Off Coppola went for his date with destiny. He threw Lucas a bone by letting him shoot close-ups of the newspaper where Michael Corleone learns his father has been shot. Lucas returned the favor by editing another key Godfather scene, in the hospital, to add more tension.
Lucas badly needed a new project. Columbia Pictures was going to bankroll Apocalypse Now but got cold feet at the last minute. He and Marcia were down to $2,000 in savings. At one point Lucas and Kurtz discussed adapting a Kurosawa movie, just as The Magnificent Seven had recently remade Seven Samurai. Hidden Fortress, perhaps. Why that particular Kurosawa flick, the favorite of neither filmmaker? “Because it’s a fairly straightforward action adventure through hostile territory,” says Kurtz. “It’s a handful of characters and it’s elegantly told”—perfect for a low-budget picture. Not that Lucas and Kurtz didn’t dream about bigger-budget fare. One night the new friends were at a diner and looked in the paper to see what was playing at the local theaters. There was nothing they wanted to see. They enthused about how great it would be to see Flash Gordon on the big screen, in color.
Nobody can remember at a forty-year remove what was said in that conversation or who started it (Lucas and Kurtz were both Flash Gordon fans). Kurtz says they were talking in more general terms about how science fiction pictures hadn’t really been enjoyable since Forbidden Planet in 1955. “They all seemed to go downhill towards either genre horror, Creature from the Black Lagoon–type movies, or alien invasions, or just dystopian stories about post apocalyptic societies,” Kurtz says. “And none of that was fun. It was just the idea of capturing the energy of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers–style space opera, really, which hadn’t been done for so long.”
Whatever was said in the diner seems to have lit a fire under Lucas. On a visit to New York in early 1971, “on a whim,” he says, Lucas went to visit King Features to inquire about the film rights to Flash Gordon. The King executives agreed to meet with him because they were thinking about the film rights too; they mentioned Frederico Fellini as a possible director. The Italian maestro was also known to be a Flash Gordon fan.* There was no way Lucas could compete with Fellini at this point in his career.
This seems to have been Lucas’s lightbulb moment. The vague space movie idea he’d been running through the projector in his head for years—there was no reason that couldn’t be better than Flash Gordon. After his meeting at King Features, he and Coppola dined at the Palm Restaurant in Manhattan, and Coppola could sense his friend’s disappointment—but also his new outlook. “He was very depressed,” Coppola would recall in 1999, over lunch with Lucas and producer Saul Zaentz. “And he says, ‘Well, I’ll just invent my own.’”
Coppola paused to consider. “What a limitation, if they had sold him Flash Gordon.”
“I’m glad they didn’t,”† concluded Lucas. Years later, he reflected on why that was. “Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established. You start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity. . . . I would have had to have had Ming the Merciless in it, and I didn’t want to have Ming. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them—I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.”
In the meantime, though, Lucas needed a more bankable movie. If Fellini was to take Flash Gordon, maybe Lucas could take something from Fellini—for instance, the idea behind the movie I Vitelloni, about four teenagers in a provincial town who talk about leaving for Rome but never do. What if you followed a bunch of guys, on the cusp of leaving a small town, and follow them through one night of cruising—a ritual that had died out in the last decade?
Lucas would set his version in the summer of 1962, the moment everything changed for him, and end it with a car crash. He came up with a semi-Italian title: American Graffiti. It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn’t intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever.
The title aside, Graffiti was intended as a very mainstream, commercial project. Lucas was determined to combat the perception that he was an emotionless science fiction nerd. It had become the butt of jokes around Zoetrope. “Everyone thinks you’re a real cold fish,” Coppola told him. “Why don’t you do something warm?” Muttered Lucas as he wrote: “I’ll give you warm.” He worked up a fifteen-page treatment with another pair of USC friends, Willard Hyuck and his wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas put the word “MUSICAL” in capital letters on the title page; it was a confusing way of emphasizing the rock and roll soundtrack he imagined for the film.
