George Lucas: A Biography

Vietnam posed a potent threat to teenagers like Lucas in 1962. Many, including his future partner Gary Kurtz, served their stint. Some were judged too unhealthy for the army, as Lucas would be, though he didn’t yet know it. Others found a way around it. Steven Spielberg would have been happy to hang out in San Jose, California after his high-school graduation (with grades as poor as Lucas’s), seeing movies and making a few of his own on 8mm, but the arrival of his Selective Service Notice in early 1964 – delivered by his father while he waited in line to see Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – concentrated his mind wonderfully, and he enrolled at California State College at Long Beach, thus gaining a student exemption.

As he convalesced, Lucas decided to continue in school, and enrolled in junior college. These halfway houses between high school and college offered two-year courses, usually vocational. In the fall of 1962, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College, assembling an arts major that even further exasperated his father: astronomy, sociology, speech, and art history – none of them any use in selling office supplies.

Except for speech, which Lucas hoped would improve his limited communication skills and eradicate his warbling croak of a voice (it didn’t; he admits he was ‘terrible in Speech class’), the other courses were those traditionally chosen by adolescents who, having rejected religion, are looking for a new belief system based in rationalism. Reason and science become the new gods. The new believer finds himself worshipping the Divine Order, the Power of the Mind, the Inevitability of Historical Change.

Already, an ambitious science fiction writer named Lafayette Ron Hubbard had cashed in on this thirst for certainties by inventing his own quasi-scientific religion, Scientology, which, with notable shrewdness, he’d launched via an article in the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The same magazine gave generous publicity to the experiences of Dr Joseph Rhine of Duke University in hunting the elusive signs of what he christened ‘psi powers’: telepathy and telekinesis.

Lucas later read the basic works of sociology and anthropology which traced modern religion and morality back to their roots in tribal rituals and earth magic. But though he has been credited, retrospectively, with a near-lifelong interest in cultural studies and science fiction which blossomed in the Star Wars films, nobody can remember him being interested in anything but television and cars until long after he left Modesto.

In 1964 Lucas graduated from Modesto Junior College with an Associate in Arts degree, and an A in astronomy and Bs in speech, sociology, and art history. His grade average hovered around C, but that was enough to get into all but the most demanding colleges. John Plummer urged him to try USC with him. But Lucas decided he didn’t want to move that far from home. Instead he enrolled at San Francisco State, which had the added advantage of being free.

He still had no clear idea of what career he might follow. At junior college he’d drifted back to photography, this time with an 8mm movie camera bought by his father. Though he no longer had ambitions to drive competitively, he also spent time around the race circuits, hanging out with Allen Grant and other old friends, but filming rather than tinkering with their cars. ‘I wasn’t the hot guy any more,’ he recalled. ‘I was sort of over the hill, though I still knew all the guys.’

Lucas discovered the pleasures of watching, ideally through the lens of a camera. People didn’t ask awkward questions when you filmed them; they just let you be. And, seen through the camera, they themselves came into sharper focus. You could observe, comment, categorize, without saying a word.

What Lucas found more interesting than human beings, however, were objects. On occasional visits to Berkeley, he saw films of the new American ‘underground’ – Stan Brakhage’s jittering 8mm diaries, Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees (1961), the abstractions of Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, Robert Breer, and in particular Jordan Belson, who projected his wobbling psychedelic creations on the walls of the San Francisco Planetarium.

The hot documentary from 1960 was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the Newport Jazz Festival, the first and only film by fashion photographer Bert Stern. Stern didn’t bother much with interviews. He preferred to stand back and film faces, or the reflections of yacht hulls on the surface of the water, which he cut to music by Mose Allison. There was no commentary, no point of view except that of the camera, no judgments, no argument, no plot. Lucas must have said to himself with some satisfaction, ‘I can do that.’ A year later, his student film Herbie would be made up entirely of reflections on the hubcaps and polished surface of a car, set to jazz by Herbie Hancock. Lucas’s first film, made as a child, had been of plates, not people, and he didn’t much change as an adult. His early student films would all be about cars. He shot them from a distance and up close, noticing the reflections on a polished fender or a windscreen; or clipped photographs from magazines and cut between them to create a narrative that bypassed performance. The idea of directing actors was, and would remain, distasteful.

