The question of what to do with that new life, then, was not to be taken lightly. Driving a race car, however, was probably out of the question. “Before that first accident, you are very oblivious to the danger because you don’t realize how close to the edge you are,” said Lucas. “But once you’ve gone over the edge and you realize what’s on the other side, it changes your perspective.… You see what the future is there [in racing], and you realize that you’ll probably end up being dead. And I just decided that maybe that wasn’t for me.”7 Lucas would always love cars, but his racing days were over—and “I was going to have to figure out something else to do,” he said, “if I didn’t want to be a car mechanic.”8
And so, in the fall of 1962, the young man who had never given his studies much thought decided to go back to school, enrolling in Modesto Junior College—“which was fairly easy to get into,” Lucas noted.9 With his new outlook, he vowed to “apply myself at school”—a choice of words his father likely approved of, even if he thought his son was wasting his time taking arts and humanities courses.10 Now that Lucas was in charge of his own educational destiny and no longer subject to the requirements of the California public school system, he could choose courses that truly interested him: Sociology. Anthropology. Psychology. “Stuff you didn’t get in high school,” Lucas said.11 “These were things I was really interested in, and that sparked me,” though he admitted, “It was very hard, and I didn’t have [the] background I needed—I couldn’t even spell.”12
For the first time, Lucas was taking a genuine interest in school. John Plummer noticed the change in his friend immediately: “You could see he was now a serious student and those things [sociology and anthropology] really meant something to him.”13 Lucas worked hard and was proud of his efforts. “I was into something I really cared about and my whole grade situation just turned around,” he said. “I had thought I was a terrible student, and then suddenly I was a great student.”14 “Great” was perhaps relative; while he received an A in astronomy and Bs in speech, sociology, and art history, his grades were mostly Cs. Still, all things considered, it was a remarkable turnaround.
Lucas received his associate in arts degree from Modesto Junior College on June 9, 1964. While anthropology had been his primary academic focus over the previous two years, Lucas had also become more serious about illustration and photography, and he was determined to go to art school, preferably the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. There was one person, however, who had a problem with that particular plan: George Lucas Sr., who made it abundantly clear that there would be no artists in the Lucas family—especially if he was bankrolling it. “No way,” George Sr. told his son flatly. “I’m not going to pay for that. Do it on your own if you want. You’ll never make a living as an artist.”15
Lucas knew that his father, with the power of the checkbook behind him, had him outgunned. “Aware, I think, that I’m basically a lazy person,” Lucas said, “[my father] knew I wouldn’t go to art school if I had to work my way through.”16 Boxed in, Lucas decided to apply instead to San Francisco State University—which was tuition-free, like most of California’s state-funded institutions at the time—to pursue a major in anthropology, the one academic subject for which he had a genuine passion. That plan, at least, met with his father’s approval, and Lucas’s grades at junior college were good enough for San Francisco State to accept him. His path seemed set—and then, almost immediately, it suddenly wasn’t.