Meanwhile, the world was starting to call him. That spring, Lucas appeared in both Newsweek and a PBS documentary in which he railed against the Hollywood system while walking below the Hollywood sign. Lucas’s first major newspaper profile, published in the San Francisco Chronicle around the same time, nailed him in its very first line: “Those who know George Lucas say that he has the temperament of an artist who works alone in his attic, plus a keen business sense aimed at the preservation of his work.” Those two essential facets of his personality were now locked in place and would not change for the rest of his career.
Then, in May 1971, Lucas learned THX had been officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Lucas was the beneficiary of circumstance: a revolt by young European filmmakers, demanding that more films by under-thirties be screened at the festival. George and Marcia cashed in their savings—no one was paying for him to attend the event—and took off for Europe. They stopped off in New York for a week, staying with Coppola (who was at his lowest ebb while shooting The Godfather) and his long-suffering wife, Eleanor, who was nine months pregnant. The Lucases slept in the Coppolas’ living room and just so happened to leave for JFK the same early morning Sofia Coppola was born.
Even before he arrived at Cannes, Lucas could see his luck changing. While in New York he met David Picker, president of United Artists, to pitch American Graffiti. Arriving in London on his twenty-seventh birthday, Lucas called Picker from a pay phone around the corner from a dingy flat costing less than $5 a night. Picker made a $25,000 deal for Graffiti on the spot.
Elated, the Lucases took a ferry to France and the train to Cannes on their Eurail passes. They had to sneak into one of the two THX screenings, which were sold out. They didn’t show up at a hastily arranged press conference; nobody even knew they were there. It didn’t matter; only one meeting at Cannes, with Picker, was to have any consequence. They met at Picker’s suite in the Carlton—Lucas’s “first big-time movie experience,” a nice change from the offices of underlings. Picker confirmed the Graffiti deal and asked Lucas if he had anything else for UA.
Lucas sensed his opening, and he took it. “I’ve been toying with this idea of a space-opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon,” he said. Picker agreed to take an option on that too.
It was the first time Lucas had pitched his dream movie, and he was shocked to find it pivot so fast from fantasy to reality. “That was really the birth of Star Wars,” Lucas remembered later. “It was only a notion up to then; at that point it became an obligation.”
Picker, sadly, can’t remember anything about the encounter now. For him, it was one of many deal-or-no-deal meetings he had in that hotel. “You can imagine how many meetings I had on that terrace,” Picker says. “More deals were made, more hearts were broken than any level of the business anywhere.” What he does remember is that Lucas has never let him live down his eventual divestment from the project. The filmmaker has needled Picker thusly on every subsequent meeting: “Hey, David, you could have had Star Wars.”
On August 3, 1971, United Artists officially registered the name “The Star Wars” as a trademark with the Motion Picture Association of America
. The definite article, as strange as it sounds to our ears, would remain oddly attached to those two more famous words for the next five years.
The origin of this historic name—whether it harkened back to the space soldiers or was inspired by a more recent phenomenon, Star Trek—is frustratingly unclear. All we know for sure is that Lucas had the name long before he had the slightest inkling of a story. “The discussion about [the title] was that it was Flash Gordon–like, space-opera-type adventure about wars in outer space,” says Kurtz, “and then that kind of gestated into The Star Wars.” Patrick Read Johnson, a filmmaker who became the first kid in the world to see the movie when he covered it as a fifteen-year-old cub reporter for American Cinematographer in 1977—Gary Kurtz calls him “fan 1”—is convinced that there’s no way you could write about that title and not think about the elder science fiction franchise. “The name, before it came out, always got a laugh from my friends,” Johnson told me. “It sounded goofy. Like someone had tried to make Star Trek but just added the word ‘Wars’ at the last minute.”* Kurtz says that was a “fairly common reaction” at the time.
