How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Cars, of course, provide the escape route. THX is pursued by police robots on bikes. Both crash. THX makes it out into the city’s shell, fends off attacks by strange dwarf creatures, and then starts climbing up a long hatch toward the light. A robot policeman pursues him but is shut down when the chase exceeds its strict budget. In the final shot, THX emerges into we-know-not-what world, a silhouette against a sunset.

  As depressing as it is to watch, THX now seems prescient, a glum presaging of America’s medicated, couch-potato consumerism. Nobody says we’re not happy, either—just that we’re spending much of our lives indoors, with a variety of interactive screens rather than holograms. The social commentary was pretty heavy-handed, as you might expect from a small-town twenty-four-year-old living in LA in 1968. Here was a man angry at our drug cultures (prescription and otherwise), at a world that had gone plastic and sterile, at authority figures obsessed with restricting sex, money, and power.* Call it Brave New World meets The Graduate.

  A month after Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, as Lucas and Murch were still tweaking the script for THX, Marcia Griffin and George Lucas got married at a Methodist church just south of Monterey (he’d proposed just prior to the Rain People trip). The Lucas family drove down from Modesto to attend. Coppola came, as did Lucas’s closest friends from USC: Walter Murch, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood. For their honeymoon, the bride and groom drove down the California coast to Big Sur before doubling back to San Francisco and across the Golden Gate. Lucas wanted his wife to see the charms of Marin County. He had good reason: Marin was where Lucas had recently glimpsed his future. Toward the end of production for The Rain People in June 1968, Coppola had wriggled out of a commitment to speak on a panel in San Francisco about film and the written word, sending Lucas in his place. There Lucas had fallen under the spell of another filmmaker on the panel, John Korty. Over the previous four years, Korty had made three prize-winning independent films out of a $100-a-month barn in Stinson Beach. His total outlay was $250,000, and he was making a profit.

  Once they saw the barn, Lucas and Coppola were converts. They wouldn’t continue to be cogs in the studio system; they would go independent. Coppola was further convinced when he visited a commune of filmmakers on a trip to Europe. He nearly bankrupted himself buying and shipping state-of-the-art editing equipment back to the United States. The instructions were in German. To fix it, an engineer would have to fly in from Hamburg. Still, now they had everything they needed.

  It is hard not to be enamored with Marin, even in February when the Lucases arrived. The San Francisco vistas from the Marin headlands, the world-class hikes, the benign gaze of Mount Tamalpais over the whole place—this was so attractive that a developer backed by Gulf Oil was planning to build an entire city in the headlands, called Marincello. “It is probably the most beautiful location in the United States for a new community,” said the developer. The locals hated the idea. By the time the Lucases arrived, Marincello was mired in lawsuits and red tape. It would never be built.

  In stark contrast to LA, Marin was perfect for a small-town kid. It was all about bucolic small towns, such as Sausalito, where the hippies lived on houseboats (Murch and his wife would move into one). There was Mill Valley, enshrined in a song by Rita Abrams (Coppola would direct the idyllic music video). In San Rafael, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin Civic Center had just been completed. (The futuristic building with its soaring spire would feature in THX and later in the 1990s science fiction film Gattaca; it also houses Lucas’s divorce papers.)

  South of Mill Valley was a tiny neighborhood called Tamalpais–Homestead Valley, full of windy roads, overgrown hedges, and picket fences. Here the Lucases rented a one-bedroom Victorian with a large attic for $120 a month. They moved in that spring. An Alaskan malamute called Indiana, which Marcia would strap into the passenger seat, completed the domestic scene. Marcia wanted kids, but Lucas demurred: they weren’t financially secure yet.

  One birth, at least, took place in the Lucas’s new home in the hills. While editing his Rain People documentary, Filmmaker, on a Moviola in the attic, Lucas declared their home the headquarters of a fictitious company, Transamerica Sprocket Works. But on screen, for copyright purposes, he used a more prosaic name: Lucasfilm. This, too, was still technically fictitious. Lucas would not file corporate papers until 1971.

