George Lucas

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George Lucas Page 8

by Brian Jay Jones


  Being rejected for military service also meant that Lucas could return to USC for graduate school, but that too would have to wait; he had missed the chance to enroll for the fall 1966 semester. For a moment, Lucas was aimless, with no job and no real prospects. Finally, he capitalized on one of the only real contacts he had in the film industry, calling on graphic designer Saul Bass, whom Lucas had gotten to know while shooting second unit footage for Grand Prix. Bass, who had designed the visually stunning opening sequences for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, had been tapped by director John Frankenheimer to put together a similarly vibrant title sequence for Grand Prix, slotted for release in December. Lucas, a lover of montages, helped Bass cut together the footage for the film’s exciting, roaring opening moments. That same summer, Bass was working on a documentary of his own called Why Man Creates—which would win an Academy Award in 1968—and would rely on Lucas to serve as a cameraman and jack-of-all-trades.

  By early fall, Lucas’s work with Bass was finished and he was looking for a job again. He was still living in the house on Portola, still shutting himself in his top-floor room, though from time to time, he could be persuaded to join a party of film school students and graduates. At one party that autumn, Lucas and Matthew Robbins were standing in the kitchen talking films when Lucas mentioned that he wanted to “make a movie about someone escaping from the police,” as Robbins recalled, “from an all-pervasive Big Brother, eye-in-the-sky” point of view.93 Robbins thought the idea sounded exciting and offered to take a crack at writing the story for it, eventually looping in Walter Murch to collaborate on a two-page treatment called Breakout, which they completed in early October. Mostly an extended chase sequence, the final scene describes the hero emerging from a trapdoor in the desert, yelping for joy and running for freedom into the sunset—the happy ending that had been denied Lucas’s young hero in Freiheit. “As the man recedes,” continues Robbins’s treatment, “[a] hand reaches out of the underground room, finds the handle on the trap door and slowly closes it.”94 The visual stuck with Lucas. He wanted to see that film. As soon as he could, he was going to make that film.

  But first, a job. After applying unsuccessfully for employment at the Hanna-Barbera animation studios, Lucas finally landed a position with the U.S. Information Agency as a grip—the person responsible for maintaining and carrying the camera equipment—for its teams working on education and propaganda films. It wasn’t much, but it was still the kind of opportunity most film school graduates would have killed for.

  George Lucas, heir to a stationery store, car crash survivor, lover of photography and film, was officially working in the film industry, albeit just barely.

  3

  The Right Horse

  1967

  Lucas returned to USC in January 1967, taking a few graduate film courses, including a class on film direction taught by comedian Jerry Lewis—a class he quickly came to loathe. “Lewis had such an outrageous ego,” said one classmate.1 Lucas would sink down into a seat in the back row of the classroom, glowering. Rather than seeking Lewis’s instruction, most of the students had taken the class merely hoping the comedian could help them get into the vaunted Directors Guild of America. They would all be disappointed.

  At almost the same moment that Lucas started back at USC, he caught a lucky break: his friend Bob Dalva, who was editing and logging documentary footage at the U.S. Information Agency, was leaving his position and recommended Lucas as his replacement. Lucas, eager to start using USIA’s equipment rather than lugging it, accepted and reported to the studios of veteran editor Verna Fields, who was working out of a facility she had set up in the garage of her San Fernando Valley home.

  Short and slightly stocky, with owlish glasses and a messy mop of dark hair, Fields—despite her unassuming looks and diminutive stature—was a larger-than-life personality, loud and brassy. As an editor, she was fast and very, very good—largely because, as one of the few women in a male-dominated profession, she had to be. “I got into movies by accident,” she said later, and that was partly true; in the 1930s, while loitering around a movie studio with her boyfriend, she had been spotted by director Fritz Lang, who asked in his heavy German accent, “Who is dat yung gurl always hanging around?” and hired her as a sound-editing apprentice. Four years of work got her into the unions—the golden ticket to the inside that so many others coveted.

