George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
inherit had begun to show its muscle. Raised on comic books and television, teenagers wanted sensational stories and gaudy special effects. When they couldn’t find them on screen, they invented them. All over the United States, amateur mask- and model-makers were painstakingly creating their own science fiction and horror films on 8mm. By the time Lucas made Star Wars, they had ripened into a generation of special-effects technicians ready to tinker together the technology he needed to realize his fantasy.
The big films of 1966 – A Man for All Seasons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (shot by Haskell Wexler), The Group and The Sand Pebbles – served an audience as middle-aged as the men who made them. That year’s Oscars honored mainly The Sound of Music. An unexpectedly large number of films came from Britain. In Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni anatomized Swinging London, which was also exploited in Georgy Girl and Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. Alfie introduced Michael Caine to an international audience. With heavy US investment, studios like Shepperton, Pinewood, and Elstree flourished in the outer suburbs of London, fostering teams of technicians who could hold their own against those of Hollywood, without the high salaries and crippling union control that made American films so expensive.
The only science fiction film of any size released in 1966 was Fantastic Voyage, an elaborate adventure in which a group of medics, including Raquel Welch, statuesque in skin-tight neoprene, are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of a leading scientist to repair a brain lesion. In the days before computer technology, the effects were achieved with wires, models, and out-of-scale sets, with some very obvious back projection and matte work.
It wasn’t in cinema that science fiction was taking its steps onto the international stage, but in television. 1966 saw the debuts not only of the live-action Batman, the gadget adventure series Mission: Impossible and Britain’s The Avengers: on 8 September, the world was introduced to a phenomenon, as Captain James Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before.
In the fall of 1966, just after he received his BA from USC, and while he was still working for Verna Fields, Lucas told Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins at a party thrown by Herb Kossower about an idea he’d had for a short science fiction film. As a first step into the fantastic, Lucas’s idea was tentative. He wondered if one could make an sf film without elaborate sets and costumes, using Los Angeles as Godard had used Paris in Alphaville, and simply suggesting the future by manipulating the image as he had in his animated USC films. If Don Glut could make Superman in the Valley, how much better might an avant-gardiste do? Lucas and Murch put together a couple of pages about an escapee from an underground civilization who emerges through a manhole into a new world; but nobody could see where it might go. Murch and Robbins developed another idea, called ‘Star Dance,’ but Lucas persisted, assembling a sort of script for a fifteen-minute film.
At this point he began to immerse himself in science fiction and fantasy. Willow, with its midget hero making an epic journey to confront the mountain fortress of an enchanter, suggests more than a nodding acquaintance with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Lucas told Alan Dean Foster, who novelized Star Wars, that Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was his favorite book. Trying to explain his vision of the Star Wars films, Lucas often quoted that book’s introduction: ‘I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man/Or the man who’s half a boy.’
Frank Herbert’s Dune had a more far-reaching influence on Lucas’s future work. From the moment in December 1963 when the science fiction magazine Analog published the first of three episodes of Dune World, with its cover by John Schoenherr of a stone pinnacle spearing out of a desert landscape against a sky with two moons, the novel caught Lucas’s imagination. Once Herbert finished the longer book version and its sequels, Dune’s story of a universe based on the ‘spice’ Melange that conferred near-immortality but which existed on only one planet in the universe, the desert world Arrakis, aka ‘Dune,’ entered the common experience of his generation. Herbert imagined a universe run by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, ruthlessly defending his declining empire from regional families, in particular that of Duke Leto Atriedes, whose son Paul was destined to overthrow him after acquiring near-godlike powers. Manipulating events from behind the scenes were the quasi-religious Bene Gesserit, an ancient sect of nun-like women with telepathic powers – not unlike Lucas’s monkish Jedi knights.
By comparison with the coming excesses of 1968, 1967, when Lucas rejoined USC as a graduate student, was calm. While he continued to teach the navy and Marine camera class, most of his Masters work consisted of two films, both building on the success of 1.42:08. He made anyone lived in a pretty little [how] town with Paul Golding, his collaborator on Herbie. The film, in CinemaScope and color, used actors and some sophisticated manipulation of images to tell a fable based on the poem of the same name by e.e. cummings. Life in an idyllic town is destroyed when a photographer arrives, each click of his shutter turning living people into dead monochrome images. Despite its greater technical sophistication, the film recalled A Look at Life in its graphic stiffness, its avoidance of character and dialogue, its reliance on flashy editing and photographic effects to disguise a lack of interest in people.
Lucas’s second film, The Emperor, was a documentary, and one of his best. His first idea had been to make a film about Wolfman Jack, but Smith had done such a good job of maintaining his incognito that nobody knew where he could be found. (In American Graffiti, one of the kids would insist that he broadcast from a plane circling over the United States.) Lucas compromised by choosing as his subject Bob Hudson, a deejay at KBLA in Burbank, right in the Valley, who grandiosely christened himself ‘The Emperor.’
Introduced by a beautiful girl cooing, ‘It’s his marvellous majesty,’ Hudson, surprisingly middle-aged and incoherent for a deejay with a large teenage following, appears making a triumphal progress through the streets of Burbank in the back of Murch and Robbins’s restored Rolls-Royce, accepting the plaudits of adoring fans, most of them eager girls. ‘Get off the freeway, peasant,’ someone shouts. ‘The Emperor is coming!’ Filmed in wide screen, intercut with helicopter news-shots of jammed freeways, hippie love-ins and facetious commercials with vox pop interviews, The Emperor shows Lucas stretching the limits of the short film and the documentary. The credits appear in the middle, and list the entire staff of the film school as student advisers, superimposed over a close-up of Hudson, pouchy, middle-aged and bored.
Marcia helped Lucas edit The Emperor. It was the first time many of the USC gang had met her, and the general reaction was astonishment that such an attractive and intelligent woman could see anything in a nerd like Lucas, however talented. ‘Marcia was very bright and upbeat,’ said Richard Walter. ‘Just the loveliest woman that you ever saw in your life. They seemed such an unlikely couple. She’s quite adorable.’
Their favorable impression of her strengthened when they saw her work on The Emperor. ‘The Emperor is a superb film,’ says Milius, who, with Richard Walter, appears on the soundtrack impersonating a Mexican bandido. ‘It still holds up today. When you see something like that, you think that maybe one of the great losses is that Marcia never became a film-maker and continued as an editor. But one of the other great losses is that George stopped making movies, and got interested in the sort of stuff that Lucasfilm puts out. Because he was a really dynamic film-maker.’
Lucas drifted back into after-hours campus society with the many old friends who were still at USC, including Milius and Charley Lippincott. Now living with Marcia in the ramshackle Portola Drive house, he had his eyes clearly set on a professional career. With that in mind, he even attended a course on direction taught by the comic Jerry Lewis. ‘George hated that class,’ recalls Charley Lippincott. ‘He sat back in the very last row, and sometimes I’d sit with him. Lewis had such an outrageous ego, it drove you crazy.’ Richard Walter rated Lewis ‘a gigantically talented man, but without taste. It’s as if those circuits just don’t operate. He was still making movies. He was at Columbia, in the midst of a “multi-picture pact.” He would frequently hold the class there, at the old Columbia studios on Gower Street. We’d all meet there on the lot; very exciting. And then he’d