George Lucas: A Life

by Brian Jay Jones

Lucas vowed he’d never cede control over his films to executives at the studios again. What did they know about filmmaking?

“That’s one of the ways of learning,” Lucas acknowledged later. “You attach yourself to somebody older and wiser than you, learn everything they have to teach, and move on to your own accomplishments.”

have strong feelings about God and the nature of life, but I’m not devoted to one particular faith,” Lucas said later.50 While Lucas was raised a Methodist, he was more intrigued by the services at Till’s German Lutheran church, where worshippers still wore broad hats and bonnets and spoke in sharply accented, reverential tones.

“The ceremony provides something essential for people,”

Plummer thought he understood his friend’s preferences. “One of the things that came out of them… was the values that were so important to us,” Plummer said. “There were the good guys and the bad guys. I think that put a pretty strong [im]print on him.”65

or, better yet, film the speeding cars and their drivers, using a small 8 mm camera his father had given him.

Even though his father disagreed, he gave him the camera.

was another lesson he wouldn’t soon forget: to get into the movie machine, one had to be part of the system. And Lucas had already decided he didn’t like the system—or the machine, for that matter. “I

It was the first time, too, said Murch, when “we saw that spark that George had that nobody else had in quite the same way.”58

but also for his inability to relate to actors—a criticism that would later be leveled at Lucas. Godard

Lucas likely grumbled; he was becoming increasingly cranky about the idea of working with others and preferred doing everything himself. He could be easily irritated if he was saddled with crew members who couldn’t keep up with him. “I was really incensed at the democratic process of filmmaking, where we helped the student who couldn’t quite make it,”

Lucas said later. “I was into making it a competition, who can get it done first and best. If they couldn’t cut the mustard, they shouldn’t have been there.”72

“People develop this relationship with people on the radio,” said Lucas. “They think of them as [being] one way and they create a sort of ambiance about themselves. People get very close to the people on the radio except, of course, they’re not close at all.”30 He

This is true of most of society. Especially as we get more and more insular

He had no intention of complying with the demand that he limit the film to ten minutes.

He repeatedly does what he wants. Is this something that many greats do?

“this issue of leaving a safe environment and going into the unknown” would be an underlying premise of his first three films, running in a thematic straight line from THX through American Graffiti and on into Star Wars. “I was very consistent in my cinematic obsessions,” he admitted.108 While critics would later pick apart THX, it and his other movies would come from the same emotional and psychological core.

but Warners was so angry they broke off all relations.”143 It would turn out to be a staggeringly shortsighted move on the part of the studio. “They had turned down what became the whole 70s cinema movement,” said Coppola.144 “They

By denying Lucas Flash, King Features had inadvertently sent him down the path toward creating Star Wars. Flash Gordon, in fact, wouldn’t appear on the big screen until 1980, in a Dino De Laurentiis–produced stinker trying hard to cash in on the science fiction craze Lucas had spawned with Star Wars—an irony that was never lost on Lucas.

Now in his pitch to Warners, Lucas told Picker all about his ideas for his unnamed “space opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon.” “Great,” said Picker, “we’ll make a deal for that, too.” “And that,” said Lucas later, “was really the birth of Star Wars. It was only a notion up to then—at that point, it became an obligation!”25

Lucas, then, turned every offer down—but it wasn’t easy. “That was a very dark period for me,” he said later.33 “We were in dire financial straits.… I turned that down [Lady Ice] at my bleakest point, when I was in debt to my parents, in debt to Francis Coppola, in debt to my agent; I was so far in debt I thought I’d never get out.”34 It took

years “to get from my first film to my second film, banging on doors, trying to get people to give me a chance,” remembered Lucas. “Writing, struggling, with no money in the bank… getting little jobs, eking out a living. Trying to stay alive, and pushing a script that nobody wanted.”

He was all in.

“But when we got in trouble and I asked him to do it, he did it—as a friend, to help me out,” said Lucas fondly.

Wexler, said Lucas, was “a lifesaver.”70 Lucas couldn’t praise him enough. “He’s really terrific so I just let him do it and I didn’t worry about it anymore… and he did a fantastic job. The movie looked exactly the way I wanted it to look.”71

Richard Dreyfuss thought there was more than just luck involved. “He trusted us,” said Dreyfuss. And why not? In Lucas’s view, he had hired the best actors, carefully chosen for each part, so why shouldn’t he trust them to deliver?

