George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  Despite his swagger, Lucas knew he had been lucky to get the deal. “We had no negotiating power,” recalled attorney Tom Pollock. “They [Fox] were the only ones that wanted it.”30 Part of the problem was the genre itself. While science fiction films were in the middle of a slow climb to respectability in the early 1970s, they were still seen as a risky venture. On its release in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey—which Lucas loved, calling it “the ultimate science fiction movie”—had been a critical hit but a financial failure, and would take years to turn a profit.31 Ladd, then, was taking a real chance on Lucas and his somewhat incoherent proposal—but unlike the skeptics at Universal, Ladd was convinced enough of Lucas’s talent to make the creative leap of faith. “It was a gamble,” said Ladd, “and I was betting on Lucas.”32 Agreed Lucas, “[Ladd] invested in me, he did not invest in the movie.”33

  It didn’t take long before Ladd would look positively brilliant. On August 1, 1973—as Lucas was still in the middle of negotiating his deal memo with Fox—came the release and near-overnight success of the underdog American Graffiti. Suddenly, Lucas was the hottest director in the industry. Fox executives might have worried that Lucas would attempt to leverage his newfound reputation into a higher director’s fee for The Star Wars—agent Jeff Berg was convinced they could easily negotiate a fee of half a million dollars—but typically, Lucas didn’t want money; he wanted control. “He had been burned on control by studios,” said Pollock later. “He really saw it first as a control issue rather than a money issue.”34

  “Fox thought I was going to come back and demand millions of dollars and all these gross points,” recalled Lucas. “I said, ‘I’ll do it for the deal memo, but we haven’t talked about things like merchandising rights, [and] sequel rights.”35 He would insist that those particular clauses—normally considered underbrush in a contract—remain negotiable as he and Fox moved forward with the formal contract. He would also insist that The Star Wars be produced by Lucasfilm, thereby ensuring that he could keep an eye on the bottom line and that any expenses billed against the film were really his—for, even three years after completing THX 1138, he was still irked with Coppola for billing Zoetrope’s costs against his movie.

  Lucas signed the agreement memo with Fox in late August. While Fox claimed public bragging rights for landing a hot commodity—it was excitedly announced in the Los Angeles Times that Lucas had been signed to “quickly” complete The Star Wars, followed by the Huyck-penned period piece Radioland Murders—behind the scenes, the studio had been cautious in wording its agreement.36 This was only a memo, not a contract. There was no agreed-upon budget, and no guarantee the film would even be made—and Fox had left itself an escape clause allowing it to back out at any time after reading the screenplay. But Lucas nonetheless set up a new company, called The Star Wars Corporation, to manage the financials and then had Lucasfilm formally “loan” the corporation his services as director. Pocketing the $10,000 he had been given on signing the agreement, Lucas set to work writing the first draft of the script—which, according to the agreement, he had promised to deliver by October 31, 1973. Lucas fretted that he’d never be able to finish on time—and, in fact, he wouldn’t even come close to making it, citing “an infinite number of distractions.”37

  Partly, he had the success of American Graffiti to blame. With a genuine hit on his hands, Lucas, for the first time in his life, had a regular flow of income, coming in almost faster than he could figure out what to do with it. Mostly he saved it. But he did make three large purchases, one of them personal, two of them practical. First, Lucas bought a partnership in a comic book store in New York City called Supersnipe, owned and managed by a New York University film school graduate named Edward Summer.

  Even though Lucas would never share his father’s enthusiasm for retail, he loved browsing the rows of comics in the little shop anytime he was in New York, and he enjoyed the company of Summer, who could talk films and comics with the same ease and enthusiasm as Lucas. For the kid who had once spent summer evenings reading torn copies of Tommy Tomorrow on John Plummer’s dimly lit front porch, owning a comic shop was a dream come true.

  On the practical side were the houses on Medway and Park Way that he purchased in San Anselmo and where he planned to draft the script for The Star Wars in earnest—if, that is, he found the time. He was enjoying overseeing the work of the carpenters and electricians as they installed the screening room and offices in the old Victorian house at Park Way. It was slowly becoming his very own clubhouse, the new headquarters for Lucasfilm Ltd.—and it was much more fun to work on than the script for The Star Wars. “I was restoring my office,” Lucas recalled with a shrug. “Building a screening room kept me going for nine, ten months.”38

  Lucas wasn’t buying and renovating houses just so he could build his own filmmaking complex; he and Marcia were hoping to start a family. But it was difficult. Lucas had worked himself to exhaustion during the nearly two years it had taken to write, film, edit, and fight for American Graffiti. Writing The Star Wars was sapping his motivation and energy too, but mostly he and Marcia were simply apart too much. For much of the winter of 1973 and spring of 1974, Marcia was working on location in Los Angeles and Arizona, editing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for director Martin Scorsese. It was a big job, the first on which she would be the lead editor, not an assistant—and at the time she had taken it, she and George had desperately needed the money. That was no longer a concern, but now Marcia found she wanted more than just the money; she wanted to be taken seriously as a film editor, and not just as an editor of films by George Lucas. “I thought, If I’m ever going to get any real credit, I’m going to have to cut a movie for somebody besides George,” said Marcia. “’Cause if I’m cutting for my husband, they’re going to think George lets his wife play around in the cutting room. George agreed with that.”39

