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If Star Wars worked out, one thing would have to change for sure: he’d control the money.
Lucas would also collect the art of Norman Rockwell. To Lucas, it was something rare and valuable: art that actually spoke to him.
“Movie serials were the real stand-out event,” said Lucas. “I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials.”76
Like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, Lucas’s Bianchina wouldn’t look like much, but it would have it where it counted—and he would make a lot of the special modifications himself.
At the encouragement of John Milius, Lucas went to see several Kurosawa films at the La Brea Cinema in Los Angeles, and remembered being “really blown away” by the director’s 1954 film The Seven Samurai. “It really had a huge influence on my life in terms of seeing something that brilliant and something that emotional, and at the same time so exotic,” said Lucas.70 He loved Kurosawa’s style, “so strong and unique,”71 with the horizontal “wipes” to transition between scenes, the rat-a-tat editing, and the dusty, slightly worn look of his sets and costumes. Everything in a Kurosawa movie looked
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feel familiar—another conceit Lucas would bring to Star Wars.
To Steven Spielberg, Coppola was “my shining star.… Francis was the first inspiration to a lot of young filmmakers because he broke through before many others.”9
Afterward, Spielberg headed backstage, where he found Lucas with Coppola—and their individual recollections years later of their first encounter is reflective of both of their personalities and narrative styles. Spielberg remembered the moment warmly and vividly. “George was a really friendly guy,” according to Spielberg. “[He said], ‘Hey, how are you?’ and we shook hands and became friends from that moment on. The friendship actually began with a handshake.”
For much of 1970, executives at Paramount had been wooing Coppola to take the helm of a low-budget action film based on one of the biggest books of 1969, a sprawling gangster novel by Mario Puzo called The Godfather. Coppola was with Lucas, recutting THX in the Mill Valley editing room, when Paramount executive Peter Bart called once more to offer him The Godfather. “They’ve just offered me this Italian gangster movie,” Coppola told Lucas. “It’s like a $3 million potboiler based on a best-seller. Should I do it?”135 To Lucas, whose father had always reinforced the concept of staying in the
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“We’re in debt. You’ve gotta get a job.”136 On September 28, Coppola signed the deal with Paramount to direct The Godfather, with production to begin in the spring of 1971. He was offered $75,000 to direct it, plus 6 percent of the profits—not much, especially if the film didn’t work, and given that Coppola was a lavish spender.137 “It takes no imagination to live within your means,” Coppola liked to say.138 But it was a job.
In 1971 Lucas officially opened Lucasfilm Ltd., his own independent production company run out of his little house in Mill Valley. Its lone employees were him and Marcia.
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, noted that “Lucas doesn’t seem to have been very concerned with his plot… but as a work of visual imagination it’s special,” and awarded the film three out of four stars.167 Critics for the New York Times were particularly
effusive, with one reviewer applauding Lucas’s “technical virtuosity that… achieves exceptional emotional intensity” (finally, someone who got it!),168 while Vincent Canby called the film “a Wow.” THX 1138, wrote Canby, “is practically
an iconography of contemporary graphics, in which actors are, intentionally, almost but not quite indistinguishable from the décor.”169 It was a sentiment that would be lobbed at Lu...
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generous, and one that promised to make both Lucas and Coppola quite a bit of money if—and this was a big if—American Graffiti could turn a profit. Finally, as he had in his initial agreement with United Artists, Lucas also rolled his untitled space opera—“the Flash Gordon thing”—into the deal with Universal. If all went well, it would be his next project.
Lucas had nothing but praise for Spielberg’s most recent effort, an edge-of-the-seat made-for-TV thriller called Duel, about a mild-mannered motorist being stalked by the unseen driver of a tanker truck. Lucas had watched it at Coppola’s house during a party, shutting himself into an upstairs room while the festivities raged below him. “I ran downstairs and said, ‘Francis, you’ve got to come see this movie. This guy’s really good.’… I was very, very impressed with his work.”57
the Wolfman as he yelped and howled
The happy ending of Star Wars, noted Time, was “a rarity these days,” and even Gene Siskel was inclined to agree that the film’s success had sent a clear message: Americans were ready to have fun at the movies again. “Give us old-fashioned, escapist movies with upbeat endings,” wrote Siskel.30 A critic at the Boston Globe would put it even more concisely: “Go—and enjoy.”
Lucas did have some doubts about giving such a pivotal role to a rubber puppet, no matter how talented the puppeteer. “That was a real leap,” said Lucas, “because if that puppet had not worked, the whole film would have been down the tubes.”28 He needn’t have worried; not only was Yoda carefully built—with small motors and rotors to open his eyes, wiggle his ears, and pull back his cheeks—but also he was brilliantly performed by Oz, with a team of two and sometimes three other puppeteers in support. The moment filming began with Oz and Yoda in early August, it was clear the character was going
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With Yoda literally in good hands, Lucas applied himself personally to wooing the film’s other Jedi master, as well as the last holdout from his original cast. Over lunch, Lucas successfully lured Sir Alec Guinness back with the promise of one-third of a point for less than a day’s work.
“Making a movie is a terribly painful experience,” said Lucas, shown here on the set of Star Wars with (from left) Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher, and Dave Prowse, sans his Darth Vader helmet. Star Wars baffled Fox executives, who refused to provide Lucas the money he requested to finish the movie to his liking. Lucas never forgot it, and vowed he wouldn’t go begging for money for one of his own movies again.
Lucas with Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, who orchestrated Disney’s $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. Lucas believed the deal required Disney to use his treatments for Episodes VII through IX, and was disappointed when Episode VII was made largely without his input. “I will go my way,” Lucas finally conceded, “and I’ll let them go their way.”
Longtime friend, collaborator, and Indiana Jones producer Kathleen Kennedy was Lucas’s handpicked successor to serve as president of Lucasfilm after its sale to Disney. The first Star Wars film with Kennedy at the helm, The Force Awakens, would earn more than $2 billion in ticket sales worldwide and successfully relaunch the franchise.
Lucas at peace—mostly—at Skywalker Ranch. “I hope I’ll be remembered as one of the pioneers of digital cinema,” he said.