Lucas was certainly a fan of Star Trek. He took afternoon breaks, during the long years of writing Star Wars, to watch Trek reruns. “I liked the idea that you could gallivant around the galaxy,” he told Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s son in 2004. He was attracted to the show because it “got rid of the mundane boring action of real space, and said let’s just get out and go where no one else dared to go.” (Roddenberry Jr. was, ironically, a far greater fan of Star Wars than Star Trek as a child.)
The original Star Trek series debuted on television in 1966. It was canceled in 1969 after a seventy-nine-episode run, short of the hundred episodes normally needed for syndication—but, by 1972, Paramount had syndicated it to 125 local TV stations around the United States. Network executives called it “the show that won’t die.” In January 1972, some three thousand eager fans crowded the first annual Trek convention in New York, snapping up Vulcan dictionaries, books of Vulcan songs, and more than one hundred fanzines. By 1975, fans were holding two conventions a year in the city, attracting fourteen thousand visitors between them; by 1976, there were four Star Trek cons a year around the country, with the cast gratefully plucked from obscurity into superstardom. Legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov reported from these cons as one might report on Beatlemania, describing “teenage girls screaming for Spock.”
Lucas went to some of these early Trek conventions, at a crucial time when he was struggling to turn Star Wars into reality. “He did talk about Star Trek quite a bit,” remembers Gary Kurtz. The show was “inspiring in a way. It freed up the mind to think about what it would be like to travel to distant galaxies and encounter other species.”
Before fans of either franchise get too apoplectic, let me clarify: it would of course be an exaggeration to say that Star Wars is just Star Trek with a facelift. The concepts behind the two franchises are pretty much diametrically opposed. Star Trek, as we know from its opening sequence, is about a starship on a five-year mission of exploration. Many of the plots are fantastical, but it is science fiction, not space fantasy. It is our own galaxy, in our own future, using the tools of science to further the progress of a rational Federation. “Star Trek was more intellectual,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t action-oriented.”
Still, there’s more than a passing resemblance between Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk—and between Lucas and Roddenberry. Both creators used speculative fiction to make political points. “If I went to a strange planet I could talk about war and race and all the things you couldn’t talk about on television,” Roddenberry told the AP in 1972. “Kids today are growing up at a time when people are saying there is no tomorrow, that it may all be over in 20 years. Star Trek said there is a tomorrow and that it can be just as challenging and exciting as the past. It said that we shouldn’t interfere in the lives of other people. Maybe the kids saw something about Vietnam in that.”
In 1971 Vietnam was hard to avoid, even for a young couple like the Lucases, bumming around Europe on a Eurail pass post-Cannes, mostly visiting Grand Prix racetracks. That summer’s biggest album, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, has a song called California—about bumming around Europe, longing for the US West Coast, but being horrified by the news from home: “more about the war and the bloody changes.” Later, Lucas would wax lyrical about how the war might have been avoided: the vast numbers of decent Americans who could have spoken out against it but chose not to. “To not make a decision is to make a decision” is how he was putting it by 1976. “By not accepting the responsibility, people eventually have to confront the issue in a more painful way.” He was extremely sensitive to the fact that the war had knocked the country off balance. Lucas referred to that balance as “the poetic state.”
Lucas was determined now to make movies about the war in three modes: past, present, and future; absence, reality, and allegory. American Graffiti would take people back to a time before Vietnam ripped America apart. Apocalypse Now, which Lucas hoped to direct before or after The Star Wars, would show it in the present tense. If THX was the movie he expected to get him banned from Hollywood for life, Apocalypse Now was the movie he felt would lead to the government running him out of the country.
The third mode that Lucas intended to use to depict Vietnam—the allegorical, futuristic lens—was only just taking shape, but already it was being influenced by Lucas’s thinking about the present tense.* Lucas was fascinated by the notion of how a tiny nation could overcome the largest military power on Earth, and this was baked into The Star Wars right from its earliest notes in 1973: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”
Back in California following his Cannes trip, Lucas officially incorporated his own brand of freedom fighters: Lucasfilm Ltd., the name he’d copyrighted back in 1969. It was just a shell corporation for the moment, and friends were confused by the British-style name; why “Ltd.” and not “Inc.”? The alliteration just sounded better, says Kurtz—and it looked better too, because the pair were sketching out logos on paper and had the notion that they’d make a big, brassy, Cinemascope-style graphic in which the letters went from large to small to large again. They never got around to it.