  George may well have agreed that Marcia needed to take on projects other than his movies—“it is hard for a film editor to come home and call the director a son-of-a-bitch when she happens to be married to him,” he told the New York Times—but that didn’t mean he had to like it.40 While Lucas could often be cool or even brusque to Marcia when they were in the same room, he would always miss her terribly when she was gone. During the months when Marcia was in Arizona, Lucas would shuttle back and forth between San Francisco and Tucson, where he would spend his days sitting on a patio, reading science fiction and fantasy novels, writing his script, and—if pressed to admit it—keeping his eye on Scorsese. While never exactly the jealous type, Lucas was hopeful his presence might at least put a damper on Scorsese’s fast hands. The approach would mostly work, though it didn’t necessarily keep the wily Scorsese from trying. Ultimately, however, Scorsese would respond most strongly to Marcia’s talent, and would make her his editor of choice for his next two films, Taxi Driver and New York, New York. Those jobs, too, would keep Marcia away for weeks or months on end.

  Even as he sat in the Tucson sun, Lucas was reading all he could now, soaking up themes, tropes, and plot devices. There was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel A Princess of Mars, whose hero, John Carter, rescues the spunky princess of the title, and E. E. “Doc” Smith’s series of Lensman novels, about superpowered space cops, a variation on Lucas’s beloved Tommy Tomorrow comic books. Lucas also devoured anything written by Harry Harrison—his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! had recently been adapted to film as Soylent Green—and Lucas particularly loved his rambunctious sci-fi comic novels like The Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero, whose title character was a frustrated farm boy. There were books on mythology and religions—Scorsese remembered Lucas reading Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, as well as Sir James George Frazer’s tome The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion—and comic books like Jack Kirby’s energetic, vibrant, and somewhat psychedelic New Gods, in which Orion, the hero, was the son of the villainous Darkseid.

  Lucas took it all in, reading books and comics, watching movies, fil
ing away the bits and pieces he liked, discarding what he didn’t. “I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West.… The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.”41

  Even Vietnam would work its way into his thinking, a by-product of the abandoned Apocalypse Now. “I figured that I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War,” said Lucas, “so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy so you’d have a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.” As Lucas made notes for his next draft, then, the planet Aquilae was now “a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion,” while the Empire “is like America ten years from now… allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a ‘total control’ police state was welcomed by the people.”42 This was Lucas coyly hiding his liberal politics in plain sight. “Most people,” said one associate later, “have no realization that part of it [Star Wars] is about a Vietnam situation.”43

  In May 1974—nearly eight months past his deadline—Lucas completed the rough draft of The Star Wars. At 191 scenes and 33,000 words, it was crammed full of politics and backstory, but even in this early draft, parts of it sound familiar. The main character in this draft is a young man named Annikin Starkiller, who trains to become a Jedi Bendu under seventy-year-old general Luke Skywalker. There are two droids providing comic relief, one short and squat, the other a gleaming “Metropolis style” robot, a reference to director Fritz Lang’s mechanical woman in his 1926 art deco film. There’s a “huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills” named Han Solo, a feisty fourteen-year-old Princess Leia, references to “lazerswords” and Wookiees, as well as to a “tall, grim-looking general”—and relatively minor character—named Darth Vader. And for the first time, one character bids good-bye with “May the Force of Others be with you.” Lucas was still holding on to elements from his first treatment that he liked, including a fight in a cantina, a chase through an asteroid belt, a rescue from a prison, and the concluding awards ceremony. But he was also struggling with parts of it: he wasn’t quite sure yet what the Empire was searching for, and there were still too many characters, too many locations, too many backstories to sort through.44 But at least it was finished.

  The script—with EYES ONLY! stamped playfully across the title page—went over to Alan Ladd at Fox. “It was a long time coming,” said Ladd.45 But he liked what he read—at least what he could understand of it—and, to the likely bafflement of some Fox executives, asked Lucas to begin working on a second draft. Back Lucas went to his writing room, to sit at his desk for eight hours each day, turning a pencil over and over in his hand, staring out the window, waiting for the muse. As the son of a stationer, Lucas was picky about his writing supplies; he would use only number-two pencils and regular blue-and-green-lined notebook paper. Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page. He was also carrying a little notebook with him at all times so he could write down names and ideas just as quickly as they came to him.

