George Lucas Unmasked in Wired.
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rogueace2000
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Well somebodies got to help you dish out some news around here that isn't Ewan-related. 
For the Lazy....
Life After Death
George Lucas is daydreaming again at his desk. He looks out the window of the 19th-century house in Northern California he bought 30 years ago, when he was still a young man slaving over a script inspired by the mental image of a dogfight in space. Art and history books line the walls of the room he designed as a personal sanctuary, and there's an editing bay next door networked to servers a few miles away at Skywalker Ranch, the Victorian headquarters of his filmmaking empire. The father of digital cinema is willing to employ technology to serve his own artistic ends, but he does not use email, nor does he surf the thousands of fan sites devoted to the output of his prodigious imagination. The whole rollicking galaxy of Star Wars was originally rendered in longhand with a No. 2 pencil.
On May 19, Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of that six-part saga, will open on thousands of screens from Chicago to Shanghai after premiering days earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. The epic that has defined Lucas' career is finished, and the director finds himself at a crossroads.
Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound. But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.
Now he has returned to the most private place in his universe to reinvent himself. He could spend the rest of his life capitalizing on Star Wars' legacy. Instead he's trying to dream up a second chance to be the rebel filmmaker he aspired to become a long time ago.
"I like Star Wars, but I certainly never expected it would take over my life," Lucas says in a conversation at Skywalker Ranch. He estimates that he gave two decades of solid work to Star Wars, not including a hiatus to raise three adopted kids as a single father. Now 60, the once-lanky wunderkind in aviator glasses has grown bearish, with a snowy, close-clipped beard and a sardonic wit that doesn't come through in the making-of documentaries. He says he's relieved that the longest chapter of his career is over.
"Normally at this time, I'd be under a lot of pressure to get the script done for the next movie. There wouldn't be any break from the stress and creative demands. So it's great to be able to kick back."
Those who have seen advance screenings of Revenge of the Sith say that the new film - which focuses on the transformation of the petulant and ambitious Anakin Skywalker into the malignant Darth Vader - is more emotionally engaging than the last two prequels, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Lucas' friends observe that he seems happier with this film, which he's been showing off proudly for months in rough-cut form at the ranch. The invitation-only audiences have included many illustrious peers from his film school days, including the directors Steven Spielberg and Matthew Robbins, writer-producer Hal Barwood, and Walter Murch, winner of two Academy Awards in 1997 for film editing and sound on The English Patient.
But Lucas won't be kicking back for long. Even as he plans a creative reboot, he faces a backlog of dozens of projects awaiting his supervision as head of Lucasfilm. First is executive-producing Red Tails, a movie about a group of African-American fighter pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, who were excluded from the US Army Air Corps until 1940 and then flew 1,500 missions in World War II without losing a single plane. A fourth episode of the Indiana Jones story will move forward as soon as Lucas, director Spielberg, and returning hero Harrison Ford sign off on a script.
And Lucas isn't quite done fiddling with Star Wars. Two more TV spinoffs are in the works - one a live-action series, the other in the vein of Cartoon Network's Clone Wars - plus he's overseeing yet another rerelease of all six films, this time digitally remastered in 3-D. Then there's Lucasfilm's animation unit, which is incubating ideas for its first full-length feature. A documentary team is producing shorts on the lives of historical figures to accompany the DVD release of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Lucas is also developing two new TV series: "one about the future, and one about media," he says, adding that they'll be "controversial and hard to get on the air."
Even if Lucas' personal imprimatur turns out not to be enough to put these shows on TV, he has little reason to worry about keeping his empire in the black. With an infusion of Sith tie-ins from Lego, Topps, Cingular, and Hasbro, Lucas' digital domain is poised to survive long after General Grievous Pez dispensers are collecting dust under beds from here to Coruscant.
Now Lucas says he is determined to leverage that security to make the kinds of movies that no one expects from him. He claims to have a stack of ideas piling up on his desk for "highly abstract, esoteric" films even more daring than his 1971 debut, THX 1138. An expansion of one of Lucas' student projects at the University of Southern California, THX anticipated the cyberpunk aesthetic of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, depicting a pharmaceutically numbed society of the future under constant video surveillance. After Lucas spent a year digitally restoring the film for its theatrical rerelease and DVD debut in 2004, a longtime employee observed: "I've never seen George so excited by any other project at the company." Lucas says the restored THX was just a preview of even edgier films to come that he will finance and direct himself.
"I've earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way," he says. "I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."
If earning the right to make movies no one wants to see seems like a dour forecast for the next phase of his career, it may be because Lucas has never felt at ease with his own mainstream success. For the past couple of years, he's been telling interviewers that the breakout popularity of American Graffiti in 1973 "derailed" him into the business of mass-market filmmaking and that his career was "sidetracked" by Star Wars. His ambivalence about presiding over a commercial empire has even led him to identify with his arch-villain, Darth Vader. In the career retrospective included with the 2004 Star Wars DVD set, Lucas declares: "I'm not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corporation, so there's a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader - he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself against."
Though Lucas says he's looking forward to "a whole new adventure" as a director of "very out-there" films, he admits that he faced this crossroads at least once before and chose to go down the more familiar route of embellishing Darth Vader's backstory. Now he'll have to tap his inner Luke again - the searcher eager to leap into the unknown. But if the father of Star Wars isn't the real George Lucas, who's the man behind the mask?
