George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  So much fun, in fact, that the first edit of the film came in at nearly three hours long. Lucas agonized over the next round of editing—keeping the music aligned even as scenes were pared down was a major challenge—but managed to excise only another hour. “With all the cars and the music in it, [it originally] came out to 160 minutes,” Lucas said. “We knew it couldn’t be that long because the contract said 110 minutes.”89 Back again he went, with Marcia cutting the film as Lucas and Murch worked on the sound, until they finally pared the film down to 110 contractual minutes. The cuts had been difficult to make, but at least he had overseen them, not some studio bureaucrat who didn’t understand the film.

  He sent the completed print to Universal in December 1972. Lucas was happy with it. Executives at Universal, however, weren’t so sure.

  In late January 1973, Ned Tanen boarded an airplane in Los Angeles, bound for San Francisco—and he wasn’t happy. Universal was still uncertain about American Graffiti and had scheduled a public screening of the film in San Francisco at 10 a.m. on Sunday, January 28, to gauge audience reaction. But Tanen was already in a dark mood; the studio was losing faith in Graffiti fast, preferring to pour their time and money into promoting Jesus Christ Superstar instead. (“They’d forgotten about us,” sighed Lucas.)90 And while Tanen himself had yet to see more than a few minutes of the film, he was less and less inclined to be enthusiastic about it. It might be salvageable, he thought, as a television movie, but that was about it.

  As Tanen made his way to his seat, he pushed past Matthew Robbins, screenwriter Hal Barwood—yet another of the USC “Dirty Dozen”—and Lucas’s agent Jeff Berg, all of whom were also headed north for Graffiti’s debut. “We greeted him and he greeted us, but I remember vividly how unfriendly he was,” said Robbins.91 “Ned wouldn’t sit with us on the airplane and he wouldn’t share a cab to the theater. He was furious before he even saw the movie.”92 In San Francisco, Tanen’s mood didn’t improve, even as his cab dropped him off outside the Northpoint Theater on the corner of Bay Street and Powell in the city’s North Beach section.

  Inside, the eight-hundred-seat theater was filled to capacity. But Tanen was still skeptical. The theater was practically in Lucas’s backyard, and the executive was convinced that Lucas had packed the house with friends and family willing to applaud anything. While Lucas had invited friends, cast members, and family—his parents were there, ready to see the film their son had pursued so devotedly with borrowed money—the crowd was mostly a young one, Lucas’s age or younger, a new kind of filmgoer, raised on rock and roll and weaned on Easy Rider. Tanen took it all in with a scowl, then sank into a seat near the front of the theater; George and Marcia, Coppola, and Kurtz retreated to their seats in the back.

  “The movie started,” said Marcia, “and the minute ‘Rock Around the Clock’ came on, people just started whooping and hollering. And when Charlie Martin Smith drives in on the Vespa and bangs into the wall, the audience laughed. They were with the film all the way.”93 Ron Howard agreed. “The audience just went nuts,” he said, and by the time the final credits rolled under the music of the Beach Boys, “there was applause and there was cheering and chatter,” recalled Robbins, a “feeling of such generous goodwill and astonishment. It was a fabulous screening.”94

  Lucas exhaled in relief. “Francis and George and I were all euphoric,” remembered Marcia.95 And then here came Tanen, striding purposefully up the aisle toward them. As he passed, he angrily collared Kurtz and Coppola and dragged them into the dark walkway between the last rows of seats. “[Tanen] was livid; he thought [the film] failed,” said Murch. “He was saying as much to Francis… and George was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s THX all over again, they’re gonna take the film away from me.’”96 Marcia, too, was stunned by the executive’s dismissive response. “I was in a state of shock,” she said.97

  Coppola had worked himself into a lather. “What are you talking about?” he shouted at Tanen. “You were just in the theater for the last two hours! Didn’t you just see and hear what we all just saw and heard?”

  “I’m not talking about that,” said Tanen flatly. “We’ll see if we can release it.”