  And inspiration, it seemed, could come from anywhere. One afternoon, Marcia drove away from the house with their dog—an enormous Alaskan malamute named Indiana—sitting happily in the passenger seat next to her, his head brushing the ceiling of the car. Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia’s copilot—an image that would eventually evolve into Chewbacca, the copilot of the Millennium Falcon. Another important character had found his name in a throwaway comment from Walter Murch while he and Lucas were editing American Graffiti. The two of them had devised their own system for making sense of the racks of film reels and miles of film, assigning each of the reels, dialogue tracks, and sound tracks its own identifying number. During one late-night session, Murch asked Lucas for Reel 2, Dialogue 2—but shortcut the request by asking for R2 D2 instead. Lucas loved the sound of it—the way a name sounded would always be important to him—and after handing Murch the film cans, quickly scribbled R2D2 down in his notebook. “As I was writing, I would say the names to myself, and if I had a hard time dealing with a name phonetically, I would change it,” he said later. “It had to do with hearing the name a lot and whether I got used to it or not.”46 At the moment, however, it seemed he hadn’t gotten used to any of them—for in July 1974, as Lucas went through his rough draft again, he suddenly decided to change nearly every name in the script. R2-D2 became simply A-2. The Jedi Bendu became the Dai Nogas. Annikin Starkiller was redubbed Justin Valor, Leia became Zara, Wookiees became Jawas.

  Still, changing character names was the easy part. Revising the story was harder—and for weeks, Lucas would stare at his notebook, then at the typewriter page, waiting for something, anything, to fire his imagination. “I sit there and wait for the mail to come,” he sighed, “then I sit and wait for 5 o’clock to come.”47 Gray hairs began to fleck his beard. At times, he would snip absently at his hair with a pair of scissors, filling his trash can with the clippings. His mind wandered. “I can’t help but think about things other than what I’m supposed to be thinking about,” he admitted—and one morning, as he thought about the old Flash Gordon movie serials that had initially inspired Star Wars, he realized that he liked plenty of other old serials too. He was especially fond of Don Winslow of the Navy, about a naval intelligence officer who fights spies as he locates and explores a secret submarine base. Lucas liked that Winslow relied as much on his brains as his fists. “I began thinking it’d be a good idea to have an archaeologist in a 1930s-style serial,” Lucas said. “So I’d make little notes about what it would be, who his character was, and how all that would work out. That’s how I came up with the idea of Indiana Smith.”48 That name—taken from his beloved malamute—he would also slightly change.

  Progress was slow; his mood blackened, but Marcia remained upbeat and supportive, patiently bringing him his dinner in front of the television set each night, either a TV dinner or tuna sandwiches with the crusts removed, just like his mother had made them. Marcia didn’t always understand exactly what was going on as the drafts progressed, but she encouraged George to keep working, and to stay true to his own vision for the film. “George knows who his audience is,” she explained. Still, she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind when she thought the script dragged or got overly confusing. “I’m real hard,” she admitted, “but I only tell him what he already knows.”49 George might set his mouth tightly, but he would take her suggestions seriously. As she would prove time and again, when it came to story, Marcia’s instincts were almost always right.

  Lucas also sought the opinions of friends whom he trusted, including Milius, the Huycks, and Coppola. Lucas was genuinely interested in their comments, flying down to Los Angeles with nothing more than deodorant and a change of underwear so he could spend the night talking over his pages with the Huycks. “He’d take his notes, and he’d go and visit all his friends,” said Huyck. “Then he’d fly back home and rewrite [Star Wars] some more.” Most of them still found the script incomprehensible; Coppola, however, offered few changes. “I thought it was terrific,” he reassured Lucas.50

  In fact, Lucas and Coppola’s relationship was warming again; in an interview published in Film Quarterly that spring, Lucas described their relationship in genuinely affectionate, almost brotherly terms. “We more or less work together as collaborators.… We can bounce ideas off each other because we’re totally different. I’m more graphics-filmmaking-editing oriented, and he’s more writing and acting oriented. So we complement each other, and we trust each other,” explained Lucas. “Half the time he says I’m full of shit, and half the time I say he�
��s full of shit. It’s not like a producer telling you that you have to do something. Francis will say, ‘Cut that scene out, it doesn’t work at all.’ And I may say, ‘No, you’re crazy. That’s my favorite scene. I love it.’ And he’ll say, ‘Okay, what do I care? You’re an idiot anyway.’ Actually, he calls me the stinky kid. He says, ‘You’re a stinky kid, do what you want.’ And I say the same thing to him. It works very well, because you really need somebody to test ideas on. And you get a piece of expert advice that you value.”51

  Another friend whose opinion he valued was Steven Spielberg, whose company Lucas was enjoying more and more. In the summer of 1974, Spielberg was at work on Jaws for Universal, a project that would feature a gigantic mechanical shark that was still being constructed in a North Hollywood hangar. One afternoon, Spielberg took Lucas, Milius, and Scorsese out to the warehouse to have a look at the half-completed monster shark, still on struts and suspended in slings. The thing was enormous—so big, in fact, that Milius thought the craftsmen were “overdoing it.” As Lucas looked over the storyboards the artists were using for reference, he felt himself becoming slightly envious. “If you can get half of this on film,” he told Spielberg, “you’re gonna have the biggest hit of all time.” (He would be right: soon after its 1975 release, Jaws would indeed become the highest-grossing film of all time—at least until Lucas surpassed it with Star Wars two years later.) Ever the gadget freak, Lucas climbed a ladder and leaned into the gigantic open mouth of the shark to see how it worked—at which point Spielberg mischievously seized the controls and slowly closed the mouth on Lucas… and then couldn’t get it to open again. Lucas eventually shook himself loose and the four filmmakers fled, convinced they’d broken Universal’s prized prop.52