were lax. The few papers required were mostly book reports, and as long as Lucas turned up and took at least a perfunctory part in class discussions, he was unlikely to fail any course for academic reasons. He’d also found his mechanical skill much in demand. The Moviolas and ancient clockwork Cine Special cameras were always breaking down, and he was usually the only person who knew how to fix them.
Like all the students, he gravitated to the congenial teachers, and away from those who demanded too much. The least popular was Irwin Blacker, who taught a screenwriting course from which students had been known to emerge in tears. Unlike almost everyone else, Blacker flunked those who didn’t meet his exacting standards, or share his respect for the Aristotelian model of story structure. Those who survived, including Milius and Richard Walter, emerged with a grasp of screenwriting technique that stood them in good stead in Hollywood. Walter, now head of the screenwriting department at UCLA’s film school, called Blacker ‘a cantankerous, obstinate, boorish bull of a guy,’ but ‘my mentor and my inspiration.’
Lucas shunned Blacker’s class, but enjoyed that of Arthur Knight. The antithesis of Blacker, cordial, clubbable, and social, Knight had come to a comfortable accommodation with both academe and the film business. Through his journalism for magazines like the Saturday Review and the Hollywood Reporter, he maintained close contacts with the industry, which he exploited on behalf of USC. He ran a lecture series called ‘Thursday Night at the Movies’ where directors often presented their new films and discussed them with students. Afterwards, Knight liked to invite the guest and some students back to his home for drinks. David Lean previewed Doctor Zhivago at one of Knight’s evenings in 1965, and Jean-Luc Godard spoke the following year. In both cases, Lucas attended. The screening room in which Knight held court became the ad hoc center of film studies at USC, to the extent that when the school was rebuilt in the nineties – largely with Lucas money – a space was named Room 405 in its honor.
Knight’s encouragement of his students went beyond occasional soirées in the Hollywood Hills. His student assistant had a valuable inside view of what was going on and coming up. Charley Lippincott held the job for a while, after which it passed to Richard Walter. Knight also occasionally recommended students for part-time jobs in the industry, or scholarships which came his way via the few USC alumni who had gone on to make careers in the industry. This small and not-particularly-distinguished group included James Ivory, who in those days before A Room with a View and Howards End was living in India and making low-budget features like Shakespeare Wallah and The Guru; cameraman Conrad Hall, a moving force in the setting up of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, NABET, the craft union more sympathetic to low-budget producers and television than the monolithic International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, IATSE; and Denis Sanders, who with his brother Terry had won an Oscar for their short film A Time out of War in 1954, and who had gone on to make low-budget independent features like War Hunt (1961).
The most distinguished USC alumnus, however, and the most typical of the generation before Lucas and his friends, was Irvin Kershner. Tall and bearded, with a goatish profile like that of a Biblical patriarch or an Arab chieftain, ‘Kersh’ had many friends on the faculty of the film school, in particular Mel Sloan and Gene Peterson, and sometimes taught courses there when they went on leave. He had drifted into USC after World War II, following desultory attempts at careers in painting and music. The then-dean of communications asked him to give a course in photography, after which he taught himself cinematography to shoot some of the documentaries the school made as part of a deal to supply instructional material to the US Public Health Service.
Kershner’s experience of the professional film business was instructive, and enshrined the received wisdom about getting a job in movies after graduation: you didn’t have a chance. ‘They wouldn’t let me in the Cameraman’s Union, the Editing Union, or the Art-Director’s Union,’ he told the students, ‘so I said, “There’s only one thing to do – direct.’” He sneaked in the back door, getting jobs as a cameraman on TV documentaries which led to his low-budget and non-union feature Stakeout on Dope Street, made for a bare-bones $30,000
At every turn, students like Lucas were told they might as well forget a career in Hollywood feature-film-making. ‘Everybody knew there were only three ways to get into the film business,’ says Randy Epstein. ‘You could be born the son or nephew of a famous film personality, or you could marry a producer’s daughter. I forget the third one.’ Even if they got into a union, they faced a tortuous apprenticeship of three to five years before they won their card. Gary Kurtz, later Lucas’s producer and partner, went through USC from 1959 to 1962, and graduated as a cameraman. ‘It was impossible to break into the industry in any of the guilds or unions,’ he says. ‘So we were more or less forced to work in the low-budget or exploitation area, really. A lot of film-school graduates just got tired of that process and did other things. They became teachers at other film schools or universities, or they went into educational or documentary films, which weren’t so rigidly unionized. They started to work for television stations around the country, which didn’t have that problem either.’
The very idea of film school was anathema to Hollywood. Charley Lippincott was warned not to mention that he went to USC if he ever visited a studio lot. ‘We were all brainwashed with the notion that none of us would ever get into the business,’ says Don Glut. ‘We might work in camera shops or as projectionists in theaters, but we were never going to work in the business.’
For the craft classes, film lighting, editing, and animation, the end-of-year examination was a film, culminating, in the senior year, in a graduate exercise in film direction; Course 480 of the curriculum. For the first year, everyone in Herb Kossower’s animation class was given one minute of black-and-white 16mm stock and told to use the Oxberry animation camera to make a film. Most of them animated drawings or manipulated objects in stop-action. Lucas decided to make a film that was both serious and professional. A Look at Life was a collage of photographs from Life magazine. Its zooms, cuts, and pans across contrasting images of girls in bikinis, lovers, babies, politicians, vampires, and civilians being shot in the Congo might have been meant to illustrate the popular slogan ‘Make love, not war.’ Kossower, impressed, urged him to enter it in student film festivals, where its brevity and pace made it a favorite. It won a number of prizes.
Thereafter, Lucas became Kossower’s star pupil, and a faculty favorite, a role he cemented with his second film, Herbie. An exercise for the lighting class, Lucas made the film with Paul Golding, another above-average student who, like so many, left the industry after graduation. They edited together abstract close-ups of night-time reflections in the polished surface of a car. The vehicle isn’t a Volkswagen, though it is normally described as one, since two years later Disney chose the name ‘Herbie’ for the sentient VW of its fantasy The Love Bug. The Herbie of Lucas’s title is jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, whom Lucas approached to supply a few minutes of background music. A voice, presumably Hancock’s, is heard on the soundtrack saying, ‘What can I do for ya?’, then, ‘Not like sittin’ at home, I can tell ya.’ In between, the camera of Lucas and Golding watches light ripple over the car’s gleaming fenders and spotless windscreen. The credit reads: ‘These moments of reflection have been brought to you by Paul Golding and George Lucas.’
Lucas was initially rejected by the film-school fraternity, Delta Kappa Alpha, because of his nerdy image, though once it approved him, he took almost no part in its activities except to grab something from its snack bar when the cafeterias were closed. By day, the editing machines were in almost constant use, but Lucas and others sneaked back at night, missing dinner. A diet of candy and junk food finally undermined his frail constitution and brought him down with mononucleosis.
Even when he wasn’t working, Lucas didn’t mix much, least of all with women. Flirting was integral to college life, and there was a lot of sex about – much, though not all of it, playful. The film-school patio was a short-cut to other parts of the campus, and girls from the nearby women’s
