George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  If Lucas had to choose a favorite character, however, it wasn’t to be found in the pages of a science fiction comic at all. Rather, it was Scrooge McDuck, the money-hoarding, globe-trotting uncle of Donald Duck, who starred in his very own comic book, Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge, published monthly by Dell. As written and drawn by Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge’s stories were smart, funny, and genuinely sophisticated, with Barks sending Scrooge and an elaborate cast of colorful characters on adventures in South American gold mines, atop Far Eastern mountains, under the oceans, back in time, or in outer space.

  Lucas loved it—there would be a bit of Uncle Scrooge’s continent-hopping adventuring in Indiana Jones’s DNA—and was fascinated not only by Scrooge’s exploits but also by his conniving four-color capitalist ways. “Work smarter, not harder,” was Scrooge’s motto, and his stories were full of inventive schemes that, more often than not, made him even richer and more successful. In Scrooge’s world, hard work paid off, yes—but so did cleverness and a desire to do something in a way no one had ever thought of before. Scrooge’s ethic reflected those of writer-artist Carl Barks, who hailed “honor, honesty, [and] allowing other people to believe in their own ideas, not trying to force everyone into one form.”66

  Lucas found it all exciting and inspiring. “To me, Uncle Scrooge… is a perfect indicator of the American psyche,” he observed later. “There’s so much that is precisely the essence of America about him that it’s staggering.”67 The lessons Lucas learned from Uncle Scrooge would, to some extent, shape the kind of artist and businessman he would become in the future: conservative and driven, believing strongly in his own vision and pursuing it aggressively, while at the same time nursing just a tinge of nostalgia for better times that may or may not ever have existed. Years later, when he was just on his way to amassing a fortune that would rival Scrooge’s own, one of the first artworks Lucas would buy was a page of Carl Barks’s original art for an Uncle Scrooge comic—a coy tip of the hat to his four-color forefather.

  Besides Carl Barks, there was another artist Lucas adored who did the same kind of “storytelling in pictures” that Lucas admired in Barks, albeit in a slightly different format. Whenever he had the chance, Lucas would track down copies of the Saturday Evening Post just so he could stare at the gorgeously painted photorealistic front covers by illustrator Norman Rockwell. Rockwell’s work for the Post was intentionally sentimental, with boys and girls cheerfully swimming, ice-skating, raking leaves, playing ball, climbing trees, or celebrating Christmas or the Fourth of July. Even if they were getting into mischief, they were rarely in trouble, and instead were looked on kindly by understanding parents and authority figures. Lucas got a kick out of the detail in Rockwell’s work; it was like a comic strip compressed into one panel, and trying to figure out the entire story Rockwell was telling in a painting became something of a parlor game for Lucas. “Every picture [shows] either the middle or the end of the story, and you can already see the beginning even though it’s not there,” Lucas said. “You can see all the missing parts… because that one frame tells everything you need to know.”68

  Rockwell, Lucas said, offered “a sense of what America was thinking, what [Americans’] ideals were, and what was in their hearts.”69 It didn’t matter that Lucas had never splashed in a swimmin’ hole or seen a sparkling white Christmas, or that he could barely play baseball; Rockwell’s paintings were snapshots of Life as It Ought to Be. Lucas would never be mawkish about his own childhood, but he could be very sentimental about the one that he might have had in a Rockwell painting. Decades later, as with the work of Carl Barks, Lucas would also collect the art of Norman Rockwell. To Lucas, it was something rare and valuable: art that actually spoke to him.

  In May 1954, George Lucas Jr. turned ten—and that summer came a new addition to the Lucas home that would change his life forever: television.

  For his first ten years, George—like millions of Americans at the time—would sit on the floor in front of the radio, mesmerized by radio dramas, many of which used incredibly elaborate and convincing sound effects. “I’ve always been fascinated by the fantasy of radio,” Lucas said later. “I loved to listen and imagine what the images would look like.”70 He was particularly fond of suspenseful thrillers like Inner Sanctum and The Whistler, as well as adventures like The Lone Ranger. Radio, he said, “played an important part in my life.” But it would be nothing compared to television.71

  John Plummer had actually gotten a television set first. In 1949, Plummer’s father brought home a little Champion TV set, which he put in the garage, then constructed a small set of bleachers so neighbors could crowd around to watch boxing. George’s own father was intrigued but skeptical; he would wait a few years for the technology to improve before he made an investment in such an expensive device. While George Jr. would watch as much television as he could over at the Plummer house, he would have to wait five more years for a TV of his own.

