George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  It was Coppola, in fact, who now brought them together again as Lucas was mulling over Apocalypse Now. Coppola had seen some of the footage Kurtz had shot in Vietnam, and suggested to Lucas that Kurtz might be the ideal collaborator on a war movie. Kurtz, however, wasn’t so sure. Unlike the polar opposites Lucas and Coppola, Lucas and Kurtz were cut from the same temperamental cloth; both were quiet and low-key, and Kurtz worried that neither of them had a forceful enough personality to run a movie set. But he and Lucas got on well enough that they decided to move ahead anyway.

  Kurtz was genuinely intrigued by Apocalypse; he saw it as their opportunity to make a dark comedy in the same vein as Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H. But the more they talked, the more Lucas waffled. There was some question as to whether it was really their film to shop around anyway; technically, it was the property of Zoetrope, though the typically defiant Lucas continued to argue that the film actually belonged to him and Milius and that Coppola had had no right to use it as a bargaining chip in the first place. More than anything else, however, Lucas was having second thoughts about making a war movie at all. With a highly unpopular war still splattered across the front pages of the newspapers each day, Lucas shuddered at the idea of taking part in some insidious cynical trend. “I was working on basically negative movies—Apocalypse Now and THX, both very angry,” Lucas said later.5 “I realized after THX that people don’t care how the country’s being ruined. All that movie did was to make people more pessimistic, more depressed, and less willing to get involved in trying to make the world better.” He decided, “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.”6

  After THX, Lucas was driven to make a movie that was not only optimistic but also mainstream, marketable, and exciting. Apocalypse Now was shelved, but Lucas definitely wanted to keep working with Kurtz. So while vowing they would come back to Apocalypse Now at some point in the future, he and Kurtz continued to kick around ideas for a new film. What kinds of movies did they like? What did they think was exciting? For a moment, they considered a remake of the Kurosawa classic The Hidden Fortress, reimagining it in a more modern setting in the same way director John Sturges had transferred another Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai, from ancient Japan to the Old West in his 1960 picture The Magnificent Seven.

  What really got them both fired up, however, was Flash Gordon. Lucas animatedly described the Flash Gordon serials he had loved watching on KRON as a kid, but he didn’t need to bother: Kurtz was a fan too, and excitedly discussed with Lucas the possibilities of acquiring the rights from King Features. Lucas reached out to the syndicate, even making a quick trip to New York to plead his case, but “they were way too expensive for us,” recalled Kurtz. King Features had perhaps intentionally priced Lucas out of the market, holding out hopes for a big-name director to take on their franchise, since they were also coyly dangling the rights in front of Federico Fellini. Lucas kept the pressure on, and “they weren’t averse to discussing it,” said Kurtz, “but their restrictions were so draconian that we realized right away that it wasn’t really a great prospect at the time.”7 The syndicate ended up overplaying its hand, as Fellini, too, would pass.

  Both Lucas and Kurtz knew that what they really wanted to do was “some kind of Flash Gordon–like science fiction story,” said Kurtz.8 It was “something that we wanted to see, that we would pay to go see! And no one was making it!”9 If Lucas couldn’t get the rights to Flash, then he’d simply create a world of his own that didn’t have to adhere to someone else’s rules or work with someone else’s characters. By denying Lucas Flash, King Features had inadvertently sent him down the path toward creating Star Wars. Flash Gordon, in fact, wouldn’t appear on the big screen until 1980, in a Dino De Laurentiis–produced stinker trying hard to cash in on the science fiction craze Lucas had spawned with Star Wars—an irony that was never lost on Lucas.