The popular myth of Lucas' life is that he grew up as the son of a conservative businessman in Modesto, California, and became obsessed with car racing until his teenage dreams of being a professional driver were cut short in 1962 by a near-fatal accident. With little interest in cinema beyond Flash Gordon serials and Adventure Theater reruns on TV, he went off to film school, emerging after American Graffiti as the architect of the Blockbuster That Ate Hollywood.
Lucas himself has been the primary author of this version of events. "When I went to USC, I didn't know anything about movies," he told a Canadian film crew in 2002. "I watched television. I wasn't that interested in movies."
While this kind of talk suits Lucas' image as an ordinary billionaire in a flannel shirt who wanted to upgrade the old-fashioned cliff-hanger so generations of kids could learn to dream again, it obscures the crucial part of his life when he first glimpsed his own destiny. Understanding these early years not only casts light on Lucas' current yearning to make experimental films, it reveals the frustrations that drove a self-proclaimed Luddite to finance the creation of digital tools that forever changed the craft of moviemaking.
Like the journey of Luke Skywalker, the journey of Lucas the filmmaker began with a cryptic transmission that hinted at the existence of a universe more vast than the one he grew up in. While he was zipping his souped-up Fiat through the dusty Central Valley flatlands that provided the model for Luke's home planet of Tatooine, another kind of momentum was building to the north in San Francisco, where poets and painters were picking up Army surplus handheld 16-mm cameras to launch the first wave of independent cinema on the West Coast.
A filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of indie pioneers like Jordan Belson, who crafted footage of exploding galaxies in his North Beach studio, saying that he made films so life on Earth could be seen through the eyes of a god. Filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner had equally transcendent ambitions for the emerging medium: Brakhage painted directly on film and juxtaposed images of childbirth and solar flares, while Conner made mash-ups of stock footage to produce slapstick visions of the apocalypse. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses, where art films shared the stage with folksingers and stand-up comedians.
Life After Death
George Lucas is daydreaming again at his desk. He looks out the window of the 19th-century house in Northern California he bought 30 years ago, when he was still a young man slaving over a script inspired by the mental image of a dogfight in space. Art and history books line the walls of the room he designed as a personal sanctuary, and there's an editing bay next door networked to servers a few miles away at Skywalker Ranch, the Victorian headquarters of his filmmaking empire. The father of digital cinema is willing to employ technology to serve his own artistic ends, but he does not use email, nor does he surf the thousands of fan sites devoted to the output of his prodigious imagination. The whole rollicking galaxy of Star Wars was originally rendered in longhand with a No. 2 pencil.
On May 19, Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of that six-part saga, will open on thousands of screens from Chicago to Shanghai after premiering days earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. The epic that has defined Lucas' career is finished, and the director finds himself at a crossroads.
Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound. But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.
Now he has returned to the most private place in his universe to reinvent himself. He could spend the rest of his life capitalizing on Star Wars' legacy. Instead he's trying to dream up a second chance to be the rebel filmmaker he aspired to become a long time ago.
"I like Star Wars, but I certainly never expected it would take over my life," Lucas says in a conversation at Skywalker Ranch. He estimates that he gave two decades of solid work to Star Wars, not including a hiatus to raise three adopted kids as a single father. Now 60, the once-lanky wunderkind in aviator glasses has grown bearish, with a snowy, close-clipped beard and a sardonic wit that doesn't come through in the making-of documentaries. He says he's relieved that the longest chapter of his career is over.
"Normally at this time, I'd be under a lot of pressure to get the script done for the next movie. There wouldn't be any break from the stress and creative demands. So it's great to be able to kick back."
Those who have seen advance screenings of Revenge of the Sith say that the new film - which focuses on the transformation of the petulant and ambitious Anakin Skywalker into the malignant Darth Vader - is more emotionally engaging than the last two prequels, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Lucas' friends observe that he seems happier with this film, which he's been showing off proudly for months in rough-cut form at the ranch. The invitation-only audiences have included many illustrious peers from his film school days, including the directors Steven Spielberg and Matthew Robbins, writer-producer Hal Barwood, and Walter Murch, winner of two Academy Awards in 1997 for film editing and sound on The English Patient.
But Lucas won't be kicking back for long. Even as he plans a creative reboot, he faces a backlog of dozens of projects awaiting his supervision as head of Lucasfilm. First is executive-producing Red Tails, a movie about a group of African-American fighter pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, who were excluded from the US Army Air Corps until 1940 and then flew 1,500 missions in World War II without losing a single plane. A fourth episode of the Indiana Jones story will move forward as soon as Lucas, director Spielberg, and returning hero Harrison Ford sign off on a script.
And Lucas isn't quite done fiddling with Star Wars. Two more TV spinoffs are in the works - one a live-action series, the other in the vein of Cartoon Network's Clone Wars - plus he's overseeing yet another rerelease of all six films, this time digitally remastered in 3-D. Then there's Lucasfilm's animation unit, which is incubating ideas for its first full-length feature. A documentary team is producing shorts on the lives of historical figures to accompany the DVD release of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Lucas is also developing two new TV series: "one about the future, and one about media," he says, adding that they'll be "controversial and hard to get on the air."