  Once he had one, however, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. The problem, as Lucas remembered it, was that “there wasn’t much to watch on television.”72 Still, the Modesto Bee dutifully reported the television schedules each day, listing the fare shown on channels like KJEO from Fresno and KOVR from Sacramento, both of which had signals too weak to be picked up clearly in Modesto. It took patience and a bit of finesse to tune in the few stations with stronger signals—mainly KRON from San Francisco and KTVU from Stockton—but once Lucas had tuned them in, he didn’t want to tune out. Ever.

  Like generations of kids, Lucas would get up on Saturday morning to watch cartoons, sitting cross-legged in front of the set with his cat Dinky.73 The set could be on all day, rolling through game shows and newscasts, baseball games and comedies—and George Sr. had very carefully installed it on a rotating stand so the family could turn the TV toward the dining room to watch as they ate dinner. In the evenings, it was tuned to more serious fare like the courtroom drama Perry Mason or westerns like Have Gun, Will Travel, which Lucas never missed.74

  But the TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those thirty-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials.75 There were westerns and jungle adventures, cops and Canadian Mounties, spies and space operas, all in thirty-minute installments practically made for television—and ending on cliff-hangers, guaranteeing that viewers would tune in the next afternoon. “Movie serials were the real stand-out event,” said Lucas. “I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials.”76

  Produced by Universal in the 1930s, the three Flash Gordon serials—based on Alex Raymond’s beloved comic strip—were quickly and cheaply made, with props, sets, and costumes borrowed from other Universal horror and science fiction films. And they were straight-ahead pulp-fiction fun, eye-rolling and over the top but earnest, with Flash battling Ming the Merciless and saving the galaxy in the process. “Thinking back on what I really enjoyed as a kid, it was those serials, that bizarre way of looking at things,” said Lucas. “I don’t think I ever grew out of it. Those serials will always be something I remember, even though they were pretty awful technically.”77

  Lucas was part of the first generation raised in front of the TV set—a pop culture phenomenon that would forever change the way audiences related and responded to their entertainment. TV shows were quick, convenient, and disposable, there with the click of an ON button and a twist of the dial. With only thirty- or sixty-minute blocks in which to tell a story—and commercials breaking up the narrative—TV plots had to move rapidly, propelling the plot forward, often at the expense of character development. Attention spans were demanding, and any lag in the action would send viewers spinning the TV dial to another channel, looking for something better. As television grew louder and faster, subtlety became passé—or, at the very least, challenging. It would fundamentally change the way Lucas—and other filmmakers of his generation—would tell stories with the mo
vie camera.

  For the first time, too, one didn’t have to go to a movie theater to watch movies; instead, George could watch them in his own living room, spinning the TV around toward the dining room to ensure he never missed a moment. Lucas remembered watching “a whole run of westerns on television, John Wayne films, directed by John Ford, before I knew who John Ford was,” adding, “I think those were very influential in my enjoyment of movies.”78

  As for seeing movies in the theater… well, Lucas rarely went. “We had a couple of theaters in Modesto. They’d show The Blob and Lawrence of Arabia and things like that.”79 But he was unimpressed. Even as a teenager, Lucas was more interested in what was going on inside the theater than up on the screen. “I would mostly go to the movies… to chase girls,” he admitted.80 While Lucas recalled seeing a few memorable films either on TV or in the Modesto movie theaters—Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, The Bridge on the River Kwai—for the most part, movies were simply a pleasant diversion, not an inspiration.

