Another misapprehension about Modesto: that it is extremely remote. “If there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet it’s farthest from,” said Luke of Tatooine. But the Bay Area is less than ninety miles due west of Modesto. If I-580 traffic is light and you have a lead foot, you can be in San Francisco in an hour and change. Sacramento is less than an hour to the north, Yosemite the same distance to the east. You can get to Hollywood faster from Modesto than from the Bay.
This doesn’t mean it is easy to leave Modesto. The town exerts a strong cultural gravitational pull. It’s just that, to see what else the world has to offer, you must be determined, and you must like fast cars—two qualities that the young George Lucas had in spades.
When George Walton Lucas Jr. was born, in the early morning of May 14, 1944, droves of German bombers were attacking Bristol. General Rommel was preparing a plot to assassinate Hitler. Britain’s cryptographers were uncovering a plan by Göring to trick the RAF into bombing unused airfields. Japanese fighters harried American bombers over the Truk Atoll on their way to Wake Island. The British XIII Corps consolidated a bridgehead over the Rapido River, helping to open the road to Rome. In a school hall in London, workers prepared a giant map of Normandy as General Montgomery prepared to explain to Churchill and the king exactly how he and Eisenhower intended to liberate Europe.
The planet was on fire, but Modesto was about as far away from the conflagration as you could get. Lucas’s father, George Walton Lucas Sr., had volunteered but was turned down—he was too slender, and he was married. The Lucases were even more insulated from the horrors of the war than they might have been. Still, the war left no one untouched, and its after effects—the warm glow of victory, the posttraumatic stress—went on for decades. Lucas later remembered growing up in a world where the war was “on all the coffee tables”—in Time, in Life, in the Saturday Evening Post, in living Technicolor.
The 1950s and 1960s were filled with war movies, each one a repolish of legendary heroics on the ground and—increasingly—in the air. The Dam Busters (1955), 633 Squadron (1964), Tora Tora Tora! (1970)—These were the movies Lucas would record and splice to create the ultimate dogfight, a 25-hour reference reel that would form the basis for all the special effects of Star Wars (which would be shot by the same cinematographer who filmed Dam Busters).
If you look closely enough, you can see that wartime influence throughout the franchise. It’s in the one-man fighters, the rebel’s helmets and boots, the Stormtrooper’s modified UK Sterling submachine guns, Han Solo’s German Mauser C96 semiautomatic, the tall fascist in the black gas mask. “I like to say Star Wars is my favorite World War II movie,” says Cole Horton, who runs the website From World War to Star Wars, which has documented hundreds of callbacks. “The story comes from myth. The physical, tangible things come from history.”
The war’s aftermath wasn’t all coffee-table entertainment for young Lucas. Another conflict, this one on the Korean peninsula, broke out a month after he turned five. His sister Ann’s fiancé was shipped out and killed in action there when George was nine. Even before that tragedy, Lucas had been subjected for years to the specter of an even more frightening war. His year of schoolchildren was the first to be shown the civil defense training film Duck and Cover (1951). Imagine seeing this at age five: not just a cartoon about a clever turtle who hides in his shell when the atom bomb drops, about also two schoolchildren who, “no matter where they go or what they do, are always trying to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then.”
Future war took terrifying shapes under the wooden desks of John Muir Elementary School. “We did duck and cover drills all the time,” Lucas recalled later in life. “We were always hearing about building fallout shelters, about the end of the world, how many bombs were being built.” No wonder, then, that he once called growing up “frightening” and said he was “always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.” It couldn’t have helped that he was a scrawny kid, an occasional target for older and larger boys at John Muir who liked to throw his shoes at the lawn sprinklers. More than once, Wendy had to step in and rescue him.*
War fears and bullies aside, Lucas was hardly suffering. He was the son of an increasingly successful and wealthy small businessman, George Walton Lucas Sr., who knew and supplied stationery to everyone in town. He was in the store at seven A.M., six days a week. Evenings were for golf, for the Rotary club; on Sundays, he and Dorothy, his wife and high school sweetheart, would do the accounts.
