back. I had it for a week, and finally after a week and a half I pried it out of him. It got me in trouble with the Canadian consulate. But it fit George perfectly. The technical stuff with the lenses was so “George” that it was unbelievable.’ When the college acquired the latest 16mm camera, the Eclair NPR, Lucas seized it as his personal property.
Everyone at USC remembers Lucas’s films abandoning nouvelle vague casualness. He earned a reputation for high production values. ‘I had the feeling he had more money than us,’ says Don Glut, ‘because he was able to do things that we couldn’t do. He could get aerial shots; rent airplanes to get shots of race cars from the sky.’ The money for the ambitious touches in Lucas’s films came from his father, who had attended a student screening, and had been surprised by the respectful reaction of the laid-back and largely stoned audience to his son’s films. When they came on, kids murmured, ‘Watch this, it’s George’s film.’ Driving back to Modesto, George Sr conceded to his wife, ‘I think we may have put our money on the right horse.’
Already, the students were separating into those with grandiose ambitions and those resigned to taking a back seat, or dropping out altogether. During the summer, Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins had gone to England and, ‘in a farmer’s field,’ according to Lippincott, ‘had found an old Rolls-Royce, one of those ones with the open back seat. They brought it back and rebuilt it.’ Lucas surprised John Milius by telling him he’d met a man with a restored World War II P51 Mustang fighter. If Milius could think up a story that included one, he’d help him film it. ‘The rest of them didn’t think big,’ says Milius. ‘They were thinking about meeting some girl, and she was good-looking so they were going to put her in the film, and get to sleep with her. And if not, maybe she’d wear some revealing outfit in the film. Or they would imitate some French film, some avant-garde style. I would try and do it through convincing people. George would do it through nuts and bolts. I’d say, “Join me on this great crusade.” But George would know someone who had a race car, and he’d go out and persuade him to let him put the camera on his race car. The guy just thought he was going to have pretty pictures of his race car. George was thinking, “This is a film about a race car. It’s going to look good, and have great sound, and be in color.”’
Everyone in the senior class was gearing up for their last film, the 480 Project. Instead of the normal five-man crew, Lucas called in favors all over campus, and accumulated a team of fourteen. Getting a camera and sound gear was harder. ‘You’d try to steal film from the other guys, steal equipment,’ says Milius. ‘One thing I did do was steal the camera George loved so much, the Eclair. He was the only one who could use that camera. Everyone else was awed by the technology, but George, being a race-car mechanic and a great great visual guy, understanding light and all this stuff, could very quickly master the technology of anything. He really wanted to use that camera, and I stole it, and hid it in my car, and slept in my car with the camera for a week while we used it.’
Lucas’s car-race film was called 1.42:08, named for the lap time of the yellow sports car which was its subject. His expertise with cars had got him a job as cameraman for Saul Bass, Hollywood’s premiere creator of title sequences. Lucas shot some material for the short film Why Man Creates, one of the few Bass works not attached to a feature. Bass was doing the credits for John Frankenheimer’s epic car-racing movie Grand Prix, and Lucas used his background in car racing to infiltrate the second unit shooting with James Garner at the Willow Springs raceway, north of Los Angeles. Grand Prix provided the impetus for 1.42:08, but 60 Cycles was evident in every frame. Lucas persuaded driver Pete Brook to contribute his car and his time. Edward Johnson, his obliging flyer friend, gave him a single aerial shot looking down on the speeding car. 1.42:08 had no sound except the blare of the car’s engine. Repeated tracks over the racer as it’s gassed up show the enthusiasm for machinery that would typify most of Lucas’s later films, and though we do glimpse Brook as humanly fallible when he spins out in the middle of the practice and grimaces at his error, the film has no character except the car.
‘Down there,’ he is inclined to say of Hollywood, ‘down there, for every honest true film-maker trying to get his film off the ground, there are a hundred sleazy used-car dealers trying to con you out of your money.’
Lucas in New York Times, 13 July 1981
Once he graduated from USC, Lucas, outside the protection of his student exemption, was eligible for the draft. With a few other ex-USC people, he was urged to flee to Canada and get a job at the Canadian National Film Board. However, some classmates from the air force contingent counselled him not only to stay in LA, but actually to volunteer. As a college graduate with impeccable film-making credentials, they told him, he’d be immediately sent to Officer Candidate School, then posted to a film-making unit in the US, where he’d gain valuable professional experience far from the front line.
During the summer of his graduation, Lucas, according to legend, tried to enlist, but was turned down because his teenage driving convictions gave him, technically, a criminal record. One is forced to be skeptical about this story. Such minor offences were only taken into account if the offender compounded them by consistently failing to turn up in court, or evaded bench warrants issued by the judge for his arrest; otherwise anyone could have dodged the draft simply by getting arrested for dangerous driving. Had he been accepted for OCS, Lucas might, in fact, have been dismayed by the result. Gary Kurtz, who went through USC from 1959 to 1962, was drafted into the Marines as a cameraman, and didn’t get out until 1969. ‘There were so many photographers killed,’ he says, ‘that we became what they called a Critical MOS, and they kept sending us letters saying, “You have been extended, convenience of the government,” and in theory, I found out later, they could have done that forever.’ Whether Lucas presented himself for military service voluntarily or when he received his Selective Service Notice, he was almost certainly rejected for the same medical reasons that finally kept him out of the forces permanently. The standard physical examination revealed that the diabetes that had killed his grandfather had jumped a generation and reappeared in him. Rating him 4F, the medical board warned him to seek help for what would be a lifetime problem.
Lucas drove shakily to Modesto, where Roland Nyegaard, the physician who’d married his sister Wendy, confirmed the diagnosis. Nyegaard put him on Orinase, an oral drug that replaced the traditional daily insulin injections of most diabetes sufferers, and warned Lucas to start watching his diet: no drugs, no alcohol, above all no sweets. Farewell to chocolate malts, chocolate chip cookies, and Hershey bars, which he’d consumed in quantity since childhood. It was a rite of passage of sorts. With one of the last great pleasures of adolescence denied him, he had no choice but to grow up.
The discovery of his diabetes freed Lucas to launch his adult career. His first thought was to re-enter USC as a graduate student and get his Master of Fine Arts degree, but he was too late for the 1967 intake. All the same, the faculty was sufficiently impressed with his student work to offer him a part-time job in its night school, running a refresher course for navy and Marine Corps cameramen: ‘The whole idea of the class was to teach them they didn’t have to go by the rulebook,’ Lucas said.
He accepted, then went looking for a day job. Bob Dalva, a USC student who would become one of the moving forces of Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, and who was already adept at keeping his ear to the ground, had a job with Verna Fields, who was compiling a film for the United States Information Agency called Journey to the Pacific, about Lyndon Johnson’s seventeen-country tour of Australia, Korea, and points east in pursuit of consensus on Vietnam. Dalva proposed Lucas as assistant editor, and Fields hired him.
Burly and aggressive, Fields had grown hard and cynical in a business that routinely demeaned women. She’d been sound editor for Fritz Lang and worked on big productions like Anthony Mann’s
