Furthermore, the moguls were dead or retiring. At Warner, in fact, seventy-five-year-old studio head Jack Warner had recently sold his stock to Seven Arts and was preparing to head across town to set up his own production company. As the studios hemorrhaged money, in-house actors and writers were let go. Making things worse, as the vise grip of unions squeezed studio bottom lines, many studio heads found it cheaper and easier to abandon making films in the studios in favor of filming on location or with foreign film crews. Soundstages were shuttered. For a moment, Lucas held out hope that he might be able to pursue animation at Warner’s famous animation unit, which had produced a seemingly endless stream of quality Looney Tunes cartoons for decades—but that, too, had been closed since 1963 and would not reopen. “Everything was shut down,” said Lucas. “It was like a ghost town.”48
As it turned out, not everything was shut down; there was one movie in production on the lot, just starting a twelve-week shoot under a rookie director: a film adaptation of the shopworn musical Finian’s Rainbow, starring an equally shopworn sixty-eight-year-old Fred Astaire. Lucas groaned as he reported to the set. “I wasn’t really interested,” he said. “I had just finished one scholarship watching Mackenna’s Gold, and by this time I had pretty much decided I didn’t want to go into the theatrical film business anyway. I wanted to be a documentary cameraman.”49 And now here he was, stuck at a nearly deserted Warner Bros. lot, playing the dreaded role of observer again—and to a greenhorn director, no less.
Lucas loitered around the set of Finian’s Rainbow for several days, quietly watching—observing—with his arms folded, mouth set tight. Eventually, the director noticed the “skinny young man” watching him, and asked someone who it was. Learning that his guest was a “student observer from USC,” he coyly sidled over to the stone-faced Lucas between takes.
“See anything interesting?” he asked Lucas.
Lucas shook his head slowly. “Nope,” he said flatly, making a quick sideways cut with his hand, palm down. “Not yet.”
And “this,” said the director—a burly, bearded twenty-eight-year-old named Francis Ford Coppola—“is how I met George Lucas.”50
4
Radicals and Hippies
1967–1971
Francis [Ford Coppola] and I were very good friends right from the moment we met,” said Lucas.1 In spite of Lucas’s typically brusque opening salvo—it wasn’t quite the gruff “you’re doing it wrong” with which Lucas had once greeted Murch, though it was close—Coppola, too, felt an immediate kinship with Lucas. Partly, it had something to do with their closeness in age: Lucas was twenty-three, Coppola twenty-eight. “In those days, film directors were not young people. They were pretty much older men in suits, smoking pipes,” said Coppola. “When I saw George, it was sort of like seeing one of my own, someone more my age… with my background and with my attitudes toward filmmaking.”2
At first glance, the two of them didn’t seem to have much in common. Unlike Lucas, Coppola had been raised in a household that tolerated, even encouraged, artistic expression. Coppola’s father, Carmine, was a musician with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra who happened to be playing the flute on the radio show The Ford Sunday Evening Hour on the evening Francis was born on April 7, 1939—and hence adopted the name of the show’s sponsor for his new son’s middle name. Unlike in the Lucas household, there would be little strife between Francis and his own father—and when Francis contracted polio at age ten, his father was nearly “wiped out” with anguish, a show of emotion that would have been out of character for George Lucas Sr.3 Francis would recover from the disease after nearly a year of being quarantined on bed rest in his own room—a confinement he never forgot. “A lot of my getting into the movie business stems from me feeling this isolation,” Coppola said later.4
After graduating from Jamaica High School in New York, Coppola enrolled at Hofstra University in 1956, where he quickly took over the theater arts program on the strength of his ability to do it all: write, direct, act, and produce. He also honed a defiantly independent streak. “The whole tone of my regime—and it was a regime,” said Coppola, “was to turn control of the Theater Arts Department into the hands of students,” which he successfully did. After graduation—“I left Hofstra as really the top guy,” Coppola recalled proudly—he discovered the films of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein and immediately transferred his love from theater to cinema. “On Monday I was in the theater,” he said, “and on Tuesday I wanted to be a filmmaker.”5