  The young Lucas may have been ambivalent about movies, but there was one entertainment, in fact one place, he was very passionate about. “I loved Disneyland,” Lucas said—and so, it seemed, did George Lucas Sr., who flew the entire family to southern California to be there for the park’s opening day in July 1955.81 The Lucases remained in Anaheim for a week, staying at the Disneyland Hotel and diving into the park daily—a practice they would make a regular tradition. With its themed, immersive locations and rides, the place made an immediate impression on eleven-year-old George. “I wandered around. I’d go on the rides and the bumper cars, the steam boats, the shooting galleries, the jungle rides,” he said. “I was in heaven.”82

  Disneyland in the 1950s was a far cry from the thrill-ride-and-roller-coaster-centric park it is today—but no one, then or now, designed attractions quite like Disney’s famous Imagineers. One of the cleverest rides was Rocket to the Moon, luring in visitors with the promise of a virtual trip to the moon and back. The mechanics were simple but convincing: riders sat in a small, round theater with enormous windows—actually video screens—set into the floor and ceiling, giving them the sense they were seeing the open sky and the moon through the window above, and the diminishing earth through the window below, as they rocketed through space. Decades later, when Lucas was given the opportunity to develop a Star Wars–themed ride for the Disney parks, he would use a setup similar to Rocket to the Moon—video screens acting as windows in a spaceship—then synchronize those on-screen images with state-of-the-art motion technology to give riders an even more convincing, and exhilarating, space travel experience. For now, however, Disney’s rocket ride was thrilling enough—and back in Modesto, the boy who hated writing set to work excitedly reporting his adventures at Disneyland for a new local newspaper.

  The newspaper was the Daily Bugle, and it was one that Lucas had helped start that summer with a ten-year-old friend, Melvin Cellini. After watching a TV show in which several characters tried to come up with a name for a newspaper, Cellini had been inspired to create a paper of his own and sought out Lucas as a willing collaborator. Their first issue, which Lucas and Cellini distributed for free at Muir Elementary School on August 4, announced itself with a banner headline declaring, “MELVIN CELLINI OPENS NEWSPAPER—APPOINTS GEORGE LUCAS STAR REPORTER.”83

  The boys were enthusiastic, but producing a daily newspaper—including printing a hundred copies of each issue—was a lot of work. “Paper will be given out Monday to Friday,” they reported. “But this Friday it won’t be out because the press broke down.” Lucas, whose do-it-all-yourself instincts were already kicking in, quickly talked his father into letting them use the printing presses down at L. M. Morris for the Bugle, promising to repay any expenses. But in less than a week, the novelty had worn off. “The Daily Bugle stops,” they reported to their readers. “The Weekly Bugle will be put out on Wednesday only. There is the same news.” And, they stressed, they weren’t hiring. “We need no reporters, printers or newsboys. No subscriptions taken.”84

  Despite its struggles, a kid-run newspaper was enough of a novelty that it made the pages of the Modesto Bee, complete with a posed photo of George and Cellini leaning over an issue of the Weekly Bugle, deep in conversation. Lucas, his hair in a close crew cut and wearing a breezy tropical-print shirt, already knew the prop needed to sell his image as the Bugle’s star reporter, and had tucked a newly sharpened pencil smartly behind his right ear.85

  The Bugle soon folded—but if Cellini was disappointed by the lost revenues he had predicted from selling “about 200 copies a week” at a penny per issue, Lucas never gave it another thought. He wasn’t in it for the money, he told the Bee. Anything he earned from the Bugle he planned to put right back into the newspaper, paying any delivery boys and reimbursing L. M. Morris for the costs of paper, ink, and stencils.86 While Lucas may not have realized or appreciated it, his father—and Scrooge McDuck—had taught him well: Think differently, believe in yourself, and when you can, invest in yourself. But pay your debts.

  Lucas showed similar business acumen when it came to managing his allowance. Under George Sr.’s roof, money was to be earned, and George Jr. and his sisters were expected to do chores in exchange for their allowances. George Jr.’s big weekly chore was to mow the lawn with a gigantic rotary push mower, a task he struggled with and quickly came to dread. “The frustrating thing was that it was tough grass to mow, and I was a little kid,” Lucas said.87 He eventually saved enough money from mowing so that, with a small loan from his mother, he was able to buy a gas mower, which made the task much easier. Lucas had figured out what he needed to solve a problem, and then put up his own money to do it. Invest in yourself. His father was grudgingly impressed.

