Fellowship & Fairydust

There’s no question that George Lucas changed science fiction cinema when Star Wars premiered in 1977. Before, the sci-fi market consisted almost entirely of low-budget movies that weren’t treated as great or important mainstream entertainment (except perhaps after the fact). Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey started changing that norm, but Kubrick’s film received mixed reviews and lost money at the time (Block and Wilson 493). Star Wars broke barriers, opening the market for sci-fi classics like Alien, E.T., Blade Runner, and Back to the Future. As detailed in mini-documentary “The Force Is With Them,” Star Wars also influenced fantasy filmmakers like Peter Jackson, particularly through its production design. It’s also worth noting that American fantasy films didn’t attract A-list talent or budgets until after Star Wars, leading to films like Willow and Ladyhawke, and eventually to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Whether or not George Lucas made any great sci-fi films after the original Star Wars trilogy, his influence has been incredible. What’s more incredible is that on the face of it, Star Wars apparently came from nowhere. Before Star Wars, George Lucas was a semi-successful protégé of Francis Ford Coppola, with two films to his credit: an artsy dystopian film where the characters’ names sound like license plates,* and a fun (but definitely not sci-fi) film about kids coming of age in 1960s Modesto.

However, a closer look at Lucas’ first two films alongside his films made as a student at the University of Southern California (USC) shows how certain ideas had percolated long before he introduced audiences to a galaxy far, far away. These early films have been made available in various ways—as bonus materials on DVDs of Lucas’ theatrical films, as footage in the documentary A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, and appearing in countless copies on YouTube.

These early films provide not only a unique chance to see all of a filmmaker’s early content but also hints of what would come.

*Various filmmakers and scholars have interpreted the names in THX 1138 in various ways. The suggestion that they sound like license plate numbers comes from John Lithgow’s introduction to the 1994 TV documentary American Cinema: The Film School Generation.

The Early Student Films

The following short films were made when Lucas was an undergraduate student at USC. In a conversation with Christopher Nolan, Lucas observed that at this period, he was most interested in pure film, even fighting with professors about whether characterization mattered in movies (“George Lucas on the impact of Star Wars”). That love for visuals over plot clearly influenced these student films.

“At USC Film School during the ‘60s—and perhaps even more at UCLA—student films generally shied away from ‘narrative.’ That is to say, for the most part they did not try to tell stories. To attempt to recount a story was considered (particularly by bitter, creatively and professionally unfulfilled faculty) to be ‘too Hollywood.’” — Richard Walter

During this period, Lucas joined “the Dirty Dozen” (Pollock 48), a group of USC students that viewed and influenced each other’s work, not unlike C.S. Lewis’ Oxford group, the Inklings. Along with Lucas, the Dirty Dozen included future greats like Randal Kleiser (director of Grease), Matthew Robbins (director of Dragonslayer) Walter Murch (film and sound editor on movies like The Godfather Part II), John Milius (screenwriter of action films like Dirty Harry, director of Conan the Barbarian), and Willard Huyck (who, along with his wife Gloria Katz, became Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters for a period). As we shall see, the Dirty Dozen contributed to Lucas’ early work in various ways.

Look at Life (1965): made for an animation class where the finished film had to be only a minute long, Look at Life is a collage of news images. Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech. An athlete doing a slam dunk. A child in a KKK outfit at a rally. Various hippies doing hippie things. An advertisement that reads “Help stamp out these runny noses.” The collage culminates in various images of couples kissing or embracing, then a bloodied man raising his hands as someone recites Proverbs 10:12: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.” The last images are the words “The End,” then a question mark.

To the extent this film has a discernible theme, it appears to be “let’s love and get away from all the violence.” Most of the images are about 1960s strife, but it ends with loving couples and the injunction that love covers all sins. In other words, make love, not war, and live free.

Herbie (1966): Not to be confused with the Disney film released two years later, but surprisingly both are about cars. This short film is another collection of images — this time a video of light reflecting off a car’s bodywork, punctuated by shots of headlights going on and off. Pleasant jazz plays in the background, and the images are striking without having any overarching theme or plot progression.