It was partly John Plummer’s fault. That summer, Plummer had decided to apply to business school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and invited Lucas to accompany him to Stockton to take USC’s entrance examination. Lucas scowled. “What am I going to do down there?” Plummer explained that USC had a cinematography school—which, Plummer thought, sounded close enough to photography for Lucas to find it interesting.17 Lucas was interested; cinematography sounded so much more serious than art school that it just might meet with his father’s approval. “So we drove to Stockton and took the… entrance exams. And I applied,” said Lucas. While Plummer had assured him that the entrance exam was easy—and that the cinematography program would be even easier—Lucas wasn’t so sure. “I didn’t think I’d get in—because even though my grades had come up considerably in [junior] college, I didn’t think they were good enough.”18
Lucas bought a silver Camaro that summer, ready for his fall relocation—though whether it would be to San Francisco or Los Angeles he didn’t yet know. And while he had sworn off racing, that didn’t mean he had forsworn cars altogether. From time to time he would still hang around with Allen Grant, loitering in the pits and helping him prepare his car for races.19 At this point, however, Lucas was more likely to photograph the race—or, better yet, film the speeding cars and their drivers, using a small 8 mm camera his father had given him. And while shadowing Grant, Lucas was introduced to another racing fan who knew his way around a movie camera: cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
The forty-two-year-old Wexler had recently wrapped the Henry Fonda political drama The Best Man, and was prepping his civil rights documentary The Bus for a 1965 release. Between films, Wexler headed his own racing team, and he was in the pits when a crew member steered Lucas his way. Talking cars and photography together, Lucas and Wexler quickly struck up a friendship—another older brother figure Lucas could attach himself to and learn from—and Lucas mentioned that he had recently applied to USC and was nervous about his prospects. Wexler promised to call a friend of his at the university and ask him to keep an eye out for the kid from Modesto. “I sensed a guy who had a burning desire to explore unique visual graphics, filmic things,” Wexler said later.20
Lucas learned of his admission to USC shortly thereafter. While the story would be retold later with Wexler pulling strings to get Lucas into USC, the timing was coincidental. Even Wexler himself would say that he had only “encouraged [Lucas] to go to film school.”21 Lucas, to his great surprise and credit, had passed the entrance exam and gotten into USC on his own merits. But he would later remember, and repay, Wexler’s support.
The decision to attend USC met with the approval of George Sr. as well. It had a solid reputation—and while it might be a bit too liberal for his taste, it was still a private school. As a private school, in fact, USC wasn’t free, but Lucas’s father agreed to pay for his son’s tuition, as well as books and fees—and even send along monthly spending money—on the condition that Lucas take school seriously and treat it like a job. Failure, he made clear to his son, meant Modesto and L. M. Morris. So intent was the senior Lucas on teaching his son a life lesson that he hardly seemed to notice his son’s declared major, just as Lucas had predicted. “I couldn’t be an art major—that would have upset my father—but cinema, that’s obscure enough,” said Lucas. “He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t care as long as I wasn’t in the art department.”22 Or at least as long as he didn’t read too far into the school’s description: Lucas would be enrolled in USC’s Division of Cinema at the School of Performing Arts.23
There weren’t many film schools in the United States in the mid-1960s, but the three largest and best were located at USC, at New York University in Manhattan, and at USC’s crosstown rival, UCLA. The program at USC was the country’s oldest and largest, founded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1929, with a founding faculty that included some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including actor Douglas Fairbanks and producer Irving Thalberg. It took its curriculum seriously and embraced new media without bias—it began offering television courses as early as 1947—and, by the late 1950s, offered the nation’s only Ph.D. in film studies. The school was highly regarded for turning out educational films and documentaries. In 1956, cinema instructor Wilbur T. Blume had even won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for The Face of Lincoln.24 Without quite meaning to, Lucas had chosen well. But even more than the school’s professors, it was the other students he met, and access to moviemaking equipm
ent, that really set him off running.