Even if Lucas' personal imprimatur turns out not to be enough to put these shows on TV, he has little reason to worry about keeping his empire in the black. With an infusion of Sith tie-ins from Lego, Topps, Cingular, and Hasbro, Lucas' digital domain is poised to survive long after General Grievous Pez dispensers are collecting dust under beds from here to Coruscant.
Now Lucas says he is determined to leverage that security to make the kinds of movies that no one expects from him. He claims to have a stack of ideas piling up on his desk for "highly abstract, esoteric" films even more daring than his 1971 debut, THX 1138. An expansion of one of Lucas' student projects at the University of Southern California, THX anticipated the cyberpunk aesthetic of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, depicting a pharmaceutically numbed society of the future under constant video surveillance. After Lucas spent a year digitally restoring the film for its theatrical rerelease and DVD debut in 2004, a longtime employee observed: "I've never seen George so excited by any other project at the company." Lucas says the restored THX was just a preview of even edgier films to come that he will finance and direct himself.
"I've earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way," he says. "I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."
If earning the right to make movies no one wants to see seems like a dour forecast for the next phase of his career, it may be because Lucas has never felt at ease with his own mainstream success. For the past couple of years, he's been telling interviewers that the breakout popularity of American Graffiti in 1973 "derailed" him into the business of mass-market filmmaking and that his career was "sidetracked" by Star Wars. His ambivalence about presiding over a commercial empire has even led him to identify with his arch-villain, Darth Vader. In the career retrospective included with the 2004 Star Wars DVD set, Lucas declares: "I'm not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corporation, so there's a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader - he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself against."
Though Lucas says he's looking forward to "a whole new adventure" as a director of "very out-there" films, he admits that he faced this crossroads at least once before and chose to go down the more familiar route of embellishing Darth Vader's backstory. Now he'll have to tap his inner Luke again - the searcher eager to leap into the unknown. But if the father of Star Wars isn't the real George Lucas, who's the man behind the mask?
The popular myth of Lucas' life is that he grew up as the son of a conservative businessman in Modesto, California, and became obsessed with car racing until his teenage dreams of being a professional driver were cut short in 1962 by a near-fatal accident. With little interest in cinema beyond Flash Gordon serials and Adventure Theater reruns on TV, he went off to film school, emerging after American Graffiti as the architect of the Blockbuster That Ate Hollywood.
Lucas himself has been the primary author of this version of events. "When I went to USC, I didn't know anything about movies," he told a Canadian film crew in 2002. "I watched television. I wasn't that interested in movies."
While this kind of talk suits Lucas' image as an ordinary billionaire in a flannel shirt who wanted to upgrade the old-fashioned cliff-hanger so generations of kids could learn to dream again, it obscures the crucial part of his life when he first glimpsed his own destiny. Understanding these early years not only casts light on Lucas' current yearning to make experimental films, it reveals the frustrations that drove a self-proclaimed Luddite to finance the creation of digital tools that forever changed the craft of moviemaking.
Like the journey of Luke Skywalker, the journey of Lucas the filmmaker began with a cryptic transmission that hinted at the existence of a universe more vast than the one he grew up in. While he was zipping his souped-up Fiat through the dusty Central Valley flatlands that provided the model for Luke's home planet of Tatooine, another kind of momentum was building to the north in San Francisco, where poets and painters were picking up Army surplus handheld 16-mm cameras to launch the first wave of independent cinema on the West Coast.
A filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of indie pioneers like Jordan Belson, who crafted footage of exploding galaxies in his North Beach studio, saying that he made films so life on Earth could be seen through the eyes of a god. Filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner had equally transcendent ambitions for the emerging medium: Brakhage painted directly on film and juxtaposed images of childbirth and solar flares, while Conner made mash-ups of stock footage to produce slapstick visions of the apocalypse. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses, where art films shared the stage with folksingers and stand-up comedians.
These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. As their peers cruised Modesto's Tenth Street in the rites of passage immortalized in American Graffiti, the 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas embraced these films with the enthusiasm of a suburban goth discovering the Velvet Underground.
"That's when George really started exploring," Plummer recalls. "We went to a theater on Union Street that showed art movies, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been a D-plus slacker in high school. A creative writing teacher at junior college in Modesto opened his eyes to the pleasures of reading, which led him to the writings of Joseph Campbell, a decisive influence on Star Wars.
Then Lucas and Plummer migrated south, where they discovered another filmmaking revolution in progress. They made pilgrimages to the New Art Cinema in Santa Monica to take in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, François Truffaut's Jules et Jim, and Federico Fellini's 8½ - movies that used handheld cinematography and in-your-face editing to deliver life unfiltered through the stale conventions of the Hollywood studios.
At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.
By the time Lucas entered film school in 1964, he was already on his way to becoming the director who would combine the visceral excitement of Flash Gordon with the visual language of transcendence.
At USC, Lucas joined the first generation of film students who were influenced more by the explosion of world cinema than by the silver screen canon. One of his classmates, John Milius, the future cowriter of Apocalypse Now and director of Red Dawn, introduced him to the epics of Akira Kurosawa, whose depictions of Japanese feudal society were a key influence on Star Wars.
Lucas' sense of his own mission crystallized in animation classes and in a course called Filmic Expression, which focused on the non-narrative aspects of filmmaking - telling stories without words by using light, space, motion, and color. The professors screened animated shorts and documentaries sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, which has been funding cinematic exploration since the 1940s.
