Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  He had always wanted to do sci-fi, “a fantasy in the Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon tradition, a combination of 2001 and James Bond.” He admired Kubrick’s 2001, but thought it was excessively opaque. Star Wars “was a conscious attempt at creating new myths, he continued. “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would... introduce a kind of basic morality. Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’”

  Lucas started writing the treatment for Star Wars in February 1972, about a month after the Northpoint screening of Graffiti. He was reading extensively through the literature of fairy tale and myth, discovering Joseph Campbell. He pored over Carlos Castaneda, recast Castaneda’s hero, a Mexican shaman named Don Juan, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and his “life force,” into the Force. But as usual, he had trouble writing. More than a year later, by May of 1973, all he had to show was thirteen pages of virtual gobbledygook. The first sentence informed the reader that this was “the story of Mace Windu, a revered Jedibendu of Opuchi who was related to Usby C.J. Thape, padawaan learner of the famed Jedi.”

  Neither his lawyer, Tom Pollock, nor his agent, Jeff Berg, could make any sense of Lucas’s treatment, but he was their client, and they gamely went out to try to sell it. They were still obliged to bring the project to Universal. “George didn’t want it set up with Tanen,” said Pollock. “We were pretty sure they would pass... because it was right in the middle of Ned’s most angry period.”

  Meanwhile, three months before Graffiti released, Berg had smuggled a print to production head Alan Ladd, Jr., at Fox. Ladd saw it at 9:00 in the morning, and called Lucas that afternoon, saying he wanted to be in business with him. They had a meeting. Lucas pitched Star Wars, described the picture as a cross between Buck Rogers and Captain Blood, language Ladd could understand. He had none of Tanen’s mishegoss; he was quiet, laid-back, and nonconfrontational, not unlike Lucas himself. He knew his place, and Lucas liked him for it. The two men reached an understanding.

  According to Pollock, Universal had thirty days in which to respond. Right before the deadline, Tanen called Berg and said, “We’re passing.” Berg made a deal at Fox within a week after Tanen said no. Ladd paid Lucas $15,000 to develop a script, $50,000 to write, and another $100,000 to direct. Lucas’s company, the Star Wars Corporation, would get 40 percent of the net. The budget was fixed at $3.5 million, which Lucas knew was wildly unrealistic, but he was afraid Fox would back off if Ladd realized what the true cost might be.

  Graffiti opened on August 1, 1973. It broke house records, and earned a phenomenal $55.1 million in rentals. The picture’s direct cost was $775,000, plus another $500,000 for prints, ads, and publicity, a staggering return on investment. “To this day, it’s the most successful movie ever made,” says Tanen. Lucas’s cut came to about $7 million, around $4 million after taxes. This, after living on a combined income of $20,000 a year or less for longer than George and Marcia cared to remember. But for George, the glass was still half empty. So different from Francis, he made few changes in his lifestyle. Says Marcia, “He had this idea of being a flash in the pan, you hit it once and that’s all you’re ever going to have, there are no guarantees.” But they did buy an old Victorian in San Anselmo and restored it. Marcia called it Parkhouse.

  Like Spielberg, Lucas wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, be paid the kind of attention the critics lavished on Coppola and Scorsese. He told Friedkin that in Graffiti, he had made an American version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, and he wondered why none of the critics had picked up on it. Friedkin thought to himself, My God, he’s filled up with himself. This guy really thinks that’s what he’s done?

  Mean Streets opened six months later. “They’re similar,” observes Scorsese. “One was about urban Italian-Americans and one was about small-town Americans. That’s when I saw the handwriting on the wall. The movies I was going to make were going to be for specialized groups, while Graffiti and Star Wars would appeal to everyone.”

  Although Lucas had conceived the story and directed the picture, the press gave Coppola a lot of the credit. Graffiti was another example of his unfailing golden touch. Lucas distributed points to those he felt had made major contributions. Lucas and Coppola, who had promised points to DP Haskell Wexler and producer Gary Kurtz, fell to fighting over whose cut the points came out of. George wanted Francis to pay them out of his twenty-four points; Francis didn’t see why he should. “George is just like an accountant when it comes to money,” says Huyck. “The amount of money that George had to send to Francis upset him.” Said Lucas, “Francis was questioning my honesty. It was one of the reasons we drifted apart.” According to Dale Pollack, Lucas’s biographer, George previously thought Coppola didn’t know any better. After this quarrel, he felt Coppola was immoral. (Lucas says Pollack exaggerated the degree of animosity between himself and Coppola in the interest of a good story.)

