On his way home, Coppola stopped at a Photokina trade fair in Cologne, where he eagerly spent $80,000 on a new editing console and sound mixers, despite the fact that he couldn’t afford any of it—and once the equipment was shipped back to the States, he had nowhere to put it. It didn’t matter; Coppola was too fired up in pursuit of his dream of his own cinematic commune, his own creative freedom, to bother with such details. “It’s mine,” Coppola said proudly of his new equipment.63 “If you’re not willing to risk some money when you’re young, you’re certainly not ever going to risk anything in the years that follow.”64 Arriving back in San Francisco, he excitedly called Lucas to tell him about Skot-Hansen, the mansion, and his new toys. “This is what we need to do,” he told Lucas. “We need to get a big old house, like a fraternity, and make movies. And do it here, somewhere outside of Hollywood.”65 That sounded just fine to Lucas, who wanted to stay as far away from Hollywood as possible.
As Lucas drove around Marin County, in fact, he was looking for more than just a location for Coppola’s studio; he and Marcia were planning to move to northern California together—just as Lucas had sworn they would when they got engaged—and he had spotted a little house perched at the top of a sloping hill in Mill Valley. The place was small but picturesque—with its white picket fence, it looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting—and at $120 a month, it was definitely affordable. It was just the kind of place where a young couple could settle down together. “We were really happy and optimistic,” Lucas said later of their time together in Mill Valley. “In our lifestyle there were only two rooms we used, the kitchen and the bedroom. We were in either one or the other.”66
George and Marcia were married on Saturday, February 22, 1969—almost exactly a year after they had announced their engagement—at the First United Methodist Church in Pacific Grove, California. Lucas, in his darkest suit and tie, was rail thin but beaming from ear to ear as he and Marcia said their vows. Coppola was there in a plum-colored jacket and matching shirt, along with USC classmates Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins, and Verna Fields, who had been present at the beginning of their unexpected courtship. “It was a small wedding, it was informal,” said John Plummer. “It was friends, it was a terrific time.”67 The newlywed Lucases sprinted off for a brief honeymoon at Big Sur, then returned to Mill Valley, where Marcia hoped to settle in and start a family, while Lucas headed for San Francisco to play businessman with Coppola.
Over the past several months, Coppola had come close to landing a home for his company. At one point Lucas had spotted in the tiny town of Ross what seemed to be an ideal property, an old mansion known locally as the Dibble Estate. Coppola excitedly sold his house and nearly everything else he had on hand to raise the money for the down payment, then was beaten to the punch by another buyer (“which was very disappointing,” sighed Coppola).68 Negotiations then began on another property, which also fell through, leaving Coppola in the lurch as the editing console and sound mixers he had purchased in Cologne were finally on their way to San Francisco with no place to house them. With time running out, John Korty helpfully located a three-story loft in a warehouse at 827 Folsom Street in San Francisco—“a big kooky brick building,” Coppola called it—just in time for Coppola to load in his bulky new equipment.69 Lucas enthusiastically suggested calling their upstart company Transamerican Sprocket Works, but Coppola overrode that particular proposition, arguing that it sounded too much like a rock group. Coppola had another name in mind anyway, a tip of the hat to Skot-Hansen and his wonderful optical toy: American Zoetrope.