  “You’ll see if you can release it?” fumed Coppola. “You should go down on your knees and thank George for saving your job! This kid has killed himself to make this movie for you. He brought it in on time and on schedule. The least you can do is thank him for that!” Coppola reached dramatically for a nonexistent checkbook and offered to buy the film from Universal outright. “If you hate it that much, let it go,” he told Tanen. “We’ll set it up someplace else, and you get all your money back.”98

  Tanen refused to rise to Coppola’s bait and stormed out of the theater. Coppola was furious and would bear the grudge a long time; he and Tanen wouldn’t speak to each other for nearly twenty years. (Years later, Coppola looked at the numbers and determined that had Tanen permitted him to finance American Graffiti, he’d have made $20 million.)99 For his part, Lucas was touched by Coppola’s chest-thumping defense. “Francis really stood up to Ned,” said Lucas later. “I had given [Francis] a bad time when the Warners thing came down over THX, I really held that against him—‘You’re gonna let them cut it, you’re not gonna go down there and stop ’em?’—and when Graffiti came along, I said, ‘Here we go again.’ But Francis did what he was supposed to do. I was pretty proud of him.”100

  Robbins tried as best he could to console Lucas as he staggered out of the theater in shock. “That the studio, with a capital ‘S,’ could still represent itself in such a blind, insensitive, and obtuse way only reaffirmed so many of George’s feelings about what Hollywood was made of,” said Robbins.101 Tanen, however, wasn’t concerned about Lucas’s feelings; he was worried that he had another one of Lucas’s art movie bombs on his hands, this time with an expensive rock and roll sound track. American Graffiti was taken away from Lucas to be reexamined and recut.

  Lucas slunk home to fume to Marcia, to friends, to anyone who would listen. “I don’t know what to do,” he moaned to Willard Huyck. “This picture—people are responding off the wall, and they keep telling me they’re going to put it on television.”102 Marcia was sympathetic, but only to a point. “George was just a nobody who had directed one little arty-farty movie that hadn’t done any business,” she said later. “He didn’t have the power to make people listen to him.”103 Still, she encouraged him to fight, to talk with Tanen and make the case for his own film. But Lucas sulkily refused to have anything to do with Tanen, and left the negotiations with Universal up to Kurtz. Producers, not artists, were the ones who should fight with the studio suits.

  Kurtz eventually persuaded Tanen to allow Lucas to reedit the film himself as long as it reflected Tanen’s recommended changes. Lucas spent the next three months recutting the film, gleefully ignoring Tanen’s suggestions altogether, with a predictable result: an unamused Tanen handed the film off to Universal’s in-house editors. With a bit of persuasion from Coppola, however, even Universal’s editors could see that Lucas had been right: the film flat-out worked. In the end, Universal pulled only three scenes, totaling a little more than four minutes, out of American Graffiti. But Lucas was apoplectic. “There was no reason for the cutting,” he complained. “It was just arbitrary.”104

  It was a “formative experience” for Lucas, said Walter Murch.105 Lucas had seen Hollywood tamper with—no, mutilate—his art, not once, but twice now. He wasn’t going to let it happen again. “It’s more a moral issue than anything else,” Lucas said plainly.106 “That was the beginning of his passion to become an independent filmmaker,” said his sister Wendy, “so that he would have total control over his films and not be under some MBA studio executive who himself had never written or directed or edited a film from the ground up.”107

  “They’re people who have never made a movie in their lives—agents and lawyers with no idea of dramatic flow,” said Lucas derisively. “But they can come in, see a movie twice, and
in those few hours they can tell you to take this out or shorten that. The movie industry was built by independent entrepreneurs, dictators who had a very strong feeling about movies. They knew what they wanted and they made it happen.”108 Those four excised minutes would spawn an empire that would answer to the one independent entrepreneur and dictator who mattered: George Lucas.