The work of three Canadian directors in particular excited Lucas about the potential of experimenting with the tools of filmmaking. An animator named Norman McLaren explored novel ways of creating images and sounds with every film he made, mixing human actors, animation, and special effects as Lucas would do digitally 20 years later. Lucas was also impressed by the documentaries of Claude Jutra, who used the artistic strategies of Godard and Truffaut to tell real-life stories. One of the reasons the first Star Wars film seemed so vivid compared with previous sci-fi fare, Lucas explains, was that he shot it like a Jutra documentary, covering the scenes with multiple cameras and staging them loosely on purpose so they would unfold with an edge of spontaneity. (Another reason was the salty insouciance of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, blissfully unaware that they were about to become action figures.)
The film that made the most profound impression on Lucas, however, was a short called 21-87 by a director named Arthur Lipsett, who made visual poetry out of film that others threw away. Working as an editor at the National Film Board, he scavenged scraps of other people's documentaries from trash bins, intercutting shots of trapeze artists and runway models with his own footage of careworn faces passing on the streets of New York and Montreal. What intrigued Lucas most was Lipsett's subversive manipulation of images and sound, as when a shot of teenagers dancing was scored with labored breathing that might be someone dying or having an orgasm. The sounds neither tracked the images nor ignored them - they rubbed up against them. Even with no plot or character development, 21-87 evoked richly nuanced emotions, from grief to a tenacious kind of hope - all in less than 10 minutes.
Lucas threaded the film through the projector over and over, watching it more than two dozen times. In 2003, he told directors Amelia Does and Dennis Mohr, who are making a documentary on Lipsett, "21-87 had a very powerful effect on me. It was very much the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I was extremely influenced by that particular movie." Deciding that his destiny was to become an editor of documentaries who, like Lipsett, would make avant-garde films on the side, Lucas worked in the USC editing room for 12 hours at a stretch, living on Coca-Cola and candy bars, deep in the zone.
"When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off," says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. "One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience's mind to try to figure out the connection."
To simulate a realistic society of the future on a shoestring budget for THX, Lucas and Murch pushed that audiovisual disconnect as far as they could. A scene in which the hero (played by a young Robert Duvall) is tortured is made more horrific by the banal shoptalk of his offscreen tormentors; the chatter of unidentified voices throughout the film reinforces the idea that in a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you are never alone.
"Walter and I were working simultaneously, so I could react to his sounds and recut the film according to what he was doing," Lucas says. "We were inspiring each other as we went, rather than just doing the picture and attaching sounds to it. That's the way I've worked since then." While he was writing the first Star Wars script, Lucas hired USC student Ben Burtt to make the Imperial Star Destroyers sound more ominous by adding the subliminal rumble of an air conditioner; a barely perceptible jingle of spurs was slipped under Boba Fett's entrance in The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas never met the young Canadian who influenced him so deeply; Lipsett committed suicide in 1986 after battling poverty and mental illness for years. But like a programmer sneaking Tolkien lines into his code, Lucas has planted stealth references to 21-87 throughout his films. The events in the student-film version of THX took place in the year 2187, and the numerical title itself was an homage. In the feature-length version, Duvall's character makes his run from a subterranean city when he learns that the love of his life was murdered by the authorities on the date "21/87." And in the first Star Wars, when Luke and Han Solo blast into the detention center to rescue Princess Leia, they discover that the stormtroopers are holding her as a prisoner in cell 2187.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper: One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer who went on to develop Imax. In the face of McCulloch's arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: "Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God."
When asked if this was the source of "the Force," Lucas confirms that his use of the term in Star Wars was "an echo of that phrase in 21-87." The idea behind it, however, was universal: "Similar phrases have been used extensively by many different people for the last 13,000 years to describe the 'life force,'" he says.
"That's when George really started exploring," Plummer recalls. "We went to a theater on Union Street that showed art movies, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been a D-plus slacker in high school. A creative writing teacher at junior college in Modesto opened his eyes to the pleasures of reading, which led him to the writings of Joseph Campbell, a decisive influence on Star Wars.
Then Lucas and Plummer migrated south, where they discovered another filmmaking revolution in progress. They made pilgrimages to the New Art Cinema in Santa Monica to take in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, François Truffaut's Jules et Jim, and Federico Fellini's 8½ - movies that used handheld cinematography and in-your-face editing to deliver life unfiltered through the stale conventions of the Hollywood studios.
At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.
By the time Lucas entered film school in 1964, he was already on his way to becoming the director who would combine the visceral excitement of Flash Gordon with the visual language of transcendence.
At USC, Lucas joined the first generation of film students who were influenced more by the explosion of world cinema than by the silver screen canon. One of his classmates, John Milius, the future cowriter of Apocalypse Now and director of Red Dawn, introduced him to the epics of Akira Kurosawa, whose depictions of Japanese feudal society were a key influence on Star Wars.
Lucas' sense of his own mission crystallized in animation classes and in a course called Filmic Expression, which focused on the non-narrative aspects of filmmaking - telling stories without words by using light, space, motion, and color. The professors screened animated shorts and documentaries sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, which has been funding cinematic exploration since the 1940s.
