Though it doesn’t quite beat a certain 125-page story conference transcript, I’ve managed to get my hands on what I think can rightfully be called a Lucas-rarity. It’s been referenced in a couple of books on Lucas1, but isn’t to my knowledge generally available, though it should hold the interest of anyone interested in THX 1138, American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and filmmaking in general in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
Allow me to first give it some context (or skip to goods):
The Early Years of George Lucas
Despite whatever sour feelings his (so-called) fans may hold for his work today, George Lucas was nothing if not a driven and extremely talented filmmaker from day one, best exemplified in his 1967 pièce de résistance student short THX 1138 4EB2, though the rest of his USC output from the late sixties, including his first ever film, the Time Magazine picture montage animation effort, A Look at Life3, the car-centric visual tone-poem 1:42.08 and the politically charged Freiheit4 all show signs of the themes and aesthetics that have ended up defining him as a filmmaker ever since.
Lucas was known as a student to watch at USC, and around spring of 1967, Charles Lippincott, who would later work for Lucas as the marketing director on Star Wars (and whose interviews form the basis for the amazing The Making of Star Wars), dropped out of a sponsorship to go to Arizona for three months and shoot a ‘making of’ short for McKenna’s Gold; at Lippincott’s suggestion, Lucas took his place. Once there however, the experience confirmed Lucas’ growing suspicion that Hollywood was a wasteful and corrupt lumbering monstrosity of old, out of touch with the world around it and incapable of making films that were even remotely personal or relevant.
He finished on June 18, 1967 and aptly named it: 6.18.67.
Remember that for a moment.
Afterwards, at the end of his tenure at USC, in 1968, Lucas won a scholarship which granted him a six-month internship at Warners-Seven Arts (which would a few years later revert back to their old name, Warner Bros). Here he struck up a friendship with Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Finian’s Rainbow, who while being almost diametrically opposite of Lucas, personality-wise, was like him, young, graduated from a film school (UCLA) and full-bearded, setting them apart from the rest of the fifties and up-crew. During the editing of Finian’s Rainbow, the two men bonded and the rest is history.
In 1969, they went on the road for Coppola’s next film, The Rain People, a made-on-the-move film based off of the same principles American Zoetrope5 would soon be founded upon. During The Rain People, Lucas made a documentary simply called Filmmaker6, which is a fascinating look at how Coppola (and by proxy Lucas), was fighting the rigidity of the old system and its cumbersome, expensive ways. It also shows a 29-year-old beardless Coppola remarking “the world is filled with guys who said: ‘First I’ll make the money, then I’ll go off and make the personal films I’ve always wanted to make’, yet they never get around to doing it”, a curious parallel to what has since happened to Lucas, which, since it’s Lucas’ documentary, makes it poignantly fitting in retrospect.
Up until this point Lucas had always wanted to be a documentarian more than a feature film director, but as the idea of American Zoetrope started taking shape, he nonetheless went to work on THX 1138, the feature-length adaptation of his student short, expanding it into an abstract sci-fi masterpiece, which at once echoes both vaguely and at times very specifically, everything from his USC influences, like 21 – 87, to his own short films and even foreshadowing his coming obsession with pulp adventures in the odd Buck Rogers intro7. As it so happens, Lucas even found the time to direct a short documentary about THX 1138 called Bald.
THX 1138 was a major milestone for Lucas not because of its scope, but because no sooner had he finished the film, than Warner Bros took it away from him and recut it without his consent8. Adding insult to injury, they considered the film such a failure, they cancelled the seven-picture deal they had with American Zoetrope, forcing Coppola into doing The Godfather.
And so forth.
The Interview
And this is where we come to the heart of the matter.
It is 1971, THX 1138 was released on March 11, American Zoetrope is spiraling towards certain doom, Lucas has become even more disillusioned with Hollywood than he was during his stint on McKenna’s Gold, and where exactly things go from here for the upstart and its members is all up in the air. And while American Zoetrope and Coppola had slowly started to cause waves — mostly due to THX’s failure as it were, though also because Coppola wasn’t afraid of touting American Zoetrope a state-of-the-art facility which could outmatch Hollywood, and that the company (and thus himself) was the future of filmmaking — Lucas was little more than a promising student who had made an obscure sci-fi film which opened small and died fast.
