The story was simple: Two friends, Curt and Steve, are class stars trying to decide if they are going off to college in the morning. Their other two pals are polar opposites: a hot-rodder, Milner, who gets lumped with someone’s kid sister for the night and is being pursued by an out-of-town hotshot driver, and a hapless scooter rider, Terry the Toad, who borrows Steve’s car for a night and picks up a cute but demanding date. Lucas later suggested three of the friends represented aspects of his Modesto life. Terry was Lucas the dorky comic-reading kid. Milner was Lucas the Bianchina boy racer. Curt was the junior college version, the Lucas who had knuckled down and was moving on to bigger and better things.
Graffiti’s story threads were united by Wolfman Jack—an actual contemporary DJ whose location no one knew (just as they didn’t back in Modesto—it turned out Wolfman was broadcasting from a powerful tower down in Tijuana). The four stories intercut, an unusual idea at the time, as if viewers were bouncing between cars on radio waves. Wolfman himself appears at the end to help Curt contact a mystery blonde he had glimpsed through a car window. It is the DJ as benign force, the voice that answers prayers: like Lucas’s student film The Emperor, but from the point of view of the radio audience.
Coppola was wrapped up in Godfather publicity at the time, and barely took part in the film he was nominally producing with Kurtz. But thanks to Fred Roos, a friend of Coppola’s who also did casting for The Godfather, Lucas was gifted what may be the best cast of unknowns any second-time director has ever had. Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss stole the show. Then there was the guy playing Bob Falfa, the mystery driver who challenges Milner. He was a former bit player for Columbia who’d gotten out of the business and taught himself carpentry, which paid better. His name was Harrison Ford, and Kurtz had a set-to with him about how much he had been drinking at the crew’s Petaluma motel before shooting the crucial drag race scene at dawn. “Don’t show up like this again,” Kurtz remembers chiding Ford, who stayed sober on the set from then on.
Lucas wasn’t about to stop the party, or give his cast much of anything in the way of direction. “The set was very wild, very loose,” remembers Terry McGovern, who played a teacher. “George is not an actor’s guy.” McGovern had his hair cut hours before playing his scene opposite Dreyfuss when someone pointed out that teachers didn’t have long hair in 1962. Another member of the cast, Charlie Martin Smith, remembers Lucas getting much more animated in describing his next movie than discussing the one at hand. “It sounded great to me,” recalled Smith. “A big science fiction adventure with these short furry creatures called Wookiees. Richard Dreyfuss and I kept begging George to let us play them. . . . Then he turned around and made the Wookiees seven feet tall, which knocked [us] out of the running for that part.”
But for the most part, Lucas faded into the background like Wolfman Jack. He hid from the actors in most every scene—jammed under a diner’s counter-top, prostrate atop a car—and let the cameras capture what they would. He frequently fell asleep during a take. “I’m really going to direct this in the editing room,” he told Ron Howard. And so he did, but not in his attic this time. He talked Coppola into buying a house in Mill Valley and turning its granny flat into an editing studio. Verna Fields was the main editor, but Marcia played a major role after Lucas pleaded: “I made it for you.” It was a tough needle to thread. The crosscutting between stories had to work perfectly, never losing the delicate mood of teenage fantasia. Getting the sound right was just as challenging. Lucas and Murch spent hours moving speakers to and fro in the garden of Coppola’s Mill Valley house, trying to perfect the sound of a song heard from a passing car. (The film’s soundtrack would be drawn from the songs Lucas had listened to in 1962—all except those by Elvis, who wouldn’t give up the rights.) They worked through cans marked with reel (R) and dialogue (D) numbers. One night Murch called out: “I need R2, D2.” Lucas was amused; he was still a fan of curious letter-number combinations. “R2D2,” the friends repeated, laughing. Lucas wrote it down in a notebook he’d started carrying around.