The work of three Canadian directors in particular excited Lucas about the potential of experimenting with the tools of filmmaking. An animator named Norman McLaren explored novel ways of creating images and sounds with every film he made, mixing human actors, animation, and special effects as Lucas would do digitally 20 years later. Lucas was also impressed by the documentaries of Claude Jutra, who used the artistic strategies of Godard and Truffaut to tell real-life stories. One of the reasons the first Star Wars film seemed so vivid compared with previous sci-fi fare, Lucas explains, was that he shot it like a Jutra documentary, covering the scenes with multiple cameras and staging them loosely on purpose so they would unfold with an edge of spontaneity. (Another reason was the salty insouciance of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, blissfully unaware that they were about to become action figures.)
The film that made the most profound impression on Lucas, however, was a short called 21-87 by a director named Arthur Lipsett, who made visual poetry out of film that others threw away. Working as an editor at the National Film Board, he scavenged scraps of other people's documentaries from trash bins, intercutting shots of trapeze artists and runway models with his own footage of careworn faces passing on the streets of New York and Montreal. What intrigued Lucas most was Lipsett's subversive manipulation of images and sound, as when a shot of teenagers dancing was scored with labored breathing that might be someone dying or having an orgasm. The sounds neither tracked the images nor ignored them - they rubbed up against them. Even with no plot or character development, 21-87 evoked richly nuanced emotions, from grief to a tenacious kind of hope - all in less than 10 minutes.
Lucas threaded the film through the projector over and over, watching it more than two dozen times. In 2003, he told directors Amelia Does and Dennis Mohr, who are making a documentary on Lipsett, "21-87 had a very powerful effect on me. It was very much the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I was extremely influenced by that particular movie." Deciding that his destiny was to become an editor of documentaries who, like Lipsett, would make avant-garde films on the side, Lucas worked in the USC editing room for 12 hours at a stretch, living on Coca-Cola and candy bars, deep in the zone.
"When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off," says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. "One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience's mind to try to figure out the connection."
To simulate a realistic society of the future on a shoestring budget for THX, Lucas and Murch pushed that audiovisual disconnect as far as they could. A scene in which the hero (played by a young Robert Duvall) is tortured is made more horrific by the banal shoptalk of his offscreen tormentors; the chatter of unidentified voices throughout the film reinforces the idea that in a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you are never alone.
"Walter and I were working simultaneously, so I could react to his sounds and recut the film according to what he was doing," Lucas says. "We were inspiring each other as we went, rather than just doing the picture and attaching sounds to it. That's the way I've worked since then." While he was writing the first Star Wars script, Lucas hired USC student Ben Burtt to make the Imperial Star Destroyers sound more ominous by adding the subliminal rumble of an air conditioner; a barely perceptible jingle of spurs was slipped under Boba Fett's entrance in The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas never met the young Canadian who influenced him so deeply; Lipsett committed suicide in 1986 after battling poverty and mental illness for years. But like a programmer sneaking Tolkien lines into his code, Lucas has planted stealth references to 21-87 throughout his films. The events in the student-film version of THX took place in the year 2187, and the numerical title itself was an homage. In the feature-length version, Duvall's character makes his run from a subterranean city when he learns that the love of his life was murdered by the authorities on the date "21/87." And in the first Star Wars, when Luke and Han Solo blast into the detention center to rescue Princess Leia, they discover that the stormtroopers are holding her as a prisoner in cell 2187.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper: One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer who went on to develop Imax. In the face of McCulloch's arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: "Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God."
When asked if this was the source of "the Force," Lucas confirms that his use of the term in Star Wars was "an echo of that phrase in 21-87." The idea behind it, however, was universal: "Similar phrases have been used extensively by many different people for the last 13,000 years to describe the 'life force,'" he says.
The lessons Lucas learned from filmmakers like Lipsett, McLaren, Jutra, and Kurosawa helped shape the creation of all of his later work. "My films operate like silent movies," he explains in an unused portion of an interview for a documentary on editing called Edgecodes.com. "The music and the visuals are where the story's being told. It's one of the reasons the films can be understood by such a wide range of age groups and cultural groups. I started out doing visual films - tone poems - and I move very much in that direction. I still have the actors doing their bit, and there's still dialog giving you key information. But if you don't have that information, it still works."
After Lucas' assault on Hollywood in 1971 with THX 1138, the Empire struck back.
Convinced that the stark, stylish film had no commercial potential, a team of Warner Bros. executives snatched control of THX from Lucas, recut it, and hung it out to dry in a handful of B-list theaters. The studio then backed out of its deal with Francis Ford Coppola's independent production company, American Zoetrope, which had financed the film, nearly putting Coppola out of business. In 1973, when Universal threatened not to release Lucas' American Graffiti - which became one of the biggest moneymakers in film history - Lucas vowed to build his own rebel base far from Hollywood.
Armed with the success of the first two Star Wars movies, Lucas built his ranch in Marin County and launched a massive R&D blitz to extend a director's editorial control over not just a film's pacing and choice of shots, but every element inside the frame as well.
"If you want to know what editing was like before George came along, visualize that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark," says Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, which will be published this fall. "If you shot a movie like Star Wars, you had 300,000 feet of film and sound rolls that had to be code-numbered and matched by hand. If you wanted to cut the scene where Luke was doing this and Han Solo was doing that, some poor schmuck had to find those pieces so you could fit them together with tape. It was like the Library of Congress with no librarian."