No two people agree on how Lucas made the first step in the journey from Sunday cameraman to the most successful film-maker in history, but there’s little doubt that cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Haskell Wexler came into it.

The early sixties saw the arrival of new lightweight 16mm cameras and the documentary movement they engendered, cinéma vérité. The image of the cameraman with a 16mm Arriflex on his shoulder and a Nagra tape recorder close to hand – though not in hand; most professional tape machines still weighed twenty pounds – became a potent one, and even more so when Eclair launched its NPR, a sleek, updated version of the hand-held 16mm camera. With such equipment, a film-maker was independent, able to shoot where he liked, and with as little light as fast new film stocks would accept. Albert and David Maysles began turning out films in what they called ‘Direct Cinema.’ They were soon joined by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, who, as Drew Leacock Pennebaker, set most of the benchmarks with films like Primary, The Chair, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, the 1960 Eddie, about racing driver Eddie Sachs.

Haskell Wexler was thirty-six, and widely respected as a cameraman with a penchant for realism and a strong leftist political commitment. In 1958, Irvin Kershner had persuaded producer Roger Corman to finance Stakeout on Dope Street, a low-budget thriller about three boys who find a case full of drugs, and are pursued by the gang who owns it. Kershner co-wrote and directed. Wexler shot part of the film, adapting hand-held, low-light documentary technique to drama. He also lit Kershner’s The Hoodlum Priest (1961), and A Face in the Rain (1963). In between, he worked on low-budget experimental films like The Savage Eye (1960), and on documentaries. It was one of these that brought him to Modesto.

How he met George Lucas has long been a subject of rival mythologies. Dale Pollock, in the semi-authorized Skywalking, says simply, ‘Wexler took a liking to the weird skinny kid whose head was bursting with ideas. He went so far as to telephone some friends of his on USC’s film school faculty and advised them to watch out for Lucas. “For God’s sake, keep an eye on the kid,” Wexler told one faculty member [presumably Gene Peterson, who had been his assistant and who now taught cinematography there]. “He’s got the calling.” But Wexler did not get Lucas into USC, as legend has it. Lucas had applied to the film school prior to meeting Wexler, and to George’s and his father’s amazement, he was accepted.’

Other sources make a more direct link, and emphasize Wexler’s role. Charley Lippincott, who was at USC with Lucas and who would become his head of publicity and marketing, discounts the later story, encouraged by Lucas, that he had already made up his mind to enter film when he met Wexler: ‘Wexler was up there doing a film about cars [probably The Bus, a documentary Wexler wrote, shot, and directed], and George helped him out, working on the film as production assistant or something.’

As an aficionado of car racing, Wexler inevitably ran into Allen Grant. As they talked, Wexler complained that he was having trouble with his Citroën-Maserati, notorious for its tricky timing. Grant said he knew someone who could help, a guy who’d been his mechanic and co-driver, and who was interested in movies too. ‘George met up with Haskell Wexler,’ says Lippincott, ‘and told him he didn’t know what he wanted to do, but that he was interested in film. And Haskell got him into USC. He’s the one who persuaded him. I don’t think George really knew that much about film at the time.’

John Plummer also played a part. His grades were better than Lucas’s, and he wanted to enter USC in Los Angeles as a business major. He was going to LA to take the admission tests, and asked Lucas to keep him company. In fact, why didn’t he take the test too? ‘So I said, “All right,”’ Lucas recalled, “‘but it’s a long shot, ’cause my grades aren’t good enough to get into a school like that.” So I went and took the test and I passed. I got accepted!’

6 USC

[I want to thank] my teachers from kindergarten through college, their struggle – and it was a struggle – to help me learn to grow …

George Lucas in his speech to the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences, accepting the Irving Thalberg Award,

30 March 1992

Lucas enrolled at USC as a film major. His junior college courses counted toward credit, so he could skip his freshman and sophomore years, and enter as a junior.