During the summer of ’71, as all of this is happening, Gene Youngblood interviewed the then 27-year-old Lucas for a Los Angeles-based educational TV station, KCET in an hour-long program called George Lucas: Maker of Films.
(The sound is slightly out of sync on the embedded video, I suggest downloading the full thing instead).
How this has managed preservation until now is a small media miracle in my book. It offers rare insight into both Lucas as well as American Zoetrope’s position following THX’s release. And remember, this is before Lucas goes on to make American Graffiti and later Star Wars, and the fact that this at the time relative nobody is interviewed at all, is probably because of Gene Youngblood himself was at the forefront of film, though in a journalistic capacity, and thus in touch with what was coming out of student films and also what was going on with this prodigious young filmmaker.
The rarity of any footage of Lucas from this period makes this amazing in itself, but more than that, this is also very soon after Lucas had his first film taken away from him, something which would happen again on American Graffiti, and one of the prime reasons that Lucasfilm came into existence at all. Had things fallen out differently, he may well have continued working with Coppola at American Zoetrope.
Furthermore, Lucas’ hatred for the studio system is really on display here, him going so far as to say that he isn’t sure studio executives think at all, and that he has no idea how beautiful films get made under these conditions. Most striking to me on a personal level, and what brought me to this interview to begin with, is this quote, which was also printed in page 47 of The Cinema of George Lucas:
Making film is an art. Selling film is a business, the trouble is they don’t know how to sell films. As a result, they try to make you make films that people will go to without them having to be sold. This is the real key to the problem. If they can’t put a film in a theater and have people rush to the door, they’re not interested.
That the people with money hold the power (and the will) to control the artists frustrates Lucas to no end, as he is nothing if not a man of his own ideals. To gain independence from the gatekeepers of Hollywood was at the forefront even then.
Of personal interest is a passing comment that USC had renamed THX 1138 EB, his student short, to Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB for copyright reasons as well as Lucas talking about how American Zoetrope is planning on entering the educational and industrial markets, where there’s good money to be made; something which thankfully never came to pass.
The last third of the interview belongs more to Gene Youngblood than Lucas, but it is an interesting one nonetheless, hailing the arrival of the video cassette as the democratization of film, something which was perhaps before its time and a little oversold, but still surprisingly relevant today, what with the internet ‘n’ all. Yet micro-monetization still isn’t where it needs to be to make this work, so the ’10 years from now’ forecast was perhaps a bit hasty.
I imagine this was the sole source of the original THX 1138 4EB for many years, and adding bliss to joy, Lucas’ short, 6.18.67, which he shot while on location with McKenna’s Gold (remember I told you to hold that thought?), is a part of the program. I’m not entirely sure, but this at least the first time I’ve seen it in the wild, which makes this program all the more wonderful.
And There You Have It
Despite whatever flaws I might find in his later work, George Lucas is a tremendously captivating individual whose work has had a profound impact on my life. His integrity to his original vision and the choices he’s made along the way have remained seemingly unaltered since he first set foot on USC, which is truly remarkable, considering how much I myself waver, turn back on and constantly reevaluate my own choices and whatever vision I have for myself and my dreams.
I can’t decide whether to feel depressed or uplifted when I look in the mirror and think to myself: “When George Lucas was 31 he had directed two fantastic feature films and was in the middle of writing Star Wars. And what am I doing with my life?”
Further Reading and Watching
The DVD for THX 1138 has a documentary on it called A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, which chronicles exactly what the name implies. The American Graffiti DVD has a making of which naturally picks up just after THX 1138. For biographical information on Lucas before and after this period, I recommend Skywalking by Dale Pollock and The Cinema of George Lucas by Marcus Hearn.
In a similar vein, I’ve previously written about the first films of notable directors, such as Spielberg’s Amblin’, Cameron’s Xenogenesis and Saul Bass’ Quest.
Thanks
Thank you pufnstuf for supplying me with this fantastic find, makes me hope there might be more of these out there, waiting to be unearthed.
