Lucas’s friendship with Wexler would pull his life powerfully in a new direction. Wexler showed the student around his commercial film house; it was the first time Lucas saw the movie industry in the wild and became aware that movie careers existed. Wexler said he would have gotten Lucas a production assistant job—possibly on a documentary Wexler was working on, The Bus—but that it was nixed by film unions. Lucas said that was the point he “turned his back on Hollywood.” In fact, Wexler would keep trying to get Lucas a job within the Hollywood system for the rest of the youngster’s time in school, with little success.
Around the time he met Wexler, Lucas was figuring out his next move beyond junior college. The first to accept him was San Francisco State, where he would have pursued a degree in anthropology. He also applied to do illustration and photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; his father torpedoed that dream by telling his son he’d have to pay for it himself. Lucas says he was too lazy to even consider that. Meanwhile John Plummer was thoroughly enjoying his time at USC and thought Lucas might get a kick out of the film school’s photography program. “It’s supposed to be easier than P.E.,” Plummer told Lucas. That was all the kid needed to hear. Wexler called up a USC instructor called Mel Sloan; legend has it his words were “For God’s sake, watch this kid.” This may have tipped the scales, or Lucas’s newfound aptitude may have shone through on the test. It mattered not. USC accepted Lucas, and the young man continued to be pulled inexorably toward film.
His father came up with a generous solution: he would pay George Jr.’s way through school as an employee of his company. Lucas would get $200 a month. Lucas Sr. may have reasoned that film school would confer a valuable lesson. After all, nobody graduated from film school and immediately found work at a studio. They were first taken on as apprentices. If you made it to the dizzying heights of assistant editor after four years of apprenticeship, you would have to wait another four years until you could edit film.
Hollywood was a closed fortress of nepotism, yet there was always a place where nepotism would work in Lucas’s favor: Modesto. “You’ll be back in a few years,” George Sr. told his son.
“No I won’t, I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m 30,” Lucas shot back. Or at least, so he remembered as a millionaire in his thirties.
5. USC
When did Star Wars first emerge as a cinematic concept? Where did the love of Flash Gordon transmogrify into the idea of putting some version of it on celluloid? Lucas’s answer is frustratingly imprecise: sometime during film school. “You end up with a little stack of ideas for great movies you’d love to make,” he told Starlog magazine in 1981. “I had this idea for doing a space adventure. . . . It was such an obvious thing that I was amazed no one had ever done it before.”
No student was less likely to have emerged as the star of the class. Lucas began at USC as a junior, and he was a photography major, not a cinema major; he began with only two classes at the film school. Film was not the cool subject it is today, and the department was banished to a spartan building called the Stables on the edge of campus. In his opening address, the dean of the school told students there was still time to get their tuition back. “Conditions were crowded, equipment limited, and scheduling editorial and mixing equipment was challenging,” remembers Lucas’s classmate, Howard Kazanjian. “We learned to work together. We created the feeling of family. The facility was old and funky, but I would have had it no other way.”
Lucas was increasingly drawn to the “geeks and the nerds” of his film classes, despite their pariah status. “No one wanted to be around us,” he remembered in 2013. “We were bearded and strange.” He compared his compatriots to modern-day Googlers and Facebookers. Something exciting and new was going on within the Stables, and the kids sensed it.
Lucas shunned the screenwriting class, run by the infamous Irwin Blacker, from which students had been known to emerge in tears. He didn’t care for plot or dialogue. Sound and vision were all he wanted to learn about. He took a history of film class with Arthur Knight, whose enthusiasm was infectious. Knight screened Metropolis, the 1927 masterpiece by Fritz Lang. It imagined a future city where an imperious “master” is challenged by rebel workers. The master’s son ventures into the underworld in pursuit of the female leader of the rebellion, and the master orders a machine made in her image in order to discredit her. Lucas would file that iconic golden robot away in his mind, where it would stay for years, becoming fluent in over six million forms of communication.