EditDroid, the digital-editing system that Lucas' team of engineers invented in the 1980s, replaced this Sisyphean task with film scanners, a searchable archive, and a drag-and-drop interface. Sold to Avid, it has become the core of the technology used to edit most major-studio releases and nearly all prime-time TV programs today. Meanwhile, the brainstorming of his computer division produced the 3-D rendering software that spun off into Pixar Animation Studios. Lucas' f/x house, Industrial Light & Magic, made computer graphics the centerpiece of big-budget moviemaking with Jurassic Park and Terminator II. And the improvements in audio clarity and theatrical sound pioneered for Star Wars (including a set of standards known as THX Certification) resulted in massive sonic upgrades not only at the local mall, but in surround sound systems at home.
The result of these efforts gave Lucas just what he'd been looking for back at USC. He could flood the screen with color as Brakhage did, mix real and animated elements like a McLaren, manipulate shape and scale with the fluidity of a Belson, and make montages of any image and sound that he could imagine. Reincarnated as a cluster of menu items, the avant-garde techniques that inspired Lucas to become a director are now available to any filmmaker.
"Everything George has done has been to reduce the distance between what's in his skull and the pixels on the screen," Rubin observes. "He's really a painter."
Among the new generation of filmmakers who use the tools developed at Lucasfilm is Peter Jackson, the director of his own epic trilogy. "I was obsessed by visual effects, and in the year prior to Star Wars, Logan's Run and the King Kong remake had come out," he says. "The world of those films was the one I thought I would have to work in - a world in which your imagination was limited by the technology. Then Star Wars came out in 1977 and blew my mind. Quite apart from being the 16-year-old kid standing and cheering at the end, I knew that if I was ever to achieve my filmmaking aspirations, I no longer had to be limited by technology."
Jackson finally met his hero when the production schedules of The Lord of the Rings and Attack of the Clones overlapped in Sydney. As a fellow techie, he was blown away by the size of Lucas' monitors: "I was used to peering at my little 12-inch screen to watch our shooting, and George had two 42-inch plasmas. The thing I remember most was us discussing 'Where to from here?' in cinema technology. That's a true visionary - someone who is always thinking about what's next and making it happen."
By the time Lucas got around to making The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, however, even longtime fans and colleagues started asking if his focus on technology had become, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end. While the original film had the scruffy vitality of a garage band making its big break, the recent episodes can seem like a whirlwind tour of Industrial Light & Magic's interplanetary showroom.
"For me, those films pummel you into submission," Murch says. "You say, OK, OK, there are 20,000 robots walking across the field. If you told me a 14-year-old had done them on his home computer, I would get very excited, but if you tell me it's George Lucas - with all of the resources available to him - I know it's amazing, but I don't feel it's amazing. I think if George were here and we could wrestle him onto the carpet, he'd say, 'Yeah, I've gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.'"
The side of Lucas that wants to get out of the box has more allies than he may realize. Film critic Roger Ebert is already intrigued by the possibility of the director of Star Wars maturing beyond his well-worn role of being a dreamweaver for kids. "Lucas is obviously great at science fiction, and he could combine his indie origins with his natural inclinations in smaller-scale sci-fi films," he says. "There's a lot of mind-bending speculative fiction by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov that has never been filmed. A movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is science fiction, though it was never described that way." While Lucas promises that his new films will tackle philosophical issues ranging from theology to slavery in contemporary society, he says they'll be "short projects, like normal people do. You shoot a few months, they're finished in a year, and if you want to do another one, you still have time off."
Given a powerful enough vision, as Yoda might say, size matters not. A 32-year-old former coder named Shane Carruth walked away with the Sundance festival's coveted Grand Jury Prize last year for a knotty thriller on the subject of time travel called Primer. Total cost of production: $7,000.
One hurdle to Lucas' thinking small, however, is it isn't easy to downscale your ambitions when you believe that you not only inadvertently financed the multiplexing of America but that you're also indirectly responsible for the popular successes of indie films like Lost in Translation and Amélie.
"After Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Godfather, and The Exorcist - all the giant blockbusters - half of the money went to the theaters, and we went from about 15,000 screens to about 35,000 screens," Lucas says. "The crux of the movie business is the crux of any business - shelf space." With all those new screens, he believes, "hundreds of esoteric art films" are now being financed by companies like Miramax and reaching audiences that would never have seen them before: "You end up with a much more varied group of films being available to you than in the '60s."
He's right that the post-Jaws blockbusters, including his own, financed the morphing of the neighborhood movie palace into the corporate googolplex. But he's wrong about what's playing there, says Dade Hayes, author of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession. "It's true that a certain tier of art-house product would never have seen the light of day a generation ago. That's supercool if you're living in LA, Boston, or New York, but in most of the big-grossing complexes, you're just going to get more showtimes of Shrek 2."
Fortunately for indie filmmakers, there's a counterforce: the marriage of the DVD and the Internet. Companies like Film Movement, CineClix, and Netflix are boosting sales of independent films by offering choices and targeting online ads to users likely to rent niche fare. More people saw Niki Caro's Whale Rider on DVD and VHS than in theaters, adding $13 million in rentals to the film's US box office of $21 million - serious money for a movie by a first-time director. Netflix alone generated 530,000 of these rentals by promoting Whale Rider to its 2.5 million members based on user recommendations.