George Sr. had once dreamed of being a lawyer, and the career may well have suited him. Thin and ramrod straight, fond of dispensing Shakespeare quotes at the dinner table, he could have been a courtroom Lincoln. But he had been glad to have a job in a stationery store in 1933 when unemployment hit 20 percent. He talked himself into a 10 percent stake in the company, L. M. Morris, which the store’s eponymous owner had founded in 1904. George worked his way up to a 50 percent stake and then took over and renamed the company when Morris retired. By 1950, the Lucas Company grossed a very respectable $30,000 a year (about $300,000 today). George Sr. made all that from stationery and—crucially for Star Wars, as it turned out—toys.†
George Lucas Sr. was no Darth Vader, despite the suggestion from Lucas biographer Dale Pollock that his relationship with his son inspired the paternal revelation in Empire Strikes Back. In fact, the young Lucas—Georgie, as he was affectionately called—seems to have been doted on. Lucas owned the best train set in Modesto, a three-engine Lionel Santa Fe, and all the Lincoln logs to go with it. Georgie got a great allowance for the time: 4 cents a week at the age of four, rising to $4 a week (that’s $94 in 2013 dollars) by the age of eleven. In July 1955, George was packed off on his first plane ride—to Anaheim for the grand opening of Disneyland. He just missed Walt Disney opening the park in person but arrived in time for day 2. “I was in heaven,” Lucas said of the trip. In the shining realm of Tomorrowland, the nameless monster that haunted him back in Modesto was banished. The Lucas family would return to Disneyland every other year.
Certainly, George Sr. exerted a powerful influence over his children when he was around. “His dad was stern,” says Patti McCarthy, a professor at the University of the Pacific in nearby Stockton, California, who thoroughly researched Lucas’s life for Modesto’s American Graffiti Walk, a series of video kiosks around the town. “But parents were stern then. Wendy Lucas always says, ‘He was a stern man and a good father.’” Georgie and his sisters were expected to do chores; the boy detested having to mow the lawn with the family’s battered old mower. His way of dealing with that was to save up his allowance, borrow $25 from his mother, and buy a new mower. Dale Pollock painted that incident as defiance. Hardly: it was the stuff of budding business genius—a sensibility that Lucas surely soaked up from his entrepreneurial dad. “My first mentor was my father,” Lucas would tell Bill Moyers years later. (He named Francis Ford Coppola his second and Joseph Campbell his third.)
If anything, Lucas’s mother was a more mysterious presence than his father. Dorothy, the daughter of a Modesto real estate magnate, was bedridden with inexplicable stomach pains throughout much of Lucas’s childhood. At the age of ten, Lucas came to her with his first existential question: “How come there’s only one God, but so many religions?” No satisfying answer was forthcoming, and Lucas would spend a good chunk of the next twenty years developing a new name for God that was embraced by religious and nonreligious alike.
Before Lucas Sr. became wealthy enough to move the family to an isolated walnut ranch outside town, Lucas enjoyed their modest tract home at 530 Ramona Avenue. Its most important feature was the alley out back, which Lucas shared with his tight knot of childhood friends: John Plummer, George Frankenstein, and Mel Cellini. The friends later called it “alleyway culture.” They’d run in and out of each other’s houses, always involved in some creative endeavor, constructing toy rail tracks and backyard carnivals. At eight, they made a rolle
r coaster ride out of a telephone wire spool. “I liked to build things,” Lucas recalled in 2013: “woodshop, treehouses, chess boards.” He constructed forts and 3-D landscapes with papier-mâché mountains. He filled his room with drawings: landscapes, mostly, with people added as an afterthought. If asked what he wanted to be, he would suggest “architect.” There was one exception to Lucas’s impersonal artistic creations: in art class at school he drew—earning a rebuke from his teacher—pictures of “space soldiers.” Such disapproval would not stop him for a second.
Lucas’ writing and directing abilities were skills he had to acquire later in life with great effort and pain. His early years yield few portentous examples of either pursuit. But one of his surviving stories, from the third grade, foreshadows his love of speed, his lifelong sense of urgency, and his stick-to-itiveness: the qualities that would compel Lucas to complete every creative project he ever started. The story is called “Slow Poke,” but the setting is the “land of Zoom”—in retrospect, a perfect name for the chrome-plated 1950s.
