George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

“When I was very young, I loved make-believe,” said Lucas. “But it was the kind of make-believe that used all the technological toys I could come by, like model airplanes and cars. I suppose that an extension of that interest led to what later occupied my mind, the Star Wars stories.”41 Still, “there wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult.”42 Or so he would always claim.

Lucas never had a romantic or idealized view of childhood. “I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant, it was just . . . frightening,” Lucas said later. “I remember that I was unhappy a lot of the time. Not really unhappy — I enjoyed my childhood. But I guess all kids, from their point of view, feel depressed and intimidated. Although I had a great time, my strongest impression was that I was always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.”

even as a child, Lucas already had a complicated relationship with God; at six — an age when most children see God as simply a benevolent bearded man in the sky — Lucas had a “very profound” mystical experience that would shape the way he looked at spirituality in his life and work. “It centered around God,” he recalled. He found himself wondering “ ‘What is God?’ But more than that, ‘What is reality? What is this?’ It’s as if you reach a point and suddenly you say, ‘Wait a second — What is the world? What are we? What am I? How do I function in this, and what’s going on here?’

“I was never ashamed that I read a lot of comic books,” he said.59

At Lucas’s best, his own storytelling style would mimic the colorful rat-a-tat bravura of the comic book page: words and images working together to propel the action forward, with little time for speeches or soliloquies.

But the TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those thirty-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials.75 There were westerns and jungle adventures, cops and Canadian Mounties, spies and space operas, all in thirty-minute installments practically made for television — and ending on cliff-hangers, guaranteeing that viewers would tune in the next afternoon.

“Thinking back on what I really enjoyed as a kid, it was those serials, that bizarre way of looking at things,” said Lucas. “I don’t think I ever grew out of it. Those serials will always be something I remember, even though they were pretty awful technically.”77

“All the films I made during that time center on conveying emotions through a cinematic experience, not necessarily through the narrative. Throughout my career, I’ve remained a cinema enthusiast; even though I went on to make films with a more conventional narrative, I’ve always tried to convey emotions through essentially cinematic experiences.”

Attendance at movies had plummeted over the previous two decades — in the early 1950s, movie theaters in the United States were already selling 34 million fewer tickets each week than they had only three years earlier — largely because of an upstart invention called television that provided viewers with more entertainment options, and made them available in the comfort of their homes. Looking for audiences, studios began making sprawling big-budget films, many of which dragged the studios down when they failed to take hold at the box office

Coppola had continued to lecture Lucas that it was the ability to write original material that separated filmmakers from mere directors. “Write the screenplay, and then execute it as a producer and director,” admonished Coppola.57 The irony would be that over the course of their careers, it would be Lucas, the self-proclaimed “terrible writer,” who would write and direct his own original material — and create two iconic film franchises along the way — while Coppola would largely make his name adapting other people’s work for the big screen.

Suddenly, independent films — made by young directors, writers, actors, and producers — were in demand. The studios wanted young talent, at times even recruiting directly from film schools. It was a movement Lucas applauded. “I think the student films are the only real hope,” Lucas told one reporter. “I think [the studios are] slowly beginning to realize that students know what they’re doing, you know? That they’re not just a bunch of silly kids out there playing around.”

Hollywood was shifting — at least for the moment — toward a new wave of dynamic American filmmaking, largely defined by the personal visions of the auteur directors — as integral to a film, went the argument, as a poet was to a poem.

At its core, THX 1138 was about refusing to accept the status quo. “[It’s] about a hero who lives in an anthill and dares to go outside,” Lucas would say later. In a way, that was what he and Coppola were doing with Zoetrope. Like THX, they too had broken away from the system in pursuit of a freedom that could be had if one was simply willing to walk away from the status quo. As Lucas noted, “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.

What really got them both fired up, however, was Flash Gordon. Lucas animatedly described the Flash Gordon serials he had loved watching on KRON as a kid, but he didn’t need to bother: Kurtz was a fan too, and excitedly discussed with Lucas the possibilities of acquiring the rights from King Features.

If Lucas couldn’t get the rights to Flash, then he’d simply create a world of his own that didn’t have to adhere to someone else’s rules or work with someone else’s characters. 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.

The larger problem, however, was that Lucas was pushing American Graffiti not just as a movie but as some sort of musical, actually writing across the first page of the script: “American Graffiti is a MUSICAL. It has singing and dancing, but it is not a musical in the traditional sense because the characters in the film neither sing nor dance.”