In mid-summer, Lucas packed his Camaro and headed for Los Angeles to stay with John Plummer in an apartment Plummer was renting in Malibu. Before classes started in the fall, Lucas planned to spend some time working in restaurants near the beach, drawing girls—for money, if he was lucky, and picking some up, if he was even luckier—and looking for summer work in the film industry. He would be disappointed; every film company door he banged on along Ventura Boulevard was closed in his face. Film was strictly an old boys’ network, an insiders’ game, closed off to those with no industry connections, relations, or contacts. “Every one I went into, I said I was looking for a job and I’d do anything,” said Lucas. “No luck.”25
What was more frustrating was that Lucas actually did have a connection in the film industry: Haskell Wexler. The seasoned cinematographer, already a fan of Lucas’s in only a brief amount of time, had allowed Lucas to hang out that summer at his own commercial film company, Dove Films, to watch movies being made. But not even Wexler could get Lucas a job working in his own company unless Lucas was in the union. Lucas, never a joiner—and with an antipathy to unions learned from his conservative father—bristled. It was another lesson he wouldn’t soon forget: to get into the movie machine, one had to be part of the system. And Lucas had already decided he didn’t like the system—or the machine, for that matter. “I was disposed against it, mainly because of my first experience trying to get a job with Haskell and not being able to,” Lucas said in 1971, still smarting from the rejection. “Being shut out… I thought that was extremely unfair.”26
When it came down to it, going to film school didn’t seem like a way into the system either. At that time, “nobody from a film school in the United States had ever worked in the film industry,” said Lucas. “If you went to film school, it was a silly thing to do because you would never get a job. The only people who ended up there were people who loved movies. So there was this underground movement of film nerds who weren’t going to amount to anything. As far as we knew, the studios didn’t know we existed.”27 That was likely true: at that time, a degree in film meant nothing to the studios. Getting a job was hard enough; getting one working on a feature film was nearly impossible. Most students assumed they would probably make documentaries, commercials, or industrial films after graduation—if, that is, they worked in film at all. Even USC’s most famous alumnus at that time, forty-one-year-old director Irvin Kershner, had scratched and clawed his way from government documentaries to television before finally getting a break from schlockmeister Roger Corman to direct Stakeout on Dope Street in 1958, then sliding into respectability with A Face in the Rain in 1963. It was a long road to success. Lucas’s classmate Walter Murch, later an Academy Award–winning editor and sound designer, remembered being given the frank lay of the land his first day at USC. “The very first thing our film teacher told us… was, ‘Get out of this business now. There’s no future in it. There are no jobs for any of you. Don’t do this.’”28
Lucas, too, heard the same grumbling and naysaying. “But I wasn’t moved by that,” he said. “I set the goal of getting through film school, and just then focused on getting to that.… I didn’t know where I was going to go after that.” But he knew that “everybody was thinking I was silly.”29 Lucas’s father, while giving tight-lipped approval to his son’s curriculum, worried he’d never find a real job—and still had the doors of the Lucas Company propped open to welcome the prodigal son back home to Modesto. Lucas had even taken a razzing from the guys in the pits at the racetrack. “I lost a lot of face,” Lucas said, “because for hot rodders, the idea of going into film was a really goofy idea.”30
Lucas came into USC’s film school as a junior in the fall of 1964. If he was expecting the campus to possess even a touch of Hollywood glamour, he was surely disappointed. Despite its long tenure at USC, the film school appeared to have been glued onto the outer edges of the USC campus almost as an afterthought, accessible through an ornate Spanish gate, and squeezed between the main campus and a girls’ dormitory. And the buildings containing the classrooms themselves were famously low-rent: a smattering of Quonset huts and a group of bungalows built with lumber salvaged from World War I army barracks. In a way, said one USC film school dean, it “looked like a lot of movie studios. It had the feel of them, with its little corridors and wings and adjacencies. The story department was here, the editing department there, the sound stage around the corner, and so on.” That didn’t necessarily make them any more appealing. Even Steven Spielberg, who attended Long Beach State, twenty-five miles away, was well acquainted with the school’s lack of charm. “A cinema ghetto,” Spielberg said with a shudder, “the film equivalent of housing in the South Bronx.”31
And yet, something about the school’s ragtag, run-down appearance also inspired a sense of camaraderie, a sense of community, among its students—most of whom, said Lucas, “were kind of the geeks and nerds of our era.”32 For many, it was the first time they’d had a clique of their own, or a gathering place where they could talk about their interests—film—without sniggering or eye-rolling from the cool kids. The buildings might have been run-down, but they were their buildings, crammed with the loud, clattering equipment—cameras, projectors, Moviolas—they needed to bring their own visions to life. Over the entrance to one of the classrooms, someone had scrawled Reality Ends Here, and in a creative sense, that was certainly true; but for many, reality finally began when they entered film school. Lucas, for one, knew he had found his way. “I was sort of floundering for something,” he said. “And so when I finally discovered film, I really fell madly in love with it, ate it and slept it 24 hours a day. There was no going back after that.”33
The same could be said for many of Lucas’s classmates, who had found a similar calling. The mid-1960s to early 1970s, in fact, marked an extraordinary moment for the major American film schools—a narrow sliver of time that gave birth to some of film’s most enduring and prolific directors, editors, writers, producers, and craftsmen. Schools in New York were turning out artists with a grittier, harder-edged approach to film, like Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone at NYU, and Brian De Palma at Columbia. In California, the versatile Francis Ford Coppola was working his way slowly through UCLA—even as he was writing and directing low-rent horror films for Roger Corman—while Steven Spielberg was at Long Beach State, ad-libbing his own cinema program, from which he would drop out in 1968, just shy of his degree. But it was USC that would produce one remarkable class after another for nearly a decade.