- Page 47 of The Cinema of George Lucas and several places in Droidmaker [↩]
- I would be remis to not mention it: The linage to Lucas’ inspiration, Arthur Lipsett’s 1963 abstract Canadian short 21 – 87, is distinct, down to music, editing, individual stylistic elements and even the robot-like arms manipulating the flasks, which would become the cyborg manufacuring plant in the feature film version of THX 1138. Furthermore, I found this 1968 Time Magazine mention of the short intriguing, as it mentions things not referenced in the film, like erosbods and clinicbods… [↩]
- Oddly, I just found out that there are two versions of Look at Life, this one, which is from the American Zoetrope documentary from the THX 1138 disc, and another one, which is 50 seconds, has different titles and opens on a womans face with the words ‘kinestasic (I think) project’ and ‘by George Lucas’ printed on it and a second face of a black man afterwards, besides which it says ‘animation 44B USC’. This doesn’t have the man looking through the net. Otherwise they’re the same… I would venture the guess that one was the hand-in, another was for competitions. [↩]
- Speaking of ‘rare on the internet’, this is a clip only, though the entire short was up on Youtube for a short stint before it was taken down due to a copyright claim from Cinema 16 who owns the publishing rights. [↩]
- American Zoetrope got its name from a zoetrope gifted to Coppola from the collection of antique projection devices at Lanterna, an independent Danish studio which did commercials, the occasional feature film and softcore porn. [↩]
- This is the revised version, running 32 minutes. Skywalking (page 280) lists an ‘original version’ running 64 minutes. [↩]
- For a super-quick rundown of Star Wars influences, check this out [↩]
- I wrote a small piece about this alternate version a little while back. [↩]
Enjoying this. Wonderfully interesting.
Thank you very much.
While the history of famous filmmakers is always interesting, you give Lucas too much credit.
Keep in mind that George Lucas, Fighter of The System, was the guy who INVENTED movie tie-ins. He’s the guy who changed Return of the Jedi from Wookies to Ewoks because he felt Ewoks would make the film more marketable (not to mention the better toy tie-in sales).
Whether or not I give Lucas too much credit is a matter of perspective I think. I don’t discount his judgement on Jedi and onward, though on the other hand I’m not nearly as indignated as others. During Empire Lucas had to make certain concessions to the studio to keep filming, including throwing a sizable chunk of his own money into the pool. Between having taken his first two films away from him and having had to fight an uphill battle throughout Star Wars, with Empire also turning out to be a nightmare for him, I think he perhaps had another view on things than that of a retrospective cinefile.
That said, I agree that Jedi marked a change for the worse in many respects in regards to his output, but that doesn’t preclude the fact that Lucas had been ahead of the curve on just about everything up until that point, and in a lot of cases afterwards as well.
Besides, you seem to use the term movie tie-ins as if it were a dirty idea, which I disagree with.
My understanding was that he had to put in his own money for Empire because Bank of America flipped out when they went hugely over budget.
And movie tie-ins are a bad thing when you’re changing your movie to increase tie-in sales. They are also a bad thing when they are a large factor in deciding whether or not a movie will get a green light from the studio. Or when Disney’s shareholders are upset because they don’t think Up will do as well in toy sales as Pixar’s past films and that the film should’ve been altered to have more toy tie-in possibilities.
Aside from EditDROID (which was far from ideal), George Lucas hasn’t had a good idea since Star Wars, save for maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark (and even then, most of that movie’s awesomeness is due to other people).
I used to watch Star Wars every day. It still holds a special place in my heart. I also used to think George Lucas was some kind of super visionary genius, but now instead I realize that the emperor has no clothes.
Can’t say I agree with you.
Rock on. Thanks for this fascinating find and incisive commentary.
This is incredible! Thanks so much for posting this!
Maybe one day we’ll understand why Lucas changed after Star Wars. Or if he changed at all. Personally I don’t get the man. He could have done everything – anything really – after American Graffiti and he chose to do Star Wars. And then he seems to have lost it. First two sequels, then Indy, then a lot of nonsense, then more Star Wars and now again more Star Wars. As if some alien had taken over his body or something.
I remember his wonderful statement from the From Star Wars to Jedi documentary: A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing. Right! Absolutely right! So why did you do the prequels the way you did?
As I said, I don’t get that man. He’s imaginative and full of ideas and has invented more beloved characters and worlds and concepts than anyone since Walt Disney, but at the same time he’s some lost-in-technology weirdo. Also much like Walt Disney. ;-)
Freak. :-p
Great Video! Thanks for sharing this with us all!
