by Edward Gross
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The only choice was to place him on the backlot, because there was only one movie in production, which was Finian’s Rainbow. This was where Lucas met Coppola for the first time. One thing that Lucas brought to the table is the fact that he’d previously had another scholarship working for Carl Foreman at Columbia Pictures, where he got to shoot documentaries, which he found enjoyable. But as Lucas was on the set of Finian’s Rainbow, he found there was nothing for him to do but sit around. After a few days, his mind began to wander.
GEORGE LUCAS
I’d had a tour and gone over to the animation department, which is where I started in film school, and it was empty. I said, “Well, I’ll just skip this and I’m going to go over to the animation department, find some short ends and make a movie.” Back then film was really expensive, and when you were doing independent films in those days they would cost you at least $150,000 or $200,000 just to buy the raw stock, have it processed, rent the cameras, and do that stuff. So to make a movie it was just impossible, because people couldn’t come up with a few hundred thousand dollars. So everybody would steal short ends—when you finish shooting something, they’d take what’s left in the camera and you could get that. It would be like, a hundred feet or fifty feet or whatever. You can splice it all together and you’d use it to make a movie with.
Francis found out about it and he said, “I heard you were in the animation department. What’s that all about?” And I said, “Well, I think you’re boring. I’ve done this and I don’t want to do Hollywood movies. They have no interest to me at all.” Again, this was the sixties and we hated the establishment. All of us in film school hated the establishment in every possible way, and I had no interest in working in a studio. I didn’t like the studios, I didn’t like the system, I didn’t like the movies they made. I said, “I’m going to be a documentary cameraman; I’m going to do more experimental type of films. I do not like character-driven drama. I don’t like plots. I’m not into this stuff. Film cinema is pure; it’s not photographing a stage play, it’s not photographing a book. It’s its own medium.” Well, he was a stage director and a writer, but between the two of us, we formed a bond, because photography, editing, directing actors, and writing scripts are all tied together when you’re making a movie. So we complemented each other well; I was really good at some of the stuff he didn’t know that much about, and he was really good at this stuff I didn’t know about, because I had no interest in going there. So I became his assistant. But we were both young and everybody else on the crew was like, over sixty and they sort of looked down on us like we were subhuman. Eventually, we finished the movie he was doing, then we went and did a movie all across the United States.
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That movie was The Rain People, released in 1969 and starring Shirley Knight, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Robert Modica. For it, a crew of eight—including Coppola and Lucas—began in New York and drove across the country. Upon arriving in Nebraska, they decided to rent a small warehouse and turned it into a studio to put the movie together.
JONATHAN RINZLER
(author, The Making of Star Wars)
In some ways, I think that Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas are like brothers. They love each other, but they’re also very competitive. So, while one says, “I’m going to do this,” the others say, “Well, I’m going to do it first!” [laughs] They also help each other out in a lot of ways, as brothers do.
GEORGE LUCAS
I was born and raised near San Francisco and I wanted to go back there. I had to go to a conference there and got a chance to meet and talk to John Korty, who was a local filmmaker making independent feature films. I went back and said to Francis, “This is what we’ve got to do. We’re not going back to Hollywood.” And we didn’t. San Francisco was perfect, kind of bohemian. So we just literally came from Ogallala, Nebraska, and moved right into San Francisco and tried to have a situation independent of the studios. And when we started to go to the studios and beg for money, we didn’t want them running anything or coming up or bothering us or anything like that. But we started a little company there and I got a chance to make a movie for a studio. So I said, “I’ll do one that’s kind of half an experimental film and half kind of a story film. I’ll never get a chance to do this again, and I may never get a chance to make a movie again.” As it turned out, I made the movie that is what we now call a “cult classic,” but at the time it bankrupted our company and sent us off in other directions. That film was THX 1138.
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Their company was American Zoetrope and the film was another take on Lucas’s acclaimed student film. Cinefantastique magazine described the plot this way: “THX 1138 is a mind-bending look into a future century and into a civilization that exists totally underground, its hairless citizens computer-controlled, euphoric with compulsory drugs and having arrived at the ultimate in human conformity under a robot police force … The story is concerned with the efforts of Robert Duvall, who plays THX 1138 in a society where a prefix and a number suffice for a name, to escape his drug-induced state, which leads to love, an unknown and even forbidden emotion in his dehumanized surroundings, and finally his attempt to escape completely from the subterranean world itself.”
GEORGE LUCAS
My primary concept in approaching the production of THX 1138 was to make a kind of cinema verité film of the future—something that would look like a documentary crew had made a film about some character in a time yet to come. However, I wanted it to look like a very slick, studied documentary in terms of technique. I’m very graphics-conscious, and I don’t believe that a documentary has to look bad because it follows a cinema verité style. It can look good and still look real. Simply stated, that was my approach to every element of the production—the sets, the actors, the wardrobe, everything. At the same time, I wanted the picture to look slick and professional in terms of cinematic technique. I felt that the realism of the film’s content would be enhanced by having the actors and their surroundings look slightly scruffy, even a little bit dirty, as they might well look in the society depicted. They wore no makeup, which helped to keep them from looking too slick and clean. No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but, with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance—and a whole lot of luck.