However, the fact this short film focuses on a car’s visual aspects may be prophetic. Lucas observed when talking to Nolan that his experience building cars in Modesto informed his movies (ibid). In Lucas’ experience, cars can get people places, but they can break down — in fact, they seemed to break down all the time (ibid). His history with vehicles informed moments in Star Wars where characters talk about spaceships like old cars (“what a piece of junk!”) and those ships break down at the worst times. Here in Herbie, Lucas doesn’t emphasize vehicles’ flaws. Instead, he focuses on their beauty and sleekness (a quality that we see in the sleek Death Star interiors).

Freiheit (1966): Titled after the German word for “freedom,” Freiheit opens with some still images of night skies and nature before transitioning to its main subject: a man (played by Randal Kleiser) running through woods. The man stops under a tree and waits, preparing to run across an open field with a sign marking a borderline. What is he escaping from? Who pursues him? We never figure it out, but we see the consequences as he tries to escape. After seeing those consequences, which include some ominous men in long coats, the film ends with contradictory narration about the nature of freedom: “freedom’s a thing you have to deserve,” “without freedom, there’s no reason to live,” “without freedom man can’t exist properly.” 

Freedom was arguably the theme of Look at Life (live freely, make love, not war) and is clearly the theme here. In this case, the film becomes explicitly about someone (the man) outrunning authority (the men in long coats), the fight between freedom and authoritarianism. Those themes would become central to Star Wars, with its story of rebels fighting against the evil Empire (“George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian”). In this case, though, there are no specific details about the tyranny the hero wants to escape, which makes the idea a little too abstract. This is a short film about an idea, and not much else. However, unlike Lucas’ previous short films, it has a basic plot where events follow a line of progression.

1:42.08 (1966): A visual tone-poem (images that capture a setting without characters or plot per se), showing a pit crew preparing a Lotus 23 race car to do a lap around the track. According to some secondary sources, the film is alternatively known as “1:42.08 to Qualify” (“1:42.08”), so the numbers presumably refer to the car’s lap time. The chronology of events (car is prepped, car drives, car finishes the lap) gives the short film a minimal plot progression. The images are also very striking, and like Herbie, they show Lucas’ fascination with cars.

6-18-67 (1967): Another visual tone-poem, this one made when Lucas visited the set of J. Lee Thompson’s Western MacKenna’s Gold. Bits of overheard dialogue appear in a few scenes of Thompson’s crew setting things up. Beyond that, the short film consists of striking images showing the sun, prairies, animals, windmills, etc. All this is visually very interesting, and shows Lucas’ eye for Western landscapes. Westerns, particularly John Ford’s The Searchers, heavily influenced Star Wars’ style (“The Films That Made Star Wars”).

Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town (1967): Named after the E.E. Cummings poem, the short film has no dialogue but follows two plots that slowly converge. In the first, a young man wanders through a field and finds a pretty girl. In the second, a photographer seemingly makes people disappear when he gets photos of them in their everyday life.

Like the poem, the images are very pastoral, and the story seems to be about nothing more than everyday life — although the photographer may suggest another kind of authoritarianism. Trapping people in images and making them disappear to get a good image suggests the idea of technology controlling human life.

Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4 EB (1967): A combination of Lucas’ original ideas and some ideas by Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins (“Artifact from the Future”), this short film tells a story about a dystopian underground world. A man, THX 138 4 EB, runs down various corridors to escape captivity. Security camera footage shows his movements and other residents (all wearing white tunics, with their numbers written on their heads or on caps they wear) operating the equipment that keeps this underground world operational. In between these scenes are recordings of a conversation with THX’s female roommate, apparently being interrogated about his disobedient behavior.

