George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
Now.
For the make-or-break meeting, Coppola flew down to Los Angeles, but, Easy Rider-like, rode onto the lot astride a huge Harley Davidson. He was well prepared, with the help of Lucas, who gave Charley Lippincott $100 to create a montage of ‘underground’ films to show the Warners board. ‘We put together this presentation showing that it was going to be futuristic,’ said Lucas, ‘and outlining how we were going to be shooting it on location and such. And we put in there that we were going to develop this very unusual reality using “rotary-cam photography.” Fortunately nobody at the studio asked us what it was, because it was nothing.’
After this, Coppola moved in. He had a new movie ready to go, he told the suits. Here’s the script – he slammed down a draft of THX1138, which he’d barely read. Here’s the cast – except for Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, all were unknown, and none had yet been asked if they wanted to appear. ‘Where is the money?’ he asked them rhetorically. He departed in a roar of exhaust, leaving them to chew on his proposal. The next day, when he still hadn’t received the green light, he wired them: ‘PUT UP OR SHUT UP’ – or, in some versions, ‘SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT.’
Warners did put up, but not as whole-heartedly as Coppola had hoped. They offered to lend – not advance or invest – $3.5 million, part of it in the form of $2500 a week seed-money while Coppola was setting up his company. If they liked THX1138, this sum could become a down-payment on the package. If they didn’t, Coppola would have to refund every penny. Given that he had no other offers, Coppola agreed.
Lucas received the news with delight. The way Coppola described it to him, the strings attached to Warners’ offer became thistledown. Immediately, he and Coppola, with Korty’s help, began visiting mansions in Marin County, looking for the future headquarters of the company. They made an offer on the Dibble estate in Ross, but while Coppola was raising the money, it went to someone else. The buyer already owned another mansion, and Coppola offered on that too, only to have the zoning commission refuse his application to transform it into a film studio.
Gradually, Coppola turned against the Laterna model. If he couldn’t find a mansion, maybe he should look for something in San Francisco itself – where, in addition, staff and services were more readily available. Dismayed, Lucas argued that the whole point had been to abandon city influences. He cited Korty’s rural retreat. All he wanted, he said, was ‘a nice little house to work in.’ But Coppola bulldozed him. The sound equipment would arrive shortly from Germany, and they must have a place to install it. Anyway, their working capital was all his, raised by selling his Los Angeles house and taking out substantial loans on the promise of a Warners deal.
Korty found a recording studio at 827 Folsom Street, in what locals derisively called the ‘warehouse and wino’ section of San Francisco, and Coppola leased three floors. Once Coppola had persuaded Korty to become the first tenant of their new facility, Lucas threw up his hands. Francis had won again.
Eleanor Coppola conceived and managed the décor of the new facility while Francis toyed with names. His first choice, ‘Transameri-can Sprocket Works,’ traded on the current taste for the Edwardian, which had hippie girls wandering Haight-Ashbury in Pre-Raphaelite braids and gypsy skirts, accompanied by men in crimson pre-World War I military tunics over jeans and sandals. Remembering Laterna’s magic lanterns, Coppola finally chose ‘American Zoetrope,’ after the optical toy of a spinning drum with vertical slits through which one glimpses dancing or running figures.
The Rain People, proudly bearing the American Zoetrope logo, opened on 27 August. Reviews were mixed, but Coppola brushed them aside, consumed by the fulfilment of his dream. The new company’s name not only implied that it could do everything from A to Z, but, once it was launched as a public company, would alphabetically give it a spot near the top of the share listings.
For the moment, however, nobody but Coppola owned any shares – not even Lucas, whom he grandly named vice president. Mona Skarger, one of the producers on The Rain People, became secretary-treasurer. Christopher Pearce was general manager. Jobs were also found for Bart Patton, Bob Dalva and Dennis Jakob, all cronies of Coppola, some going back to high school and Hofstra. Perhaps thinking of insinuating someone more personally loyal to him than to Coppola, Lucas offered the job of head of intellectual property – basically head of development – to Charley Lippincott, who turned him down. He didn’t want to move to San Francisco, nor to give up his ambition to make documentary films.
Being located in San Francisco had one definite advantage for Lucas and Coppola: few films were made there, and the local branch of IATSE, its hands full with mainly theatrical technicians, didn’t look too closely at who did what at Zoetrope. Cameramen could record their own sound, and even direct. The union listed Walter Murch as simply a post-production worker, a flexible term that could encompass editing, sound editing, even scriptwriting.
The day they took over the building, Coppola ordered everyone up on the roof and had them photographed: Korty, Carroll Ballard and an unknown guy – already names were being forgotten – each with a hand-held 16mm camera; Milius in sombrero and bandoliers; Warners’ liaison man Barry Beckerman; Lucas, almost unrecognisable in heavy beard and wide-brimmed black felt hat, like some middle-European anarchist; Bob Dalva, also with camera; Larry Sturhahn, later to be the producer of THX; Al Locatelli, its eventual production manager, incongruously playing a flute; Dennis Jakob, crouched behind an enormous piece of sound equipment. And of course Francis, dressed in a long double-breasted coat and a felt hat with turned-up brim, and clutching a zoetrope under his arm – the model for an allegorical statue in some Sicilian square of the town’s great explorer who had encompassed the world.
The sound equipment arrived, and was installed while carpenters were still sawing in the corridors. Walter Murch arrived on his BMW motorbike to supervise. For him, the chance to work on a state-of-the-art Keller system was more than enough reason to relocate to the Bay area. Able to handle seven separate strips of film in gauges from 8mm to 70mm, and video as well, it was the most advanced piece of equipment of its type in America – so advanced that when it broke down, an engineer had to fly in from Hamburg to fix it.
Word quickly spread of the radical new venture. Stanley Kubrick, cinema’s most famous recluse, corresponded with Coppola about special effects from his rural hideout in England. John Schlesinger said he wanted to rent space. Mike Nichols intended to invest. One night, Coppola was making coffee in the conference room when Orson Welles rang. He was thinking of making a film in San Francisco, he said. Awed, Coppola talked with him for half an hour, coffee pot in his hand, while the water overflowed from the sink and flooded the room.
American Zoetrope officially became an entity on 14 November 1969, when Coppola’s attorney filed the incorporation papers. The facility, though still far from ready, was opened by San Francisco’s Mayor Joseph Alioto on 13 December. Alioto announced that Coppola had already spent $500,000 on equipment, never mind staff. Except for John Korty, who was cutting his feature Riverrun, the only person actually working there was Haskell Wexler, who was shooting a huge rock concert being held at nearby Altamont with the Maysles brothers. He offered Lucas a few days’ work as a cameraman, and Lucas was there on the day when Hell’s Angels employed as security men murdered a member of the audience, Meredith Hunter. John Milius insists that Lucas shot the scenes of the killing which were later used in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Lucas says he can’t remember.
American Zoetrope became a target of pilgrimage. ‘It all looked too good to believe,’ said one early visitor, ‘terribly chic and terribly sincere, with leggy secretaries in crocheted miniskirts, $50,000 KEM and Steenbeck editing tables, Creative Playthings paraphernalia, bubbly chairs, and blowups of D.W. Griffith on the walls.’ The main reception area was dominated by a pool table and a silver espresso machine. Fabrics from the Finnish company Marimekko draped the walls, their purples, oranges and yellows echoed even in the décor of the freight elevator. Every Thursday night, Coppola screened classic movies, with a buffet of Chinese food. A lavish brochure in faux art-nouveau style promised films and facilities that combined the best of Europe and America, of Hollywood and the Bay area.
Prospective tenants soon found it was too good to believe. Zoetrope could only handle the