After Lucas' assault on Hollywood in 1971 with THX 1138, the Empire struck back.
Convinced that the stark, stylish film had no commercial potential, a team of Warner Bros. executives snatched control of THX from Lucas, recut it, and hung it out to dry in a handful of B-list theaters. The studio then backed out of its deal with Francis Ford Coppola's independent production company, American Zoetrope, which had financed the film, nearly putting Coppola out of business. In 1973, when Universal threatened not to release Lucas' American Graffiti - which became one of the biggest moneymakers in film history - Lucas vowed to build his own rebel base far from Hollywood.
Armed with the success of the first two Star Wars movies, Lucas built his ranch in Marin County and launched a massive R&D blitz to extend a director's editorial control over not just a film's pacing and choice of shots, but every element inside the frame as well.
"If you want to know what editing was like before George came along, visualize that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark," says Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, which will be published this fall. "If you shot a movie like Star Wars, you had 300,000 feet of film and sound rolls that had to be code-numbered and matched by hand. If you wanted to cut the scene where Luke was doing this and Han Solo was doing that, some poor schmuck had to find those pieces so you could fit them together with tape. It was like the Library of Congress with no librarian."
EditDroid, the digital-editing system that Lucas' team of engineers invented in the 1980s, replaced this Sisyphean task with film scanners, a searchable archive, and a drag-and-drop interface. Sold to Avid, it has become the core of the technology used to edit most major-studio releases and nearly all prime-time TV programs today. Meanwhile, the brainstorming of his computer division produced the 3-D rendering software that spun off into Pixar Animation Studios. Lucas' f/x house, Industrial Light & Magic, made computer graphics the centerpiece of big-budget moviemaking with Jurassic Park and Terminator II. And the improvements in audio clarity and theatrical sound pioneered for Star Wars (including a set of standards known as THX Certification) resulted in massive sonic upgrades not only at the local mall, but in surround sound systems at home.
The result of these efforts gave Lucas just what he'd been looking for back at USC. He could flood the screen with color as Brakhage did, mix real and animated elements like a McLaren, manipulate shape and scale with the fluidity of a Belson, and make montages of any image and sound that he could imagine. Reincarnated as a cluster of menu items, the avant-garde techniques that inspired Lucas to become a director are now available to any filmmaker.
"Everything George has done has been to reduce the distance between what's in his skull and the pixels on the screen," Rubin observes. "He's really a painter."
Among the new generation of filmmakers who use the tools developed at Lucasfilm is Peter Jackson, the director of his own epic trilogy. "I was obsessed by visual effects, and in the year prior to Star Wars, Logan's Run and the King Kong remake had come out," he says. "The world of those films was the one I thought I would have to work in - a world in which your imagination was limited by the technology. Then Star Wars came out in 1977 and blew my mind. Quite apart from being the 16-year-old kid standing and cheering at the end, I knew that if I was ever to achieve my filmmaking aspirations, I no longer had to be limited by technology."
Jackson finally met his hero when the production schedules of The Lord of the Rings and Attack of the Clones overlapped in Sydney. As a fellow techie, he was blown away by the size of Lucas' monitors: "I was used to peering at my little 12-inch screen to watch our shooting, and George had two 42-inch plasmas. The thing I remember most was us discussing 'Where to from here?' in cinema technology. That's a true visionary - someone who is always thinking about what's next and making it happen."
By the time Lucas got around to making The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, however, even longtime fans and colleagues started asking if his focus on technology had become, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end. While the original film had the scruffy vitality of a garage band making its big break, the recent episodes can seem like a whirlwind tour of Industrial Light & Magic's interplanetary showroom.
"For me, those films pummel you into submission," Murch says. "You say, OK, OK, there are 20,000 robots walking across the field. If you told me a 14-year-old had done them on his home computer, I would get very excited, but if you tell me it's George Lucas - with all of the resources available to him - I know it's amazing, but I don't feel it's amazing. I think if George were here and we could wrestle him onto the carpet, he'd say, 'Yeah, I've gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.'"
The side of Lucas that wants to get out of the box has more allies than he may realize. Film critic Roger Ebert is already intrigued by the possibility of the director of Star Wars maturing beyond his well-worn role of being a dreamweaver for kids. "Lucas is obviously great at science fiction, and he could combine his indie origins with his natural inclinations in smaller-scale sci-fi films," he says. "There's a lot of mind-bending speculative fiction by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov that has never been filmed. A movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is science fiction, though it was never described that way." While Lucas promises that his new films will tackle philosophical issues ranging from theology to slavery in contemporary society, he says they'll be "short projects, like normal people do. You shoot a few months, they're finished in a year, and if you want to do another one, you still have time off."
Given a powerful enough vision, as Yoda might say, size matters not. A 32-year-old former coder named Shane Carruth walked away with the Sundance festival's coveted Grand Jury Prize last year for a knotty thriller on the subject of time travel called Primer. Total cost of production: $7,000.
One hurdle to Lucas' thinking small, however, is it isn't easy to downscale your ambitions when you believe that you not only inadvertently financed the multiplexing of America but that you're also indirectly responsible for the popular successes of indie films like Lost in Translation and Amélie.
