In February 1968, Lucas left California for Long Island, New York, to begin scouting locations for The Rain People. Coppola was planning to begin filming in March and had headed to New York ahead of Lucas, shooting B-roll at Hofstra and preparing his seven-vehicle caravan for its slow trek across the county. Coppola had already announced that wives and girlfriends would not be permitted on the trip, so Lucas had brought Marcia to New York for a bit of time together before he left on his extended adventure with Coppola. As he prowled nearby Garden City, scouting sites where Coppola would later film a wedding sequence, Lucas proposed to Marcia.
For Lucas, the decision to marry Marcia was as inexplicable as it was obvious. “It wasn’t that I saw her in the editing room and said, ‘I’m going to get that girl,’” said Lucas. “It was more like, ‘This is another girl and we’ll have fun and what the heck.’ I certainly never expected I would marry Marcia.” But, he said, “Marcia and I got along real well. We were both feisty and neither one of us would take any shit from the other. I sort of liked that. I didn’t like someone who could be run over.”36 John Plummer, who had been there from the beginning, wasn’t at all surprised. “She had a lot of the same beliefs that George did,” said Plummer. “As a couple, [they were] very supportive. They had a mission together, what they wanted to do. It seemed like it was a very good relationship.”37
That mission, at least as envisioned by George, involved their eventually moving back to northern California, where Marcia could continue to edit commercials and the odd film project while he pursued a career as an independent avant-garde filmmaker. “We’ll make [films] together and sell them there,” he told her. “It’s probably going to be very hard.” But Marcia admired that kind of forward thinking. “George has always planned things very far in advance,” she said. “He always works out in his head what may happen in a year or two and figures out what all the possibilities are so that he can handle whatever situation pops up. He’s very good at capitalizing on all the options.”38
As in his friendship with Coppola, Lucas viewed his and Marcia’s differences as the underlying strength in their relationship; typically, however, he had a tough time articulating it. “I say black, she says white,” explained Lucas. “But we have similar tastes, backgrounds, feelings about things, and philosophies.” Marcia put it a bit more elegantly, noting that “we want to complete ourselves, so we look for someone who is strong where we’re weak.” If there was one thing that truly made them compatible, however, it was their mutual love of editing. “That’s one of the reasons our relationship works—we both love the same thing.”39 In hindsight, it was probably not the best foundation on which to build a marriage.
Officially engaged, Marcia headed back to California while Lucas piled into one of the several station wagons Coppola had wrangled to transport his entire twenty-person film crew—director, actors, stuntmen, grips, soundmen, everyone—on a nearly five-month crawl through eighteen states. Coppola also planned on carrying all the equipment he needed, including a full-size, state-of-the-art Steenbeck editing table he had purchased at his own expense, deducting the cost from his director’s fee. The process of shooting The Rain People was “a labor of love,” Coppola said later. “We had a very small crew in a remodeled Dodge bus that we rebuilt ourselves and filled with the most advanced motion picture equipment available.”40 Ultimately, the plan was there was no plan: while Coppola had a shooting script, he had no established shooting schedule and no specific locations in mind; if he saw a place that looked promising for a certain scene, he’d stop and roll film. Inspiration would define their direction each day. It was shooting without a net—the sort of guerrilla filmmaking Lucas loved.