  But as well intentioned as George Sr. might be, doling out allowances with lectures on frugality and hard work, he and his son would never quite appreciate each other. “He never listened to me. He was his mother’s pet,” said George Sr. of his only son. “If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it. He was hard to understand.”88 The more George Sr. tried to impart his old-school Methodist values to his son, the more his son rebelled or frustrated him. “He is a conservative, self-made kind of man,” Lucas later said of his father, “with a lot of prejudices which were extremely annoying.”89

  For George Sr., tensions between father and son must have been particularly frustrating—especially as the company that he was hoping to pass down to his son was thriving. In 1956, in fact, business was positively booming. That year, George Sr. moved L. M. Morris to a new space at 1107 I Street—the company’s first address change in five decades—and opened the Lucas Company, the area’s only supplier of the new copying machines. With the company growing, George Sr. also went looking for a more suitably upscale home address. The house on Ramona Avenue was sold, and the Lucases moved into a ranch house with a swimming pool on thirteen sprawling acres of walnut trees at 821 Sylvan Road. The new Lucas home was only about five miles away from Ramona Avenue—but in Modesto miles, and to George, it might as well have been on another planet.

  Lucas was “very upset” about the move, he said later. “I was very attached to that [Ramona Avenue] house.”90 His mood blackened. “He started changing,” recalled John Plummer. “He started paying more attention to records. He was becoming more introspective. He started to almost become a little bit of a ruffian… to follow some of the bad kids.” Lucas bristled at that particular suggestion. “I was with all the crowds,” he said. “I was little and I was funny. I was easy to get along with. I made friends pretty easily.”91 Or so he thought. What was true, however, was that Lucas—like millions of teenagers—had discovered rock and roll.

  Lucas had taken music lessons on a wide variety of instruments, and while nothing ever stuck, he loved music. As a child, he adored the marches of John Philip Sousa, intuitively realizing the importance of themes and loving the way a good, loud march could thrum excitingly in the chest cavity. But his life changed in September 1956, w
hen Elvis Presley swaggered and snarled his way through four songs on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis performed in San Francisco in October 1957, Lucas was there.92 For Lucas, rock and roll—and Elvis—was here to stay. Every day after school, Lucas would shut himself in his new room on Sylvan, read his beloved comics, and eat Hershey bars and drink Cokes while rock and roll throbbed from his little record player. Over the next decade, he would amass a “gigantic” collection of rock and roll records.93

  Once Lucas began classes at Thomas Downey High School in 1958, his best grades, perhaps predictably, were in art and music. Otherwise, he quietly sank toward the bottom half of his class. “I was not a bad student; I was an average student,” Lucas explained. “I was a C, sometimes a C-minus student. I was definitely not an achiever.”94 That was putting it mildly; by the end of his freshman year, he was getting Ds in science and English. “I daydreamed a lot,” Lucas said later. “I was never described as not a bright student. I was always described as somebody who could be doing a lot better than I was doing, not working up to potential. I was so bored.”95

  His real classroom was probably back at home, where Lucas took up photography, and converted a spare bathroom in the new house into a darkroom. He taught himself the basics, shooting airplanes as they soared overhead and eventually becoming savvy enough that he could catch his cat frozen in mid-leap. But just as his classes had taken a backseat to art and music, his photography would vie for time with a new passion that would take up nearly all of his next six years—and would very nearly take his life. “My teenage years, they were completely devoted to cars,” recalled Lucas. “That was the most important thing in my life from about the ages of 14 to 20.”96

  It was motorcycles first, which the thirteen-year-old Lucas would ride at a breakneck speed—engine roaring, tires squealing—through the rows of walnut trees on the Sylvan ranch. (“I’ve always liked speed,” he admitted later.)97 At fifteen, “cars kicked in,” said Lucas. “I started hanging out at a garage, doodling with cars and working on engines.”98 He was good at it, too—the kid who had tinkered with toy trains and made a roller-coaster run with a reel of phone cable found himself right at home under the hood of a car. It wasn’t long before Lucas was yearning for a car of his own—and George Sr., who had already watched his son race dangerously around the ranch on a motorcycle, made a preemptive purchase that he thought was in his speed-demon son’s best interest: a tiny yellow Fiat Bianchina with a two-cylinder engine. “He figured that would be safe because it couldn’t go that fast,” Lucas said.99 But the engine, he groaned, was “a sewing machine motor.… It was a dumb little car. What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter.”100