  Coppola in fact ended up paying Wexler and Kurtz, and his twenty-four points shrank to fourteen, netting him $3 million, although had he produced Graffiti himself, he could have made much more. “That movie could have brought me over $20 million,” he said. “I lost the chance to earn enough money to set up my own studio. After that, I decided that I would finance all Zoetrope films myself.” He always regretted his failure to finance Graffiti, for a long time blamed Ellie for it.

  When Graffiti started cleaning up at the box office, Lucas had an opportunity to renegotiate his deal with Fox. Berg told him he could expect to get his salary raised to $500,000, and cash in his net points for gross. Lucas shrewdly decided to make his demands in another area. Wiser from his traumatic experiences with Warners and Universal, he wanted Star Wars produced by his own company so he could make sure that costs charged against the picture were genuine. Says Pollack, “He had been burned on control by studios. He really saw it first as a control issue rather than a money issue, because he was then and still is into control.”

  Lucas also insisted on the music rights and profits from sales of the sound-track album, as well as the sequel rights. And last but not least, he wanted the merchandising rights. Until Star Wars, merchandising was a relatively trivial cash center. Lucas understood its importance. Just how much Lucas was motivated by money is a matter of debate. Someone who worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Lucas produced, once volunteered that her favorite film of his was THX. He gave her a puzzled look and said, “But it didn’t make any money!” As always, Coppola was the standard by which he measured himself. Recalls Milius, “George said to me, ‘I’m going to make five times as much money as Francis on these science fiction toys. And I won’t have to make The Godfather.’ I thought, Where is this coming from?” Lucas had all the angles figured out. He was under no illusions about the kind of picture he was making. “I’ve made what I consider the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make.” He added, “This is a Disney movie,” he said. “All Disney movies make $16 million, so this picture is going to make $16 million. It cost ten, so we’re going to lose money on the release, but I hope to make some of it back on the toys.”

  Recalls Huyck, “When George said, ‘I’m gonna make my own movies,’ it wasn’t, ‘Fuck you, we’re gonna make our movies,’ because we kinda could make our own movies in those days. What was upsetting him was the fact that he felt he should be getting more of the movie. George looked at it like a businessman, saying, ‘Wait a minute. The studios borrowed money, took a 35 percent distribution fee off the top.’ He said, ‘This is crazy. Why don’t we borrow the money ourselves?’ So some of the bravest and/or reckless acts were not aesthetic, but financial.”

  From Fox’s point of view, Lucas’s demands were a joke. Everyone knew that toys took eighteen months to design, manufacture, and distribute, and by that time the movie would be history. It was axiomatic that you couldn’t make money on sequels, and the rights obviously didn’t amount to much unless the movie was a huge hit, which nobody expected.

  MEANWHILE, Coppola approached Lucas about directing Apocalypse
Now. The period from Godfather II to Apocalypse Now, roughly a year and a half from December 1974 to March 1976, marked the high tide of Coppola’s power, success, and fame. Godfather II had been all his, dispelling the doubts he and others had harbored about its predecessor. A lot of people he respected thought it was better than the first Godfather. Now that he had really come into his own, his ego exploded. The overwhelming grosses of Graffiti, the double Oscar nominations that greeted Godfather II and The Conversation, the Godfather II sweep that followed, gilded his career—he was a triple threat as writer, producer, and director—with unparalleled triumph. He had done what every young director dreamed of: achieved spectacular success in a mainstream genre, managed to pursue personal filmmaking at the same time—and more, combined the two in his risky Godfather sequel. It is fair to say that no other figure, not even Welles at his most grandiose, or Spielberg at his height, enjoyed the wild acclaim bestowed upon him. Not even the perfervid fantasies of the polio-ridden child could equal the reality of his life. Coppola was still all of thirty-five years old; the youth movement had come of age.