6. CLEAN CUT CINEMA
Don Glut arrived at USC the same year as Lucas; he, like George, started as a junior. The two met when Lucas and his dorm roommate, Chris Lewis, along with Glut’s roommate, Randall Kleiser, founded the Clean Cut Cinema Club, where members took turns screening movies. Glut joined too, though he didn’t quite fit in with the club’s deliberately uncool ethos. “I was the only one in the club with long hair,” says Glut. “After the Beatles came out, everyone grew their hair long. That’s what girls wanted, so that’s what we did. But Lucas and Kleiser and Lewis were groomed perfectly.” (Lucas wouldn’t gain a beard until he returned to USC as a graduate student.) Indeed, the CCCC had a reactionary bent aimed at the “beatnik guys dominating the cinema department,” the ones exhorting them to follow Jean-Luc Godard into independent filmmaking and telling them they couldn’t get a job in the industry. Lucas and his cohorts had a different concept of what that industry could be.
The CCCC tended to shy away from screening the then-fashionable works of new-wave French cinema. That’s what the professors were into, so the CCCC wanted to be into something else. Glut was a brash blue-collar Chicagoan who loved comic books and superheroes. A friend at Republic Pictures got him reels of old serial episodes, which is what he screened for the club: Captain Marvel, Rocketman, Spy Smashers, Zorro. Despite his love for Flash Gordon serials, Lucas was seeing most of these other serials for the first time, Glut recalls.*
In his second year, Lucas rented an $80-a-month place up in Benedict Canyon, the name of which may well have inspired Tatooine’s Beggar’s Canyon. Kleiser moved in, and the pair threw a party at which Glut screened an episode of The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Glut loved this stuff, but he also recognized the dumber scenes when he saw them. In one, Captain Marvel is following a car whose driver has been knocked unconscious. The car careens down a winding road, somehow managing to avoid going off the edge. “That’s impossible,” laughed Glut.
Lucas looked at him very seriously. “No,” he insisted. “The car would follow the contours of the road.”
The two shared a love of cheesy serials, but Glut’s passion for them got him into trouble. Each classroom had a 16mm projector; you could screen anything if there wasn’t a class in session. Glut was screening his serials for an audience one night when he was ejected by Herb Kosower, the animation teacher. In 1965, Glut had to take his camera class over again after turning in a movie called Superman vs. The Gorilla Gang for his final assignment. It fulfilled the requirements, but the teacher failed him. Why? “Because it’s a Superman movie.”
Lucas, by contrast, kept his own love for such things out of school bounds, although it ate up his extracurricular life. Kleiser remembered trying to urge him out of his room and go to parties, but Lucas “just wanted to stay in and draw star troopers,” Kleiser said. All those years after art class, he was still picturing space soldiers.
7. LOOK AT LIFE
As a junior, Lucas took Kosower’s animation class. While Glut hated Kosower, Lucas sat in the front row, intent on learning how everything worked, ready to overachieve. Almost immediately, he discovered he had a talent for animation—and how.
In 1965, George Lucas made his first short movie, born of an early homework assignment that couldn’t have been more basic. The students had been instructed to take a minute of 16 mm film, run it through the Oxberry camera, and make something move. What Lucas did with that minute was extraordinary and still holds up today as
if it were a great YouTube short (which it now effectively is). It’s called Look at Life. The title referred to the two popular weekly photo magazines Look and Life. Lucas cut out his favorite pictures and strung them together in a collage, in the style of Lipsett’s 21–87.
As in all subsequent Lucas films, the music was in the driving seat: in this case, the first track from the soundtrack to the Brazilian film Black Orpheus, which happens to be a minute long. It opens with a lilting guitar, over which Lucas zooms out from an eye, a face behind wire mesh. Then an urgent samba bursts in, appearing as rudely as would years later the first chord of John Williams’s Star Wars theme. We see snarling dogs in Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Klansmen, Khrushchev, soldiers in Vietnam, all in rapid succession. Five frames per image: extremely fast for 1964, even a little shocking today. It ends with the title cards “anyone for survival?” and “End?”