But there was nothing easy about it. The schedule was particularly grueling for Lucas, who would get up every day at 4 a.m. to agonize over his script for THX 1138 for two hours, then head out at 6 a.m. to spend the rest of the day as Coppola’s third assistant director, right-hand man, and all-around gofer. The writing process was particularly slow and miserable. “Francis… practically handcuffed George to the desk,” Marcia remembered.41 But Lucas persevered. “[Francis] sort of took me under his wing,” as Lucas later put it. “He said, ‘I’ll help you.’”42 Coppola’s first bit of advice: “Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it… you just keep fixing it.”43
At the same time, Lucas—never one to pass up the opportunity to grab any bit of film and start shooting—had begun working on a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the film, tailing along after Coppola with a 16 mm camera and a Nagra tape recorder. “George was around in a very quiet way,” said producer Ron Colby. “You’d look around and suddenly there’d be George in a corner with his camera. He’d just kind of drift around. But he shot the camera, did his own sound. He was very much a one-man band.”44 He also found in the boisterous Coppola an ideal subject; it was easy to catch the director arguing with his actors—among them James Caan and Robert Duvall—squabbling with local authorities, or grousing loudly into the telephone about union interference and daring Warner executives to call the police on him. But Coppola loved what Lucas was putting together, and even managed to re-appropriate $12,000 from the film’s publicity budget to pay for the documentary, which Lucas would eventually title filmmaker.
As the Coppola convoy rolled out of New York, through New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania, Coppola ordered the entire crew to shave off their beards—himself included, which Lucas thought made Coppola “unrecognizable”—to give themselves a more conservative look that might come in handy when dealing with local authorities.45 Sometimes the ploy paid off, as Coppola was able to sweet-talk his way into shooting in the middle of an Armed Forces Day parade in Tennessee. In Kentucky, however, a prickly ferry operator refused to permit Coppola to film onboard, while in Nebraska, he clashed with local cops over his use of police insignia. Through it all, Lucas stood quietly by, camera rolling—and when he wasn’t filming, he still stood near Coppola, hands jammed in his pockets, Coppola’s silent shadow. “There was definitely a joining of the hip there between those two guys,” remembered Colby. “George was very withdrawn, very quiet, very shy. And Francis was quite ebullient and outgoing.”46
Still, Lucas and Coppola weren’t so joined at the hip that they couldn’t squabble from time to time; Lucas found it particularly galling when Coppola exempted himself from all the terms and conditions he’d imposed on the rest of the crew in the spirit of their adventure. Though Coppola had decreed, for instance, that there would be no wives or girlfriends permitted on the trip, he brought along his wife, Eleanor, and their kids anyway, putting them at the rear of the convoy in a Volkswagen minibus. That particular offense Lucas was able to brush off, though he did make a point of showing Coppola’s family in filmmaker, under a bit of fawning narration. But when Coppola abandoned their convoy at a run-down motel in Pennsylvania in favor of spending a relatively comfortable weekend in New York—there were whispers that Coppola was visiting a mistress—Lucas was furious. “Francis was saying all this ‘all for one’ stuff, and then he goes off and screws around in New York,” said Lucas. “He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.”47 Fair would always be a big deal to Lucas.
Such disagreements aside, both Lucas and Coppola found the whole seat-of-the-pants process of making The Rain People invigorating. No sets were needed, no studio facilities were needed—and anything Coppola didn’t have on hand he could get on his own terms. While he didn’t have equipment with him to print each day’s footage, for instance, Coppola would simply have the film flown to New York each evening for printing so he could view the footage several days later. And better yet, he could do it all without having the Hollywood suits looking over his shoulder or visiting the set and offering useless advice. “We began to feel like Robin Hood and his band,” said Coppola. “We really had a filmmaking machine in our hands, and it didn’t need to be in Hol
lywood. It could be anywhere.”48
Anywhere could even be the middle of nowhere. By late June, Coppola had so much footage in his hands that he decided to hole up for a few weeks in Ogallala, Nebraska, to sort through it all. Coppola converted an old shoe store into an editing room, where he huddled over the Steenbeck with editor Barry “Blackie” Malkin to assemble a working cut. Lucas suggested that things might move along faster if Malkin had an assistant, and recommended Marcia for the job, coyly subverting Coppola’s rule against girlfriends in the name of practicality. But when Lucas called her with the offer, Marcia was torn; she had an offer from Haskell Wexler to work on his film Medium Cool, which Wexler was planning to shoot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in what would turn out to be a most tumultuous summer. Lucas had his projects, she had hers—but newly engaged, Marcia felt she was obligated to choose Lucas’s project over hers, and dutifully showed up at the shoe shop in Nebraska. As things turned out, a delay in Wexler’s shooting schedule would ultimately permit her to work on both films, but a pattern was already forming: Lucas’s work came before her work. And sometimes before her.
