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 particular, it was a powerful lesson, which he would put into practice in his major student film, THX1138.
Many of the teachers, particularly those teaching craft courses like camerawork and sound recording, also embraced the nouvelle vague. Its techniques weren’t much different from those used in documentary everywhere. ‘The faculty was into art films,’ says Randy Epstein. ‘If it had sprocket-holes showing, or was a little out of focus, they loved it.’ Richard Walter said scornfully of their attitude, ‘A real film-maker didn’t write his or her film. They put a camera on their shoulder, sprayed the environment with a lens; they Did Their Own Thing, Let It All Hang Out, and anything they did was beautiful, because Hey, you’re beautiful.’
Arthur Knight screened the films praised by his generation of critics: the classics of German expressionism like Metropolis, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible, D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, David Lean. Nobody decreed to be ‘commercial’ received a second look, including later heroes of New Hollywood like Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller. Even Alfred Hitchcock was regarded as having ‘sold out.’
John Milius adulated B-westerns and the films of directors like Fuller, and Don Glut was a fanatic for serials and old science fiction and horror films. As a boy in Chicago, he had made thirty 16mm films, including a version of Frankenstein. Such was his enthusiasm for serials that his mother sewed him a Superman suit and another like that worn by the Martian menace of The Purple Monster Strikes, both of which he brought to USC
Lucas drove a silver Camaro, and continued to wear his Modesto clothes. The only person in the film classes who looked more square was Randal Kleiser, who moonlighted as a photographic model. In their second year at USC, his beach-boy good looks beamed from billboards all over Los Angeles, advertising Pepsi-Cola. Don Glut, who, despite his raffish background, had some of the same style, formed what he called the Clean-Cut Cinema Club. The members were himself, Kleiser, Randy Epstein, Chris Lewis (the son of film star Loretta Young), and Lucas. The group contrasted starkly with the hippie element of the school, personified by Milius, who wore no shoes, extravagantly praised the then-unfashionable films of John Ford and the almost unknown Akira Kurosawa, lived in a converted bomb-shelter near the beach so he could surf every day, and let it be known that he was only marking time in college until he could enter the Marines, go to Vietnam, and die gloriously in battle. When the Marines turned him down because of his chronic asthma, he directed his frustrated