Whatever it was called, Lucasfilm was barely a zygote at this stage, let alone an embryo. Lucas and Kurtz hired their first two secretaries, named Lucy Wilson (who also did accounts) and Bunny Alsup respectively, and that was it for employees. Lucasfilm’s first legal headache concerned the Graffiti draft Lucas had assigned to a USC classmate of his, Richard Walter, who had grown up in New York and didn’t understand car culture. Kurtz had already paid Walter most of what Lucas had received up front; Walter fought for weeks to get paid for his desultory second draft. Lucas resigned himself to writing the third draft from scratch—time to bleed on the page again.
There was a way out. Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, had been trying to sell him as a contract director for months, and now there was an offer: a crime picture called Lady Ice. It would pay $100,000. He could take the money, pay off all the money he’d borrowed over the years from his dad, make a name for himself, and achieve financial security. But he would have to postpone the dream of those three movies. The dreams were just too big. He decided to plow on in penury.
In December 1971, the UA development deal was sealed into a memo. It described The Star Wars only as “a second picture” after Graffiti, despite the fact that the company had just registered “The Star Wars” as a trademark. Lucas’s space fantasy project, it seems, was still at such a protean stage that even the placeholder name wasn’t certain.
Lucasfilm’s first movie deal was incredibly short-lived. Shortly after the UA deal memo was issued, Lucas sent Picker his third draft of Graffiti. He asked for more money for a fourth draft, and promised he would cowrite with Hyuck and Katz. Picker says he loved it, but his boss at UA didn’t get it. The Graffiti deal was dead, but Picker still had the option to produce
The Star Wars whenever Lucas got around to writing a treatment.
There followed four months of rewriting and shopping Graffiti. Finally, Ned Tanen, head of the “youth division” set up to fund low-budget independent pictures in the wake of Easy Rider, agreed to take it on. He was a former cruiser himself; he got that part of it. He didn’t get the title. Gary Kurtz still has a letter from Tanen complaining that American Graffiti made him think of “an Italian movie about feet.” Universal had a half-dozen suggested titles. Lucas was writing about his hometown; why not call it “Another Quiet Night in Modesto”? Lucas and Kurtz thought that ridiculous. “The way we solved that was by saying, ‘You come up with a better title, because we don’t love this one but it’s better than anything we’ve heard,’” remembers Kurtz. It was good practice, as it turns out; a year later, he would use the exact same line with another set of studio bosses over the title Star Wars.
Tanen conceded the title fight but had one other stipulation: the film had to have a star actor or a star producer. What about that guy who just directed that amazing movie, The Godfather? Coppola readily agreed.
Lucas’s space fantasy project was shopped a second time. When Universal agreed to take on Graffiti, Lucas sold his other ideas as part of the deal: the contract gave Universal options on Apocalypse Now and The Star Wars, although it would only have a chance to pick up the latter project if UA declined its option.
The Star Wars was now named in a legal contract, not just a trademark document. Lucas was to get $50,000 for cowriting and directing Graffiti—a pay cut compared to THX. The budget was $650,000, also lower than that of THX. For enduring that ignominy, however, Lucas would get 40 percent of any profits.
The American Graffiti shoot, in July 1972, was a frenzied month of vampire hours, dusk till dawn. That one night the movie is set in would, for the cast and crew, happen sixty times: a nocturnal Groundhog Day. Lucas was not a night person. Nor was he keen on dragging his crew back to Modesto; instead he chose San Rafael and then, when it became clear the city was too noisy to stand in for the quiet town of his youth, the small farming town of Petaluma further up in Marin. At first Lucas tried to be the cameraman as well—he really thought he could do it all. But the results looked terrible. So Haskell Wexler flew up from LA to help out, gratis.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 14