Even then, his father still opposed the move, and scorned the whole idea of training for cinema. ‘You’re just going to become a ticket-taker at Disneyland,’ he told him. ‘You’re never going to get a real job.’ He also doubted his son’s will: ‘You’ll be back in a few years.’ George lost his temper. ‘I’m never coming back!’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty.’

Persistence wore Lucas Sr down. In an ingenious compromise, he offered to send his son through USC as an employee of the Lucas Company. He’d pay him a salary equal to his tuition fees, plus $200 a month – a substantial amount at a time when one could rent a very basic apartment for half that. If George didn’t persevere with the course, he could be fired like any stock-room boy. With little choice in the matter, he took the deal.

In the early summer of 1964, he came down to Los Angeles. John Plummer was sharing an apartment in the beachside suburb of Malibu, and Lucas moved in. To fill in before courses and his $200-a-month payment started, he waited tables and did drawings of surfer girls with the wide and dewy eyes of orphan children, which he hawked on the beach.

He also looked for part-time work in the film business. Ventura Boulevard, which ran along the San Fernando Valley side of the mountains separating the city’s sprawling dormitory suburbs from Hollywood and Beverly Hills, was lined with two- and three-story office buildings, most of which harbored at least one film company. Lucas visited scores of them. He was the ten thousandth hopeful to do so, and, like everybody else, he found that the fanciful titles of those companies disguised mostly nickel-and-dime operations: freelance editors, producers of educational documentaries, or distributors of 16mm films. Real producers usually had office space on or near one of the big movie-company lots, walled cities where security guards barred anyone without a pass or an appointment.

Lucas checked into USC for his first semester in fall 1964. The university wasn’t anything like he expected. It had a notable reputation for high academic distinction. One writer called it ‘a citadel of privilege.’ For decades it had supplied Los Angeles with its public officials, doctors, and engineers. But unlike UCLA, set among the lawns and groves of pepper trees in the elegant suburb of Westwood, USC had to content itself with what buildings it could find in its area of east LA, an old residential district through which the campus had metastasized over the years.

The best of USC’s buildings shared the twenties faux-Spanish architecture of the Shrine Auditorium, the area’s most distinctive structure, for many years Hollywood’s village hall, and the site of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. The worst were functional at best, and were usually allocated to courses which stood well down the list from medicine, engineering, and law. On that scale, the film school, part of the theater department, ranked lowest of all.

Lucas, like all new arrivals, asked, ‘Where’s the theater department?’

‘Over there.’

‘But … that’s a little house.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Where are the theaters?’

‘Well, we actually only have one. It’s an auditorium, and it was built in 1902.’

Despite the grandiose Spanish-style gate that led to it, the film department consisted of three single-story wooden buildings in an expanse of open ground. They’d been stables for the horses of cavalrymen stationed there during World War I. In the twenties, it was the school of architecture, then, after 1929, the film school. Following World War II, the college erected two more army-surplus wooden barracks buildings to house an audio-visual unit which mainly trained government and military personnel to use educational film materials. On the side, it produced instructional films. That unit became the nucleus of the USC Cinema School.

The school had a bare minimum of facilities. The old stables became a sound stage, with a screening room next door, always called Room 108, with 35mm and 16mm projection. Editing machines – ancient upright Moviolas – were crammed into single large room, next to a storage space for cameras and other movie equipment. Classrooms, each with its own 16mm projector, occupied the barracks. There was nowhere to hang out, so students congregated in an open space in the middle of the buildings.

Students were required to live on campus for the first year. A high-rise dormitory, one of the college’s few modern buildings, loomed over the cinema department, but it was reserved for female students. Most males, including Lucas, occupied Touton Hall, an older building across campus. It had no cafeteria, so he either had to trudge to the women’s dorm and suffer its famously inedible food, or eat in the neighborhood – not then as dangerous as it became after the 1965 riots in nearby Watts.