  Kurtz spent much of the spring of 1973 ensuring that the newly recut American Graffiti was seen by Universal executives in the best possible light, showing the film in theaters packed with young viewers rather than in Universal’s cramped viewing rooms. “Normally, fourteen stodgy old men sit in a room and that’s it,” said Lucas. Steven Spielberg, who attended a May 15 screening in Beverly Hills, was certain his friend had a smash on his hands. And yet Tanen still wasn’t sure. But the film was building a following, and several other studios, including 20th Century Fox and Paramount, expressed an interest in distributing the film if Universal lost its nerve. Suddenly, said Lucas, Universal “knew they had a movie.”109

  American Graffiti opened on Wednesday, August 1, 1973, in limited release, seen only in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. At the Avco Theater on Wilshire Boulevard, there were lines around the block that first night. Graffiti would perform strongly from the moment of its premiere, earning good reviews and strong word of mouth. When it finally opened in theaters across the nation two weeks later, it would already have a slow momentum behind it that would build it into a certified smash. “It didn’t actually explode, it was never that huge of a hit,” said Tanen. “It just stayed in theaters for, like, two years.”110

  Critics fell all over themselves reviewing American Graffiti in the most glowing of terms. Time magazine hailed it as “superb and singular,”111 while the Washington Post called it “a lovely nostalgic conception… [which] promises to become that increasingly rare but heartening commodity, a new American movie that almost everyone is going to like.”112 Charles Champlin, the influential critic of the Los Angeles Times, called it “one of the most important films of the year” and declared that “to miss it is to miss something quite special.”113

  One of its biggest fans was the New York Times, which featured both the film and Lucas in several stories over two months and hailed American Graffiti as “a work of art.”114 Lucas wasn’t sure whether to bristle at that label or not. “My thing about art is that I don’t like the word art because it means pretension and bullshit, and I equate those two directly,” he told Filmmakers Newsletter. “I don’t think of myself as an artist, and I don’t think I ever will.… I’m a craftsman. I don’t make a work of art; I make a movie. If it does what I want it to do then somebody else can come along and figure it out.”115

  The only critics, really, who couldn’t figure it out were those in his own backyard. The reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle hated the film, calling it “without a doubt the most tedious film I have ever seen.”116 It was given an “empty chair” rating—the equivalent of zero stars. Even with all the other positive reviews behind it, for Lucas, the Chronicle review was the only one that mattered—because it was the one his parents read, and the only one his family and friends in northern California saw. “Because of those lousy reviews in San Francisco,” said Coppola sympathetically, “all his friends and neighbors think he’s a flop.”117

  The Chronicle’s opinion, however, was decidedly in the minority. Apart from some grumping from critics like the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, who accused Lucas of laying on the nostalgia a bit too thick, Lucas’s little film was the darling of the critics—and so was Lucas.118 “One of the world’s master directors,” declared the New York Times, “the current wunderkind of the film world.”119 Time magazine noted that after the relatively antiseptic THX, American Graffiti showed Lucas with “a new and welcome depth of feeling,”120 while the Washington Post thought Lucas had become “a whole movie director,”121 a description Lucas thought was fitting. “Oh, he loved it,” teased Marcia.122 But Lucas insisted that he “[didn’t] listen to any of that stuff. If you believe that, then you have to believe the bad stuff.”123 Still, he wasn’t about to be too modest. “I know how good I am,” he told the New York Times matter-of-factly. “Graffiti is successful because it came entirely from my head. It was my concept. And that’s the only way I can work.”124

  American Graffiti would end up on countless “Best of” lists for 1973 and would win a number of awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Lucas and the Huycks for Best Original Screenplay. When Oscar season rolled around, it would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, and Editing. It would win none, losing to The Sting in nearly every category. Marcia cried; George shrugged it off. He never expected his little film to win anything.

  It did, however, make a lot of money. With direct costs of a little over $1 million, American Graffiti earned more than $55 million in rentals, making it one of cinema’s most profitable returns on investment, then or ever. With his points in the film, Lucas earned nearly $4 million, after taxes. As he had vowed to his father more than a decade before, Lucas was a millionaire before the age of thirty. In fact, he had done it with two years to spare.