Coppola named himself president of Zoetrope, of course, and appointed Lucas his executive vice president. And why not? “George was like a younger brother to me,” said Coppola. “I loved him. Where I went, he went.”70 But this was more than just another moviemaking venture together; Zoetrope was freedom, a deliberate thumb in the eye of Hollywood and its stranglehold on filmmaking—and Lucas loved playing the role of revolutionary. “Francis said, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, this is what we want to do,’ so we immediately moved here [to San Francisco] and set up American Zoetrope,” Lucas recounted later. “When we got up here, they [the Hollywood studios] said, ‘You can’t possibly make movies up here.’ And we said, ‘Well, we don’t care.’ I said, ‘I love San Francisco and that’s where I want to live and I don’t care.’ I kept being stubborn and persistent.”71
One of Lucas’s first acts as Coppola’s vice president was to bring compatible talent into their ranks. Right away Lucas placed a call to Walter Murch, who was working on commercials with Haskell Wexler down in Los Angeles, and asked him to drop everything, move to San Francisco, and begin editing sound for The Rain People on Zoetrope’s newly installed equipment. “I remember George saying, ‘Well, we may all be back in a year with our tails between our legs, but at least it’ll be fun while we’re doing it. Who knows what will happen?’” recalled Murch. “Most people in Hollywood thought what we were doing was crazy. But it was the late sixties, it was San Francisco, it was all part of what we saw then as the beginnings of the technical democratization of the filmmaking process—with comparatively little money, you could actually go on the road and shoot a feature film.”72 Off Murch went to San Francisco.
John Korty, too, had come along on the adventure, though he was more interested in leasing offices and using Coppola’s state-of-the-art equipment than in becoming one of Coppola’s Merry Men. Haskell Wexler also expressed an interest in working out of Zoetrope, attracted by the idea of using small crews with portable equipment. Coppola, in fact, was willing to do business with any like-minded filmmaker, screenwriter, editor, or technician, and he and Lucas eventually recruited other eager friends and colleagues, including Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck, John Milius, and Carroll Ballard. Coppola, delighted to have apostles, sealed most of their deals with a handshake instead of a formal contract—because contracts, said Coppola, in a typical bit of antiestablishment bluster, were “sort of immoral.”73
There was one friend, however, who wouldn’t be invited into the Zoetrope circle. At one point Lucas brought in Steven Spielberg to show Coppola Amblin’, Spielberg’s recently completed twenty-six-minute student film. Coppola may have been impressed, but he wasn’t convinced Spielberg was worthy of Zoetrope; there was too much Hollywood stink on him for Spielberg to be a true revolutionary. “I wasn’t really in Francis’s circle. I was an outsider, I was the establishment,” said Spielberg. “I was being raised and nurtured at Universal Studios, a very conservative company, and in his eyes, and also George’s eyes, I was working inside the system.”74 Spielberg would remain on the outside looking in—for now.
Despite his swagger, Coppola admitted that he worried about financing Zoetrope, especially since Finian’s Rainbow had quickly faded from sight on its release in late 1968. Coppola couldn’t make money without a project on hand. “I don’t want to have to make success,” he groused to the press. “You know, if it means I’ve got to work on $6,000 films in San Francisco, then I guess that’s what I have to do. I don’t know. I’ll probably do another big picture now. I really need the money.”75
Money, Coppola decided, could probably be squeezed from Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, where he still had some influence. Despite the failure of Finian, the studio was high on The Rain People, scheduled for release in September 1969, and Coppola enthusiastically submitted Lucas’s latest draft of THX 1138 to executives in the office of studio head Eliot Hyman. To Coppola’s dismay, Hyman and his team weren’t impressed; they rejected the script outright, plunging Lucas into a funk. But the savvy Coppola knew something Lucas didn’t: Warner Bros.–Seven Arts was about to be bought out by Kinney National Services, which until 1969 was known largely for its parking lots and cleaning services. “What we’ll do is we’ll wait until these new guys come on board,” Coppola told Lucas. “We won’t tell them [THX] has already been turned down. We’ll just pretend that we’ve already started it.”76
; The imminent change in leadership at Warner was one lucky break. In July 1969, Coppola caught another.
July 14, 1969, saw the release of the film Easy Rider, a counterculture road movie directed and co-written by thirty-three-year-old Dennis Hopper, and produced completely outside of Hollywood. Filmed on the road—like The Rain People—on a shoestring budget that hovered around $350,000, Easy Rider would go on to become one of the most profitable films ever made. Its only contact with the Hollywood system had been for distribution—“the last great mystery with which studios held everyone at bay,” lamented one director—the rights to which had eagerly been snatched up by Columbia.77 “There was a breakthrough with Easy Rider,” said Walter Murch, “which finally suggested to the studios that there might be something to the way we were thinking.”78 Hopper may have beaten Coppola to the punch, but he had proved Coppola’s revolutionary instincts right.
