The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  At one time you and he were working on a revolutionary album called ‘Smile,’ which you never released.

  Yeah, we didn’t finish it because we had a lot of problems, inner group problems. We had time commitments we couldn’t keep. So we stopped. Plus, for instance, we did a thing called the “fire track.” We cut a song called “Fire” and we used fire helmets on the musicians and we put a bucket with fire burning in it in the studio so we could smell smoke while we cut. And about a day later a building down the street burned down. We thought maybe it was witchcraft or something, we didn’t know what we were into. So we decided not to finish it.

  Plus I got into drugs and I began doing things that were over my head. It was too fancy for the public. I got too fancy and arty and was doing things that were just not Beach Boys at all. They were made for me.

  Ever consider doing an album just on your own?

  No, I haven’t considered that because I didn’t think it would be commercial if I did.

  Well, so what?

  Well, maybe I could do that then. I think I might.

  What’s this program with Dr. Landy [Wilson’s therapist] and his team designed to do?

  Well, it’s basically designed to correct me from taking drugs.

  You’ve had a problem with that?

  Yeah, I had a problem taking drugs. Up until four months ago I was taking a lot of cocaine. And these doctors came in and showed me a way to stop doing it, which is having bodyguards with you all the time so you can’t get to it.

  What do you think of that approach?

  That approach works because there’s someone right there all the time—it keeps you on the spot. They catch you when you’re ready to do something you shouldn’t do. It works until you have finally reached the stage where you don’t need it anymore.

  Why did you consent to this program?

  Because my wife called the doctors and legally she had the right to call them.

  In addition to guarding you all the time, what else do Dr. Landy’s people do for you?

  They teach me socialization, how to socialize. They’re just teaching me different social graces, like manners.

  Didn’t you at one time know those?

  I did, but I lost them. Drugs took ’em away.

  How could that be?

  It just was. Drugs took ’em all away. I got real paranoid, I couldn’t do anything.

  Were you unhappy then?

  I was unhappy as all heck. I knew I was screwing myself up, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a useless little vegetable. I made everybody very angry at me because I wasn’t able to work, to get off my butt. Coke every day. Goin’ over to parties. Just havin’ bags of snow around, just snortin’ it down like crazy.

  But aren’t drugs just a symptom? There must be something else. Carl said that at some point you looked at the world and it was so messed up that you just couldn’t take it.

  I couldn’t.

  But the world is messed up. How do you deal with it?

  The way I deal with it is I go jogging in the morning. I goddamn get out of bed and I jog, and I make sure I stay in shape. That’s how I do it. And so far the only way I’ve been keeping from drugs is with those bodyguards, and the only way I’ve been going jogging is those bodyguards have been taking me jogging.

  So in one sense you’re not yet fully committed to the idea.

  It’s just that once you’ve had a taste of drugs, you like ’em and you want ’em. Do you take drugs yourself?

  Yeah, I experiment.

  Do ya? Do ya snort?

  Sure.

  That’s what I thought. Do you have any with ya?

  No.

  That’s the problem. Do you have any uppers?

  I have nothin’ on me.

  Nothing? Not a thing, no uppers?

  I wouldn’t lie to you. I wish I had ’em, but I don’t.

  Do you have any at home? Do you know where you can get some?

  See, now I guess you gotta get to the point in the program where you’re not going to ask me questions like that.

  That’s right. You just saw my weakness coming out. Which I don’t understand. I just do it anyway. I used to drink my head off too, that’s another thing. They’ve been keeping me from drinkin’, taking pills and taking coke. And I’m jogging every morning.

  Had your wife not gone to see Dr. Landy and got him to work on you . . .

  I’d have been a goner, I’d have been in the hospital by now.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  by Paul Scanlon

  August 25, 1977

  So how does it feel? Did you really expect that ‘Star Wars’ was going to take off like this?