  Lucas wasn’t the only one who got rich off American Graffiti. Lucas split one of his profit points equally among the film’s actors—only fair, he thought, since most of them had worked for little more than scale. “When you have a big hit film, it adds up,” said Candy Clark. “We didn’t ask him for it; he just did that.”125 Wolfman Jack kept his point, as well as a piece of Graffiti’s enormously successful sound track.126 Haskell Wexler, who had provided Lucas with his services for free, was also given a point, as were Kurtz, the Huycks, and lawyer Tom Pollock—a percentage that would earn each of them more than $1 million in the coming decades.

  As the film’s distributor, Universal, too, earned its piece of the movie—and Lucas gagged on every cent. “The idea that the suits actually made a profit on his movie was just appalling to him,” said Gloria Katz.127 But it wasn’t just Universal that galled Lucas; he was annoyed with Coppola as well. As the film’s producer, Coppola received ten points—that was all well and good. But he and Lucas had also agreed to split forty other points equally between them, and the details of that arrangement were causing friction between master and upstart apprentice. “George is just like an accountant when it comes to money,” said Willard Huyck. “The amount of money that George had to send to Francis upset him.”128

  Out of his twenty points, Lucas had agreed to pay the actors, Pollock, and the Huycks. Lucas expected Coppola to pay Kurtz from his share—producer looking out for producer, after all—and to split a payment to Wexler. But Coppola hadn’t liked that, arguing that it was Lucas who had hired Kurtz, not him, and therefore Kurtz was Lucas’s responsibility. As for Wexler, Lucas had brought him on in the middle of the film, and Coppola thought the cameraman should be Lucas’s responsibility as well. Coppola, however, was planning to work with Wexler on The Conversation, so he suggested that Wexler be paid three points, with one coming from Lucas’s share and two from his own. Lucas paid his share promptly; Coppola didn’t.

  Lucas angrily accused Coppola of reneging on their deal. After much negotiation, Coppola finally paid both Kurtz and Wexler from his share, but the damage was done. The relationship between Lucas and Coppola would sour again, and stay that way for the better part of a decade. For Lucas, it had never been about profits; it was about principle. “Francis was questioning my honesty,” Lucas said in 1983. “He thought that I was operating the same way he was operating. He was accusing me of being like him, and that upset me. We really didn’t have any kind of giant falling out,” he added carefully. “But it was one of the reasons we drifted apart more than anything else.”129

  With the profits from Graffiti, Lucas quickly paid back all the money he had borrowed from friends, colleagues, and parents during the dark days of trying to sell his own movie less than two years earli
er. George Sr. took the payment from his son proudly; he had backed the right horse again. But even with $4 million in the bank, Lucas was still convinced he could lose everything if he wasn’t careful—and the money was already going fast. “He had this idea of being a flash in the pan,” said Marcia. “You hit it once and that’s all you’re ever going to have. There are no guarantees.”130 Wealth, then, wasn’t going to change him too much. “Money is not the most important thing to him,” said John Plummer. “He’s not a conspicuous spender.… For a long time after American Graffiti, he still drove a sixty-nine Camaro.”131 Instead, Lucas quietly invested in property and bonds, and socked money away in savings accounts—nothing too flashy. Unlike Coppola, he wouldn’t be buying showy cars or sprawling mansions in the hills.

  Or at least, nothing too showy or sprawling. In the autumn of 1973, Lucas purchased a one-story Victorian mansion at 52 Park Way in the tiny town of San Anselmo, not far from a little colonial house he and Marcia had moved into earlier that summer at 30 Medway Road. The place was run down—it had been built in 1869 and was already a Marin County landmark—and it looked a bit like a haunted house, with its dark shingles and drooping gables. But he and Marcia loved it; Marcia would name it Parkhouse, and George would quickly have it fitted out with a screening room, offices, and an editing room in the attic. Filmmaking friends and USC Mafia members such as Carroll Ballard, Matthew Robbins, and Walter Murch were offered offices and workspace for no charge. “It was a little filmmaking complex,” said Lucas proudly—his own miniature Zoetrope.132