The found-footage approach without narration (except via security systems reporting on the rebel’s progress) takes some getting used to, but it works. For the first time in Lucas’ filmography, we see a linear plot with human characters that includes both action and dialogue, and it holds together well. Like Freiheit, this is a story about an individual trying to escape a system, but with specific details (the uniforms, the dialogue, the setting) that make it a story instead of a visualized metaphor. Unlike Herbie or 1:42.08, the technology (endless shots of wires, circuit breakers, cameras, and computer readouts) feels controlling and anti-life. At the same time, this life-controlling technology has a different effect than the camera in Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town. The camera operated like a lamp sucking people into it, something strangely magical in its ability to trap things. The cameras, circuit breakers, and computers feel banal, and perhaps therefore more threatening. The banal yet domineering quality resembles the Death Star’s huge, authoritarian technology that can destroy lives with a few flipped switches.

The Documentaries

The first of these films was made when Lucas was a graduate student at USC. The second was made when he was an intern on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People, edging into his own career as a professional filmmaker. Some members of the Dirty Dozen had moved on by this point, while others would continue to be important to his work.

The Emperor (1967): A profile of Los Angeles disc jockey Bob “The Emperor” Hudson. The footage opens with some sequences of young women saying gushing things about “Emperor Hudson,” like maidens announcing the king’s arrival. After the surprising introduction, the film cuts to several men in uniforms (one of them a young George Lucas) getting out of a vehicle to enter a building. One of the men turns into a side corridor and removes his coat to show he is Hudson, then he has a typical day in the radio studio. The rest of the film alternates between short sequences of the gushing women, Hudson doing his routine, and footage of Los Angeles residents going about their day. Meanwhile, the soundtrack alternates between Hudson talking about himself and listeners giving different opinions about him.

This documentary is interesting because Lucas doesn’t try to be a purely fact-based account. It opens with Hudson explaining he started calling himself emperor after hearing stories about San Francisco legend Joshua Abraham Norton, who dubbed himself “Emperor of the United States.” Some San Francisco people treated Norton as a tourist novelty; others dismissed him as insane but harmless. The supporting characters in Lucas’ documentary — the radio listeners who like Hudson, the ones who think Hudson is full of it, the women clearly saying scripted lines about Hudson being a king — comment on the fantasy world that Hudson creates with his radio show.

The movie also credits John Milius as one of its several screenwriters. Within a year of The Emperor being finished, Milius and Lucas were discussing a collaboration: an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam. Not only would it be set in Vietnam, but Lucas says in the documentary Milius that he planned to film it in Vietnam during the war, using real soldiers to play the parts.

Filmmaker (1968): Lucas’ behind-the-scenes documentary of Francis Ford Coppola making The Rain People. The 30-minute film includes various clips of Coppola and his team preparing scenes, the soundtrack sometimes follows the action and sometimes cuts to technicians talking to Lucas about their craft. The documentary not only provides an interesting look at Coppola before he made The Godfather, but also hints at something that became vital to Coppola and Lucas: freedom to follow one’s vision. The documentary’s meatiest moments involve Coppola talking about his struggles against filmmaking unions so he can finish the film on schedule with the technicians he desires — and threatening to defy Warner Brothers and finance the film himself. Lucas had already shown a penchant for freedom in his short films and would follow Coppola’s example by making Star Wars through his own company, Lucasfilm.

Filmmaker was also made in what proved to be a crucial period for Lucas. After meeting Lucas and Milius, Coppola hired them to write scripts based on their ideas, to be produced by his company American Zoetrope (Coppola v-vi). Lucas would write a feature film version of THX 1138, and Milius would write his Vietnam script for Lucas to direct. Coppola remembers Milius alternating between two different titles for his script: The Psychedelic Soldier and Apocalypse Now (ibid).

The Early Feature Films

THX 1138 (1971): Lucas’ feature-length version of the short film (with Murch credited as co-writer), this film has the same plot minus the found footage approach. Here, THX 1138 is a factory technician whose female roommate is named LUH 3417. THX discovers he loves LUH after he stops taking his emotion-killing medication. When authorities discover their love (partly due to surveillance man SEN 5241 seeing their behavior), THX and LUH are sentenced to separate prisons. SEN ends up in the same prison as THX due to THX reporting some crimes he committed. Now both craving freedom, the two men work together to break out so THX can find his lost love.