The film itself truly was American graffiti — a unique moment in time, preserved on celluloid, scratching its essence on the movie screen like the etchings on Egyptian monuments, to ensure its memory wouldn’t be lost forever. “It’s about a period of transition in history in America where in one year you had a President that a lot of kids admired. . . . [Y]ou had a certain kind of rock’n’roll music, a certain kind of country where you could believe in things. . . . You had a certain kind of life,” Lucas explained in 1974. “But in the next two years everything changed: no longer were you a teenager; you were an adult going to college or doing whatever you were going to do. The government changed radically, and everybody’s attitude toward it changed radically. Drugs came in. Although it had always been there, a war surfaced as an issue. The music changed completely. Graffiti is about the fact that you have to accept these changes — they were on the horizon — and if you didn’t, you had problems. . . . You try to fight it . . . and you lose.”83 Get your ass in gear.

No other project would make Lucas bleed more than Star Wars. For nearly three years he would agonize over plots and characters, plumbing science fiction novels, folklore, comic books, and movies for inspiration. He would struggle through draft after draft, writing and rewriting, lifting scenes and subplots he liked from earlier drafts, fussing with the spellings of planets and characters, and trying to make sense of an ever-expanding script that was starting to spin out of his control. And time and time again, he would find both friends and studio executives baffled by his story, skeptical he could ever get any of it on film.

Interesting: Baxter claims Lucas didn't read much SF

Lucas took it all in, reading books and comics, watching movies, filing away the bits and pieces he liked, discarding what he didn’t. “I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West. . . . The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.

“I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West. . . . The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.”41

“I thought, ‘we all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world,’ ” said Lucas. “We also know, as every movie made in the last ten years points out, how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive.”

For Lucas, the idea of The Star Wars offered a different, even higher calling. “I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps — that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures,”

“Once I got into Star Wars, it struck me that we had lost all that — a whole generation has grown up without fairy tales. You just don’t get them any more, and that’s the best stuff in the world — adventures in far-off lands. It’s fun.”

“The film has to make us believe it really existed,” explained Lucas, “that we’ve really gone to another galaxy to shoot. The success of the imaginary, it’s to make something totally fabricated seem real . . . that everything be credible and totally fantastic at the same time.”44

Interesting: Star Wars seems to be the culmination of the New Hollywood experiment: a fantastical, optimistically upbeat film that America needed, but paradoxically still tinged with the distinct realism of the decade (because of the used universe dictum).

“I’m trying to make everything look very natural, a casual almost I’ve-seen-this-before look,” he explained. “Like the X-wing and TIE fighter battle, you say, ‘I’ve seen that, it’s World War II — but wait a minute — that isn’t any kind of jet I’ve ever seen before.’ I want the whole film to have that quality. It’s a very hard thing to come by, because it should look very familiar but at the same time not be familiar at all.”

To Lucas’s likely delight, Champlin even took a shot at the studio mentality, noting that Star Wars proved “there is no corporate substitute for the creative passion of the individual filmmaker.”

For Lucas, it was enough that Star Wars could be merely entertaining — and entirely the point. Only a year or so earlier, moviegoers had flocked to films like Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Network, and The Enforcer — movies that embraced antiheroes and reinforced American filmgoers’ increasing disillusionment with the media, law, and politics. Lucas found such world-weariness depressing; he worried about its effect on a generation raised in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, and weaned on movies about criminals and conspiracies. Star Wars, then, was his response to cynicism, a shot of optimism in the arm of the American psyche.

What he did have, however, were plenty of ideas, which he’d typed up into a nine-page sequel treatment he had titled The Empire Strikes Back. It was more sophisticated than his messy first treatment for Star Wars, largely because Lucas had recently read Joseph Campbell’s book on comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces and was determined to trace Luke’s heroic journey more deliberately.

Interesting: in Baxter, Lucas comes across Campbell when writing the first film.

Star Wars did even better among the sci-fi crowd — the Science Fiction Writers of America presented it with a special award for the popular attention it brought to the genre — but the science fiction writers were a bit wary of Lucas’s pop culture phenomenon. They wanted to be thought of as working in the more serious tradition of Ted Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov, not George Lucas and his space opera. “Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-em-ups,” said writer Ben Bova derisively. “I had expected more of Lucas.”95 Lucas had little patience with that sort of snootiness. “I think science fiction still has a tendency to make itself so pious and serious,” he shot back, “which is what I tried to knock out.”

From here on, Lucas would always claim that he had taken his enormous first draft of Star Wars, divided it into thirds, then decided to film the middle third first, with A New Hope as the fourth installment of a nine-part saga. Kurtz could only shake his head. “That’s not true,” he said later. “There were a lot of little bits and pieces that were reasonably good ideas and that ended up being in the final draft [of Star Wars],” but “there wasn’t enough material to do other movies.”38 Lucas, however, would maintain he’d had a galaxy-spanning epic mythology in mind all along, though he would sometimes waffle on whether he had intended it to be six parts or nine.