By January 1973, Graffiti was ready for its preview. The Universal executives were invited to the screening, which was held in front of a packed house at the Northpoint Theatre in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Most of the audience loved the film, laughing throughout, but Universal’s Ned Tanen hated it. A self-confessed manic depressive, he genuinely didn’t see the warmth or the comedy. He wanted cuts. He threatened to release it as a TV movie. Coppola stepped in to defend his friend, offering to buy the movie from Tanen on the spot, at cost, reaching into his pocket for a nonexistent checkbook.
As gallant a gesture as that was, it didn’t work. Tanen refused to make a decision about releasing the movie; he seemed determined to keep Graffiti in limbo. Lucas was inconsolable. Once again, his child had been kidnapped by Hollywood. Again he was deep in debt to his parents, to Copolla, to everyone. He went home and refused to return Universal’s calls. Kurtz, meanwhile, had gone on scouting trips to the Philippines and South America to find the country most suitable as a stand-in for Vietnam on Apocalypse Now, as well as a country that could supply the maximum number of helicopters. While he was waiting, Lucas said, he might as well start “whipping up this treatment for my little space thing.”
It was time to bleed on the page like never before.
________
* Some of SEN’s rhetoric—“We need dissent, but creative dissent!”—was lifted verbatim from Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign speeches.
* So much so that it earned a review in Playboy.
* Kurtz too had an ulterior motive: he wanted to borrow Coppola’s fancy French Éclair cameras.
* Indeed, Fellini was said to have drawn a Flash Gordon substitute for an Italian paper during World War II, when Mussolini banned Flash. No comic strips have ever been brought forward to substantiate this rumor. Comic book and Flash Gordon expert Edward Summer is skeptical.
† Not least because at that very moment in 1971, unbeknownst to Lucas or King Features, a production company in LA was shooting a campy pornographic parody called Flesh Gordon, which would eventually see release in 1974. The company’s name, in another odd coincidence: Graffiti Productions.
* In the early 2000s, Johnson would turn his experience of seeing Star Wars before anyone else into an independent movie called 5–25–77 (Star Wars’s release date) for which Gary Kurtz acted as producer. It has still not been released.
* Though Star Wars was ultimately set “a long time ago,” Lucas’s earliest plan was to set it in the thirty-third century.
7.
HOME FREE
When Lucas prepared to sketch out his space fantasy film for the first time, he wasn’t alone. Across America, across the world, film makers were dreaming of similar projects. Just as THX 1138 was barely the first of numerous American dystopian movies in production in the early 1970s, Star Wars was one of a crop of ideas for speculative, fable-like space films, many of which were germinating as the decade progressed.
The starting gun had been fired by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 with the $10 million epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Audiences didn’t get it back then, but filmmakers certainly did. Nascent talents like Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg were all sniffing around the science fiction realm, searching for a breakout mainstream hit—something that would follow the lead of Douglas Trumball, the twenty-five-year-old special effects technician Kubrick had hired for 2001, but in the service of a more accessible story.
Lucas’s success in this race was by no means assured. One of his closest friends had already conceived of a science fiction film that may well have been the successor to 2001. It almost snagged Steven Spielberg as a director. The project fizzled, but not before it propelled Lucas’s film into hyperspace, providing the young director with the most important introduction of his career.
Once upon a time, a USC film school graduate was kicking around a treatment for a science fiction movie without a name. He was also dabbling in a com
puter language called BASIC. To help figure out what his movie should be called, he decided to write his computer program in BASIC. He would input hundreds of words he and his friend were using in the script, and the computer would spit them out in random two- and three-word combinations.
When the printout came, most of it was garbage. But as he ran his finger down the list of names, one random combination stood out. The first word was “Star.” The second was “Dancing.”
Star Dancing. Coming soon to a theater near you. “That’s kind of cool,” thought Hal Barwood. He took it to his cowriter, Matthew Robbins, and they tried the name out for a few months. Eventually, however, they decided they preferred one of the titles they’d come up with on their own: Home Free. That was the name under which their agent sold the treatment to Universal. So much for two-word titles starting with “Star.” Humans 1, Computerized Name Generator 0.
