case was Allen Grant, a coming sports-car driver whom Lucas met at Laguna Seca. Four years older than Lucas, he had graduated from Downey in 1958 with grades almost as poor as Lucas’s. Now he drove a dazzling Ford Mustang Cobra and was attracting attention from big sponsors. Good-looking, well connected, successful with women, Grant had already embarked on a business career which would make him, for a while anyway, one of the richest entrepreneurs in Northern California.
Grant offered a potent role model. Lucas became his mechanic, and a conveniently light co-driver. He also joined the Ecurie AWOL Sports Car Competition Club, and began editing its newsletter, BS. His drawings of sports cars and caricatures of drivers appeared in BS, and he sold or gave the originals to his friends, including Grant. Through Grant, Lucas began to sense that another life existed outside Modesto; but he wasn’t sure how to exploit this knowledge. He was well into his last year at high school, but didn’t delude himself that his grades would get him into junior college, let alone either of California’s two main universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with its main campus in Westwood, a luxury suburb of Los Angeles, or the University of Southern California (USC), situated in a funkier corner of the city, on the edge of the old downtown area. UCLA, the official state college, required no tuition fees, but its academic requirements were high. USC had lower requirements, but demanded fees.
Lucas and John Plummer pored over college prospectuses. ‘We wanted a school,’ says Plummer, ‘that didn’t have a lot of requirements in math or anything else, but that would let us go into more of the creative side.’ If they didn’t find one, they had more or less decided to go to Europe together, though with Dorothy Lucas in hospital again and three other children to put through school, George Sr showed no inclination to fund such a trip. Nor could he countenance his son going to study in Los Angeles, which he ridiculed as ‘Sin City.’
George persisted. Of the two universities, USC looked the more promising. It even offered a film course, one of the first in the country. ‘In those days, film school wasn’t like it is now,’ says Willard Huyck, the screenwriter who would graduate from USC and, with his wife and writing partner Gloria Katz, script American Graffiti. ‘Nobody knew about it, and they sort of stood outside the door of film school and grabbed you as you walked by, and asked if you’d like to become a film major.’
The USC course included animation and photography, and Lucas wondered if he could bluff his way in with a portfolio of drawings and his skill with a 35mm camera. First, however, he had to graduate from Downey – and with a D average, that was anything but assured. School ‘commencement,’ the end of the academic year, was on a Friday in the middle of June. As the day approached, he still had three ‘incompletes,’ and unless he delivered the papers necessary to finish the coursework, he could fail to graduate.
These things were on his mind when, on a hot Tuesday, 12 June 1962, he drove the Bianchina out of the gate of the walnut ranch and headed for town. His mother was resting, having just returned from another spell in hospital, weak and emaciated: she and her son now both weighed the same, eighty pounds. He’d tried to persuade his sister Wendy to come to the library with him, as she often had before, to help with his spelling and sentence structure, but she preferred to stay by the pool and keep an eye on her mother.
George spent a few hours at the library, but did little work. He would always hate writing, and on a hot day like this, he hated it more than usual. At around 4.30 p.m. he left, and roared the little Fiat back along the road home. He arrived outside his home at 4.50, and swung the car to the left to enter the dirt track leading to the house. He never saw the Chevrolet Impala driven by seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, a classmate from Downey, coming up fast behind him. It tried to overtake just as Lucas swung across the road. The heavier Chevy slammed into the side of the Fiat, level with the driver’s seat, and sent it bounding like a toy. On the third roll, Lucas’s seatbelt snapped and he was thrown clear, flying high into the air before landing with stunning force on his chest and stomach. The car bounced twice more, showering dust and pebbles of safety glass, crashed into a walnut tree at sixty miles an hour, and stuck there, wrapped around the trunk. So great was the impact that the tree, roots and all, shifted two feet.
I should have been killed, but I wasn’t. I’m living on borrowed time.
Lucas on his accident
Lucas’s survival was miraculous. Had the seatbelt not snapped, had he not been thrown clear, had he landed on his head rather than his chest, he would almost certainly have died in the road in front of his own home.
Nobody inside the Lucas house heard the crash. Their neighbor opposite, Shorty Coleman, bolted out, saw him lying unconscious, face bloody, and rang immediately for an ambulance. With the hospital only five miles away, it arrived quickly. As Lucas was loaded in, he began to turn blue with cyanosis, and on the trip to the hospital he started vomiting blood.
At the hospital, the doctor on duty, Paul Carlsen, gave him a blood transfusion and inserted four needles into his stomach to check for the internal bleeding that would indicate ruptured organs. George Sr was telephoned, and he raced to the hospital, then home to collect Wendy and his wife. When they arrived at George’s bedside, they found him connected to oxygen and transfusion tubes, his forehead bandaged, his face ashen. ‘Mom, did I do something wrong?’ he muttered, half unconscious. Dorothy wept, and had to be led from the room. George Sr prayed. Wendy just stared at her brother, and wondered what would have happened had she gone to the library with him. From the look of the car, she would probably have been dead.
A photographer from the Modesto Bee took a spectacular photograph of the mangled Fiat, which the paper used on the front page next day, under the heading ‘Youth Survives Crash.’ ‘Just what part in saving his life the rollbar and a safety belt played is not known but George W. Lucas Jr survived this crash yesterday,’ said the Bee. Later, the circumstances of the accident would be subtly manipulated by the Lucas machine to shift any blame from him. A 1994 book authorized by Lucasfilm describes Ferreira as ‘driving behind him at eighty to ninety miles an hour’ – a charge not supported by the record – and ‘with his headlights off – hardly a crime at 4.50 p.m. on a summer afternoon. The local police were in no doubt about who was to blame. While he was still in hospital, they gave Lucas a ticket for making an illegal left turn.
The same book magnifies the extent of Lucas’s injuries, describing him as ‘without a pulse, his lungs collapsed and numerous bones crushed.’ In fact, to the surprise of Carlsen and the other medical staff, they proved less severe than they looked. Despite the gash on his forehead and the bruises on his shoulders, he had only two minor fractures, and his liver, spleen, and kidneys were intact, though bruised. The worst damage was to his chest, which had absorbed most of the force. X-rays revealed hematomas on his lungs, which were hemorrhaging. But that could be dealt with. The doctors injected anti-inflammatory drugs, and George, who was in good health generally, started to recover.
Paradoxically, his accident won him the high-school graduation which had been in doubt. On Friday, the day of commencement, someone from the school brought his diploma to the hospital, his failure to make up his courses conveniently forgotten.
Lucas was too dazed to relish his good fortune. If anyone were to ask him the question posed by the publicity for American Graffiti, ‘Where Were You in ’62?’, he would have replied, ‘In bed.’ Most of his summer was spent convalescing, and the legend has grown up of his Pauline conversion during this period to hard work, ambition, and the life of the mind.
It may even be partly true. A lot was happening in the world, and with leisure to contemplate it, Lucas may have seen his life in a new light. During 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in October, John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev over the missiles he’d sneaked into Cuba; America exploded a nuclear device over Johnston Island in the Pacific; Polaroid launched a new one-minute color film; and the first Titan inter-continental ballistic missile was installed in a concrete silo in the American heartland, targeted