"After Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Godfather, and The Exorcist - all the giant blockbusters - half of the money went to the theaters, and we went from about 15,000 screens to about 35,000 screens," Lucas says. "The crux of the movie business is the crux of any business - shelf space." With all those new screens, he believes, "hundreds of esoteric art films" are now being financed by companies like Miramax and reaching audiences that would never have seen them before: "You end up with a much more varied group of films being available to you than in the '60s."
He's right that the post-Jaws blockbusters, including his own, financed the morphing of the neighborhood movie palace into the corporate googolplex. But he's wrong about what's playing there, says Dade Hayes, author of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession. "It's true that a certain tier of art-house product would never have seen the light of day a generation ago. That's supercool if you're living in LA, Boston, or New York, but in most of the big-grossing complexes, you're just going to get more showtimes of Shrek 2."
Fortunately for indie filmmakers, there's a counterforce: the marriage of the DVD and the Internet. Companies like Film Movement, CineClix, and Netflix are boosting sales of independent films by offering choices and targeting online ads to users likely to rent niche fare. More people saw Niki Caro's Whale Rider on DVD and VHS than in theaters, adding $13 million in rentals to the film's US box office of $21 million - serious money for a movie by a first-time director. Netflix alone generated 530,000 of these rentals by promoting Whale Rider to its 2.5 million members based on user recommendations.
While Lucas has been predicting for years that online distribution would finally free filmmakers from the death grip of Fox and Paramount, now - at the moment of its emergence - he still seems firmly attached to the old theatrical model and a Hollywood sense of scale.
"With film, if you get a million people to see your movie on the first weekend, you've made about $5 million. That basically will not end up on the top-10 chart," he told me. "You have to get 10 million people on the first weekend. And if you don't do it in two days, you're basically out of the theaters and into the DVD market. There's just an ecology there. If you're a mouse, don't expect to kill a lion, because it ain't gonna happen. If you want to have that kind of power, it's better to be a lion, because the mice are fine - you can have a life and everything - but the lions are the ones out there prowling and scaring the hell out of everybody."
That's the voice of his inner Vader - never wanting to be seen as less than a lion and keeping him busy with everything but the films he says he truly wants to make. Reinvention in midcareer is not a luxury that most directors can afford. Lucas' hard-won and cautiously managed prosperity not only earns him the right to fail, it gives him a chance to succeed in ways that his role models were denied. For the old pros who taught Lucas his craft at film school, a return to a more personal style of filmmaking by one of their most prestigious alumni would be greeted as an artistic homecoming.
"I'm proud of George, but I'm worried about him," says Lucas' former cinematography instructor, USC professor emeritus Woody Omens. "He was trying to speak a different cinematic language at an early point in his career, and he's still trying to get to that. If he wanted me to mentor him again 40 years later, I would say, 'Let go. Do something that explores the non-narrative side of human expression from the perspective of a master and a veteran. Go and make the movie of your life.'"
The myth of Luke Skywalker hinges on courageous acts of liberation. In our conversation at the ranch, Lucas sums up the central theme of his films from THX 1138 to Revenge of the Sith: "How do you personally get to the point where you wake up out of your stupor and take charge of your life and do dangerous and scary things?"
Now that Lucas' odyssey in the land of droids and Wookiees is over, he has an opportunity to tap the bravery of the younger self who mapped out a universe at his desk with a No. 2 pencil. The masters of independent cinema and the digital rebel alliance have assembled outside the gates of Skywalker Ranch to deliver a message: "Lucas, trust your feelings."
"With film, if you get a million people to see your movie on the first weekend, you've made about $5 million. That basically will not end up on the top-10 chart," he told me. "You have to get 10 million people on the first weekend. And if you don't do it in two days, you're basically out of the theaters and into the DVD market. There's just an ecology there. If you're a mouse, don't expect to kill a lion, because it ain't gonna happen. If you want to have that kind of power, it's better to be a lion, because the mice are fine - you can have a life and everything - but the lions are the ones out there prowling and scaring the hell out of everybody."
That's the voice of his inner Vader - never wanting to be seen as less than a lion and keeping him busy with everything but the films he says he truly wants to make. Reinvention in midcareer is not a luxury that most directors can afford. Lucas' hard-won and cautiously managed prosperity not only earns him the right to fail, it gives him a chance to succeed in ways that his role models were denied. For the old pros who taught Lucas his craft at film school, a return to a more personal style of filmmaking by one of their most prestigious alumni would be greeted as an artistic homecoming.
"I'm proud of George, but I'm worried about him," says Lucas' former cinematography instructor, USC professor emeritus Woody Omens. "He was trying to speak a different cinematic language at an early point in his career, and he's still trying to get to that. If he wanted me to mentor him again 40 years later, I would say, 'Let go. Do something that explores the non-narrative side of human expression from the perspective of a master and a veteran. Go and make the movie of your life.'"
The myth of Luke Skywalker hinges on courageous acts of liberation. In our conversation at the ranch, Lucas sums up the central theme of his films from THX 1138 to Revenge of the Sith: "How do you personally get to the point where you wake up out of your stupor and take charge of your life and do dangerous and scary things?"
Now that Lucas' odyssey in the land of droids and Wookiees is over, he has an opportunity to tap the bravery of the younger self who mapped out a universe at his desk with a No. 2 pencil. The masters of independent cinema and the digital rebel alliance have assembled outside the gates of Skywalker Ranch to deliver a message: "Lucas, trust your feelings."