Yet Barwood’s computer program would eventually be vindicated, because every time this lost film has cropped up in the telling of the Star Wars story, it has been rendered as Star Dancing. Barwood spoke to me with the express wish that I set the record straight about the movie’s name.
Barwood and Robbins were key witnesses to every stage of the Lucas saga, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Lucas’s Hamlet. They were friends with him at USC; introduced Lucas to their agent, Jeff Berg; rented rooms from him on the grounds of his million-dollar mansion in the mid-1970s; and were among the first few readers of early Star Wars drafts. Barwood later cropped up at Skywalker Ranch in his second career, making games for LucasArts, although he would not retire on the best of terms with his old friend or his company.
Barwood, a New Englander who married his high school sweetheart, had been a science fiction fan from a young age. At USC he made the award-winning short A Child’s Guide to the Cosmos (1964). When he graduated in 1965, he, like many USC film school alumni, went into industrial films. But he was haunted by an idea for an animated film he wanted to make called The Great Walled City of Xan. Barwood managed to wangle his way back into USC as a teaching assistant in 1967, just as Lucas was doing the same thing with the navy class that filmed the first THX. In the following years, Barwood cemented his friendships with Lucas, Robbins, and Walter Murch.
After graduation, Lucas would visit Barwood and his family in LA. The two of them geeked out over film, animation, and science fiction. They played a 1970 game called Kriegspiel—a more complex and warlike version of chess, played on hexagons rather than squares. “I beat him pretty regularly,” Barwood remembers.
The script latterly known as Home Free was written at the instigation of a producer named Larry Tucker, who’d just had a big hit with the 1969 swinger film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Tucker didn’t exactly know what he wanted next, but he knew he wanted it to be science fiction, and he wanted it to be odd. “He said, ‘Maybe there’s an alien who jumps up in the air and comes flying down and sticks his nose into the ground like an arrow,’” Barwood recalls. “We thought, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’”
What, indeed? Science fiction in its literary form had gone in some wonderfully weird directions in the 1960s; at times it seemed to be leading the way for youth culture. The decade kicked off with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Robert Heinlein’s seminal novel about Valentine Michael Smith, an Earthman raised by Martians. Returned to Earth, Smith finds he is a fish out of water, yet his psychic powers and sexually liberal attitude win many converts to his way of understanding, or “grokking.” He founds a church and tells his followers they are about to evolve into a new species, Homo Superior. The free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the hippies: they all grokked it.
Four years later came another breakout science fiction novel, Frank Herbert’s Dune. If Stranger in a Strange Land was a cult, Dune was a global religion. It is still believed to be the best-selling science fiction book of all time. Herbert built a universe in the space of a novel: specifically, a Galactic Empire 210 centuries in the future, where computers are outlawed and great aristocratic houses are at war over access to a mystical, addictive spice that grants a user longer life and enhanced awareness.
Dune centers on Arrakis, the desert planet where the spice is found, and it started a fad for desert planets. Hardscrabble warriors called Fremen are forced to harvest moisture from the atmosphere. A young aristocrat named Paul Atreides flees the massacre of his family, enters the desert, undergoes ordeals, takes the spice, and becomes a terrifying kind of messiah—as in Heinlein’s novel, the figurehead of a new religion. (There was a lot of that going on in the ’60s.) The sequel, Dune Messiah (1969), showed a dark side to Atreides just in time for the Charles Manson murders.
It took a while for Hollywood to catch up to the imaginative brand of science fiction in literature like Stranger or Dune. “Science fiction movies ran roughly 20 to 25 years behind written science fiction,” says Lucas’s friend and filmmaker Edward Summer. There were sound financial reasons for this. As great a critical impact as Forbidden Planet had made in 1956—“If you’ve an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you’ll have a barrel of fun,” said the New York Times—the film took years to recoup its $5 million budget. The audience, it was thought, just wasn’t there. Preteen boys like Lucas and his pals had rushed to see it, but the rest of the family hadn’t. What chance did any other science fiction have? “You’d exhaust the audience on the first weekend, and then you were in trouble,” remembers Barwood of the conventional wisdom at the time.