“I always call it ‘the class the stars fell on,’” said Lucas classmate John Milius, a reference to the West Point class of 1915 that famously produced an unusually large number of multi-star generals as well as one U.S. president.34 At USC, Lucas would be one of a group of highly motivated and talented young filmmakers, all friends, who would have a lasting impact on film and culture—and if they could indeed be said to be akin to the famous West Pointers, it was Lucas who ultimately held the presidential spot, the wealthiest and most successful filmmaker of the group, surrounded by a cohort of capable, clever Academy Award–winning generals. It was an assemblage who would eventually dub themselves “The Dirty Dozen,” after the 1967 film about an eclectic and slightly dangerous group of Nazi-smashing American soldiers. Lucas, however, generally referred to them all as “the USC Mafia.”35 That would end up being a more appropriate designation, as they would all regularly hire, fire, and conspire with one another on countless projects over the next five decades, putting together a kind of “system” of their own.
“George made a few friends at USC and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life,” said classmate Willard Huyck, who would become one of those friends, as well as Lucas’s go-to writer on films like American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.36 There was also Randal Kleiser, a good-looking kid from Pennsylvania Dutch country who partly paid his tuition by modeling for print ads and billboards
all over southern California. After graduation, he’d start out directing TV shows like Marcus Welby, M.D. and Starsky & Hutch before breaking into film in 1978 as the director of the most successful movie musical of all time, Grease.
And then there was John Milius, another of Lucas’s lifelong friends and one of USC’s most colorful students. Even in his early twenties, Milius was already a larger-than-life character, loud and barrel-chested, and as committed to surfing as Lucas had been to cruising. A fan of gunfighters and samurais, Milius lived in a bomb shelter, dressed like a Cuban freedom fighter, and, after film school, planned to join the marines and die gloriously in Vietnam. Chronic asthma would keep Milius out of the draft and thus out of the marines, and out of Vietnam; instead, he would write, punch up, or direct one hard-hitting screenplay or movie after another, from Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry to Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.
Slightly older than Lucas was Walter Murch, who had come to USC’s graduate film program from Johns Hopkins, along with Hopkins classmates Caleb Deschanel and Matthew Robbins. As driven as he was droll, Murch was fascinated with sound even as a boy, and had dangled microphones out of windows, banged on metal sculpture, and cut and spliced tape to make his own unique sounds; later, he would practically reinvent the art of movie sound, winning the Oscar for his work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient. Deschanel, meanwhile, would be nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography five times, while Robbins would write or direct more than a dozen films, including Dragonslayer and *batteries not included.
Murch’s first encounter with Lucas had been a brusque one. Murch was developing photos in a darkroom when Lucas entered, watched him a moment, then told him matter-of-factly, “You’re doing it wrong.” Murch harshly shooed him away, but he had to admire the younger man’s gall. “[That] was very typical of George at that time,” said an amused Murch. “He knew how to do it, and he was going to make sure everyone knew that he knew that.”37 It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
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