the girls occasionally staged discreet stripteases, tantalizingly terminated at the last moment, to the chagrin of the watchers.
‘George was chasing girls,’ says Milius. ‘He didn’t catch them, but he was chasing them.’ Richard Walter agrees that Lucas was no Lothario. ‘I’ve read books that claimed George was a ladies’ man. It’s nonsense. He was very, very reticent.’ Randy Epstein’s girl ‘fixed up’ Lucas with a friend of hers, with an unconventional result. ‘He spoke to her on the phone for many hours over many days before he got the courage to ask her out,’ says Epstein, ‘and the fascinating thing is, he asked her to describe herself. Then he did an oil painting of what he thought she would look like. Not a sketch, but an actual oil painting. It was amazingly like her. It was like he’d cheated and got a look at her somehow. The girl was just overwhelmed that he had the talent to do this without even seeing her.’
In his second year, Lucas rented a house off-campus, a rickety wooden building on Portola Drive, in the Hollywood hills. His father grudgingly paid the $80 a month rent. To reach the upper floors of the three-level house, you climbed a ladder, and the furniture was minimal, but Lucas felt secure there. After a few months, Randal Kleiser moved in to share the rent. Both were friendly with another of the Clean-Cut group, Christopher Lewis. Lewis’s mother, Loretta Young, after a fairly lurid youth, had found God in middle age and, with her husband Tom Lewis, embarked on the production of a pietistic TV series, The Loretta Young Show. Since the show ended in 1961, Tom Lewis’s production facilities were often unused, and his son persuaded him to let his USC friends edit and record there. For Orgy Beach Party, an unfinished parody, produced by Christopher Lewis and directed by Don Glut, of the then-popular ‘beach party’ films, Kleiser played the handsome hero and Glut the monster who carries off the girl. Lucas shot stills, and they used the Lewis studio to record the theme song with Glut’s garage band, the Hustlers. In between, Lewis’s friends, including Lucas, often hung out at the sumptuous home of his parents. In their senior year, Lucas and Lewis even formed a production company, Sunrise Films, but it never made a film.
By the start of his second year at USC, Lucas had found his level. His Modesto wardrobe remained, though he’d ditched the unfortunate jackets. He’d also grown a beard, which gave character to his face, and disguised a weak chin, as well as earning him honorary credentials as a radical. At the same time, he remained shrewdly aware of the advantages of good faculty relations. While students like Glut, Milius, and Epstein drew fire from their teachers for turning out pastiches like Superman and the Gorilla Gang, which Glut not only wrote, directed, and edited, but for which he also composed the music, built the models, and did the special effects – which were impressive, given the minuscule budget – Lucas went for solid production values and certified liberal sentiments. For his second-year directing project, Freiheit (‘freedom’ in German), introduced as ‘A film by LUCAS,’ he persuaded Randal Kleiser to play a young man running away from a battle, suggested by sounds of artillery in the distance. He reaches a frontier, evidently that between East and West Germany, but is shot down by a soldier (Christopher Lewis). As he lies bleeding, voices on the soundtrack discuss the significance of freedom and the need to endure sacrifices to protect it.
Whatever else USC taught Lucas, the key concept he absorbed was the importance of teamwork. With so few resources and so little time, nothing got done unless you enlisted people to help you. Projects risked becoming incestuous. Basil Poledouris’s senior film, Glut, wove a fictional story around the character of USC’s most dissident student. Milius wrote it, Lucas recorded sound, and most other students had walk-on parts. It’s an effective and amusing little film from a man who would later become best known as a composer. At the start, Glut, playing himself, tries out for a job as a stuntman with Sam Fuller, who asks him if he can do a back-flip. Glut admits he can’t, but says he can fall off the back of a truck like Dave Sharpe in one serial, or do a fight like Dale van Sickel in another. ‘You’re not a stuntman,’ says Fuller dismissively. Disconsolate, Glut goes to a party wearing his Purple Monster costume. Scorned by everyone, he leaves, complaining, ‘Men don’t feel grandeur any more’ – a classic Milius line – only to achieve his moment of glory by rescuing a girl from a purse-snatcher.
The USC students helped one another because their instructors made it clear from the start that only results mattered. Not ignorance, nor sickness, nor acts of God excused failing to deliver an exercise on time. ‘A student would show his workshop project,’ says Richard Walter, ‘and someone would say, “Gee, that doesn’t make sense to me …” And the film-maker would go into a dissertation of explanations. “Well, that day the sound man didn’t show up, and the landlady came in and ran us out, and I just had time to get this one angle …” And the instructor would say, “Well, put it on a title card at the head of the film. Say, ‘This is why the movie is the way it is – because we had all these problems.’”’ To those in the class really listening, the moral was clear: in the outside world, excuses bought nothing. Later, Lucas would put the lesson into the mouth of Yoda, the Jedi master of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke Skywalker says he’ll try to harness the power of the Force, the sage says, ‘Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.’ What people took for Zen was really USC.
Nobody was more generous with assistance than Lucas. He recorded sound and helped edit Milius’s animated film, Marcello, I’m so Bored, and there were few USC films of the period in which he didn’t take a hand. Some people resented his dismissive manner and impatience with the maladroit. Finding Walter Murch developing film in the lab, Lucas told him he was doing it wrong. A native New Yorker, Murch already had a BA in art history and romance languages from Johns Hopkins before he arrived at USC in 1965 to do his masters in cinema. He’d studied Italian medieval art history in Perugia, and French literature and nineteenth-century art history in Paris. Fluent in French and Italian, tall, solemn, erudite, and irascible, he was, says Gary Kurtz, ‘quite control-freakish; perfect for an editor,’ and didn’t suffer criticism gladly. ‘Who’s this creep?’ he demanded. ‘Get out of here! What do you know?’
But Murch too became a devoted member of the Lucas team. Like Allen Grant before him and Francis Ford Coppola after, Murch was another elder-brother figure from whom Lucas could learn, and in whom in turn he could inspire the kind of personal loyalty that creates effective teams.
Lucas credits Murch for alerting him to the possibilities of sound. Like the new wave film-makers, most USC students didn’t much care about their soundtracks, providing the dialogue was improvised and the background sound recorded ‘wild,’ i.e. on the spot. But Lucas noticed how a good track could lure audiences: ‘The screen for the screening room was positioned against a hallway that led out onto a patio where everyone would congregate,’ he said. ‘The speakers would echo into the hallway and the sound would funnel out into the open space. You knew that if you had a film with a great soundtrack you could draw an audience into the room.’
While many other USC students goofed off, turned on or dropped out, Lucas continued to create ambitious films, and to win prizes with them in student film festivals all over the country. His enthusiasm for Jean-Luc Godard peaked at about the time Godard made a personal appearance at USC in 1966. His interest then switched to slicker, more professional movies.
Charley Lippincott watched the change at first hand. Lippincott had access to the documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada, then in its heyday, and often screened them. In 1965 the CNFB’s hottest cameraman was Jean-Claude Labrecque, who shot and directed a film about the Tour de St Laurent, a 1500-mile bike race. He called it 60 Cycles. A relentless exercise in style, 60 Cycles emphasized the bikes rather than the men who rode them. Much of it was shot with telephoto lenses that compressed the riders into an apparently motionless mass of furious pedalling humanity, or from a helicopter, so that they appear a single organism, slithering through a town like a snake. The music was mostly hard-driving rock, typified by the pumping organ riff of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker-T and the MGs.
‘I brought down 60 Cycles,’ says Lippincott. ‘I may have