  No way. I expected American Graffiti to be a semi-successful film and make maybe $10 million—which would be classified in Hollywood as a success—and then I went through the roof when it became this big, huge blockbuster. And they said, well, gee, how are you going to top that? And I said, yeah, it was a one-shot and I was really lucky. I never really expected that to happen again. After Graffiti, in fact, I was really just dead broke. I was so far in debt to everyone that I made even less money on Graffiti than I had on [his first film] THX 1138. Between those two movies it was like four and a half to five years of my life, and after taxes and everything I was living on $9,000 a year. It was really fortunate that my wife was working as an editor’s assistant. That was the only thing that got us through. Then I finally got a deal for very little money to develop Star Wars.

  How many studios had turned it down?

  Two.

  And then Fox took it?

  Fox took it, and it was close because there wasn’t any other place I wanted to take it. I don’t know what I would have done, maybe take a job. But the last desperate thing is to “take a job.” I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity. Right after Graffiti I was getting this fan mail from kids that said the film changed their life, and something inside me said, do a children’s film. And everybody said, “What are you talking about? You’re crazy.”

  I had done Graffiti as a challenge. All I had ever done to that point was crazy, avant-garde, abstract movies. Francis [Ford Coppola, American Graffiti’s producer] really challenged me on that. “Do something warm,” he said, “everyone thinks you’re a cold fish; all you do is science fiction.” So I did Graffiti and then I thought I had more of a chance of getting Star Wars off the ground. I had gone around to all the studios with Apocalypse Now for the tenth time and then they said no, no, no. So I took this other project, this children’s film. I thought: We all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world, we all know how wrong we were in Vietnam. We also know, as every movie made in the last ten years points out, how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive. Because Graffiti pointed out that kids had forgot what being a teenager was, which is being dumb and chasing girls, doing the things—you know, at least I did when I was a kid.

  Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology—looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does. Anyway, I became very aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war had been wiped out in the Sixties and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—in a strong sense from about 1945 to 1962, that generation. There was a certain car culture, a certain mating ritual going on, and it was something that I’d lived through and really loved.

  So when I got done with Graffiti, I said, “Look, you know something else has happened, and I began to stretch it down to younger people, ten- to twelve-year-olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I sa
w that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had—they don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. It wasn’t that we really believed in it. . . .

  But we loved it.

  Look, what would happen if there had never been John Wayne movies and Errol Flynn movies and all that stuff that we got to see all the time. I mean, you could go into a theater, not just watch it on television on Saturday morning, actually go into a theater, sit down and watch an incredible adventure. Not a stupid adventure, not a dumb adventure for children and stuff but a real Errol Flynn, John Wayne—gosh—kind of an adventure.

  Or ‘The Crimson Pirate’ with Burt Lancaster or ‘The Magnificent Seven.’

  Yeah, but there aren’t any. There’s nothing but cop movies, and a few films like Planet of the Apes, Ray Harryhausen films, but there isn’t anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in the culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing, because I had also done a study on, I don’t know what you call it, I call it the fairy tale or the myth. It is a children’s story in history and you go back to the Odyssey or the stories that are told for the kid in all of us. I can see the little kids sitting there and just being enthralled with Ulysses. Plus the myths which existed in high adventure, and an exotic far-off land which was always that place over the hill, Camelot, Robin Hood, Treasure Island. That sort of stuff that is always big adventure out there somewhere. It came all the way down through the western.

  The western?

  I saw the western die. We hardly knew what happened, one day we turned around and there weren’t any westerns anymore. John Ford grew up with the West, the very toe end of the West, but he was out there where there were cowboys and shootings in the streets, and that was his American Graffiti, I realized; that’s why he was so good at it. A lot of those guys were good at it. They grew up in the Tens and Twenties when the West was for all practical purposes really dying off. But, there was still some rough-and-tumble craziness going on. And the people now, the young directors like me, can’t do it because there isn’t anything like that anymore.

  So you do a ‘Star Wars’?

  I was a real fan of Flash Gordon and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, “This is a natural.” One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, “Why?” What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts of 2001 and get on the romantic side of it. Nobody is going to colonize Mars because of the technology, they are going to go because they think maybe they will be able—it is the romantic aspect of it.