Still, Lucas was glad to have Marcia around—and so was Coppola, who admired more than just her editing skills. “Everybody wanted Marcia,” said John Milius flatly, and Coppola—married, but with a reputation, as Marcia put it, as “a major pussy hound”49—“attempted to hit on Marcia,” according to Milius, “because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody.” Lucas could only watch in tight-lipped annoyance, filing this new offense away for future reference, even as Marcia politely rebuffed Coppola’s overtures. “That was Francis,” said Milius. “Francis was for Francis—but Francis was great; a truly great man.”50 Sometimes that was enough, sometimes not. Lucas might forgive, but he wouldn’t forget.
Coppola returned to the rough cut of Rain People, and was so intent on the process, in fact, that in late June he decided to blow off a prior commitment he’d made to participate in a teachers’ conference in San Francisco. He’d agreed to sit on a panel called “Film in Relation to the Printed Word,” along with several other filmmakers who had adapted books into movies, as Coppola had with You’re a Big Boy Now. At the last moment, Coppola decided he wasn’t going—but rather than drop out altogether, he decided to send Lucas in his place.
Lucas arrived at the San Francisco Hilton just in time for the panel, sliding into a seat on the dais behind a placard that still had Coppola’s name on it. Sitting next to him was a thirty-one-year-old independent filmmaker from northern California named John Korty, who had adapted his film The Crazy-Quilt from psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis’s short story “The Illusionless Man and the Visionary Maid.” While Korty spoke eloquently on the topic at hand, it was when he digressed into the details of his filmmaking that Lucas really took an interest.
For the past three years, Korty had been running his own filmmaking facility out of his barn at Stinson Beach, a small ocean resort town just north of San Francisco. He had privately raised the $100,000 for Crazy-Quilt by hitting up friends, colleagues, and even his actors for money, shot the movie locally, then edited it on his own equipment. At the film’s premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, it received a lengthy standing ovation, and Hollywood executives fell over themselves scrambling to distribute it and recruit Korty, with producer David Wolper wooing him particularly hard. But Korty was having none of it. “From what I saw of Hollywood, they can keep it right now,” Korty said. “I would rather work for myself.… [In Hollywood] you have a producer breathing down your neck. Hollywood is dying slowly. Here [in northern California] I am happier working with less money. The risk of failure is far less. We can complete a film in maybe a year… getting the results we want.”51
It was a speech Coppola or Lucas could have made—and probably had. As soon as their session ended, Lucas excitedly pulled Korty aside. “You’ve gotta talk to Francis,” he said, and the two of them found a pay phone in the lobby so they could call Coppola in Nebraska.52 Coppola was ecstatic; he wanted to meet Korty as quickly as possible—and on July 4, Coppola, Lucas, and Ron Colby drove up to meet Korty at his Stinson Beach headquarters.