The received opinion in science fiction filmmaking was that you would make your money back only if you made a movie cheaply enough. James Bond could give you return on investment. Doctor Zhivago and The Sound of Music could give you a return on investment. But guys in astronaut suits just couldn’t. So the ’60s continued the trend of the ’50s, with low-budget schlock in the style of Roger Corman. While readers devoured Dune in 1965, theaters were still offering Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (cost: $200,000). That was a big budget epic by the standards of 1967’s Mars Needs Women (cost: $20,000). And so long as they were chronically undersupported by studios, there seemed little chance that science fiction or fantasy films would ever overturn the perception that the category was moribund by commercial and artistic standards.
That state of affairs started to shift on April 3, 1968, when by a startling coincidence the two most important science fiction films of the decade were released on the same day. One was Planet of the Apes. The other was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trying to imagine a world before either film existed is almost as hard as trying to imagine a world before Star Wars. Was there really a time our pop culture memory did not contain the line “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape?” Were we once able to hear the opening notes of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” without thinking of black monoliths, or “The Blue Danube” without seeing spinning space stations and zero-gravity stewardesses?
2001 was ultimately a more significant movie than Planet of the Apes. The obsessive, reclusive Kubrick—an idol of Lucas’s on a par with Kurosawa—had devoted three years of effort to this film, as had coscriptwriter Arthur C. Clarke. It was visual science fiction with as much music and as few words as possible. Its timing was exquisite. The special effects, which still hold up today, took audiences to the moon and beyond months before NASA had made its first lunar orbit. Then there was the final act: astronaut Frank Bowman’s dialogue-free trip into the monolith on Jupiter, through death and rebirth, a mere year after the acid-soaked Summer of Love.
The movie divided critics and audiences. In the United Kingdom, a young mime artist named Anthony Daniels, seeing his first science fiction movie, would walk out before the end. But the visual style of 2001 made a strong impression on one American filmmaker who preferred to tell stories with as few words as possible. “To see somebody actually do it, to make a visual film, was hugely inspirational to me,” Lucas said. “If he did it, I can do it.”
At the time, however, Kubrick’s masterpiece lost out to its relea
se-date rival. 2001 didn’t make its $10.5 million budget back until it returned to theaters in 1975 (it has since earned more than $100 million). Planet of the Apes was shot for half the cost and made $32.5 million at the box office that same year: score another victory for small science fiction budgets. Critics went ape for Apes too, and Twentieth Century Fox released a sequel every year from 1970 to 1973, followed by a TV series in 1974. Each one was weaker and cheesier and brought in fewer dollars than the last.
But the original was pitch-perfect and had much in common with 2001. Both films feature actors in monkey costumes, hunted astronauts, and profound paradigm-changing twists in their closing minutes. Both carry an implicit threat: our technology—whether self-aware computers or atomic weapons—will be the doom of us all. But both films also hold out hope that we can evolve, either into smarter apes or into star-bound embryos.
Between them, the two movies expanded the possibilities for the genre as never before. As did current events: when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon eighteen months later, the sense of wonder was infectious. All bets seemed to be off. Maybe there really were aliens who jumped into the air and stuck their noses in the ground like an arrow. Or maybe the break-through movie would have something to do with spaceships, holograms, the wave of the future.
In 1973, another young, bearded USC graduate called John Carpenter filmed a semiserious spoof of 2001 that focused on the claustrophobic confines of a long-haul starship. Its stir-crazy crew has adopted a bizarre beach ball–like alien; it jumps in the air, at least. The movie was Dark Star, and it featured film history’s first depiction of a ship going into hyperspace, created by Carpenter’s friend Dan O’Bannon. Not bad for a $60,000 budget.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 15