Inspired, Coppola enrolled as a graduate student at UCLA film school in the fall of 1960. With his talent for screenwriting, he won the prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Award and soon found himself—like so many aspiring filmmakers at the time—working for Roger Corman, for whom he wrote and directed the low-budget horror film Dementia 13 in 1963. That same year, his screenwriting also brought him to the attention of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, which put him under contract to write or punch up scripts, one of which, Patton, would later win him an Academy Award. Coppola, however, quickly grew frustrated with writing movies for others. He wrote a screenplay based on the novel You’re a Big Boy Now, which he shot on location in New York City in a speedy twenty-nine days in 1966. At twenty-seven, Coppola had officially made a major motion picture. It was a big deal, and Coppola knew it. “In those years, it was unheard of for a young fellow to make a feature film,” he said later. “I was the first one!”6
To frustrated film students and graduates, who regularly found the doors of mainstream Hollywood closed and barred, Coppola was already “a legend,” said Walter Murch.7 “Because of his personality, he actually succeeded in getting his hand on the doorknob and flinging open the door, and suddenly there was a crack of light, and you could see that one of us, a film student without any connections to the film business, had put one foot in front of another and actually made the transition from being a film student to being somebody who made a feature film sponsored by one of the studios.”8 To Steven Spielberg, Coppola was “my shining star.… Francis was the first inspiration to a lot of young filmmakers because he broke through before many others.”9
Convinced by his work on Big Boy that Coppola was the real deal, Warner had now placed him at the helm of Finian’s Rainbow, their lone project at the near-empty studio. As two of the youngest people on the set, Lucas and Coppola soon found themselves spending plenty of time together—another big brother figure to whom Lucas could attach himself. In this case, however, it was a role Coppola was happy, even eager, to play. “I was anxious to have a friend,” said Coppola, “and, as things turned out, something I had never had, which was a younger brother.”10 And as brothers tend to do, the two of them would bicker, sometimes furiously, then reconcile over and over again as the years went by.
At the moment, however, Lucas was bored. Coppola was good company, but Lucas wanted to do anything other than “observe.” He’d had enough of standing around during the production of Mackenna’s Gold earlier that spring. So Lucas began leaving the back lot—and Coppola—to poke around in the vacant animation building, looking for any abandoned scraps of film that he might use to make a short movie. “The cameras were still there,” said Lucas, “so I figured I’d find some short pieces of film and spend the six months of my work time there making an animated film.”11
Coppola noticed the young man’s absence and was not amused. “What are you doing?” he demanded of Lucas. “Aren’t I entertaining enough for you?”12 When Lucas explained that he preferred doing to watching, Coppola nodded sympathetically and gave Lucas a job as his administrative assistant, promising $3,000 for six months’ work. While Lucas took care of many of the day-to-day details on the set, dutifully shooting photographs to ensure continuity of props and furniture over a variety of takes, Coppola expected more out of the young man he was quickly coming to see as a protégé. “I used to tell him things like ‘George, every day you need to come up with a brilliant idea. That’s your assignment,’” recalled Coppola. “And ever
y day he would come up with a brilliant idea, so I very quickly understood this was an exceptional person.”13