The plot’s not big on dialogue, and the plot falls apart after the second act, but it does create a convincing atmosphere. Long shots of underground passages (most filmed in large car garages or subway tunnels) make the characters look tiny as they race around, trying to find a way out. The atmosphere also makes the dystopian future seem a bit grimy — dusty tunnels, stains on the walls, an aesthetic that Lucas says he carried into Star Wars with its grimy spaceships (“Commentary by George Lucas and Walter Murch”). 

There are also some interesting moments showing this dystopian era’s substitute for religion: tiny confession booths where a portrait of Jesus lights up and an artificial voice asks vague questions (“my time is yours, go ahead,” “yes, I understand,” “could you be more specific?”). Today, these vague answers sound creepily similar to talking with virtual assistants like Amazon’s Siri, with a dash of Orwellian authority: the artificial voice ends confession with the benediction, “you are a true believer. Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses….”

Bald: The Making of THX 1138 (1971): A TV featurette that Lucas directed uncredited to advertise THX 1138. Like his previous documentaries, it collects various contrasting images — conversations, people filming themselves for small scenes, and so on. In this case, the footage centers on how the movie’s style (bald people in white tunics living underground) required all the actors to shave their heads. Some actors are seen shaving their heads in their bathrooms; others (the women especially) have barbers do it. Some (mostly the men) treat it as a joke, while the women appear nervous and horrified at the change. In between are a few clips and stills from THX 1138, including some of the best-known scenes.

Since this film is a made-for-TV featurette, it’s the most conventional of Lucas’ films thus far. The material raises questions about how much hair affects people’s appearances and their perception of their identity. That idea would be explored in less interesting ways in later dystopian films like The Hunger Games, where everyone must be cleaned and groomed to present themselves to the public. The fact that Bald is about sacrifices to create a dystopian film creates an interesting wrinkle of complexity: what happens when people have to follow an uncomfortable policy to make a story about people fighting against authority?

American Graffiti (1973): After THX 1138 failed to gain a profit, Coppola encouraged Lucas to do something more conventional (Empire of Dreams). The result was American Graffiti, a nostalgia ride through 1960s smalltown California. Back then, Lucas was still in high school, building cars and dreaming of the future. American Graffiti begins with five friends meeting at Mel’s Drive-In. Curt and Steve are headed off to college the next day, although Curt’s having second thoughts. Steve’s girlfriend Laurie doesn’t like his suggestion that they see other people while he’s away, but doesn’t want to fight on their last night. Before the three head off for prom night, Steve leaves his car in the care of nerdy Terry, who thinks it’s his ticket to… well, use your imagination. Local dropout and drag racer John razzes their plans to leave Modesto, then drives off for his usual cruising before the morning race. The remainder of the movie follows these characters over the night’s course, their stories intersecting at various times. Curt tries to find a woman he has a crush on. Terry tries to look cool and score in “his car.” Steve and Laurie fall in and out of love. John flirts with a woman who tricks him into babysitting her 13-year-old sister Carol. 

While the language is sometimes crass and there are two sex scenes, the sexual material ends up seeming funny in a squeamish way. These characters have no idea what they’re doing, and their attempts to get lucky only make them look foolish. The squeamishness could be Lucas admitting that cruising down smalltown streets to pick up girls seemed fun, but was creepy (and stupid).

The movie’s background also provides hints of the future. The movie’s script was co-written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. They went on to polish the dialogue in Lucas’ Star Wars script (Bouzereau 7) and to write Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. John Milius didn’t contribute to the script of American Graffiti but admitted that the character John is based on him — cocky, and getting past his prime as a sportsman (Miles and Pye 72). 

