt not snapped, had he not been thrown clear, had he landed on his head rather than his chest, he would almost certainly have died in the road in front of his own home.

Nobody inside the Lucas house heard the crash. Their neighbor opposite, Shorty Coleman, bolted out, saw him lying unconscious, face bloody, and rang immediately for an ambulance. With the hospital only five miles away, it arrived quickly. As Lucas was loaded in, he began to turn blue with cyanosis, and on the trip to the hospital he started vomiting blood.

At the hospital, the doctor on duty, Paul Carlsen, gave him a blood transfusion and inserted four needles into his stomach to check for the internal bleeding that would indicate ruptured organs. George Sr was telephoned, and he raced to the hospital, then home to collect Wendy and his wife. When they arrived at George’s bedside, they found him connected to oxygen and transfusion tubes, his forehead bandaged, his face ashen. ‘Mom, did I do something wrong?’ he muttered, half unconscious. Dorothy wept, and had to be led from the room. George Sr prayed. Wendy just stared at her brother, and wondered what would have happened had she gone to the library with him. From the look of the car, she would probably have been dead.

A photographer from the Modesto Bee took a spectacular photograph of the mangled Fiat, which the paper used on the front page next day, under the heading ‘Youth Survives Crash.’ ‘Just what part in saving his life the rollbar and a safety belt played is not known but George W. Lucas Jr survived this crash yesterday,’ said the Bee. Later, the circumstances of the accident would be subtly manipulated by the Lucas machine to shift any blame from him. A 1994 book authorized by Lucasfilm describes Ferreira as ‘driving behind him at eighty to ninety miles an hour’ – a charge not supported by the record – and ‘with his headlights off – hardly a crime at 4.50 p.m. on a summer afternoon. The local police were in no doubt about who was to blame. While he was still in hospital, they gave Lucas a ticket for making an illegal left turn.

The same book magnifies the extent of Lucas’s injuries, describing him as ‘without a pulse, his lungs collapsed and numerous bones crushed.’ In fact, to the surprise of Carlsen and the other medical staff, they proved less severe than they looked. Despite the gash on his forehead and the bruises on his shoulders, he had only two minor fractures, and his liver, spleen, and kidneys were intact, though bruised. The worst damage was to his chest, which had absorbed most of the force. X-rays revealed hematomas on his lungs, which were hemorrhaging. But that could be dealt with. The doctors injected anti-inflammatory drugs, and George, who was in good health generally, started to recover.

Paradoxically, his accident won him the high-school graduation which had been in doubt. On Friday, the day of commencement, someone from the school brought his diploma to the hospital, his failure to make up his courses conveniently forgotten.

Lucas was too dazed to relish his good fortune. If anyone were to ask him the question posed by the publicity for American Graffiti, ‘Where Were You in ’62?’, he would have replied, ‘In bed.’ Most of his summer was spent convalescing, and the legend has grown up of his Pauline conversion during this period to hard work, ambition, and the life of the mind.

It may even be partly true. A lot was happening in the world, and with leisure to contemplate it, Lucas may have seen his life in a new light. During 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in October, John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev over the missiles he’d sneaked into Cuba; America exploded a nuclear device over Johnston Island in the Pacific; Polaroid launched a new one-minute color film; and the first Titan inter-continental ballistic missile was installed in a concrete silo in the American heartland, targeted on Russia.

Lucas couldn’t get out to see the summer’s biggest movies, some of them destined to be among his favorites, like the first James Bond film, Dr No, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; but he watched plenty of television, none of it very significant. That year’s Emmys chose the thoughtful legal series The Defenders as the best show of 1961, but the networks, eyes ever on the ratings, premiered nothing as interesting in 1962, which saw the debut of The Beverly Hillbillies, the World War II series Combat, animated science fiction from Hanna-Barbera in The Jetsons, and the mindless comedy McHale’s Navy. The Tonight Show also got a new host, Johnny Carson.

It was a big year for dance music. The Twist was hot – Chubby Checker seemed to be on every TV pop programme – followed by Joey Dee and the Starliters doing ‘Peppermint Twist.’ Fads like the Limbo Rock, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi and the Lo-co-motion were sent up in ‘The Monster Mash’ by the Crypt Kickers, with Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, imitating the sepulchral tones of Karloff.

What caught Lucas’s ear, however, was a new presence on the air, from an unexpected source – Mexico.

Robert Weston Smith was born in Brooklyn in 1938. His resonant voice and interest in music made him a natural for radio, and by 1962 he was a disc jockey on KCIJ-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, where as ‘Big Smith with the Records’ he gained a following among admirers of rhythm and blues. In Shreveport, Smith began developing a fictional character for himself, one which would exploit a certain furtive quality in his voice, and his flair for the outrageous. He took his idea to XERF-FM in Del Rio, Texas. Most of the station’s clients were preachers, who paid generously for the right to broadcast their message all over the US via its massive 250,000-watt transmitter – five times the power allowed for stations within the US – sited just over the Mexican border.

Smith convinced XERF that he could win just as many listeners in the late-night and early-morning hours with rhythm and blues and bluegrass music. His sponsors were the same preachers who dominated the daylight hours. Smith’s throaty musical introductions, occasional lycanthropic howls, yelps of ‘Mercy!’ and exhortations to ‘Get yo’self nekkid!’ interspersed with commercials for plastic effigies of Jesus, sanctified prayer handkerchiefs, and the collected sermons of his holy-rolling backers, soon became a feature of the American soundscape, and ‘Wolfman Jack,’ as Smith now called himself, an institution.

Lucas became a fan. Later, he would remark that, ‘People have a relationship with a deejay whom they’ve never seen but to whom they feel very close because they’re with him every day. For a lot of kids, he’s the only friend they’ve got.’

While he lay in bed listening to the Wolfman, Lucas contemplated his future.

There were plenty of alternatives. As he recovered, his father pressed the point that if there was a time for his son to go into the family business, this was surely it. George responded with the stubbornness which his father must have recognized, since it reflected his own. Lucas Sr saw that money bought power and freedom. So did his son. He believed in a hard day’s work for a fair salary. So did his son. He saw discipline, self-control, and self-reliance as the core of good character. So did his son. Lucas Jr rejected his father’s values in adolescence, but spent the next years attaching himself to surrogate fathers who would tell him the same things: work hard, make money, and use it to buy independence.

With his car wrecked and no chance of financing another, Lucas’s racing days were at an end, unless he took a job as a mechanic servicing someone else’s ride. On the plus side, he had, against the odds, graduated from high school; though this had its negative aspects too, since he now became eligible to be drafted. At the end of American Graffiti, Terry the Toad, the character with whom Lucas is most identified, goes to Vietnam, where he is listed as missing in action – a fate explained in ironic detail in More American Graffiti.