  Fields stopped editing when she married and had children, until her husband died of a heart attack at age thirty-eight in 1954, leaving her a single mother with two kids to support. Fields constructed editing rooms in her house, and took jobs editing TV programs like Sky King and Fury. (“I’d tell the kids I was the Queen of Saturday morning,” she laughed.) Soon she moved into motion pictures, working on films like the experimental documentary Savage Eye and the Charlton Heston blockbuster El Cid. But the politically liberal, outspoken Fields was a crusader—“I was interested in using film for social reform,” she said—and got enthusiastically caught up in President Johnson’s Great Society, editing films for the U.S. government’s Office of Economic Opportunity and the USIA.2 At the moment, she was editing a USIA film called Journey to the Pacific, about Johnson’s visit to the region for the 1966 Manila summit conference, and she needed all the good editing hands she could get.

  Lucas—like nearly everyone else who worked for Fields—quickly came to adore her, but he just as rapidly learned to hate editing government films. “If you make a picture for the government, it wants to look good,” said Lucas. “It’s Hollywood invading everything.” He was told that Lady Bird Johnson couldn’t be shown at unflattering angles, while no shot could be used in which President Johnson’s bald spot was visible. Even shots Lucas thought were artistic were scrutinized for potential offense. “I had put in a shot of a bunch of horses in Korea running down the street to help control the huge crowds,” he said. “Someone thought it looked a little too fascist—which it wasn’t—and made us take it out. I just liked the shot.”3

  While Lucas didn’t like cutting together footage of someone “saying things I didn’t really believe in just because I had to make a living,” more than anything else, he just didn’t like being bossed around.4 Being told which shots he could and couldn’t use annoyed him. “The director would come over and say, ‘You can’t cut this this way; you’ve got to cut this way,’” said Lucas. “And I said, ‘I don’t like this.’ At that point, I was really wanting to be an editor and a cameraman… [and] in the course of… doing this, I sort of said, ‘You know, maybe I want to be a director. I don’t want people to tell me what to do.”5

  Lucas wasn’t the only one working in Fields’s editing rooms. While Fields had plumbed the classrooms at USC for students willing to edit and log footage, she had also hired more experienced professional editors from small production companies and paired them with the less experienced students. Lucas was placed alongside a young assistant editor from Sandler Films named Marcia Griffin, a year younger than Lucas, but who had already been supporting herself as a professional editor for more than a year. Griffin was a talented, intuitive editor—and, said John Plummer, “she was cute as hell,” with straight brown hair and a wispy voice—but Lucas was more threatened than impressed by her presence in the editing room. “Marcia had a lot of disdain for the rest of us, because we were all film students,” Lucas recalled. “She was the only real pro there.”6

  She had worked hard to get where she was. Born in Modesto to an air force officer who abandoned his family when Marcia was two, she and her sister had been raised by their single mother in a small apartment in North Hollywood. With no child support coming in, Marcia’s mother managed as best she could on her meager income as a clerk in an insurance agency, but money would always be tight. “We had a lot of love and a supportive family,” Marcia remembered. “But economically, it was real hard on my mother.”7 When she was a teenager, her father reentered her life, and Marcia moved to Florida to live w
ith him and his new family, a well-intentioned experiment that turned out to be a failure. After two years she moved back to Hollywood, finished high school, then enrolled in evening chemistry classes at Los Angeles City College while working full-time in a mortgage banking firm to help support her mother and sister.

  Like Verna Fields, Marcia got into editing almost by accident: “I just walked in off the street,” she said.8 She had gone down to the California state employment office to apply for work as a librarian, and was sent to the Sandler Film Library, which was looking for an apprentice film librarian. The job didn’t pay as much as she was making at the bank, but she found she liked the work and was good at it. “I would have cut film for free because I enjoyed it so much,” she said. So far, her work was paying off; she had gotten into the union. Furthermore, she was willing to put in the effort to work her way through the apprentice editor system, an often frustrating eight-year process in which she was likely to see most of the higher-profile editing jobs go to men—mainly because female editors were considered either too fragile to carry heavy film cans or too delicate to put up with the web of foul language that film editors typically wove while on the job.