That last card may have been a portentous step too far, but there it was: America at the tipping point of the 1960s, anxiety over war and racism, the emotion behind that year’s big protest anthem “Eve of Destruction,” all within a single minute of film. The result was a hit with faculty and went on to win a total of eighteen awards at student festivals around the world. Lucas’s confidence exploded in an instant. “When I did that film, I realized I was able to run circles around everyone else,” he said. “That’s when I realized these crazy ideas I had might work.”
8. THE MOVIOLA
After Look at Life, Lucas went to town on class projects. For lighting class, he and classmate Paul Golding produced a simple meditation on the hood of a car. Set to Miles Davis’s “Basin Street Blues,” it was called Herbie, for the mistaken belief that Herbie Hancock played piano on the track. Hypnotic shots of neon diffusing over chrome were cut to the music. At the snap of a drum you saw, for a second, something that looked like a galaxy being born.
Lucas had the chance to meet and take a class from the mighty French director Jean-Luc Godard; after that, he seems to have had the zeal of a convert about new-wave cinema and the auteur theory. By the time of his third short, Freiheit—the story of a young man, played by Kleiser, escaping across the border between East and West Germany, played by Southern California scrubland—Lucas had veered so far into the avant-garde that he was experimenting with dropping his first name. “A film by LUCAS,” says the title card.
The primary film-editing machine at the time, the upright Moviola, seemed custom-built for a car-loving youth. It had gears and sprockets, it needed to be greased, and it growled. Foot pedals controlled speed and motion. Lucas had to break into the editing room, known as the Bullpen, so he could drive the film all night, cutting a scene just a hair’s breadth before he got bored with it, the whole session fueled by Hershey bars, Cokes, and coffee. He gave himself the supremely geeky nickname “Supereditor.”
For his graduation project, 1:42:08—A Man and His Car, Lucas brought his two main loves together: fast cars and fast films. It was technically excellent but cold: you didn’t see much of the man. Its soundtrack was the roar of the engine. He’d been inspired by another National Film Board of Canada film called 12 Bicycles, which used the same kind of long lenses Lucas would employ in 1:42:08.
Lucas used color film, which students were theoretically barred from using, and took more than a semester to complete the project, another breach of the rules. He was dressed down for breaking into the Bullpen and editing at night. The faculty may have grumbled, but Lucas was basically untouchable at this stage. The award-winning wunderkind had attracted a coterie of student friends, which became known—in retrospect, at least—as the Dirty Dozen. At one end of the spectrum was John Milius: girl-chasing, outlandish, conservative, militaristic, a man who would have joined the Marines but for his asthma. At the other end was Walter Murch, a refined East Coast intellectual. Murch first met Lucas when the young savant told Murch he was developing film all wrong. That kind of approach didn’t seem to stunt relationships in a school that was all about meritocracy: “If you saw an exciting film,” said Murch, “you became friends with the guy who made it.”
Both Milius and Murch would come to have an indirect effect on Star Wars, but Milius’s impact was the most immediate: he insisted on taking Lucas to see the samurai films of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa that played at the Toho cinema on La Brea in Los Angeles. Kurosawa had turned Milius’s life around when he’d been declared 4-F; a weeklong festival of Kurosawa’s movies had convinced him to apply to film school. Lucas only had to see Seven Samurai once to know he was hooked. Kurosawa shared his love of long lenses and wide shots; he told irresistible stories that built slowly to a grand conclusion; he loved to build the audience’s anticipation for something that was about to happen, something just off the edge of the screen.
And there was something more in those samurai films, something that would have been obvious to any child of the 1950s: Kurosawa loved Westerns. Asked once where he received his inspiration, the Japanese director responded: “I study John Ford.” Ford, the multiple-Oscar-winning director of movies such as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is considered the past master of the Western. Although born to an Irish family in Maine, Ford was able to find and frame the spirit of the American West. His characters struggled against vast, rugged terrain, reached for far horizons, and spoke only when necessary. Kurosawa translated Ford’s Westerns to medieval Japan. Star Wars would owe significant debts to both directors. Lucas may have taken a circuitous foreign route to the Western influences that would show up on Tatooine, but was hardly impoverished for doing so. It was like learning about American rock and roll by listening to the Beatles.