A guy who didn’t seem to trust almost anyone had to trust. It’s an interesting juxtaposition

For that reason, Lucas was never going to change the title, no

He was completely committed. AGAIN

Lucas was glad that it was over. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go through what you have to go through to make a movie,” he complained to the New York Times. “It’s excruciating. It’s horrible. You get physically sick. I get a very bad cough and a cold whenever I direct. I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or not. You feel terrible. There is an immense amount of pressure, and emotional pain.… But I do it anyway, and I really love to do it. It’s like climbing mountains.”84

Lucas wasn’t sure whether to bristle at that label or not. “My thing about art is that I don’t like the word art because it means pretension and bullshit, and I equate those two directly,” he told Filmmakers Newsletter. “I don’t think of myself as an artist, and I don’t think I ever will.… I’m a craftsman. I don’t make a work of art; I make a movie. If it does what

I want it to do then somebody else can come along and figure it out.”115

“I know how good I am,” he told the New York Times matter-of-factly. “Graffiti is successful because it came entirely from my head. It was my concept. And that’s the only way I can work.”124

It did, however, make a lot of money. With direct costs of a little over $1 million, American Graffiti earned more than $55 million in rentals, making it one of cinema’s most profitable returns on investment, then or ever. With his points in the film, Lucas earned nearly $4 million, after taxes. As he had vowed to his father more than a decade before, Lucas was a millionaire before the age of thirty. In fact, he had done it with two years to spare.

As the film’s distributor, Universal, too, earned its piece of the movie—and Lucas gagged on every cent. “The idea that the suits actually made a profit on his movie was just appalling to him,” said Gloria Katz.

But even with $4 million in the bank, Lucas was still convinced he could lose everything if he wasn’t careful—and the money was already going fast. “He had this idea of being a flash in the pan,” said Marcia. “You hit it once and that’s all you’re ever going to have. There are no guarantees.”130 Wealth, then, wasn’t going to change him too much. “Money is not the most important thing to him,” said John Plummer.

Instead, Lucas quietly invested in property and bonds, and socked money away in savings accounts—nothing too flashy. Unlike Coppola, he wouldn’t be buying showy cars or sprawling mansions in the hills.

I

don’t have a natural talent for writing,” George Lucas confessed to Filmmakers Newsletter in 1974. “When I sit down, I bleed on the page, and it’s just awful. Writing just doesn’t flow in a creative surge the way other things do.”1

Lucas would treat the writing of Star Wars as a full-time job, trudging up the stairs to his writing room each morning at 9 a.m., where he would then lower himself slowly into his wooden desk chair and stare at a blank page for hours, waiting for the words to come. “I sit at my desk for eight hours a day no matter what happens, even if I don’t write anything,” he explained. “It’s a terrible way to live. But I do it; I sit down and I do it. I can’t get out of my chair until five o clock or five thirty.… It’s like being in school. It’s the only way I can force myself to write.”

“You go crazy writing,” Lucas said later. “You get psychotic. You get yourself so psyched up and go in such strange directions in your mind that it’s a wonder that all writers aren’t put away someplace.”

For Lucas, enthusiasm always trumped clarity.

“That was why I made the deal.”27 Without it, he said later, “I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe take a job. But the last desperate thing is to ‘take a job.’ I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity.”28

Even after making his first million dollars, he still was stressed about money. He had to keep taking chances. I won’t this goes against the idea, but once you make it, you’ll feel safe. I’m not sure where that space is.

“At that point,” recalled Dykstra, “I said, ‘This is going to be hard to do in a year, George,’ and he said, ‘I don’t care, kid, just do it.’ So, we did it.”85

As far as hiring staff, “we approached the visual effects as a grand experiment,”

“Each story was a totally different story about totally different characters before I finally landed on the story,” he said later with near-palpable relief.

Ford, too, was feeling better and better about his chances for the role he hadn’t actively sought.

But there was one thing missing, something critical: he still didn’t have the official green light for the project from Fox.

“George takes enormous risks. He’s very determined,” she said. “He invested that money because he knew he was going to make that movie. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. He’s gambling, but he’s gambling on himself and his own ability to come through.”

“I ended up having to be nice to everybody, which is hard when you don’t like a lot of people.”

When the lights went up, Marcia—who hadn’t seen the film since the first cut—burst into tears, certain it was a disaster. Huyck muttered that he found the opening crawl “jiggly, and it went on forever.”93 Barwood tried to be supportive, reassuring Lucas that there was still enough time to fix everything if they could shoot some extra footage. De Palma, however,

was blistering in his criticism, carping about everything from Leia’s hair to Vader’s nondramatic entrance in the opening scene. “What’s all the Force shit?” De Palma thundered. “Where’s the blood when they shoot people?” De Palma would

continue to rail at Lucas over dinner at a Chinese restaurant “like a crazed dog,” recalled Gloria Katz.94 “Brian kind of went over the top in terms of his honesty,” agreed ...

“You should talk,” Lucas told De Palma snarkily. “None of your films have made a dime.”96 To the surprise of most onlookers, De Palma agreed to help Luc...

loved it because I loved the story and the characters...

After being stiff-armed by an uninterested Stan Lee, Lippincott had used Ed Summer, co-owner of Lucas’s Supersnipe comic book store, to wangle an introduction to comics writer Roy Thomas in early 1976. With Thomas and artist Howard Chaykin on board, Lippincott went back to the still skeptical Lee to finish the deal. Lee