George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
was punished by a swat from the club paddle, as was spinning your tires within two blocks of the clubhouse.’ They’re silent, however, about Lucas’s accusation that though he was never a member, they used him as a stooge, sending him in to enrage other gangs who, when they chased the pint-sized troublemaker down an alley, found themselves facing the Faros armed with bike chains.
Lucas was right, they agree, about initiations, but they deny ever having done anything as drastic as trashing a police prowler. (Lucas insisted ‘some friends’ did try this trick one Halloween, but without the film’s spectacular result: ‘The car just sort of went clunk, and it was really very undramatic.’) The worst a potential member might endure was being rolled through a supermarket on a trolley, dressed only in a diaper, or being blindfolded and forced to eat dogfood, or a live goldfish – and even then, they insist, the fish was replaced by a piece of peach. ‘That was the big, tough club,’ says Reiss, now a respectable local businessman, like most other members. The Faros’ last president, Marty Jackman, even became the local representative of the Sierra Club.
As a teenager, Lucas wanted to join the Faros, or at least win their acceptance. He let his hair grow even longer, fitted silver toecaps to his pointed boots, and wore black Levi’s that remained unwashed for weeks at a time. Nagging his parents finally got him a car, a tiny Autobianchi, nicknamed, when Fiat bought up the company, the Bianchina. It had a two-cylinder engine, hardly more powerful than a motorbike, and with an appalling clatter. Even then, there was a trade-off: George would become the delivery boy of his father’s business.
Lucas was grateful and resentful at the same time. He had a car, but it was barely a car. It had ‘a sewing machine motor in it. It was a dumb little car. What could I do with that? It was practically a motor scooter.’ Some of his humiliation would pass to Terry the Toad in American Graffiti, forced to bumble about on a Vespa. The deal with his father to work at the store didn’t last long. George was expected to haul large, heavy boxes of paper in the summer heat, then sweep up the store, clean the toilets, and lock up. After a few weeks he had a blazing fight with his father, who fired him and offered the job to George Frankenstein. ‘The damn kid won’t even work for me,’ he told Frankenstein, ‘after I’ve built this business for him.’ Privately, he called his son ‘a scrawny little devil.’ Lucas later said of American Graffiti: ‘In a way, the film was made so my father won’t think those were wasted years. I can say I was doing research, though I didn’t know it at the time.’
Still a few months shy of the date on which he could get his license, Lucas could only drive on the family ranch. Once, trying to make the Bianchina behave like a high-powered rod, he swung its back end into a walnut tree. He got his license after one failure, for forgetting traffic rules, but promptly drove the Fiat so fast that he rolled it at seventy miles an hour going round a bend.
Lucas had the car towed forlornly to Modesto’s Foreign Car Service. Fortunately, his friend John Plummer worked there. Also into cars, he’d rescued and restored an old MG, and offered to help George fix up his Fiat. For weeks, the two boys worked side by side in the garage, which was also the local Renault dealership. After hours, they turned the Fiat into at least an approximation of a lean, mean machine. They cut away the mashed roof entirely, fitted a new low windscreen, and a rollbar. They souped up the engine and put in a silencer, the ominous growl of which belied the feebleness of the motor. Better shock absorbers improved the suspension and minimized the chance of another roll, and Lucas also installed extra-wide professional seat-belts. The Fiat, never very attractive, now looked ungainly and foreshortened – a ‘weird little car,’ in the words of one friend – but George loved it. He had wheels at last, and he was ready to roll.
He began to explore the pleasures of driving fast. He and Plummer raced on an old go-kart track behind the garage. Plummer inclined to heftiness, but George was light, like the Fiat. He found he could take turns faster than larger cars and still not spin out, which made up for his lack of speed on the straightaways. The experience was exhilarating: ‘The engine, the noise, being able to peel rubber through all four gears with three shifts, the speed. It was the thrill of doing something really well. When you drift through a corner and come up at just the right time, and shift down – there’s something special about it. It’s like running a very good race. You’re all there, and everything is working.’
What wasn’t working was everything else. George’s camera lay unused, the environment box his father built him was discarded. His schoolwork limped along at a D+ average, barely high enough to graduate. Worst of all from the perspective of George Sr, he showed no inclination to take over the Lucas Company. ‘I was a hellraiser,’ Lucas conceded. ‘My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. My parents – not my mother: mothers never write off their sons – but my father wrote me off.’ He overstates the case, but not by much. Even when George began his film career, his father was pessimistic. ‘He kept telling me he wanted his son to go into his business,’ recalled a friend, Modesto city councilman Frank Muratore, ‘and didn’t think he would do very well in movies. I recall how sad George [Sr] was about that.’ George Sr confessed later, ‘Frankly, we just didn’t understand George. I’d try to get my point across and he’d just sit there and look at me. I’d just run out of breath. He wouldn’t pay any attention.’
At sixteen, the gap between Lucas and his father seemed an abyss, but over the next twenty years George would become more and more recognizable as the son of a small-town Methodist businessman. ‘It’s sort of ironic,’ he muses about his father, ‘because I swore when I was a kid I’d never do what he did. At eighteen, we had this big break, when he wanted me to go into the business and I refused, and I told him, “There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars … and two, that I will never be president of a company.” I guess I got outwitted.’
Almost as soon as he won his license, George started getting traffic tickets. For the police, hot-rodders were anathema, and trapping them something between a sacred calling and a sport. Most of the local cops were young themselves, had grown up with the low-riders and hot-rodders, and envied their lawless opposite numbers. In More American Graffiti, Lucas brings back Bob Falfa, the rodder defeated by John Milner in the first film, as a California Highway Patrol cop on a motorcycle, booking the people who used to be his rivals. Called into traffic court, Lucas went with his father, who insisted his son get a haircut and wear a suit – the only time anyone ever saw George in collar and tie. Business clothing became the symbol of everything his generation despised: functionaries of all sorts came to be dismissively called ‘suits.’
The car culture thrust Lucas into a new, pragmatic world. All that counted were your skills, your capacity for action. Life wasn’t for reflection: it was for use, like the landscape around Modesto. ‘George has this idea about a used universe,’ says sound engineer Randy Thom. ‘He wanted things in his films to look like they’ve been worn down, rusted, knocked about. He didn’t want things to look brand new.’
It’s not hard to trace this vision to those days in 1960 and 1961 when Lucas kicked around the world of Northern Californian car racing. Plenty of fairgrounds had installed raceways. They staged demolition derbies on weekends, preceded by auto-cross – racing sports and stock cars against the clock. Like hot-rodding, auto-cross was a first step into the pro world of the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR), or Class C sports car competition. Detroit was already taking an interest in what happened at circuits in Stockton, Goleta, Willow Springs, Cotati, and Laguna Seca, just outside Monterey. New tires, new fuels, new engines could be tested to destruction by these rural daredevils, some of whom might make it to the sponsored big time, as had Junior Johnson and Freddie Lorenzen, backed by Chevrolet, Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear. Lucas delved into this world in More American Graffiti, where John Milner, having made his reputation as a hot-rodder, tries to break into big-time drag racing, with its professional teams sponsored by big automotive companies.
The Bianchina was a toy in the high-powered world of auto-cross, but even if Lucas had had a better car, Californian law forbade anyone to race until they were twenty-one. Always the team player, he attached himself to a winner and insinuated himself into his group until he made himself indispensable, much as he would do with