The Road to Star Wars

By all accounts, the box office success of American Graffiti made Star Wars possible. At least by Milius’ account, it also killed Lucas’ plans to direct Apocalypse Now. After becoming a rich man off American Graffiti, Lucas lost interest in his plan to film a Vietnam movie in an active war zone (“Interview with John Milius”). Coppola suggests that Lucas simply wanted to make Star Wars first, but Coppola exercised his right as the producer to direct it himself (Coppola vi). Whichever is correct, Coppola moved forward with Apocalypse Now, using a completely different style than Lucas planned. The resulting film earned massive acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination for Milius. It’s tempting to think viewers lost the chance for a more experimental Lucas-directed Apocalypse Now that might have been a classic in its own right. Still, if that happened, Lucas wouldn’t have been able to work with Steven Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

While none of these early films had the impact of Star Wars, they show Lucas experimenting with the ideas that became central to Star Wars. Machines can be beautiful but also faulty and a substitute for life rather than an aid to life. Systems are often too controlling and must be fought against when they become dictatorial. Uncharted frontiers (the Western film’s prairies, the distant galaxies’ planets) are worth exploring. Freedom (the freedom to produce one’s own movie, freedom to live one’s own life) matters. However, collaborating with like-minded people (other filmmakers, other rebels) yields greater results than doing everything alone. In different and surprising ways, these themes and messages would find their way into Star Wars and change the face of speculative fiction.

Sources

“1:42.08.” IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060046/.

A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope. Directed by Gary Leva. Bonus material on THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut. Warner Bros DVD, 2004.

“American Cinema: The Film School Generation & The Edge of Hollywood.” Directed by Steve Jenkins, 1994. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C3965023.

“Artifact from the Future: The Making of THX 1138.” Directed by Gary Leva. Bonus material on THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut. Warner Bros DVD, 2004.

Block, Alex Ben and Lucy Autrey Wilson (eds.). George Lucas’s Blockbusting: a decade-by-decade survey of timeless movies including untold secrets of their financial and cultural success. HarperCollins, 2010.

Bouzereau, Laurent. Star Wars: The Annotated Scripts. Lucas Books, 1997.

Coppola, Francis Ford. “Introduction.” Apocalypse Now Redux by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola. Faber & Faber, 2001.

Commentary by George Lucas and Walter Murch. THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut. Warner Bros DVD, 2004.

Empire of Dreams: The Story of The Star Wars Trilogy. Directed by Edith Becker and Kevin Burns. Produced by Prometheus Entertainment in association with Fox Television Studios and Lucasfilm. Included in Star Wars Trilogy: Bonus Material. Twentieth-Century Fox DVD, 2004.

“George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian.” April 25, 2018. youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo.

“George Lucas on the impact of Star Wars with Christopher Nolan.” Directors Guild of America, February 19, 2011. dga.org/Events/2011/04-april-2011/George-Lucas-on-Star-Wars.aspx

“Interview With John Milius.” Bonus material on Apocalypse Now Blu-Ray edition, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nY2J1gRzg

Lucas, George and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. American Graffiti. Grove Press, 1973.

Miles, Linda, and Michael Pye. “George Lucas.” George Lucas: Interviews edited by Sally Kline, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Milius: Man, Myth, Legend. Directed by Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa. Produced by Chop Shop Entertainment and Haven Entertainment, 2013.

“The Films That Made Star Wars.” Directed by Graham Telfer and written by Robin Bailes. Dark Corners Review, December 6, 2015. youtube.com/watch?v=W27mXXU9VZM.

“The Force Is With Them: The Legacy of Star Wars.” Written by Gary Leva (director not stated). Produced by Leva FilmWorks and Lucasfilm, included in Star Wars Trilogy: Bonus Material. Twentieth-Century Fox DVD, 2004.

Pollock, Dale. Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. Harmony Books, 1983.

Walter, Richard. “Lucas-era USC Film School Luminaries: Willard Huyck.” The Script Lab, May 1, 2019. thescriptlab.com/authors/10170-lucas-era-usc-film-school-luminaries-willard-huyck/.