  But Lucas wasn’t ready to start on another science fiction movie just yet. “After THX, I was considered a cold, weird director, a science fiction sort of guy who carried a calculator. And I’m not like that at all,” Lucas said later.10 In addition to Marcia, Coppola, too, had challenged Lucas to try something different. “Don’t be so weird,” Coppola told him. “Try to do something that’s human. Don’t do these abstract things.”11 He advised Lucas, “Why don’t you try to write something out of your own life that has warmth and humor?”12

  Challenge accepted. “If they want warm human comedy,” said Lucas, “I’ll give them one, just to show that I can do it.”13 He thought he knew exactly how to go about it. Lucas would later claim it was his growing interest in anthropology that was the impetus behind American Graffiti. “I became fascinated with the modern mating rituals of American youth who did their dance in cars, rather than in the town square or in other ways that societies have done these things,” he would tell reporters forty years later. And yet, that was probably only partly true. Mostly, the writer who hated to write was following the path of least resistance—by writing, as Coppola had suggested, something out of his own life. “If you’re a writer and a director,” said Lucas, “you make movies about the things you know about.” For Lucas, then, that meant there was never any doubt what he would write about: “Growing up in Modesto, I spent many years cruising Tenth Street, and I was enamored with the experience.”14

  That still didn’t mean the actual writing process was going to be any easier. “As I started out with American Graffiti, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to write this. I can’t stand writing,’” Lucas confessed later, “and I frantically went around trying to get a deal to develop the script.”15 Getting a deal, however, would require at least an outline, so Lucas wrote a five-page treatment about four young men, most of them cruisers or cruiser wannabes, getting ready to leave high school, with their lives veering off in very different directions. Lucas envisioned a coming-of-age film in the same vein as Fellini’s I Vitelloni, which follows five young men as they go through pivotal points in their lives. “[It was] kind of the same issue about growing up,” said Lucas. “It was one of the themes in my first film, THX, and I wanted to expand on it.”16 With some help from film school pals Willard Huyck and his wife, Gloria Katz, Lucas’s five-page proposal was eventually fleshed out to eighteen pages. Lucas promised the Huycks that if the proposal sold, they’d get the screenwriting job, then handed the proposal off to another new partner in his creative life, a twenty-two-year-old agent named Jeff Berg, for Berg to shop to the studios. For Lucas, looking to studios to back a project was like tucking his tail between his legs; he’d vowed never to be a part of the Hollywood machine again. But with no money and no prospects, Lucas was going to take whatever he could get.

  Unfortunately, his timing couldn’t have been worse. In March 1971, just as Berg was taking American Graffiti around for review, THX 1138 had landed in theaters, and despite an appealing proposal for his second film, Lucas was damaged goods. “The easiest job you’ll ever get is to try to make your first film,” Lucas ruefully noted later. “That’s the easy one to get… because nobody knows whether you can make a film or not.… After you’ve done that feature, then you have a heck of a difficult time getting your second film off the ground. They look at your first film and they say, ‘Oh well, we don’t want you any more.’”17 And they didn’t. Nearly every door was closed in Berg’s face; only David Chasman, a producer at United Artists who’d overseen the James Bond films and A Hard Day’s Night, took a passing interest.

  THX 1138 did have its fans, and most of them were in France, where THX had been selected as one of fifty-two films to be shown as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. So it was in this roundabout way that Lucas’s first film helped him get his second one made. “Of course Warners wouldn’t pay for us to get there,” grumbled Lucas.18 But Lucas decided to go to Europe anyway. “What the hell,” he told Marcia, “let’s go.”19 He and Marcia took their last $2,000 out of the bank to pay for an extended trip. They planned to live as cheaply as they could, staying i
n hostels or with friends, and backpacking most of the way; their largest expense would be a set of Eurorail passes. Walter Murch and his wife, Aggie, gamely agreed to join them.

  The Lucases left California in early May, headed for London, where they planned to stay a few days in a cheap pension before heading to Cannes. Their first stop: an extended layover in New York City, where George and Marcia would spend the night with the Coppolas. Lucas was determined to make the most of his brief time in New York by paying a visit to the offices of David Picker, president of United Artists, the one film studio that had expressed even remote interest in American Graffiti. “If I could just get to him,” Lucas figured, “maybe I could pitch this and they can make it happen.”20 Lucas did get to him—and he pitched American Graffiti hard, reminding the mogul of David Chasman’s interest in the project as well. Picker nodded, took a copy of Lucas’s American Graffiti proposal, and said he wanted to think about it. Picker, too, was heading for Cannes later in the week, and asked Lucas to check back in with him once he arrived in London.