The studios didn’t care who had gotten there first; they merely smelled money. Why invest millions bankrolling production of an enormous film on a studio back lot when you could simply distribute independently produced films? Suddenly, independent films—made by young directors, writers, actors, and producers—were in demand. The studios wanted young talent, at times even recruiting directly from film schools. It was a movement Lucas applauded. “I think the student films are the only real hope,” Lucas told one reporter. “I think [the studios are] slowly beginning to realize that students know what they’re doing, you know? That they’re not just a bunch of silly kids out there playing around.”79
Hollywood was shifting—at least for the moment—toward a new wave of dynamic American filmmaking, largely defined by the personal visions of the auteur directors—as integral to a film, went the argument, as a poet was to a poem. “‘Personal filmmaking,’ that was a phrase we used a lot,” explained Coppola. “A personal film was something that you wrote and directed about things that maybe you didn’t fully understand, that the filmmaking would answer, that would be not just the repeating of a genre film over and over again… to try to make films that would shed light on life.”80
It wouldn’t take long for the movement to sputter out—and Lucas, to his dismay, would be largely responsible for the gradual shift away from grittier, more personal films, toward more easily accessible pop blockbusters.
For the time being, however, Easy Rider had created a tsunami of independent enthusiasm, and in August, Coppola decided to ride the wave right into the offices of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts—he allegedly came roaring into the studio on a motorcycle—to make the new regime an offer it couldn’t refuse. Following Warner’s takeover by Kinney, the studio had installed former talent agent Ted Ashley as its new chairman, and Ashley had cleaned house, bringing in film producer John Calley as his head of production. Coppola was all but certain that he could pry Calley’s wallet open with a bit of the famous Coppola charm—and he pitched Calley and the Warner executives hard, offering them a “multipicpac” of seven screenplays, few of which had actually been written. But Coppola confidently promised Calley that not only was every one a sure-fire hit, but also, in the spirit of low-budget independent films like Easy Rider, they could be produced for under $1 million each. Included in the mix was a script of his own called The Conversation—Coppola assured Calley that Marlon Brando was interested in it (he wasn’t)—and, of course, Lucas’s THX 1138, which Coppola, just as he had promised, claimed was already in production.
As it turned out, that was actually nearly true. After several false starts, Lucas had finished up the final draft of THX with Walter Murch—a good choice, since Murch had worked with Lucas on the outline for the original student film—but Coppola wasn’t about to let anyone at Warner have a peek at Lucas’s esoteric script. “You’ve got to understand something,” Coppola told Warner. “I can’t get Lucas involved in working with a studio about developing a script. He trusts me, we can do it together, he and I, it’ll be great, but stay out of it. We’ll bring you the finished film.”81 And not to worry, Coppola told Calley: Lucas was a genius and “a gigantic talent”—a designation Calley didn’t argue with. “All that knew him felt that [Lucas] was a sort of potential cinema genius,” said Calley, “certainly revolutionary.”82 Coppola’s word, and Lucas’s reputation, were good enough for Calley.
Lucas was also casting and scouting locations. Initially he had envisioned shooting THX in Japan, using the country’s distinctive modern architecture to convey a surreal sense of the future. After sending art director Michael Haller to Japan to take pictures, Lucas had finally gone there himself—on Zoetrope’s dime—to choose locations. Local officials were excited about the idea of Lucas filming inside several industrial complexes—including a nuclear power plant—but it quickly became clear that securing the official permissions was going to be a nightmare. Back Lucas went to San Francisco, where he’d keep looking for locations locally even as he was overseeing casting.