  The next month, Coppola and his crew arrived to start scouting locations for their film company, which was slouching toward San Francisco to be born. Lucas led them around Marin like an eager tour guide. Coppola made offers on two separate Marin mansions but couldn’t scrape together the down payment fast enough. Time was tight; the editing equipment was about to arrive. Korty, of all people, the Stinson Beach idealist, found a former recording studio in SOMA, the most urban, warehouse-filled neighborhood of San Francisco. Lucas argued against it—the whole idea was to have a retreat outside of a big city—but Coppola was holding all the cards. Sorry, George, and by the way, the company name is going to be American Zoetrope, not Transamerica Sprocket Works.

  American Zoetrope was the epitome of 1969 cool. The offices of Rolling Stone were just around the corner. Jerry Garcia was a frequent visitor. Woody Allen dropped by, as did the mythical Akira Kurosawa himself. Even Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director fresh from 2001, called from self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom, wanting to learn more about these crazy kids and their high-tech editing machine. The market was obviously on their side; Easy Rider, a film by a motley gang of Lucas and Coppola’s contemporaries, was on its way to making $55 million at the box office, on a budget of $400,000. Every studio suddenly wanted a piece of the young filmmaker revolution. Zoetrope was it. Nobody thought they were just stupid kids playing around anymore. Coppola was getting $2,500 a week in seed money from Warner Brothers to set up the new company, part of a proposed $3.5 million deal. Warner would distribute Zoetrope’s first movie, with an option on several more, sight unseen. Zoetrope would be able to produce the movie without Warner interference, at least until it was done. It was a great deal for the time, made in one brief shining moment when the big studios felt lost and desperate for young moviemakers to show them the way. But the problem with the contract was baked in from the start. The money was actually a loan; Coppola would have to pay it back if Warner didn’t like his output. Still, it included a budget for THX, the company’s first picture. Coppola’s lucky number was 7, so he whimsically decided to fix the budget at $777,777.77—a lowball figure for a feature, even then.

  That summer, as men walked on the moon, Lucas assembled his cast. Robert Duvall from Rain People would play THX; San Francisco actress Maggie McOmie would play LUH. Not for the last time, Lucas used a renowned older British actor—in this case, Donald Pleasance as SEN. Lucas’s crew scoured the Tenderloin for addicts in treatment programs, forced to shave their heads as a sign of commitment. They’d be useful as extras.

  Shooting began on September 22, 1969, and wrapped two months later. Lucas and the crew ran through a hectic schedule of shoots in and around the city. He would have loved to film in Japan, to give THX even more of the sense of alienness (for American audiences) he and Murch craved. But the budget wouldn’t even stretch to a scouting trip. Instead, it was a guerilla movie, much of it shot without permission in the still-empty tunnels of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit. The pace was intense, the work stressful. Lucas talked about his “needle going into the red” on day 1 and staying there. He noticed his crew loading film the wrong way into a camera and had an epiphany: professional crews can be just as clueless as student filmmakers. He built his own special effects with model cars and $10 fireworks. As for the actors, he let them perform the way they wanted, as if he were shooting a documentary. On one night in a closed set, Duvall and McOmie went for it in a sex scene that was risqué even in 1971.*

  Lucas wanted his underground world to look a little scuffed and dirty and lived-in. The actors wore no makeup. The whiteness of their uniforms tended to obscure this, but Lucas
hoped to achieve the look in later films. He was already thinking about a sequel to THX—after all, he’d spent all this time creating this world, it seemed a shame to limit it to one picture. There was one vague scene he had in mind for the sequel: his hero would be trapped in some kind of giant garbage masher.

  As overwhelming as it all was, and as many difficulties as he had with the crew, Lucas was breaking new ground, and the experience invigorated him. “It was the only movie I really enjoyed doing,” he said a decade later. The photo on his THX set pass showed something very unusual in the history of Lucas portraiture: a big, cheesy grin on his face.