  Lucas spent a restless night with the Coppolas. “Francis was in severe trauma,” he said, deeply embedded in work on The Godfather and hating nearly every moment of it. (“It was just non-stop anxiety,” said Coppola, “and wondering when I was going to get fired.”)21 Adding to the tension, Ellie Coppola was nine months pregnant with their daughter, Sofia. “We had to leave at around 7 a.m. to catch the plane to London,” recalled Lucas, “but Francis and Ellie got up at four in the morning, running through the room on the way to the hospital, because she was in labor. She had Sofia that day. When we got to London… I found a pay phone and called David Picker, who said, ‘I’ve thought about this and you can have some money and you can write [American Graffiti]. I’m going to be at the Carlton [Hotel in Cannes]. Come visit me there and we’ll talk about it.’” It was May 14—Lucas’s twenty-seventh birthday. “So it was my birthday, it was Sofia’s birthday, and I got American Graffiti, all on the same day.”22

  Picker didn’t have a lot of money to offer—only $10,000 to develop the full screenplay—but it was enough for Lucas to call the Huycks in California to let them know he had a deal. “I got the money,” he told them. “We can start working on the screenplay.” To his disappointment, the Huycks declined; they were preparing to make their own low-budget horror film in London, and couldn’t commit to writing a full screenplay. Lucas hung up and called Gary Kurtz. “I want to get this thing off the ground,” he told Kurtz, and the two of them agreed to give the assignment to Richard Walter, another USC classmate. But Lucas wanted Walter to work fast; ideally the screenplay should be complete when Lucas returned home from Cannes. Kurtz told Lucas he would take care of it.

  Satisfied, the Lucases headed for Cannes, already several days into its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Charlie Chaplin was there. John Lennon and Yoko Ono strolled the boardwalk, as did most of the Rolling Stones, who were there to catch the premiere of the rock documentary Gimme Shelter.23 Lucas was in awe, but with no money, he couldn’t even get tickets to the showing of his own movie; he and Marcia had to sneak in a back door. To his delight, French audiences loved THX, and Cannes officials put together a press conference where Lucas could talk about the movie—an event Lucas didn’t even know about, and thus failed to attend, much to the annoyance of his hosts. “I was barely able to get into my own picture, let alone get to a press conference,” Lucas explained. “But for a number of years, the French thought I was a real snob.”24

  Lucas did keep his appointment with Picker, however, showing up at the Carlton Hotel as directed, and meeting the studio president “in one of those big suites,” he remembered. “That was my first big-time movie experience.” Here they sealed the deal on American Graffiti—and did Lucas have anything else? In a moment reminiscent of Coppola enthusiastically giving away the unfinished Apocalypse Now in his pitch to Warners, Lucas told Picker all about his ideas for his unnamed “space opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon.”

  “Great,” said Picker, “we’ll make a deal for that, too.”

  “And that,” said Lucas later, “was really the birth of Star Wars. It was only a notion up to then—at that point, it became an obligation!”25

  As Lucas left the meeting, Picker handed him his own tickets for Cannes events so the young couple could enjoy the rest of the festival in style. When it ended on May 27, the Lucases spent the next several weeks riding trains across Europe, and in a reminder that you could take Lucas off the drag strip but you could never quite take the drag strip out of Lucas, they caught as many car races as they could, including the Le Mans endurance race and the Monaco Grand Prix, before getting back to the States and their movies.