To his alarm, he found he wouldn’t have a room of his own. The college did make an effort to match up people of like interests, so he found himself sharing with Randy Epstein. A genial Angeleno, Epstein, now a successful Californian property developer, was used to prosperity, and was surprised by Lucas’s Spartan possessions – which consisted mostly of a Nikon 35mm camera and some clothes. He didn’t even have a stereo, a deficiency which Epstein remedied.

Watching him unpack his wardrobe of plaid shirts, jeans, and a boxy jacket with too-wide lapels, woven from a blanket-like fabric with metallic threads, Epstein wondered where Lucas had got his vision of how people dressed in Los Angeles – from the movies? To another student, Don Glut, who’d come from Chicago trailing a reputation as a motorcycle freak and street-gang member, Lucas was ‘very conservative-looking. Those were the days of the hippie look, but he had short hair. He looked like a young businessman. Somebody working his way up to corporate office.’ Hal Barwood, also in the film school, thought he resembled Buddy Holly. Lucas’s long silences emphasized his air of strangeness. Nervousness increased the tremor in his voice, turning it into a nervous warble. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan says, ‘He’s sort of like a cartoon character. In fact his voice, I think, is like about ten different cartoon characters.’ Each morning, Lucas walked to his USC window and said, ‘Hello, world.’ It sounded, says Epstein, ‘just like Kermit the frog from The Muppets.’

For every USC student doing a course in the humanities, a dozen were on athletics scholarships, including most of the college’s few African-Americans, one of whom, on the 1967 football team, was O.J. Simpson. The majority of these jocks lived as if people like Lucas, Epstein, Glut, and the other arts types didn’t exist. Glut says disgustedly, ‘We were mostly in the company of beer-guzzling, fraternity-type idiots. Lots of football players, who would do isometric exercises by straining against the side of doors, and screaming. It was like they didn’t have heads: their neck and head were the same width, as if the head was just another cervical verterbra, only with hair on it.’ USC still kept up its intimate relationship with the military, and the film school routinely enrolled a large contingent of air force and navy personnel each year for training in camera operation and sound recording – an older, more reserved, and decidedly non-hippie group which stuck together, and represented a further damping influence.

Surrounded by an atmosphere somewhere between Animal House and Full Metal Jacket, the remaining film-school students seldom socialized with anyone else on campus. ‘When people would ask, “Are you in a fraternity or something?’” recalls Randy Epstein, ‘I’d say, “No, I’m basically going to a private school within a private school, and we never see the outside of these four walls.’” Had they been more gregarious, or the atmosphere more welcoming, the history of cinema might have been very different; but the sense of isolation encouraged a feeling of them-against-us that grew into a revolution.

The USC students of 1966–68 reads like a roll-call of New Hollywood. They included John Milius, director of Big Wednesday and The Wind and the Lion, the legendary scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now, and ‘fixer’ on films as various as Jaws and Dirty Harry; Randal Kleiser, director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon; Basil Poledouris, composer of scores for Conan the Barbarian and Iron Eagle; Walter Murch, sound editor on Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, and director of Return to Oz; Howard Kazanjian, line producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and other collaborations between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg; screenwriter Willard Huyck, who, with his wife Gloria Katz, then at UCLA, wrote American Graffiti, parts of the Indiana Jones series, and Howard the Duck, which Huyck also directed; Caleb Deschanel, cinematographer of The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff; and Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who would co-script Sugarland Express for Spielberg – Robbins as a director also made films like *batteries not included, while Barwood, who began as an animator at USC, became a career writer of video games for Lucasfilm. Also in Lucas’s classes were Don Glut, who wrote the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back and directed Dinosaur Valley Girls; and Charley Lippincott, later Lucas’s marketing manager, and a force in the launching of Star Wars. Then, and later, women played little part in what was seen as a man’s business. ‘There were about two women in the whole film program,’ says John Milius. (‘Three’, insists Randy Epstein, ‘but we weren’t sure about one of them.’)

