John Baxter

George Lucas: A Biography


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wooden buildings in an expanse of open ground. They’d been stables for the horses of cavalrymen stationed there during World War I. In the twenties, it was the school of architecture, then, after 1929, the film school. Following World War II, the college erected two more army-surplus wooden barracks buildings to house an audio-visual unit which mainly trained government and military personnel to use educational film materials. On the side, it produced instructional films. That unit became the nucleus of the USC Cinema School.

      The school had a bare minimum of facilities. The old stables became a sound stage, with a screening room next door, always called Room 108, with 35mm and 16mm projection. Editing machines – ancient upright Moviolas – were crammed into single large room, next to a storage space for cameras and other movie equipment. Classrooms, each with its own 16mm projector, occupied the barracks. There was nowhere to hang out, so students congregated in an open space in the middle of the buildings.

      Students were required to live on campus for the first year. A high-rise dormitory, one of the college’s few modern buildings, loomed over the cinema department, but it was reserved for female students. Most males, including Lucas, occupied Touton Hall, an older building across campus. It had no cafeteria, so he either had to trudge to the women’s dorm and suffer its famously inedible food, or eat in the neighborhood – not then as dangerous as it became after the 1965 riots in nearby Watts.

      To his alarm, he found he wouldn’t have a room of his own. The college did make an effort to match up people of like interests, so he found himself sharing with Randy Epstein. A genial Angeleno, Epstein, now a successful Californian property developer, was used to prosperity, and was surprised by Lucas’s Spartan possessions – which consisted mostly of a Nikon 35mm camera and some clothes. He didn’t even have a stereo, a deficiency which Epstein remedied.

      Watching him unpack his wardrobe of plaid shirts, jeans, and a boxy jacket with too-wide lapels, woven from a blanket-like fabric with metallic threads, Epstein wondered where Lucas had got his vision of how people dressed in Los Angeles – from the movies? To another student, Don Glut, who’d come from Chicago trailing a reputation as a motorcycle freak and street-gang member, Lucas was ‘very conservative-looking. Those were the days of the hippie look, but he had short hair. He looked like a young businessman. Somebody working his way up to corporate office.’ Hal Barwood, also in the film school, thought he resembled Buddy Holly. Lucas’s long silences emphasized his air of strangeness. Nervousness increased the tremor in his voice, turning it into a nervous warble. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan says, ‘He’s sort of like a cartoon character. In fact his voice, I think, is like about ten different cartoon characters.’ Each morning, Lucas walked to his USC window and said, ‘Hello, world.’ It sounded, says Epstein, ‘just like Kermit the frog from The Muppets.

      For every USC student doing a course in the humanities, a dozen were on athletics scholarships, including most of the college’s few African-Americans, one of whom, on the 1967 football team, was O.J. Simpson. The majority of these jocks lived as if people like Lucas, Epstein, Glut, and the other arts types didn’t exist. Glut says disgustedly, ‘We were mostly in the company of beer-guzzling, fraternity-type idiots. Lots of football players, who would do isometric exercises by straining against the side of doors, and screaming. It was like they didn’t have heads: their neck and head were the same width, as if the head was just another cervical verterbra, only with hair on it.’ USC still kept up its intimate relationship with the military, and the film school routinely enrolled a large contingent of air force and navy personnel each year for training in camera operation and sound recording – an older, more reserved, and decidedly non-hippie group which stuck together, and represented a further damping influence.

      Surrounded by an atmosphere somewhere between Animal House and Full Metal Jacket, the remaining film-school students seldom socialized with anyone else on campus. ‘When people would ask, “Are you in a fraternity or something?’” recalls Randy Epstein, ‘I’d say, “No, I’m basically going to a private school within a private school, and we never see the outside of these four walls.’” Had they been more gregarious, or the atmosphere more welcoming, the history of cinema might have been very different; but the sense of isolation encouraged a feeling of them-against-us that grew into a revolution.

      The USC students of 1966–68 reads like a roll-call of New Hollywood. They included John Milius, director of Big Wednesday and The Wind and the Lion, the legendary scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now, and ‘fixer’ on films as various as Jaws and Dirty Harry; Randal Kleiser, director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon; Basil Poledouris, composer of scores for Conan the Barbarian and Iron Eagle; Walter Murch, sound editor on Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, and director of Return to Oz; Howard Kazanjian, line producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and other collaborations between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg; screenwriter Willard Huyck, who, with his wife Gloria Katz, then at UCLA, wrote American Graffiti, parts of the Indiana Jones series, and Howard the Duck, which Huyck also directed; Caleb Deschanel, cinematographer of The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff; and Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who would co-script Sugarland Express for Spielberg – Robbins as a director also made films like *batteries not included, while Barwood, who began as an animator at USC, became a career writer of video games for Lucasfilm. Also in Lucas’s classes were Don Glut, who wrote the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back and directed Dinosaur Valley Girls; and Charley Lippincott, later Lucas’s marketing manager, and a force in the launching of Star Wars. Then, and later, women played little part in what was seen as a man’s business. ‘There were about two women in the whole film program,’ says John Milius. (‘Three’, insists Randy Epstein, ‘but we weren’t sure about one of them.’)

      To Lucas, the faculty was no more impressive than the campus. ‘Most of the people were “those who can’t do, teach”-type people,’ says Don Glut. ‘The film-history class was mostly watching movies and talking about them. That was Arthur Knight’s class. His book The Liveliest Art became our textbook-which generated a lot of royalties for Professor Knight. The only person who had ever done anything was Irwin Blacker, who taught screenwriting. He’d written some books and screenplays. Mel Sloan was a professional editor. The animation course was directed by Herb Kossower. There was a guy named Gene Peterson whose big claim to fame was he had been a gaffer on Stakeout on Dope Street.’ (Glut is actually in error here, though the truth is even more improbable. The one film on which Peterson appears to have received a professional credit, indeed as a gaffer, i.e. electrician’s laborer, was The Brain Eaters, a 1958 horror film directed by Bruno Ve Sota.)

      ‘These people were staff, not professors,’ says Charley Lippincott, who came to USC via its night school, which taught a slimmed-down film course. ‘Dave Johnson taught production management. He’d been there forever; went to school there. He was probably the best-liked teacher. Ken Miura taught sound. A lot of these guys came out of the Second World War, and had been there on the GI Plan.’

      Neat in his Modesto clothes, Lucas turned up dutifully at film classes, as well as those in astronomy and English, which he had to take as part of his regular course. He had no idea what kind of movies he was going to see, but those which were shown jolted someone whose limited experience of cinema was almost entirely Hollywood. Inflamed by legends of ‘the Underground,’ the students preferred the films of the French New Wave, which had taken off in 1959 with Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Godard’s 1960 A Bout de Souffle. The fashion for hand-held cameras, natural light, real locations, and sound recorded ‘live’ spread through them like a virus.

      Godard’s 1965 science fiction film Alphaville made a particular impression. It followed a secret agent of the future, called ‘Lemmy Caution’ after Peter Cheyney’s detective hero, whom the film’s star Eddie Constantine often played on screen, as he infiltrates, none too subtly, the city of Alphaville, controlled by a computer called Alpha 60, which rigorously suppresses all emotion, keeping the inhabitants numbed by drugs, sex, and violent death. With typical bravado, Godard ignored special effects. Footage of Paris’s bleaker suburbs stood in for Alphaville, and Alpha 60 was just the disembodied voice of a man speaking through an artificial larynx. To Lucas in