  American Zoetrope was officially incorporated in November 1969. Lucas was named vice president, but the position was unpaid. To make ends meet, he and Marcia took a variety of freelance assignments. Inspiration and occasional gigs came from Haskell Wexler, who had recently arrived at Zoetrope, fresh from the August release of his movie Medium Cool, a drama-documentary filmed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Lucas and John Milius planned to do something similar, documentary-style, in Vietnam. Milius, mocking a hippie button that said “NIRVANA NOW,” suggested calling it Apocalypse Now; he wanted to base it on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, having been incensed by a teacher’s claim back at USC that the book was unfilmable. It would go through ten drafts. Lucas was to direct it, even though, as Milius later put it, George didn’t know Conrad from Mary Poppins; he just wanted to do a documentary-style Vietnam picture. Before long, Coppola optioned it to Warner without asking either Lucas or Milius. He’d found another parade to jump in front of.

  Wexler’s next assignment was to shoot a documentary about a free concert at a racetrack over in the East Bay. Organized by the Grateful Dead, it was to feature Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Rolling Stones. Wexler had been trying to film the Stones for years. Would Lucas like to help capture crowd footage? Rock and roll on a racetrack with a camera, and he’d get paid? It must have sounded like a dream come true.

  The racetrack was Altamont. The concert was badly planned and horrifically overcrowded. Hells Angels were running security. During the Stones’ set, a Berkeley student named Meredith Hunter started waving a gun on stage. The Angels tackled and stabbed him. The drug-fueled crowd freaked out. To this day, Lucas says he can’t remember what he shot. But Albert Maysles, director of the Gimme Shelter documentary that used the footage a year later, says Lucas was responsible for the moody moments of concertgoers in silhouette, panicked, trying to find their way out. Said Maysles, with an odd kind of pride: “It’s like a sci-fi scene.”

  Lucas spent much of 1970 in his attic in Marin, retreating into his own cautionary tale of sex, drugs, and escape. “It’s a kind of therapy” was how he described editing. Just as well—he despised the regular kind. He had even been irked when Coppola tried to get him to sit down with the crew and discuss difficulties during the THX shoot.

  Coppola came to visit and introduced Lucas to Gary Kurtz, an older USC grad just returned from three years as a filmmaker with the Marines in Vietnam, whom Coppola had worked with in his Roger Corman days. Kurtz, a quiet Quaker with an Amish-style beard, was now associate producer on a road movie called Two-Lane Blacktop. Lucas had shot with an unusual film stock, Techniscope, on THX; for a lot of technical reasons, Techniscope makes it easy to make a reel of film last twenty minutes rather than the usual ten. “For low budget pictures, that was perfect,” Kurtz says. “Especially pictures with car stuff.” Coppola had an ulterior motive for getting the two together; Kurtz was the only filmmaker he knew who’d seen action in Vietnam, which would make him a perfect producer for Apocalypse Now.* Given the subject was film and cars and the war, Kurtz and Lucas bonded instantly. Lucas offered to make Kurtz producer on his next picture, whatever that might be—but with the strong presumption it was going to be Apocalypse.

  For the moment, Lucas had all the backup he needed. Marcia helped edit THX, although she found it emotionally cold even after she was done with it. At night, Walter Murch cut an audacious avant-garde soundscape: less music than distorted noises, feedback, free-floating electronica. For the prison scenes, while Duvall was tortured on screen, Murch got improv actors to record adlibbed lines as if they were bored and casually sadistic air traffic controllers. One of the voices belonged to Terry McGovern, a local DJ and actor who, during his session, would unwittingly create the name for one of the Star Wars universe’s most famous creatures. McGovern was in the army reserves at the time and was running late from his once-a-month training weekend. So he drove to the studio with his best friend and fellow reservist, Private Bill Wookey.