Once upon a time in the land of Zoom, there was a little boy who was always slow. All the other people in the land of Zoom were fast.
Once this little boy was walking down a trail when he met a horse. He wanted to talk to the horse, so he started to sit down on a stone where a bee was sitting.
No sooner had he sat on the stone than he was up with a yell, and running down the trail.
From then on, he was never slow again.
Brevity aside, this was quintessentially Lucas: a dreamer of a boy, slow at school, motivated by sudden moments of fear to be fast, an inveterate tinkerer restlessly searching for something cool in the Land of Zoom. “He was bored with school; he needed a bee sting,” says Professor McCarthy. “The bee sting was the accident. It’s almost a foreshadowing.”
As for films, the focus of his later life? He went to the movies once every other week, if that, and while he enjoyed Disney movies—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a particular favorite—he said that in his teenage years he only went to Modesto’s two picture houses to chase girls. Filmmaking was just one of many happy pastimes he tried out with Mel Cellini during the alley years. The pair had tried writing and editing a newspaper on Lucas’s return from Disneyland, printed in George Sr.’s store; it lasted for ten issues. Cellini’s dad had an 8mm movie camera, which could be used to make stop-motion animation. The boys played a lot of war games with toy soldiers, so they recorded their tiny green army moving across the alley a frame at a time. For special effects, Lucas would light tiny fires. “It was very critical to him that everything would look right,” Cellini would remember. “It had to look real.”
Even as a young auteur Lucas was learning to link art and profit. One fall he and Cellini built a haunted house in Cellini’s garage. It was a sophisticated affair, with ghouls dropping out of the roof and strobe lights. Neighborhood kids were charged a nickel to see it. “We’ve got to change it around so it’s different,” Lucas said when the crowds started to drop off; then he relaunched the enterprise as a new and improved haunted house. “He did this a couple or three times; I marveled at it,” said Cellini. “As soon as sales fell off, George would go back and redo it and retweak it, and the kids would come back again.” It was a trick he would repeat many times with Star Wars.
Lucas turned ten in 1954—a transformative year, and one he has hearkened back to on many occasions. It was the year George Sr. bought a television. (He was not the first parent in town to do so, and George had been getting his Flash Gordon fix at John Plummer’s house for years.) It was the year Lucas first declared his intent to become a race car driver. And it was the year he realized something he revealed publicly years later, in his first promotional short movie.
In 1970, when he was twenty-six, Lucas would make the ten-minute film Bald to promote his avant-garde dystopian movie THX 1138. The film opens with Lucas and his second mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, gravely introduced as “two of the new generation of filmmen,” discussing what influenced the movie. Lucas could have mentioned many dark influences that would have resonated with his generation, such as Brave New World and the speeches of Richard Nixon. Instead, he proudly planted his flag in nerd territory. THX “actually came from reading comic books when I was about ten years old,” Lucas said. “I was always struck by the fact that we were living in the future. If you wanted to make a film about the future, the way to do it would be to use real things, because we’re living in the future.”
By the age of ten, Lucas was already a voracious reader of comics. His and his sister Wendy’s hoards grew so large that Lucas Sr. devoted an entire room to their comics in the family shed—more than five hundred comic books in total. Even that wasn’t enough. On Sundays, while his parents did the accounts, he would go over to Plummer’s house and read a stack of comics Plummer’s dad got for free from the Modesto newsstand Nickel’s News. The covers had all been torn off so they couldn’t be resold. Lucas, however, wasn’t about to judge a comic book by its lack of a cover.
The year 1954 was the tail end of the postwar zenith known to comics historians as the Golden Age. Superman and Batman were in the prime of their second decades. Subjects were diversifying—cowboy comics, romance comics, horror comics, humor comics, science fiction comics. This was the soup that Lucas swam in: supremely visual, wild, horrific, hilarious, boundary-stretching, authority-defying, and out of this world.