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Unfortunately, luck wasn’t still with the film at the time of its release in 1971. The studio didn’t understand it and audiences virtually ignored it in theaters. And for Lucas, the most infuriating aspect of the whole experience was the never-ending interference from executives.
GEORGE LUCAS
THX freaked them out when they saw it and they tried to recut and shorten it. “You can’t understand it anyway, why are you trying to shorten it? It’s not going to make any more sense.” But they said, “We can do it.” “You know, I put my heart and soul into this thing and to me it means something. You’ve just come in here and whacked a few fingers off and think there’s nothing to it.” So I was really angry about that. Then they did the same thing with American Graffiti, because they thought it was a terrible movie. They put it on the shelf and they cut five minutes—the magic number.
ERIC TOWNSEND
(author, The Making of Star Wars Timeline)
THX 1138 was released on March 11, 1971. As a result of its failure, Warner Bros. decided to defund American Zoetrope. The studio also requested that Coppola return $300,000 that they had put up for the development of several other films, including Apocalypse Now and The Black Stallion.
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Warner Bros.’ demand for a return of that money put Coppola, Lucas, and everyone else in a precarious situation. And through all of this, Lucas actually learned quite a bit from his mentor Coppola, particularly about writing and directing actors. Their careers would veer off in an unexpected way when Coppola was given the opportunity by Robert Evans at Paramount Pictures to direct the adaptation of Mario Puzo’
s bestseller The Godfather, which, of course, would go on to win the 1972 Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year (among others), as would its critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning sequel two years later, The Godfather Part II.
GARY KURTZ
(producer, American Graffiti, Star Wars)
Warner Bros. didn’t like THX when it first came out and it also got trapped in a feud between Warner Bros. and Francis Coppola’s organization when they backed out of financing his group of pictures. It was the only picture produced under that program. It was finished just about the time they had a falling-out. They also didn’t understand the picture and just didn’t really know what to do with it. It did very well in its initial release, but got pulled right away.
GEORGE LUCAS
Writing and directing were very important things, but Francis didn’t completely convince me that that was the kind of moviemaking I would be interested in. Oddly enough, after THX our company went bankrupt and we had to make some money. I couldn’t make any money. I couldn’t get arrested, for God’s sake. I was still like, a year out of film school. I said, “Francis, you’re the director. You’re going to have to run and get a job and pay off this loan.” He said, “Well, they’ve offered me this thing. It’s a potboiler gangster movie, but it’s Italian and I liked the spaghetti scenes and all that kind of stuff, and they’re going to pay me a lot of money.” I said, “Well, I don’t think you have any choice,” though he didn’t want to make it. He was just hired to direct, but he did a lot more than direct that movie. He worked on the screenplay, he cast it, and he fought with the studio. It was really one of the most horrific experiences I’ve ever seen a director go through in terms of people trying to get him kicked off the picture all the time, studio executives that were just involved in everything and he had to fight every single day. You know, the studio hated the cast, they hated the music, they hated the story. Everything he did, they hated. There was blood everywhere on that movie, but he did get it made the way he wanted it.
He said to me at the time, “I don’t think you should be doing these experimental films, these kind of weird things that don’t make sense. You shouldn’t be doing science fiction films with robots where it’s all kind of artsy-fartsy. I dare you to make a comedy.” And I said, “I guess I don’t have anything to do. I can write a screenplay.” So I started working on American Graffiti, which is about how I grew up. I figured at least it would justify all the years I wasted cruising the main street of town. Even though I got offered some jobs from Hollywood with lots of money, I just decided that this is what I wanted to do. And once I committed to that, then I spent a couple of years trying to convince the studios to make it.
JONATHAN RINZLER
That’s what makes Star Wars so great—it’s a mega-franchise, huge phenomenon, but unlike the other ones, this is original material, created by a single person, seen through his highly idiosyncratic mind, who, at his heart, was an independent filmmaker, and had been from his days at USC. I think it’s worth mentioning, some of George’s oldest friends have said, it’s kind of too bad Star Wars became such a huge hit. Because it prevented him from making other movies that would’ve been much weirder and thoughtful and maybe more interesting—like American Graffiti and THX. They were sort of closer to him in some ways.