They made an odd-looking pair. Lucas was short and unassuming, while the nearly six-foot Coppola was jovial and outgoing. But the more they got to know each other, the better they liked each other—and the more they came to appreciate their differences. “[George’s] strengths were in areas different than mine,” said Coppola. “I had come out of theater, and I had been trying to be a writer for so long, and he had come more out of design, and was very strong in editing. So there was a kind of mutual joining of these specialties.”14 Whereas Lucas, for example, had little interest in dealing with the daily dramas of actors, Coppola, with his background in acting in the theater, jumped willingly into the fray, unconcerned about feelings or egos. At one point during the production of Finian, Coppola made a point of loudly firing Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire’s choreographer of choice, even over the objections of Astaire, who quietly grumbled that he “hated the things he saw Coppola doing.”15
For Lucas’s part, it was easy to get swept up in the charismatic Coppola’s loud enthusiasm. “Francis is very flamboyant, very Italian, very ‘go-out-there-and-do-things.’ I’m very ‘let’s-think-about-this-first,’” Lucas said later. “But together we were great, because I would be the weight around his neck that slowed him down a little bit to keep him from getting his head chopped off. Aesthetically, we had very compatible sensibilities… but we were very much the opposite in the way we operated and the way we did things. And that, I think, allowed us to have a very active relationship.”16 At times Coppola could even run his crew with a gleeful disregard for the rules that Lucas admired. For one scene in Finian, Coppola had hauled a film crew up to San Francisco to film Fred Astaire on the city’s famous Golden Gate Bridge. Lacking the proper permits, Coppola simply shot until a state police car chased them off—a bit of insurrectionary moviemaking Lucas could appreciate.17
They may have been complementary personalities even in their twenties, but there was one thing about Lucas that Coppola was determined to change. “You’re going to have to learn to write if you’re ever going to learn to direct,” Coppola told him.18 “Nobody will take you seriously unless you can write.”19 Lucas groaned, shuddering at the memory of the long evenings he had spent laboring over high school and college papers, struggling with spelling and basic grammar. “I’m not a writer,” he protested. “I hate writing.”20 Besides, he told Coppola, “I like cinéma vérité, documentaries… non-story, non-character tone poems.”21
But Coppola stood firm; any director worth his salt had to know how to put together a screenplay. Coppola promised to help in any way he could, and even had a project in mind for Lucas’s first script: Lucas’s own THX 1138 4EB, the short student film ending with the escape into the desert, which Coppola was convinced could be expanded into a full-length feature. To sweeten the deal, Coppola thought of a way Lucas could write his script and get paid for it. All it would take was a bit of subterfuge, Coppola-style.
As Coppola wrapped filming on Finian’s Rainbow that autumn, he was already eager to get started on his next film, this time from one of his own scripts called The Rain People, inspired by a childhood experience when his mother had run out on his father after a fight and checked in to a local motel, effectively disappearing for several days. Coppola envisioned it as a much more intimate and personal film than any he had made previously and wanted to bring a grittier style of filmmaking to it. “I’ve got this plan to do a tiny movie with just a small group of people, a bit like making a student film,” he told Lucas, “get in a truck and drive across the United States, making a movie as I go. No planning, no nothing—just do it.”22 Coppola wanted Lucas to serve as his right-hand man for the project. Lucas was intrigued, but slightly skeptical. He thought that Coppola needed to think things through first; Coppola thought that Lucas lacked a sense of adventure. “He used to call me the eighty-five-year-old man,” sighed Lucas.23
With his typical swagger, Coppola dangled The Rain People in front of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts for several weeks, then coyly went missing, a strategic feint meant to convince the studio that he was taking his project somewhere else. It worked: in a flurry, Warner Bros.–Seven Arts agreed to give Coppola $750,000 to shoot The Rain People exactly as he wanted—on the road, away from the studio, and without script approval. Additionally, as part of the deal, Coppola had persuaded the studio to include $3,000 for Lucas to write the script for THX 1138. Coppola told Lucas to think of it as his salary; he could work with Coppola on The Rain People by day and write THX 1138 at night.