  You firmly establish that at the beginning of ‘Star Wars’ with the words: “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .”

  Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space.” I just wanted to forget science. I didn’t want to make a 2001. I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.

  So that was the mainspring of your decision to make ‘Star Wars.’

  Right. I had done sociological research on what makes hit films. It is part of the sociological bent in me; I can’t help it.

  How do you explain a Wookie to a board of directors?

  You can’t, and how do you explain a Wookie to an audience, and how do you get the tone of the film right, so it’s not a silly child’s film, so it’s not playing down to people, but it is still an entertaining movie and doesn’t have a lot of violence and sex and hip new stuff? So it still has a vision to it—a sort of wholesome, honest vision about the way you want the world to be.

  What was your actual salary for directing?

  I think in the end my actual salary was $100,000, which again was still like half of what everybody else was making.

  Do you have percentage points in the film?

  Everybody has points, but the key is to make them pay off. I figured I was never going to see any money on my points, so what the heck. I also had a chance to give away a lot of my points, which I had done with Graffiti. Part of the success is the fault of the actors, composer and crew and they should share in the rewards as well, so I got my points carved down much less than what my contemporaries have. But I never expected Star Wars to . . . I expected to break even on it, I still can’t understand it.

  Why?

  I struggled through this movie. I had a terrible time; it was very unpleasant. American Graffiti was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time and I was compromising myself to death. But I could rationalize it because of the fact that, well, it is just a $700,000 picture—it’s Roger Corman—and what do you expect? But this was a big expensive movie and the money was getting wasted and things weren’t coming out right. I was running the corporation. I wasn’t making movies like I’m used to doing. American Graffiti had like forty people on the payroll—that counts everybody but the cast. THX had about the same. You can control a situation like that. On Star Wars we had over 950 people working for us and I would tell a department head and he would tell another assistant department head, he’d tell some guy, and by the time it got down the line it was not there. I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before.

  I’ve done this thing now. I’ve directed my large corporation and I made the movie that I wanted to make. It is not as good by a long shot as it should have been. I take half the responsibility myself and the other half is some of the unfortunate decisions I made in hiring people, but I could have written a better script, I could have done a lot of things; I could have directed it better.

  When I saw you back in California last summer you were upset. You said the robots didn’t look right. R2 looked like a vacuum cleaner; you could see fifty-seven separate flaws in C3PO; you didn’t like the lighting—everything seemed like it wasn’t coming together. Was it coming together?

  Well, for one thing, by the time we got back to California I wasn’t happy with the lighting on the picture. I’m a cameraman, and I like a slightly more extreme, eccentric style than I got in the movie. It was all right, it was a very difficult movie, there were big sets to light, it was a very big problem. The robots never worked. We faked the whole thing and a lot of it was done editorially.

  How?

  Every time the remote-control R2 worked it turned and ran into a wall, and when Kenny Baker, the midget, was in it, the thing was so heavy he could barely move it, and he would sort of take a step and a half and be totally exhausted. I could never get him to walk across the room, so we would cut to him there and cut to a close-up, and cut back so that he would be over here. It is all really movie magic more than it was anything else.

  That’s why it’s amazing because when I saw the film I was surprised. I couldn’t see any seams. So I went again and maybe saw a couple of seams, but that was it.

  I can see nothing but seams. A film is sort of binary—it either works or it doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all. It is a fusion thing and then everything else, all of the mistakes don’t count anymore.

  Well, the ‘Star Wars’ audience has no trouble suspending disbelief.

  Right. If a film does not work, then you can do an impeccable job with making the movie. People still see the mistakes, and they get bored and it just doesn’t work. And so what can you say? THX was about 70 percent of what
I wanted it to be. I don’t think you ever get to the point where it is 100 percent. Graffiti was about 50 percent of what I wanted it to be but I realized that the other 50 percent would have been there, if I just had a little more time and a little more money. Star Wars is about 25 percent of what I wanted it to be. It’s really still a good movie, but it fell short of what I wanted.

  The film’s success should guarantee some success in the merchandising program you’ve launched.