  But the nonstop adulation was beginning to take its toll. “The success... went to my head like a rush of perfume,” Coppola recalled. “I thought I couldn’t do anything wrong.” Francis wanted to get Apocalypse out for the Bicentennial in 1976, but George had begun work on the Star Wars script, and demurred. Francis didn’t think much of George’s script, told him he was crazy to pursue it when he could do Apocalypse instead. George always regarded Apocalypse as his to direct whenever he decided he was ready. True, Coppola had folded it into his deal with Warners way back when, and Lucas had never objected, but he had presented Lucas with a fait accompli, never even discussed it with him, and Lucas believed he had a moral claim on the project.

  “All Francis did was take a project I was working on, put it in a package deal, and suddenly he owned it,” he says. After Zoetrope collapsed, Lucas took the script to the studios. When Begelman arrived at Columbia, the conversations went so far that Lucas’s producer, Gary Kurtz, flew to the Philippines to scout locations. Lucas was all ready to begin, wanted to shoot it in 16mm for $2 or $3 million. “I couldn’t get the same terms Francis had gotten at Warners, it was much less,” continues Lucas. “But he was determined to hang on to the same number of points, his old number, so whatever Columbia took, I had to give up. My points were going to shrink way way down, and I wasn’t going to do the film for free. He had a right to do it, it’s in his nature, but at the same time I was annoyed about it.” He was quoted as saying, “Whatever Francis does for you always winds up benefiting Francis the most.... He finds it incredible that people do things he doesn’t wish them to do, since he’s controlling it all and they’re all here for him.”

  “I was always on Francis’s side,” says Milius. “George had nothing whatsoever to do with it, other than the fact that he was going to direct it. ‘Just go do your Vietnam thing, John.’ Francis gave George ample opportunity to make the movie. George never did. He was too good for it. Francis has a lot of terrible qualities; he is a supreme egotist, and he will take everything for himself. He is like what they said of Napoleon, he was great as a man can be without virtue. But if Francis hadn’t done it, that movie never would have been made.”

  Once Coppola decided to do Apocalypse himself, he moved ahead quickly. He had absorbed the lesson of Graffiti, and he was determined to set it up without studio money. That way, he could control the production and retain a large slice of the profits. In spring of 1975, he sold off the foreign rights to European distributors for $7 million. But there was a string attached. He couldn’t touch the money until he signed a couple of brand-name actors, the kind that would make his investors see dollar signs. Coppola thought it would be easy, just wave his Oscars in front of, say, Steve McQueen. But he was in for a surprise. He failed with McQueen, Pacino, Nicholson, and Redford, none of whom was eager to spend months in the jungle with Coppola, particularly since he was unwilling to offer them gross points. Pacino said, “I know what this is going to be like. You’re gonna be up there in a helicopter telling me what to do, and I’m gonna be down there in a swamp for five months.” Coppola failed with all of them. Ditto Brando. Furious, Francis threw his Oscars out the window, until all but one lay on the sidewalk, shattered. By this time, he had spent about $1 million of his own money on preproduction. He told his production designer, Dean Tavoularis, that if he couldn’t get big stars, he’d cast unknowns, “young Al Pacinos. The war was fought by children. Redford and McQueen are too old.”

  The script, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, told the story of a rogue Green Beret colonel named Kurtz, targeted for termination by the army, through the eyes of Willard, the officer sent to execute him. It was now six years old, and a lot had changed since Milius had written it in 1969. Although the U.S. had decimated Vietnam, it had lost the war. Coppola told everyone that the script was little more than a one-dimensional expression of Milius’s neolithic jingoism: “The film continued through comic-strip episode and comic-strip episode until it came to a comic-strip resolution: Attila the Hun (i.e., Kurtz) with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero (Willard) by the hand, saying, ‘Yes, yes, here! I have the power in my loins!’”

  From the beginning, Francis had in mind a surrealistic treatment. “People used to ask me, ‘What’s this movie gonna be like?’ And I would say, ‘Like Ken Russell,’” he remarked. “‘The jungle will look psychedelic, fluorescent blues, yellows, and greens.... I mean the war is essentially a Los Angeles export, like acid rock.