  Working alongside Lucas, however, she was unlikely to hear much profanity—or much conversation at all, for that matter. When he was editing, Lucas preferred listening to music and rarely engaged in chatter—and when he did, he preferred to talk about film instead of anything personal. While Lucas remained wary and a bit daunted by this unwanted presence in the editing room, in truth Marcia was slightly intimidated by him as well. She could see right away how good he was. “He was so quiet and he said very little, but he seemed to be really talented and really centered, a very together person,” said Marcia. “I had come out of this hectic commercial production world and here was this relaxed guy who threaded the Moviola very slowly and cautiously. He handled the film with such reverence.”9 For now, Lucas would remain aloof. But despite his wariness, Marcia intrigued him; in time, he thought, he might even talk to her.

  After spending his days in class, then sitting for hours at a Moviola for Verna Fields, Lucas spent his evenings standing in front of a classroom at USC, serving as a teaching assistant for cinematography instructor Gene Peterson, a job he had taken to help defray some of his tuition costs. The evening class that Lucas taught had a unique enrollment; Peterson had a contract with the military to teach its cameramen, mostly navy men and air force representatives, how to “loosen up a bit,” as Lucas put it. “These veteran Navy cameramen had been taught to shoot film by the book.” Lucas’s job, then, was to make them think more like artists. “I had to train the Navy guys to shoot using available light, to think about composition, and to try to get them to make a movie in a different way.”10

  Lucas likely caught a bit of razzing from the USC Mafia; with the war in Vietnam taking up more and more of the front page each day, and student protesters taking out their frustrations on both politicians and returning soldiers alike, teaching a class full of crew-cut servicemen seemed to some like fraternizing with the enemy. “They sent these military guys to join all of us who had shaggy hair and who were protesting and marching,” said Willard Huyck. “And we would have nothing to do with the military guys.”11 Lucas, however, saw things a bit differently. Because the class he was teaching was sponsored and subsidized by the federal government, the navy crews had better equipment than the average USC film class—and, more important, they had nearly unlimited access to color film with sound. What Lucas saw, then, was a classroom filled with great equipment, limitless supplies of film, and a crew that could take orders well. He could do things entirely his way, with all the equipment and film he needed.

  Lucas’s gut instinct was correct: the military crews did take orders well; they just didn’t want to take them from him. Astutely reading the mood of the room, Lucas decided to play to their competitive spirit. He broke the class into two teams, one of which he would lead to make his film, while the other group would follow the lead of their ranking officer. It was a contest the opposing team was destined to lose right from the beginning—for Lucas already knew what film he was going to make. He was going to make that movie he’d discussed with Matthew Robbins and Walter Murch in a Hollywood kitchen—the one about the man emerging from underground and running for freedom.

  There was going to be very little plot; with only twelve weeks to complete the project, Lucas wanted to concentrate more on the look and feel of the film rather than plot or characters—a criticism that would be lobbed at some of his later films as well. “I liked the idea of doing something futuristic,” Lucas said. “I wanted to do something extremely visual that had no dialogue and no characters—a cross between a theatrical and a nontheatrical experience. Something a little experimental.”12 Actually, it was going to be a lot experimental, as Lucas had some unconventional ideas that had, he said, been “boiling around in my mind for a long time.”13

  First, as in Godard’s Alphaville, Lucas was going to use the present to represent the future. There would be no need to build space-age sets or props; with some clever camerawork and a bit of tape and fabric, Lucas could make 1960s-era clothing and machinery look futuristic yet still somehow shopworn and vaguely familiar—the “used universe” mentality he would later bring to Star Wars. Plus, with the power of military clearances behind him, Lucas could access computer rooms and other facilities at locations that would normally be closed to him, including LAX, Van Nuys Airport, and an underground parking area at UCLA. To the greatest extent possible, too, he was going to use only natural lighting, which would give the film a documentary sensibility, almost a feeling of “found footage” that had somehow made its way back to 1967 from the future.