  McGovern and Wookey looked pretty ridiculous that day. It was 1970, and like everyone else in their twenties, the two pals had long hair, but for the sake of the army they squeezed it into short-hair wigs. “We had these huge heads,” Wookey remembers. “We must have looked like aliens.” Wookey was a pretty hairy guy in general (he still is, and started growing a long beard to match his hair the moment he got out of the reserves in 1972). He had fuzzy, red-brown locks and stood six foot three inches tall. Believe it or not, that’s all sheer coincidence. Wookey has never met George Lucas. All that happened was that during his ad-libbing, McGovern threw out a line for the benefit of his friend: “I think I just ran over a Wookey back there.” Memories are fuzzy at this four-decade distance, and nobody knows if Wookey was actually in the studio at the time. There’s a good chance the pair were high: “We smoked an awful lot of dope at the time,” remembers Wookey. McGovern says he “probably just dropped his name to be silly.”

  The wonderfully silly line didn’t even make it into THX 1138. But Murch was amused by it, as was Lucas when he heard it. The filmmaker filed the name away in his notebook, where it gained an extra couple of vowels and became “wookiee.” McGovern kept on working as occasional voice talent for Lucas. One day in early 1977, he would be paid all of $200 to record another bunch of lines that didn’t make a lot of sense at the time: “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for,” he was told to say in a slightly dazed voice. “You can go about your business.” It was only when he saw Star Wars several months later that he was blown away by the result: “I was paralyzed with joy,” says McGovern. “I’m in a scene with fucking Alec Guinness!”

  Similarly, Bill Wookey was blissfully unaware of what had happened until he saw Star Wars with everyone else in 1977. By that time he had a steady job as a clothing salesman in San Rafael and took his two young boys to see the movie their Uncle Terry had been working on. Then he heard the family name on the screen for the first time: “Droids don’t rip people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose; wookiees have been known to do that,” says Harrison Ford of his large hairy friend, who suddenly looked strangely familiar. “I definitely thought right away it was cool,” Wookey said. “It wasn’t until the next few weeks and months that I started getting a little uncomfortable with people making references and assuming I was the role model for Chewbacca.” But the embarrassment soon turned into pride—especially for his sons, who began a Star Wars action figure collection that now fills the family basement. “When my boys went off to school, they just thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” the hirsute clothing salesman, now age seventy, remembers. “They were Wookiees.”

  By the time THX was ready, Lucas feared his first feature film would also be his last. He knew the movie was off the wall. In November, Coppola came by to collect the final product. After Murch screened a reel for him, Coppola shrugged: “It’s either masturbation or a masterpiece.” But if George was happy, Francis was happy. He packaged it up for the journey to Warner, together with boxes of Zoetrope screenplays ready for production, including The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. The quirky little THX was supposed to be the appetizer. Even if they didn’t like it, the suits at Warner wouldn’t refuse the main course. Would they?

  As it turned out, they would and did. The day Coppola took THX south—November 19, 1970—was so disastrous
that Zoetrope employees took to calling it Black Thursday. The suits detested THX 1138 so much they didn’t even glance at the other screenplays. They owned this film whether they liked it or not, but they didn’t intend to support another. On the spot, they cancelled the whole deal and called in Coppola’s loan. Suddenly he owed Warner $400,000.

  Lucas’s baby was a hostage to Hollywood. This was the metaphor he offered repeatedly about this formative moment: you raise a child for two or three years, and then someone comes along and cuts one of her fingers off. It’s okay, they say, she’s fine—she’ll live. “But I mean, it hurts.”

  Warner forced Lucas to cut four minutes from THX 1138. Lucas ignored the studio’s entreaties to edit more. The studio pushed the movie out in March with little fanfare. Big theaters didn’t book it. It got good but tiny notices in Time and Newsweek. “Some talent, but too much ‘art,’” sniffed the New Yorker, calling the white-suited dystopia “gloomy and blinding.”

  The film had left Lucas in a bad way financially, and Zoetrope in an even worse spot. The studio started to turn a small profit by renting its editing machines to makers of commercials, but it wasn’t enough to dig Coppola out of debt. Then he got a call from Paramount, offering $150,000; he was their third-choice director on the adaptation of a Mario Puzo potboiler from 1969 called The Godfather. Coppola refused the first couple of times Paramount asked. That was old Hollywood stuff. But Lucas talked Coppola into it: “We need the money,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”