Lucas was in an open casting call, in fact, when Coppola burst into the theater and pulled him aside to tell him he’d reached a deal with Calley to finance seven films. (Since his birthday was April 7, Coppola always considered seven his lucky number.) Warner had agreed to give Coppola $300,000 for the development of THX and six other scripts—one of which, he told Lucas, was his and Milius’s Apocalypse Now. It was a film Coppola really had no right to barter with; he hadn’t seen the script, and had nothing to do with it, apart from knowing of Lucas’s involvement, but his own excitement had carried the day.83 “I was shocked,” Lucas said later. “It was great about THX, but Francis hadn’t even asked me or talked to me about Apocalypse.”84 There was no talking Coppola down, though, and there was no going back. “Nobody can pick holes in this [deal],” Coppola said. “It’s right. I can feel it.… I know this is good.”85
“That was the moment that American Zoetrope was really born,” Lucas said later.86 “Once THX was a go, we were able to pay people, and everybody suddenly had a job.”87 Publicly, Calley had been supportive, even excited about Warner’s relationship with Zoetrope. “We’re inclined to take enlightened gambles on young people,” Calley told one writer.88 But being enlightened didn’t mean he was naïve or stupid. Calley had given Coppola the money on one very shrewd condition: these scripts weren’t being optioned; this was a loan. The moment Warner Bros.–Seven Arts lost faith in Coppola or any of his films, they could call in their loan and Coppola would have to pay back everything.
Coppola was confident that was never going to happen, publicly vowing that his company would be worth $10 million by 1975.89 Flush with Calley’s money, Coppola spent the late summer of 1969 making Zoetrope resemble a proper company, charging his wife, Ellie, with the task of turning Zoetrope’s eight editing rooms and three floors of offices into “a homey place, not lush or anything.”90 Ellie filled it with inflatable couches and furniture, painted the brick walls red, white, and blue—or covered them with orange and blue fabric—and mounted gigantic black-and-white photos of old-time directors in every room. Coppola took particular pride in the reception area, where he set up an antique pool table and a polished silver espresso maker, lined the walls with display cabinets filled with old movie equipment, and hired only the most beautiful and most miniskirted of receptionists.91
Most of the money, however, went into equipment. In addition to his expensive German editing machines, Coppola owned the only three-screen Keller mixer in California, a beast of a machine—it looked like it belonged on the bridge of Star Trek’s Enterprise—that could edit three sizes of film at three different speeds. There were portable lights and sound equipment, and cameras with personalities as distinct as filmmakers’, from Super 8 to Arriflex to a $40,000 Mitchell BNCR.92 All were available for any filmmaker to rent—and over the next year, most of it would be misplaced, lost, or flat-out stolen.93 “The studio wasn’t always run prudently,” Coppola admitted later. “The company was created out of idealism more than anything.”94
That was certainly true—and he and Lucas often cla
shed over exactly whose idealism should prevail. “I think Francis always looked at George as sort of his upstart assistant who had an opinion,” laughed Steven Spielberg. “An assistant with an opinion, nothing more dangerous than that, right?”95 While Coppola envisioned Zoetrope as a corporate compound, with its own airport and fleet of helicopters, Lucas wanted something smaller, even cozy, and less oppressive. “What we’re striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released, and be completely free to express ourselves,” explained Lucas. “That’s very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free. So the danger is—in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We’re going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall.”96
Still, both Coppola and Lucas proclaimed to anyone who would listen that independent filmmaking was the wave of the future, with Zoetrope as the standard-bearer. The Hollywood studio system was dead, Coppola thundered to the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s like Czarist Russia had toppled itself.… [I]n ten years there won’t be a major studio left.”97 Lucas put it in slightly less heated terms, telling one reporter: “The only thing they’ve got that we need is money. And they’re getting less and less. The most exciting thing about film is that it’s just starting. Everyone in Hollywood is over 50 and creaking. They see movies as the past. We see it as the future.”98
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