  He had a new cinematic muse as well, yet another product of the National Film Board of Canada: an eclectic black-and-white film called 21-87, by a brilliant thirty-year-old montagist named Arthur Lipsett. Lucas admitted to watching the film “twenty or thirty” times.14 It “had a very powerful effect on me,” Lucas said later. “It was very much the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I was extremely influenced by that particular movie.”15 Not only would it have a profound impact on the way he thought about and used sound in his films but also it would even subtly inspire a key part of Lucas’s Star Wars mythos.

  For 21-87, Lipsett created a nearly ten-minute film montage, using short movies he had taken in New York City along with random bits of film picked up off the editing room floor at the National Film Board. The result is jarring and fascinating: regular people going about their everyday lives—walking in the park, talking on phones, commuting to work—intercut with bizarre, often unsettling footage, like a horse jumping from a diving board, an autopsy, or a smiling, disembodied prop head advertising cigarettes in a store window. But it’s Lipsett’s unique sense of sound that gives the images their vivid, almost subversive feel, infecting everything on-screen with mood and personality: Lipsett’s sound track buzzes and whirs with fragments of conversations about morality, the Bible, and ruminations on God. Blues and gospel play over couples dancing and young men shooting one another with toy pistols. A choir exults as people laugh at their distorted images in funhouse mirrors and as commuters exit an escalator. “When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off,” said Walter Murch. “One of the things we clearly wanted to do… was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating.”16

  In one memorable moment—especially as it affected Lucas—Lipsett inserts over images of fluttering pigeons a snippet of an existential discussion between Warren S. McCulloch, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and cinematographer Roman Kroitor. As McCulloch contends that human beings are merely complicated machines, Kroitor counters that it can’t be that simple or soulless, arguing that as humans contemplate the world around them, “they become aware of some kind of force… behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God.” A decade later, Lucas would acknowledge that his own version of the Force, while based on
the universal idea of life forces, was a tip of the hat to Lipsett, “an echo of that phrase in 21-87.”17

  Lucas would borrow one more conceit from 21-87: “I think that’s one reason I started calling most of my [college] movies by numbers,” he said.18 This film, then, would be named for its main character, designated in Lucas’s dystopia as THX 1138 4EB. As Vorkapich had done with his main character in Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, Lucas would emblazon his hero’s identifying number across his forehead. Although Lucas always insisted that the letters THX “[don’t] mean anything,”19 Matthew Robbins—who had left the protagonist unnamed in his first treatment—thought Lucas might simply have liked the look of the three letters, pointing out that “the letters T, H and X are all symmetrical.”20 Others speculated that Lucas had coyly lifted the title from his phone number, 849-1138, with the letters THX corresponding to the numbers 8, 4, and 9 on the phone’s dial.21

  Lucas filmed THX 1138 4EB over three long, grueling days in January 1967. He would work his navy film crew hard all night, lugging equipment into computer labs and parking lots to catch his main character sprinting down one hallway after another as his pursuers monitor him from a control room. At times it was practically guerrilla filmmaking, as Lucas and his crew would shoot as much as they could in a parking garage before the light changed or they ran out of time. And even with the military’s equipment at their disposal, there were still shortages and equipment failures. Through it all, Lucas simply coped and improvised, with a resilience that impressed the hardened navy officers. Lacking a proper dolly for moving shots, for instance, Lucas and cameraman Zip Zimmerman simply mounted the camera sturdily onto their shoulders and sat stone still on a rolling platform as it was towed slowly backward.

 

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