ERIC TOWNSEND
In May 1971, George and his wife, Marcia, traveled to Europe, because THX 1138 was being featured at the Cannes Film Festival. On the way, they spent the week with Francis Ford Coppola, who was shooting The Godfather in New York. While there, Lucas arranged a meeting with David Picker, president of United Artists, to discuss his ideas for American Graffiti. Then, while at Cannes, he called Picker and met him in his hotel room, where the two of them once again discussed American Graffiti. As a result, Lucas was given a development deal with United Artists for $5,000 to write the script, $5,000 when the script was finished, and another $15,000 if the film was produced. The plan would be for a two-film deal, the first to be American Graffiti and the second to be a Flash Gordon–esque space fantasy. They must have been seriously considering it, because in August they registered the title The Star Wars with the MPAA for Lucas’s vague plans of making a space fantasy film.
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Although contracts were signed between Lucas—and the recently created Lucasfilm, Ltd.—and United Artists for American Graffiti, once the studio received the script in early 1972, they passed on the project. After that, Universal read the script and turned it down as well. UA would also officially pass on The Star Wars on May 29, 1973.
ERIC TOWNSEND
Coppola’s The Godfather was released and became a critical and box office success. Universal reversed its opinion of American Graffiti assuming Lucas could get Coppola involved, so he was brought on as a producer. He shot the film between June 26, 1972, and August 4, 1972.
BRIAN JAY JONES
American Graffiti was small enough that Lucas could still control pretty much everything, and he was smart enough at that time to have a good lineman in Gary Kurtz, who was taking care of a lot of the detail work that Lucas probably thought he had taken care of, but Gary Kurtz I’m sure did. Here’s another thing I love about Graffiti and that I love about Lucas. Coppola is the one who told Lucas, “No one’s going to take you seriously as a director unless you can write.” American Graffiti and everything Lucas has done is an original screenplay, an original story. Even Raiders of the Lost Ark is based on his concept and his story. Whereas Coppola is making The Godfather, he’s making The Outsiders—he’s the one who likes films based on novels. The irony of that is just beautiful.
So, anyway, Graffiti is a script that Lucas wrote and he recognizes his own inability in it and hands it off to Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck to punch it up and gives them points, which he does with Star Wars as well. Again, he’s a great collaborator in the sense that he knows where his superpowers lie. He’s like, “We’ve got a good story here, it’s got some problems, but you guys take care of that.” So that project is still small enough that he can keep his fingers in most of the pie, but it’s also his first gateway drug in a sense to the way you can make movies and the kind of movies he’s going to make. It’s the place where he starts to really understand and appreciate the value of great sound, for example. And he’s got a great collaborator in Walter Murch, who goes out there and they’re like, “We’re going to record the music, the rock and roll.” First of all, how amazing is it that he gets all the rights to the rock music in that movie? I mean, just amazing. But Murch is the one who says, “We’re going to make this sound like it’s coming out of the car radios or the PA system of a school.” So they do all this weird cool stuff to get the sounds sounding very organic. I love the story about them walking around in the backyard with the speakers swinging off ropes so they can record the sounds like it’s coming out of passing cars. They’re doing a lot of really innovative hard work that makes Lucas, I think, appreciate the process even more and really value that stuff.
Lucas is one of our really first valuers of the way movies sound, which ultimately the exclamation point of that is THX [the digital sound certification]. He really knew that for film, 50 percent is the way it sounds. This is a gateway drug. It’s the place where he’s learning some really cool tricks, especially when you don’t have a lot of money to make the movie sound the way that he hears it in his head, and to make it look the way he envisions it and to make it cut together.
GEORGE LUCAS
I made the film and we showed it at a preview test screening. The audience absolutely went berserk, but the studio hated it, said it wasn’t fit to show an audience, “How dare you?” And they were not going to release it. They said, “We’re going to see if maybe the TV department wants to put it on as a movie of the week.” We’d bring the film down from San Francisco and instead of showing it in the studio screening room, we booked a five-hundred-seat theater. We would go and say, “Ask all your friends, everybody at the studio, everybody come and see the movie.�
� So these four guys were sitting there in a huge crowd that went berserk. Absolutely berserk. And after about three or four of these screenings, we went through the publicity department and the marketing department and then to the film department, where a high-up executive said no. But the underlings said, “You should really see this movie. It’s good.” So we did the same thing for them and then they said, “Okay, we’ll release it.”
BRIAN JAY JONES
One of the stories I love about American Graffiti is when he’s making that movie and he’s got the suits always telling him, “No one’s going to understand this. You’ve got four different characters, four different storylines going on. You’re trying to resolve them all by the third act. No one’s going to understand what’s going on.” And I always tell everybody, “That’s a Seinfeld episode.” You know what I mean? Lucas is so far ahead of the curve on this and he’s like, “Guys, stop treating your audience like they’re stupid. People are going to get it and we’re going to put it together and we’re going to cut it together right so that they will get it.” It may not seem that innovative when we watch it now almost fifty years later, but at the time that had people scratching their heads, which is funny. You go back to it and it’s like, “Why did this film have people scratching their head?”