  Coppola eventually settled on Harvey Keitel as Willard, and Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore. Desperate, he changed Brando’s mind with an extremely rich deal: a million a week for three weeks and 11 percent of the gross. Other parts went to Sam Bottoms, Fred Forrest, Scott Glenn, and Dennis Hopper. With this cast on board, Francis turned around and sold U.S. rights to United Artists for $10 million. All told, he had about $17 million—a wildly inadequate sum, as it would turn out—but he had managed to retain control of the movie. UA optimistically announced a release date of April 7, 1977, Coppola’s thirty-eighth birthday.

  Francis called Roger Corman, who had shot several films in the Philippines. “I know you’ve been shooting your films in that area. What advice can you give me?”

  “My advice, Francis, is, Don’t go.”

  “It’s too late to change. We’ve been in preproduction for weeks.”

  “You’re going right into the rainy season—May through November. Nobody shoots there that time of year.”

  “It’ll be a rainy picture.”

  On the eve of his departure, Coppola’s mood was ebullient. Megalomania, never a stranger, came knocking once again. He startled a journalist by falling dramatically to his knees before the new pyramidal skyscraper that poked upward through the skyline of North Beach. It was the Transamerica headquarters at 600 Montgomery Street, home of UA’s conglomerate parent. It dwarfed his own Sentinel Building across the street, a daily reminder of his humiliating dependence. “Someday I won’t just own this,” he bellowed, “but I’ll own you too,” gesturing at Transamerica’s headquarters. As the Apocalypse budget climbed, it seemed that the tiny Sentinel Building threw an ever larger shadow on the glass facade of the Transamerica Tower behind it.

  LUCAS WORKED on the Star Wars script for two and one half years, writing at the back of his house in San Anselmo in a room that he shared with a gaudy Wurlitzer juke box. A photograph of Sergei Eisenstein peered down at him from the wall behind his desk. The Emperor, corrupted by power, was based on Richard Nixon, although some of his friends suggested that it was only later, after the picture became a hit, that Lucas claimed this. He plundered Flash Gordon serials and other pulp sci-fi of the ’30s for decor and costume. He wrote, revised, and revised some more. He puzzled over how to get the right “wholesome” tone, avoiding sex and violence, yet including “hip new stuff.”

  First there were too many
characters, then too few. They combined, and then divided again. The plot was too simple, too complex. Princess Leia’s role grew bigger, then smaller. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, initially one character, became two. The Force got a good side (Ashla) and a bad side (Bogan). Annikin Starkiller became Luke Skywalker. Kenobi began life as an elderly general, became an addled hermit, and then an elderly general again. A Kiber Crystal appeared, then disappeared.

  Lucas, meanwhile, was afflicted by headaches, pains in the stomach and chest. He became compulsive about his writing materials, insisting on No. 2 pencils and blue and green lined paper. He took to slicing off bits of his hair with scissors, depositing them, along with crumpled sheets of paper, in the wastebasket. He could never remember how he had spelled the names of his characters, rendered Chewbacca differently every time he wrote it.

  When Lucas finished a draft, he would show it to his friends: Coppola, Huyck and Katz, Robbins, and so on. No one was supportive. “They said, ‘George, you should be making more of an artistic statement,’” Lucas recalled. “People said I should have made Apocalypse Now after Graffiti, and not Star Wars. They said I should be doing movies like Taxi Driver.” He was depressed, convinced he was a failure. Marcia asked De Palma to talk to him. “George thinks he has no talent,” she said. “He respects you. Tell him he does.”

  The third draft was finished on August 1, 1975, by which time Marcia had started work on Taxi Driver. Lucas wrote Coppola into his script as Han Solo, in a self-flattering version of their relationship. Solo outwitted the Empire (read, studios) and enjoyed skating along the edge of the precipice, but he gambled and lost heavily, never accumulating enough money to get any real power, and had a self-destructive streak a mile wide. And most important, he lost the girl to Luke, i.e., George. He was still anxious about the script, and begged Huyck and Katz to do a polish, swearing them to secrecy. “They’re already nervous,” he told them. “If they find out that I’ve gotten someone else to rewrite the script, they’re gonna back out. I’ll give you some points.” He gave them two.