Korty and his wife lived in a two-story house overlooking the beach, only steps away from a slate-gray barn with broken windows that Korty used as his all-purpose film studio. The view was gorgeous. “Where else can you walk out the door and be in the ideal place to start shooting?” said Korty.53 The barn was packed with “all of the toys of a young filmmaker,” recalled an impressed Colby.54 A large movie screen hung over a stage at one high end of the barn, faced by a soundproofed projection room housing a 35 mm projector. Korty was finishing work on his newest film, Funnyman, and showed Coppola the recording, editing, and dubbing equipment tucked away under the eaves. It wasn’t necessarily all state of the art, but it was all his, and Coppola and Lucas were dazzled. This was exactly what they had in mind for themselves. “[Korty] inspired us both,” said Coppola. “He was a real innovator.”55
Coppola, Lucas, and Colby piled into their station wagon to begin their drive back to Nebraska, where The Rain People was still spooled on the Steenbeck. But Coppola and Lucas had seen the future in Korty’s barn on the beach—and when they finished living out of their Rain People caravan, Coppola was going to build his own cinematic community… somewhere. “If you can do it,” he had told Korty enthusiastically, “we can.”56
Coppola finally completed the first rough cut of The Rain People in San Francisco in mid-October. While Francis was finishing his film, George and Marcia were cutting together Lucas’s documentary, now officially called filmmaker: a diary by george lucas, in their little house on Portola. As always, film editing, no matter how long the hours, was the fun part—and it was great that he and Marcia could do it together. The rest of the time, however, Lucas was toiling over the script for THX 1138. Coppola had continued to lecture Lucas that it was the ability to write original material that separated filmmakers from mere directors. “Write the screenplay, and then execute it as a producer and director,” admonished Coppola.57 The irony would be that over the course of their careers, it would be Lucas, the self-proclaimed “terrible writer,” who would write and direct his own original material—and create two iconic film franchises along the way—while Coppola would largely make his name adapting other people’s work for the big screen. At the moment, however, Lucas was taking his mentor’s advice seriously, writing and rewriting, getting it all down, just as Coppola had directed.
By November 1, the first draft was complete. “This is terrible,” Lucas told Coppola as he handed him the script, and Coppola didn’t disagree.58 After several weeks of working with Lucas on a second draft, Coppola finally admitted he was stumped. “I just don’t understand your vision,” he told Lucas. “Maybe what we’ll do is hire a writer and let him try to do it.” Coppola then handed off the first two drafts to television writer Oliver Hailey, but after reviewing Hailey’s work, Lucas was even more frustrated, grousing, “His script wasn’t at all what I wanted.”59 Lucas would keep revising. And he’d stay unhappy.
For Lucas, writing would always be hard—unless someone else was doing it, at which point Lucas was brimming with ideas and suggestions. Lately, Lucas had become more and more intrigued by a script John Milius was tinkering with for a war movie set in Vietnam—a dangerous topic in 1968, to be sure. It was a mashup of Dr. Strangelove—a film both Milius and Lucas loved—and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel Milius was eager to adapt because it seemed so impossible. (A successful film adaptation, said Milius proudly, “had stumped all these great writers.”) At first, Milius called his script The Psychedelic Soldier but then settled on Apocalypse Now, an inspired swipe at the NIRVANA NOW buttons being worn by the hippies Milius despised. Lucas loved the script, and as Milius continued writing, Lucas would throw out one idea after another about how the film should be made. Naturally, he would direct it, and would do it in a documentary style on 16 mm film, to give it almost a newsreel eff
ect. “George said, ‘Put all the neat stuff in there, all the helicopters,’” laughed Milius. To Lucas’s mind, “the big hero thing to be was the director,”60 said Milius, not the writer.
That winter, even as THX was still simmering, Lucas began scouting around Marin County for possible places to establish Coppola’s grand cinematic community. Coppola was looking, too. While Francis was leaning toward San Francisco for his new headquarters—he had come to appreciate the area’s “political and cultural ferment”—he was casting a wide net when it came to inspiration.61 Late in 1968, Coppola and Ron Colby left for Denmark to visit another independent film company, Lanterna Film, from which Danish filmmaker Mogens Skot-Hansen had been overseeing film production—mostly commercials and soft porn—since 1955. Coppola and Colby arrived to find Skot-Hansen working out of an old mansion tucked up on a hillside overlooking a lake, filled with state-of-the-art equipment, staffed by beautiful blond women, and housing a bohemian community of filmmakers. Coppola wanted it all, from the house to the equipment to the camaraderie. He and Skot-Hansen struck up a friendship—he would stay with Skot-Hansen and his family for nearly three weeks—and when Coppola left, the Dane presented him with a nineteenth-century optical toy, a cylinder that, when spun and squinted at through a series of slits, produced an illusion of movement.62 While Coppola liked the toy, he loved its name even more: zoetrope, from the Greek words meaning “life movement.”
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