  When Lucas returned to California in late summer, he called on Richard Walter to check on his progress with the script for American Graffiti. Right away he knew he had several problems. First, Kurtz had promised Walter the entire $10,000 Picker had provided for script development—meaning Lucas was already out of money before he’d even read a page of the script. The other problem was the script itself. As Lucas sat reading it, “he really looked grim,” recalled Walter. “George always looked as if he was ready to be executed—and I can tell he doesn’t like this draft.”26

  According to Walter, Kurtz had given him the eighteen-page proposal, described the basic plot, and then told Walter to “pay no attention to these pages.” Walter, thinking he had been given free rein, offered to base the screenplay on a rock and roll novel of his own set in New York called Barry and the Persuasions—hardly the California cruising scene Lucas had outlined. (“I’m a Jew from New York,” Walter said later. “What do I know from Modesto? We didn’t have cars.”)27 Kurtz had wisely nixed that idea, but Lucas still hated the final script that Walter turned in. “I ended up back home with a completely worthless screenplay about drag racing that was basically Hot Rods to Hell,” said Lucas. “It was completely different than the original treatment.… My intense desire to get a writer had backfired on me, and I ended up with an unusable script and no money.”28 Excruciating as the experience might be, then, Lucas would write it himself. So over the next three weeks, Lucas wrote from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, seven days a week, bleeding on the page, as he would always put it.

  In late summer, agent Jeff Berg took the completed script back to David Picker at United Artists, and Picker rejected it outright. While he was still intrigued by the idea, he was disappointed with Lucas’s execution: four different yet interwoven story lines, carried along by a rock and roll sound track. While common and nearly a cliché today, back in 1971 no one had ever seen or heard of such an approach to filmmaking. “The kind of structure I had presented just wasn’t done in those days,” said Lucas.29

  With a failed science fiction film to his name and a new script no one wanted, Lucas had no real prospects and no money. Desperate, he borrowed money from Coppola and—the ultimate humiliation—from his father. “Financially, he was struggling,” recalled his sister Kate. “It was a difficult time for him. I think being my father’s son, he didn’t believe in debt.”30 But Lucas was also determined not to take no for an answer. Berg was to keep shopping the script until he found someone, anyone, who could appreciate what Lucas was trying to do. In the meantime, he picked up a bit of work from Coppola shooting a montage for The Godfather in early 1972—the sequence of spinning newspaper headlines and crime scene photos as the Five Families go to war—but not much else.

  Still, Lucas was determined to keep pressing ahead, working with his attorney to file the necessary paperwork to officially incorporate Lucasfilm Ltd., at the moment little more than a shell corporation with a placeholder name. As he and Kurtz filled out the forms, Lucas nearly balked at the continued use of the very British extension “Ltd.” instead of its Americanized counterpart, “Inc.” “He was a bit leery of it,” said Kurtz. “He thought it was kind of an ego thing. But we thought we’d just call it that for the incorporation and worry about it late
r.”31 They would never worry about it again. It would remain Lucasfilm Ltd. in perpetuity.

  As Berg shopped around the American Graffiti script, he found that while there were few takers for the film, there were studios interested in Lucas as a director. Tomorrow Entertainment in particular wanted Lucas to direct a feature the studio had in the pipeline, a heist film starring Donald Sutherland called Lady Ice. The studio made Lucas an attractive offer, upping his directing fee to $100,000 as well as a piece of the net profits. There were other offers, too, to direct movies based on the Who’s concept album Tommy or the rock musical Hair. “I had all these producers calling me saying, ‘I hear you’re really good at material that doesn’t have a story. I’ve got a record album I want you to make into a movie,’” Lucas recalled. “And they were offering me a lot of money… but they were terrible projects.”32

  Still, he did need the money. Lucas talked it over with Marcia, who encouraged him to remain steadfast in his pursuit of American Graffiti. After all, if Graffiti sold, he couldn’t be in the middle of a project for someone else. Lucas, then, turned every offer down—but it wasn’t easy. “That was a very dark period for me,” he said later.33 “We were in dire financial straits.… I turned that down [Lady Ice] at my bleakest point, when I was in debt to my parents, in debt to Francis Coppola, in debt to my agent; I was so far in debt I thought I’d never get out.”34 It took years “to get from my first film to my second film, banging on doors, trying to get people to give me a chance,” remembered Lucas. “Writing, struggling, with no money in the bank… getting little jobs, eking out a living. Trying to stay alive, and pushing a script that nobody wanted.”35