9. GOVERNMENT WORK
On graduating in August 1966, Lucas got the draft letter he’d been expecting. The Vietnam War was sucking an entire generation into the major maelstrom of the Cold War. He considered following the exodus to Canada; friends who had been drafted had weighed that option, but thought better of it when they heard back from homesick classmates. The best Lucas could hope for was Officer Candidate School, perhaps leading to assignment with a military filmmaking unit.
When he reported for medical inspection, however, Lucas got a nasty shock: he was diabetic. Not only did that rate him 4-F, but he also had to quit his constant companions: Hershey bars and Cokes. John Plummer said Lucas compared the diagnosis, once it was confirmed by his doctor back in Modesto, to a second car crash. But it was to give him a heroic dose of self-discipline and a leg up on his contemporaries. Desperate to outrun the need for insulin injections, he would remain substance-free for the rest of his career: no smoking, no drugs, no sugar, barely any drinking. Such choices would set him apart from many other filmmakers of his generation, and not in a bad way. In 1977, the year the first Star Wars film was released, Martin Scorsese admitted he was too coked up to face the challenge of making much-needed changes to the disastrous New York New York; Francis Coppola sat amid a haze of pot smoke on the horrifically over-budget, long-delayed Apocalypse Now while friends feared for his sanity. Meanwhile, Lucas—boring old Mr. Clean—churned out the year’s top movie on a tight budget, then turned around and started its sequel.
Since he was spared from military service, Lucas’s next obvious step was USC graduate school, but he was too late to apply for the fall. While he waited for the next year’s admissions process to begin, he cut movie reels for the US Information Agency, working in the living room of editor Verna Fields.
This first taste of professional moviemaking forced Lucas to rethink his aspirations. After being told that he’d made a story about a crackdown on an anti-government riot in South Korea look “too fascist,” he had an epiphany: he didn’t want to be an editor. He wanted to be the one telling the editors what to do.
His year off from school afforded Lucas another revelation. Fields hired a second editor to work alongside him. Her name was Marcia Griffin. She was as shy and willful as Lucas, and they had both been born in Modesto. (Griffin was a military brat from a ne
arby base.) “Neither one of us would take any shit from the other,” Lucas said. They began to date. And it didn’t take long for George to start telling Marcia about an idea he had for a space fantasy. “That damn movie was whirring through the editing machine in George’s head on the day we met,” she would say two decades later, from the other end of a bitter divorce. “He never doubted it would get made. . . . He spent a lot of his time thinking of ways to get those spaceships and creatures on the screen.”
Those spaceships and creatures were to change her life forever, too—and not necessarily for the better.
10. THX 1138 4EB
The dream of spaceships and space soldiers seems to have been entangled with the dream of an easier-to-make movie—more science fiction than space fantasy—whirring through the editing machine in Lucas’s head. Walter Murch and another classmate, Matthew Robbins, had come up with a treatment for what was originally called Breakout: a man escaping from an underground lair in a dystopian future. Lucas loved the concept. How to make it, though? He wasn’t in film school at the time. He didn’t have access to equipment, and he certainly couldn’t afford to buy any on his own.
But these obstacles were surmountable with a little bit of lateral thinking. Lucas realized that if he took a second job as a teaching assistant in a USC class for navy cadets (USC trained military filmmakers) in return for the lease, he would have access to their color film. He organized the navy guys into two teams, framing the class as a competition to see who could shoot a film with the best natural lighting. He took charge of one team. His guys had access to military installations. Hey presto: instant film crew, instant locations. It wouldn’t have failed to remind Lucas of Jean-Luc Godard’s own strange dystopian film Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965), filmed in the strangest, most fascist-looking locations he could find around Paris.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 9