An impressed Lucas could only shake his head in awe at Coppola’s colossal nerve. “Francis could sell ice to the Eskimos,” Lucas said later. “He has charisma beyond logic. I can see now what kind of men the great Caesars of history were, their magnetism.”24
Coppola had good reason to believe in the potential of THX as a feature-length film. Throughout 1967 and early 1968, Lucas’s THX 1138 4EB was still making the rounds of the student film circuit, where it was winning praise—and prizes—from students, critics, and even Hollywood insiders. Ned Tanen, a young producer at Universal, remembered leaving the theater in a near daze. “You looked at the movie, and said, ‘Jesus, who the hell did this? I don’t know where he stole the footage, but he is someone very special.’”25
The pinnacle for THX—and for Lucas as a student filmmaker—came in January 1968, when THX was selected as the best dramatic film at the third National Student Film Festival, held at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Lucas actually had films entered in three of the four major categories; besides THX, The Emperor had been competing in the documentary category, while 6-18-67 was entered as an experimental film—and rumor had it that Lucas had actually won in those categories as well before being downgraded to honorable mention status to prevent a sweep by a single student filmmaker. As it was, Lucas even had a hand in the winning entry in the animation category, USC classmate John Milius’s Marcello, I’m So Bored, for which Lucas had edited the sound. It was enough to get him a mention in Time magazine and applause from the Los Angeles Times as “the most impressive young talent to emerge from a university cinema department in the past five years.”26 Film critic Charles Champlin went even farther, declaring that “for ingenuity, power, and professionalism, Lucas’s THX 1138 4EB is a knock-out and must be seen.”27
Beyond the accolades and attention, the competition proved pivotal to Lucas—and filmmaking—for a very different reason. When the curtain at Royce Hall went up on Friday, January 19, 1968, for the first night of the festival, sitting in the audience was a twenty-one-year-old junior from California State Long Beach named Steven Spielberg. “I didn’t know ahead of time about any of the films… so I anticipated nothing,” Spielberg remembered. “I saw a number of shorts first—but when THX came on, there was so much virtuosity in the craft and the vision and the emotion of that story that… I couldn’t believe it was a student film.… It absolutely stopped the festival. You could have heard a pin drop in that theater.”28 Spielberg was awestruck—and practically jade green with envy for its young director. “My first impression was ‘I hate you!’” said Spielberg later, laughing. “‘I hate that guy, man! He’s so much better than I am!’”29
Afterward, Spielberg headed backstage, where he found Lucas with Coppola—and their individual recollections years later of their first encounter is reflective of both of their personalities and narrative styles. Spielberg remembered the moment warmly and vividly. “George was a really friendly guy,” according to Spielberg. “[He said], ‘Hey, how are you?’ and we shook hands and became friends from that moment on. The friendship actually began with a handshake.”30 In his telling of events, however, Lucas wasn’t willing to confirm either the emotion or the details. “I think I may have met him. There were a lot of people afterward,” Lucas said. “But,” he conceded, “if we met, it was definitely [just] a handshake, ‘Hi, how are you?’”31
However memorable—or unmemor
able—its start, a friendship between Lucas and the man he would later refer to affectionately as “my partner, my pal, my inspiration, my challenger”32 was perhaps inevitable, for the two of them were much alike. As teenagers, both had been outsiders, though in Spielberg’s case, he was more nerd than greaser. “I was a loner and very lonely,” Spielberg recalled of his years growing up in Arizona. “I was the only Jewish kid in school, and I was very shy and uncertain.”33 Spielberg, too, was an apathetic student, a devotee of comic books, and a self-proclaimed “TV junkie.” Unlike Lucas, however, Spielberg had known since elementary school that he wanted to be a filmmaker, shooting his own westerns, mysteries, even a World War II fighter pilot film called Fighter Squad. “I’ve been really serious about filmmaking since I was twelve years old,” Spielberg said later. “I don’t excuse those early years as a hobby.… I really did start then.”34
Poor grades kept Spielberg out of film school at USC, so he enrolled at Cal State Long Beach instead, where he had to ad lib a cinema curriculum since Long Beach had no formal film school. It probably didn’t matter anyway; Spielberg spent most of his college years sneaking into Universal Studios to watch films being made, sitting with editors in cutting rooms, and, from time to time, getting thrown off soundstages. While he had completed several amateur films—including a feature-length film called Firelight that had premiered at a real movie theater in Phoenix when he was seventeen—at the time of his first encounter with Lucas in early 1968, Spielberg’s filmmaking was still more aspiring than actual. But Lucas and his work had inspired him anew. “No longer were John Ford, Walt Disney, David Lean… my role models,” said Spielberg. “Rather, it was someone nearer my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with, draw inspiration from.”35 Motivated in part by what he had seen on-screen at Royce Hall, Spielberg would raise the money to write and direct an impressive twenty-five-minute film called Amblin’—and by the end of the year would be under contract with Universal, an observer no more.
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