Where’d the video go?
Many thanks for this. Also good to have a download link since Vimeo took down the copy online there. The battle between culture and commerce will always exist – especially in America where the culture is so defined by commerce – but as the net grows and the tools for expression, creation and distribution become increasingly democratized we will eventually see a waning of the powers that Lucas raged against.
Cheers.
Vimeo took it down. But that’s why I kept a backup at Viddler; so it’s up again.
I’ve talked about this interview on my blog. Thanks for the backup at Viddler and the direct link :)
I know how you feel mate.
When I turned 25, I also wrote on my blog what Lucas, Spielberg and Cameron has acheived at that age and how I’m still a rut at the moment.
But in time… in time… don’t give up. Remember, back then the competition isn’t as fierce as now. Now, everyone wants to be a film maker.
Also like the bit during the credits about getting into Education & Industrial films. The Young Indy/History Channel programming did the Education. …I guess most films now-a-days have got the ‘Industrial’ touch of light and magic.
Its great to see something like this but as soon as George started making money, I think his mindset drastically changed.
Lucas’ decision to change Wookies into Ewoks was not simply a marketing decision. In numerous interviews he stated that, not only was an army of Wookies too expensive to produce, he had already established Wookies as being technologically adept and thus didn’t make sense, thematically, as a primitive species overcoming a far superior technological force.
While I don’t believe every decision George Lucas has made over the years has been flawless, I simply have never understood the outright hostility people have expressed toward him. Like him or hate him, he was a visionary who changed the way movies have been made, for better or worse.
And let’s be realistic, GL didn’t “invent” the movie tie-in. He simply made it successful.
“A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”
I dont see how GL changued in that point.
With the prequels the problem was not the FXs, the story under the prequels was great and inclusive more deep than in old trilogy, but GL failed in the concretion: bad script, worst dialogues, terrible actors direction… The old trilogy was overly critized in his time for put much more effort in FXs losing “the history”, bad dialogues, bad actor direction, the same reasons used now for blame against GL and the more recent prequels. That not makes recent Star Wars films good, but we cant blame GL for do the same thing with FX in the recent movies than in 70’s.
His influence in cinema is more great in the FX department, ILM is his real revolutionary thing. He was at the begining and is one of the main promotors of the digital era in films, and the digital era can changue the cinema realization in a much more radical and deep manner than Star Wars how massive marqueting fenomena did. Now the blockbuster era initiated by GL is near the end, and only the future have the last word in how GL will be remembered ins cinema history.
Lucas had a lot to do with Raiders at least, judging by that story conference. He strikes me as someone with great vision, but also one who needs others to rein in and hone that vision. His uncredited co-writers on A New Hope (who had also written American Graffiti) did a lot to make that story much more accessible than how it started out. And that might be a large reason why the prequels didn’t quite capture the magic of the original trilogy.
But his autonomy with the prequels also illustrate why I think the notion that he was a “sell-out” is just bunk. If he were only in it for the money, why’d he go to all the trouble of producing, writing, AND directing, when he easily could’ve just doled out those duties to other people, while he just sat back and counted his money?
Yet coming after the mind-boggling commercial success of A New Hope, that’s essentially what he did with Empire, and yet no accuses him of being a sell-out at that point.
After the extremely stressful experience of making A New Hope, George Lucas swore he would never direct again, which is why he didn’t direct The Empire Strikes Back.
It most certainly wasn’t about sitting back and counting his money while other people did all the work, since Lucas was still the producer. He was still on the set every day, but since he wasn’t writing or directing he could focus on the overall story but leave the actual writing and directing to people who were better at it. It’s not like he hired hacks, either. Lawrence Kasdan is one hell of a screenwriter, Irvin Kirshner’s directing was pretty good, and bother of them were better at their respective jobs than George Lucas.
There’s also the point that Empire was a pretty dark film, which people only out to make a buck tend to avoid making. People were expecting another lighthearted, action-filled romp, and instead got a slower movie with less action and more drama, where the good guys get their asses kicked and the bad guys win at the end.
Lucas didn’t sell out until Return of the Jedi.
With the prequels, he returned to directing mostly out of ego. As I’ve said before, his reach exceeds his grasp. He can come up with good ideas, but needs other people to refine them and, sometimes, tell him “No.”