them destined to be among his favorites, like the first James Bond film, Dr No, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; but he watched plenty of television, none of it very significant. That year’s Emmys chose the thoughtful legal series The Defenders as the best show of 1961, but the networks, eyes ever on the ratings, premiered nothing as interesting in 1962, which saw the debut of The Beverly Hillbillies, the World War II series Combat, animated science fiction from Hanna-Barbera in The Jetsons, and the mindless comedy McHale’s Navy. The Tonight Show also got a new host, Johnny Carson.
It was a big year for dance music. The Twist was hot – Chubby Checker seemed to be on every TV pop programme – followed by Joey Dee and the Starliters doing ‘Peppermint Twist.’ Fads like the Limbo Rock, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi and the Lo-co-motion were sent up in ‘The Monster Mash’ by the Crypt Kickers, with Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, imitating the sepulchral tones of Karloff.
What caught Lucas’s ear, however, was a new presence on the air, from an unexpected source – Mexico.
Robert Weston Smith was born in Brooklyn in 1938. His resonant voice and interest in music made him a natural for radio, and by 1962 he was a disc jockey on KCIJ-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, where as ‘Big Smith with the Records’ he gained a following among admirers of rhythm and blues. In Shreveport, Smith began developing a fictional character for himself, one which would exploit a certain furtive quality in his voice, and his flair for the outrageous. He took his idea to XERF-FM in Del Rio, Texas. Most of the station’s clients were preachers, who paid generously for the right to broadcast their message all over the US via its massive 250,000-watt transmitter – five times the power allowed for stations within the US – sited just over the Mexican border.
Smith convinced XERF that he could win just as many listeners in the late-night and early-morning hours with rhythm and blues and bluegrass music. His sponsors were the same preachers who dominated the daylight hours. Smith’s throaty musical introductions, occasional lycanthropic howls, yelps of ‘Mercy!’ and exhortations to ‘Get yo’self nekkid!’ interspersed with commercials for plastic effigies of Jesus, sanctified prayer handkerchiefs, and the collected sermons of his holy-rolling backers, soon became a feature of the American soundscape, and ‘Wolfman Jack,’ as Smith now called himself, an institution.
Lucas became a fan. Later, he would remark that, ‘People have a relationship with a deejay whom they’ve never seen but to whom they feel very close because they’re with him every day. For a lot of kids, he’s the only friend they’ve got.’
While he lay in bed listening to the Wolfman, Lucas contemplated his future.
There were plenty of alternatives. As he recovered, his father pressed the point that if there was a time for his son to go into the family business, this was surely it. George responded with the stubbornness which his father must have recognized, since it reflected his own. Lucas Sr saw that money bought power and freedom. So did his son. He believed in a hard day’s work for a fair salary. So did his son. He saw discipline, self-control, and self-reliance as the core of good character. So did his son. Lucas Jr rejected his father’s values in adolescence, but spent the next years attaching himself to surrogate fathers who would tell him the same things: work hard, make money, and use it to buy independence.
With his car wrecked and no chance of financing another, Lucas’s racing days were at an end, unless he took a job as a mechanic servicing someone else’s ride. On the plus side, he had, against the odds, graduated from high school; though this had its negative aspects too, since he now became eligible to be drafted. At the end of American Graffiti, Terry the Toad, the character with whom Lucas is most identified, goes to Vietnam, where he is listed as missing in action – a fate explained in ironic detail in More American Graffiti.
Vietnam posed a potent threat to teenagers like Lucas in 1962. Many, including his future partner Gary Kurtz, served their stint. Some were judged too unhealthy for the army, as Lucas would be, though he didn’t yet know it. Others found a way around it. Steven Spielberg would have been happy to hang out in San Jose, California after his high-school graduation (with grades as poor as Lucas’s), seeing movies and making a few of his own on 8mm, but the arrival of his Selective Service Notice in early 1964 – delivered by his father while he waited in line to see Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – concentrated his mind wonderfully, and he enrolled at California State College at Long Beach, thus gaining a student exemption.
As he convalesced, Lucas decided to continue in school, and enrolled in junior college. These halfway houses between high school and college offered two-year courses, usually vocational. In the fall of 1962, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College, assembling an arts major that even further exasperated his father: astronomy, sociology, speech, and art history – none of them any use in selling office supplies.
Except for speech, which Lucas hoped would improve his limited communication skills and eradicate his warbling croak of a voice (it didn’t; he admits he was ‘terrible in Speech class’), the other courses were those traditionally chosen by adolescents who, having rejected religion, are looking for a new belief system based in rationalism. Reason and science become the new gods. The new believer finds himself worshipping the Divine Order, the Power of the Mind, the Inevitability of Historical Change.
Already, an ambitious science fiction writer named Lafayette Ron Hubbard had cashed in on this thirst for certainties by inventing his own quasi-scientific religion, Scientology, which, with notable shrewdness, he’d launched via an article in the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The same magazine gave generous publicity to the experiences of Dr Joseph Rhine of Duke University in hunting the elusive signs of what he christened ‘psi powers’: telepathy and telekinesis.
Lucas later read the basic works of sociology and anthropology which traced modern religion and morality back to their roots in tribal rituals and earth magic. But though he has been credited, retrospectively, with a near-lifelong interest in cultural studies and science fiction which blossomed in the Star Wars films, nobody can remember him being interested in anything but television and cars until long after he left Modesto.
In 1964 Lucas graduated from Modesto Junior College with an Associate in Arts degree, and an A in astronomy and Bs in speech, sociology, and art history. His grade average hovered around C, but that was enough to get into all but the most demanding colleges. John Plummer urged him to try USC with him. But Lucas decided he didn’t want to move that far from home. Instead he enrolled at San Francisco State, which had the added advantage of being free.
He still had no clear idea of what career he might follow. At junior college he’d drifted back to photography, this time with an 8mm movie camera bought by his father. Though he no longer had ambitions to drive competitively, he also spent time around the race circuits, hanging out with Allen Grant and other old friends, but filming rather than tinkering with their cars. ‘I wasn’t the hot guy any more,’ he recalled. ‘I was sort of over the hill, though I still knew all the guys.’
Lucas discovered the pleasures of watching, ideally through the lens of a camera. People didn’t ask awkward questions when you filmed them; they just let you be. And, seen through the camera, they themselves came into sharper focus. You could observe, comment, categorize, without saying a word.
What Lucas found more interesting than human beings, however, were objects. On occasional visits to Berkeley, he saw films of the new American ‘underground’ – Stan Brakhage’s jittering 8mm diaries, Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees (1961), the abstractions of Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, Robert Breer, and in particular Jordan Belson, who projected his wobbling psychedelic creations on the walls of the San Francisco Planetarium.
The hot documentary from 1960 was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the Newport Jazz Festival, the first and only film by fashion photographer Bert Stern. Stern didn’t bother much with interviews. He preferred to stand back and film faces, or the reflections of yacht hulls on the surface of the water, which he cut to music by Mose Allison. There was no commentary, no point of view except that of the camera, no judgments, no argument, no plot. Lucas must have said to himself with some satisfaction,