The comic book hero Lucas would recall in his earlier interviews is a largely forgotten character: Tommy Tomorrow of the Planeteers. For decades, Tomorrow clung tenaciously to the pages of Action Comics, the title that had given birth to (and in Lucas’s childhood was still dominated by) Superman. In comic book terms, this was like opening for the Beatles.
Tommy Tomorrow sprang to life in 1947 as a cadet in what the comic called the “West Point of space.” He then became a colonel in a solar system–wide police force called the Planeteers. At first young and naive, Tomorrow soon gained assistance from a sassy female character, Joan Gordy, and an older sword-wielding mentor, Captain Brent Wood. The most shocking twist in the strip: Wood learns that a notorious space pirate, Mart Black, is in fact his father.
Think that was shocking? If you really wanted to be shocked, there was EC Comics. Brash iconoclast William Gaines inherited the company from his father in 1949, and immediately instituted a long line of titles that delved into the smart and the spooky, from horror (Tales of the Crypt) to Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, which delivered four science fiction short stories per issue, each with a twist in the tale. “EC Comics had it all,” Lucas later wrote in a foreword to a Weird Science collection. “Rocket ships, robots, monsters, laser beams. . . . It’s no coincidence that all of those are also in the Star Wars movies.” EC’s storytelling style was inspirational, too: “mini-movies that managed to keep you enthralled and wanting more until the final page. . . . You read them with your eyes open wide, your mouth agape and your brain racing to take it all in.”
But EC didn’t have long to live. From April to June 1954, as Lucas sat on a blanket in the back yard reading comics, a Senate subcommittee grilled Gaines over an EC Comics title—one that would have been on newsstands on Lucas’s tenth birthday—featuring a grisly image of a woman’s severed head. Gaines spoke passionately in his comics’ defense, but behind the scenes he was fatally eager to compromise. He helped found the Comics Magazine Association of America, which created the Comics Code Authority, which specifically targeted EC’s distribution. Gaines’s distributor went bankrupt the following year.
One of Gaines’s publications survived unscathed, however, and would prove to be far more damaging to the established order of things than EC Comics. Mad Magazine, so quaint today, predated the great satirists of the 1960s. “Mad took on all the big targets,” wrote Lucas in 2007:
Parents, school, sex, politics, religion, big business, advertising and popular culture, using humor to show the emperor had no clothes. This helped me recognize that just beca
use something is presented to you as the way it is, doesn’t mean that’s the way it really is. I realized that if I wanted to see a change in the status quo, I couldn’t rely on the world to do it for me. The impact this had on my worldview was enormous. I have spent much of my career telling stories about characters who fight to change the dominant paradigm. . . . For that, Alfred E. Neuman bears at least a little of the blame.
Carl Barks, a veteran Disney artist who created Scrooge McDuck and gave him his own comic book in 1952, was also partially responsible for sharpening the young Lucas’s contrarian sensibility. The first piece of art Lucas ever bought, in the late 1960s, was a page of Barks’s Scrooge. Barks comics were passed around at the very first Star Wars shoot in the Tunisian desert.
One of the earliest and most sophisticated Scrooge strips, a 1954 parody of the utopian novel and film that introduced Shangri-La, Lost Horizon, would find echoes in Lucas’s later years. The strip opens with the billionaire duck being harassed by phone calls, letters, charity requests, speaking engagements, and the taxman. Seeking a respite, he and his nephews take off in search of the mythical Himalayan land of Tralla La. Scrooge is overjoyed to have found a society where friendship is the only currency. It all goes hilariously wrong when a local finds a bottle cap from Scrooge’s now-discarded nerve medicine. A tidal wave of avarice rips through Tralla La, the bottle cap becomes the land’s default currency, and the ducks are forced to escape again when the market is flooded.
The ten-year-old Lucas could not have guessed how much this strip fore-shadowed his later life. He too would learn the peculiar isolating harassment that comes with being a famous billionaire. He too would use wealth to escape wealth, building his own whimsical Tralla La in Skywalker Ranch. Yet the need to sustain this utopia, and the people he hired to work it, would lead to a life that was far from carefree—and eventually he would sell his main enterprise to the same company that owns Uncle Scrooge.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 5