George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
in the whole of California.
I pattern my life on Hitler. He didn’t just take over the country. He worked his way into the existing fabric first.
Francis Ford Coppola, Newsweek, March 1967
One of the crumbs from the Hollywood table that occasionally fell into the eager hands of institutions like USC was the Samuel Warner Scholarship. The winner spent six months at the studio on a salary of $80 a week, doing what he wanted, learning what he could. He could even nominate the department in which he interned.
In 1967, the shortlist for this perk comprised Lucas and Walter Murch. On the day the decision was announced, they hung out on the USC patio and discussed what they’d do if they won. Whoever got the job, they agreed, the other would do everything he could to help. That was the trouble with Old Hollywood, Lucas argued: its primary directive was ‘divide and rule.’ It would never be like that with the next generation, he assured his friends. At USC, everyone worked with everyone else on every project. That’s how it would be in New Hollywood too.
Lucas won, and in June 1967 he drove his Camaro to Burbank and checked in at the gate. Traditionally, he has said he wanted to spend his six months with the legendary animator Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and Speedy Gonzales. Directed to the animation department, he found it reduced to a single office with ‘one guy, who was sort of head of the department, and he would just sit in his office and twiddle his thumbs all day.’ The department had been closed.
Legend also claims that Lucas arrived on the Warners lot on the very day that Jack, last of the four Warner Brothers, cleared out his office. ‘From my point of view, the film industry died in 1965,’ says Lucas, amplifying this story. ‘It’s taken this long for people to realize the body is cold. The day I won my six-month internship and walked onto the Warner Bros. lot was the day Jack Warner left and the studio was taken over by Seven Arts. I walked through the empty lot and thought, “This is the end.” The industry had been taken over by people who knew how to make deals and operate offices but had no idea how to make movies. When the six months was over, I never went back.’
The skinny, bearded kid in jeans and running shoes ambling across the lot, passing the dapper, impeccably suited Jack Warner with his hairline mustache and insincere smile, trudging into oblivion, is such a Hollywood moment that one wishes it were true. Unfortunately for myth, when Lucas arrived, Warners’ animation department had been closed for five years. Since 1962, Chuck Jones had been attached to MGM, turning out versions of Tom and Jerry which even he himself rated as inferior. As for Jack Warner, his departure from the lot was as prolonged as a soprano’s farewell performances. He sold his stock to Seven Arts in November 1966, but the company encouraged him to stay on in his old office as an independent producer. Long after Steve Ross’s Kinney Services bought out Seven Arts in 1969, Warner remained on the lot. Only when Kinney told him they wanted to convert his private dining room into offices did the last of the Warners move over the hills into Century City, on what had been part of the old Twentieth Century-Fox, and set up Jack L. Warner Productions.
Lucas found the Warners lot a ghost town. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz commented soberly of that time, ‘I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that any minute I’d look out and see tumbleweeds come rolling past.’ Only one film was shooting: Finian’s Rainbow. Howard Kazanjian from USC was second assistant director, and got Lucas onto the set. He stood at the back and watched a man with a beard and a loud voice order people about and wave his arms a lot. If this was the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, the first film-school student of their generation to penetrate the Hollywood establishment, Lucas wasn’t impressed.
In 1968, Coppola, in the estimation of everyone who knew him, had the bucket in his hand and was headed for the well. Before he’d even finished his postgraduate degree at UCLA film school, this ebullient voluptuary with a thick black beard and a tendency to corpulence had directed two soft-core porn films, The Peeper and The Belt Girls and the Playboy, written both music and lyrics for a musical, finished a feature screenplay, and worked in Roger Corman’s film factory, turning foreign sf films into fodder for the drive-ins.
Producer Ray Stark recognized Coppola as someone he could use, and offered him a job as hired gun and script fixer at Seven Arts, for which he was then head of production. Lured by promises of an eventual directing credit, and Stark’s flattering assurances of his genius, Coppola accepted. The day he did so, an anonymous sign went up on the UCLA bulletin board. It said simply, ‘Sellout.’
In between fixing broken-down movies for Stark, Coppola turned out at least three screenplays a year, in the hope that Stark would let him direct one. Each time, however, Seven Arts assigned them to someone else. Grown cold and canny, Coppola optioned a 1963 British novel called You’re a Big Boy Now, offering author David Benedictus $1000 if the film was ever made. He scripted it as a wise-ass comedy with music about a shy boy who spends his days roller-skating round the stacks of the New York Public Library, replacing returned books, and who falls into the bizarre world that surrounds a febrile young library user.
Half flower-power comedy, half pop-art musical, You’re a Big Boy Now evolved into an American version of Richard Lester’s films with the Beatles, with a mobile camera (critic Rex Reed called Coppola ‘the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera’), musical numbers erupting into the action, and characters as much comic-strip as Actors’ Studio. Seven Arts was sufficiently impressed to sign a new deal with Coppola. He would write three films for them – two, The Conversation and The Rain People, from his original stories, and the third, The Scarlet Letter, from Nathaniel Hawthorne
You’re a Big Boy Now lost every penny of the $800,000 invested in it. In fact, Seven Arts estimated it lost over $1 million, once they counted advertising and print costs. But by the time it came out, the company’s mind was elsewhere. Having just bought a tottering Warner Brothers, it wanted something in production quickly. Dusting off the 1947 E.Y. Harburg/Burton Lane Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, a whimsical tale of an eccentric Irishman wandering the rural Southern United States looking for a leprechaun’s buried pot of gold, Warners-Seven Arts, as it was now known, exercised an outstanding option on the services of a tottering Fred Astaire, assembled a low-cost supporting cast led by British unknowns Petula Clark and Tommy Steele, and assigned the film to their cheapest and hungriest director – Coppola.
In June 1967 he started shooting Finian’s Rainbow on Warners’ Burbank lot. Distracted, he didn’t look around for a few days. When he did, ‘I noticed this skinny kid watching me. I was curious who this young man was, and I think I went over to him and said, “Hi. See anything interesting?” and he said, “Not much.” That was the first time I met George Lucas.’
This first encounter between two men who were to become pivotal not only in each other’s careers but in the growth of New Hollywood typified their relationship. Coppola never ceased to think of Lucas as that grubby boy watching from the shadows. ‘Actually,’ said Lucas, ‘he calls me a stinky kid. He says, “You’re a stinky kid. You do what you want.”’
Each day, Lucas came in and stood about on Coppola’s set, a thin, silent guy, habitually dressed in a white T-shirt, black pants and sneakers. The crew ignored him, and even Coppola, once he’d established who he was, only spoke to him in passing. It didn’t escape Lucas’s notice, however, that he and Coppola were the only people on the crew under fifty, and the only ones with beards.
After two weeks, Lucas had had enough. He thought the animation department might have a 16mm camera he could borrow to shoot a film. Also, Carl Foreman had suggested that if he wrote a treatment for a feature version of THX1138 4EB, he would see if he could interest Columbia in it. Either way, he felt he had nothing more to learn by watching Coppola.
‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ Coppola blustered when Lucas told him. ‘Aren’t I entertaining enough? Have you learned everything you’re going to