To Lucas, the faculty was no more impressive than the campus. ‘Most of the people were “those who can’t do, teach”-type people,’ says Don Glut. ‘The film-history class was mostly watching movies and talking about them. That was Arthur Knight’s class. His book The Liveliest Art became our textbook-which generated a lot of royalties for Professor Knight. The only person who had ever done anything was Irwin Blacker, who taught screenwriting. He’d written some books and screenplays. Mel Sloan was a professional editor. The animation course was directed by Herb Kossower. There was a guy named Gene Peterson whose big claim to fame was he had been a gaffer on Stakeout on Dope Street.’ (Glut is actually in error here, though the truth is even more improbable. The one film on which Peterson appears to have received a professional credit, indeed as a gaffer, i.e. electrician’s laborer, was The Brain Eaters, a 1958 horror film directed by Bruno Ve Sota.)

‘These people were staff, not professors,’ says Charley Lippincott, who came to USC via its night school, which taught a slimmed-down film course. ‘Dave Johnson taught production management. He’d been there forever; went to school there. He was probably the best-liked teacher. Ken Miura taught sound. A lot of these guys came out of the Second World War, and had been there on the GI Plan.’

Neat in his Modesto clothes, Lucas turned up dutifully at film classes, as well as those in astronomy and English, which he had to take as part of his regular course. He had no idea what kind of movies he was going to see, but those which were shown jolted someone whose limited experience of cinema was almost entirely Hollywood. Inflamed by legends of ‘the Underground,’ the students preferred the films of the French New Wave, which had taken off in 1959 with Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Godard’s 1960 A Bout de Souffle. The fashion for hand-held cameras, natural light, real locations, and sound recorded ‘live’ spread through them like a virus.

Godard’s 1965 science fiction film Alphaville made a particular impression. It followed a secret agent of the future, called ‘Lemmy Caution’ after Peter Cheyney’s detective hero, whom the film’s star Eddie Constantine often played on screen, as he infiltrates, none too subtly, the city of Alphaville, controlled by a computer called Alpha 60, which rigorously suppresses all emotion, keeping the inhabitants numbed by drugs, sex, and violent death. With typical bravado, Godard ignored special effects. Footage of Paris’s bleaker suburbs stood in for Alphaville, and Alpha 60 was just the disembodied voice of a man speaking through an artificial larynx. To Lucas in particular, it was a powerful lesson, which he would put into practice in his major student film, THX1138.

Many of the teachers, particularly those teaching craft courses like camerawork and sound recording, also embraced the nouvelle vague. Its techniques weren’t much different from those used in documentary everywhere. ‘The faculty was into art films,’ says Randy Epstein. ‘If it had sprocket-holes showing, or was a little out of focus, they loved it.’ Richard Walter said scornfully of their attitude, ‘A real film-maker didn’t write his or her film. They put a camera on their shoulder, sprayed the environment with a lens; they Did Their Own Thing, Let It All Hang Out, and anything they did was beautiful, because Hey, you’re beautiful.’

Arthur Knight screened the films praised by his generation of critics: the classics of German expressionism like Metropolis, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible, D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, David Lean. Nobody decreed to be ‘commercial’ received a second look, including later heroes of New Hollywood like Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller. Even Alfred Hitchcock was regarded as having ‘sold out.’

John Milius adulated B-westerns and the films of directors like Fuller, and Don Glut was a fanatic for serials and old science fiction and horror films. As a boy in Chicago, he had made thirty 16mm films, including a version of Frankenstein. Such was his enthusiasm for serials that his mother sewed him a Superman suit and another like that worn by the Martian menace of The Purple Monster Strikes, both of which he brought to USC. His devotion won over Randy Epstein and other students, who held popular late-night screenings of serials until Herb Kossower ejected them – not for misuse of the facilities, but for the nature of the films they showed. Marked as troublemakers, students like Glut and Milius had a tough time at USC. The faculty almost flunked Glut because of his enthusiasm for cheap fantasy films and his habit of reading comic books between classes. He finally had to do an extra year to get his degree. Milius, refused a passing grade in a French course by a professor who regarded him as ‘a savage,’ never graduated at all.