George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
was a tremendously valuable class.’
Lucas, like many others, signed up for only one reason, according to Walter: ‘Lewis encouraged people to believe he could get them into the [Screen Directors’] Guild, and that’s why a bunch of these students were coming. Caleb Deschanel and certainly George and others would come to that class not because they wanted to learn from Lewis. They didn’t appreciate his movies, though they thought it quite appropriate that the French appreciated his movies. But George really believed he could get them into the Guild, which was a hoax.’
Lewis surrounded himself with sycophants. ‘There was a little group of outsiders, tangential to USC, who used to sit in on the course,’ says Lippincott. ‘They included the actress Corinne Calvet, who had been in one of Lewis’s films, and her husband, who was an agent or something. And it was they who brought down a copy of Steve Spielberg’s Amblin’.’
While Lucas was working his way through USC, Spielberg, rejected by USC because of his poor grades, enrolled at the less prestigious University of California at Long Beach. Aware that he needed a calling card to attract the attention of studios, he persuaded Dennis Hoffman, who ran a small special-effects company, to back a twenty-four-minute 35mm widescreen color short about a young couple who meet on the road while hitch-hiking and fall in love. He called it Amblin’. Even Spielberg dismissed the film as a ‘Pepsi commercial,’ with as little intellectual weight as a piece of driftwood, but he was relentless in showing it to anyone who might help his career. Lewis liked it enough to include it in his USC class, and to have Spielberg introduce it.
As historic meetings go, that between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg was unimpressive. Presenting his film, Spielberg, with his open-necked flowered shirt and leather jacket, his high-pitched voice and nervy delivery which caused him to stumble over his words, made an unattractive impression. His naked ambition to succeed in Hollywood also offended the elitist USC audience. Lucas didn’t like Amblin’. He told Lippincott it was ‘saccharine.’ But over the next few months, Spielberg became a fixture at USC, often turning up at ‘Thursday Night at the Movies’ screenings. ‘He became part of the gang right away,’ says Milius. ‘That was a pretty tight-knit group. We hated UCLA and people like that. We were special – though we didn’t think we were going to conquer the world; we didn’t think we had a chance. But that’s also what made us so tight-knit. But he got accepted right away, because he had the same kind of enthusiasm.’ In particular, Spielberg became friendly with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, who shared his ambition to work in studio films. Finally, in 1968, a friend got a copy of Amblin’ to production head Sidney Sheinberg at Universal, who signed Spielberg to a seven-year contract. Later, Spielberg named his company Amblin Entertainment in acknowledgment of the film’s role in his success. Robbins and Barwood would write his first cinema feature, Sugarland Express.
Urged by Milius, Lucas started seeing Japanese films at the Toho cinema on La Brea. He discovered Akira Kurosawa, in particular his period adventures like Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, and Yojimbo. Kurosawa acknowledged John Ford as his master and model. His films have the spaciousness of westerns, and heroes of mythical proportions, often played, in the words of critic Audie Bock, by ‘a filthy, scratching, heavy-drinking Toshiro Mifune who tries to avoid violence but when forced to, enters battle with his breath held.’ Eighteenth-century Japan, when Kurosawa set most of his films, was so alien it could well have been Mars: the ankle-length robes and rural settings, the castles and swordplay, the culture of imperial power and privilege opposed by daring and belief – all recalled Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Lucas particularly admired Kakushi Toride no San Akunin (1958), released in the West as The Hidden Fortress. For the first time, Kurosawa shot in CinemaScope, and the film’s panoramas, even in black and white, conferred a new spaciousness and energy. Unusually for a Japanese film, the main character is a girl. When civil war threatens her family castle, the princess loads up its treasure, dresses as a boy and enlists the wiliest of her father’s retainers (Mifune) as her guide and protector. On the way, they dragoon a couple of peasant soldiers (Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki) into helping them. As played by Misa Uehara, the princess of Hidden Fortress is far from the stereotype of the shrinking, submissive Japanese woman. She’s ruthless in exploiting the peasants, and no less tough with Mifune, whom she criticizes for having put duty ahead of family, leaving his own sister to die while he flees with her and the treasure.
Lucas loved the formalized sword-duels of Kurosawa’s historical films: combatants inching minutely as they searched for a weakness, then slashing out with razor-sharp blades. No less attractive were his themes: loyalty to a lord; honor; mutual respect among warriors; fidelity to bushido, the samurai code. The characters, plot and setting of Hidden Fortress all found their way into Star Wars, as did those of Seven Samurai, the story of seven mercenaries who come together to save a village from a predatory warlord. In this case, Lucas’s model was John Sturges’s 1960 western version of the film, The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner as the group’s laconic leader Chris and Steve McQueen as his sidekick Vin. Retrospectively, Lucas claimed nobler models for Star Wars – ‘the Arthurian Quest for the Knight, the Biblical Renewal of Faith and the classic science fiction conflict of Man versus Machine,’ as one writer would put it – but in 1974, Dune, The Magnificent Seven, The Hidden Fortress and Flash Gordon were most on his mind. In February 1975, while he was still on the second draft of the film, he would describe it to Esquire magazine as ‘the first multi-million dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie – with The Magnificent Seven thrown in.’
Lucas’s Navy Production Workshop was now well on the way to becoming an efficient film crew. All at least ten years older than him, and mostly resentful of having anyone teach them their business, the sailors were contemptuous of almost all civilians, but particularly of hippie students. Shrewdly, Lucas divided the group, and set each half to compete with the other. The better of the two became his crew for his last student film. Making a virtue of necessity, he told them it would be an exercise in the use of available light: the sole artificial light would be three photo-floods for fill-ins.
The men responded with enormous effort, and complete loyalty to Lucas. ‘Within a week, those tough navy guys were licking George’s boots,’ said Dave Johnson respectfully. ‘I don’t understand how a low-profile guy like George can do those things. But they were following him around like puppy dogs.’ It was a social model that owed a lot to Japan, and Lucas may well have adapted some of the rules he saw being practiced in Kurosawa. Lucas was the navy men’s daimyo, they his samurai, ready to sacrifice friends, even family, in their loyalty. When Lucas came to make the feature version of THX1138, he even suggested shooting in Japan, to capture that sense of alienness and focused will.
Once he had decided to make the science fiction film as his graduate project, Lucas put his team to work. ‘The navy crew had all the best equipment,’ said Willard Huyck later, ‘all the free film, so it was very shrewd of him to make THX with a navy crew.’ Being on official navy business also won Lucas access to otherwise forbidden locations. Looking for futuristic settings, he persuaded USC’s computer department to let him shoot there, and bluffed his way into the parking stations at LAX and Van Nuys Airport.
‘That was a brilliant piece of generalship,’ says John Milius of THX1138. ‘Everybody wanted the real artistic guys on their crew – guys like Bob Dalva. George went off and got all these navy guys. They were real competent. They knew how to do stuff, and get things done. They got equipment, and they got short ends of film from the navy, so he had five times as much film as everybody else, five times more equipment. That was brilliant. That was real producing.’
Having such a well-organized crew removed some of the strain of directing. But, whether out of genuine illness or because he was aware for the first time of his diabetes, Lucas felt tired most of the time. Hefting a 16mm camera onto his shoulder became increasingly difficult. Equipment was difficult to obtain. They had no dolly: for travelling shots, cameraman Zip Zimmerman sat with the Arriflex on a rolling platform of the sort used to shift loads in a warehouse, and was towed backward.
Most days, Lucas worked for Verna Fields editing Lyndon Johnson material, and shot THX at nights and on