and yellows echoed even in the décor of the freight elevator. Every Thursday night, Coppola screened classic movies, with a buffet of Chinese food. A lavish brochure in faux art-nouveau style promised films and facilities that combined the best of Europe and America, of Hollywood and the Bay area.
Prospective tenants soon found it was too good to believe. Zoetrope could only handle the kind of films Coppola wanted to make: mobile movies shot on location with hand-held cameras. There was no sound stage, and only minimal facilities for wardrobe and props. Coppola had recklessly paid $40,000 for a Mitchell BNCR camera which nobody could afford to rent, and bought a range of the latest lightweight Arri-flexes and portable tape recorders. His old mentor Roger Corman came to take a look. As well as being godfather to Coppola’s son Gio, he was an executor of his will. Coppola asked him what would happen to all this equipment if he died. Corman said, ‘I’ll put it all in a truck and take it down to LA, because you’re in the wrong city, Francis.’
Instead of presiding over a cinematic renaissance, Coppola found himself trying, without success, to supervise a tribe of vigorous young film-makers, all looking out for themselves. ‘Everyone was off in his own little corner, competing,’ recalls Carroll Ballard. $40,000 worth of equipment disappeared in the first year, and a number of company cars were cracked up. Desperate to put the facility in profit from the start, Coppola set rental rates that were high for the time: $175 a month for one of the seven cutting rooms, $240 a month for an editing machine to go in it, and correspondingly more for office services, production facilities and time on the Keller console. He was parsimonious when it came to funding the projects which would be Zoetrope’s lifeblood. To write and direct THX, Lucas would get only $15,000; but even that was not immediately forthcoming.
Lucas, fretting about being able to replicate the clinical emptiness of his student THX, wondered if he could shoot in Japan. ‘The idea was, it was this weird dictatorial society in the future,’ says Gary Kurtz, ‘and if it was totally alien as an environment to the audience, and it was in a foreign language, you might be able to believe in the isolation of the main characters. Well, nobody in Hollywood liked that idea.’ All the same, Coppola truculently announced Japanese locations as an accomplished fact. ‘George is going to direct it in his own way. I’m giving him my strength. I’m saying, “If you want me, you’ve got to give George Lucas his break.”’
Warners weren’t sure they wanted either of them, particularly when they got around to reading the script of THX1138. It had little real plot, aside from the idea of a man fleeing an overpowering society. There was no motivation. Nobody was characterized. The ending was ambiguous, THX climbing from a manhole into a world of which we see nothing except a huge sun and a solitary bird.
Lucas sulked. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at the studio they don’t understand scripts; that they should look more like blueprints than novels. They don’t even know who [Marshall] McLuhan is over there.’ Nevertheless, he asked Walter Murch to help with the script, and they amplified the story where they could. ‘We just threw everything up in the air and watched it come down,’ said Murch. The setting was narrowed down to the twenty-fifth century. They sketched in some social background. Everyone is tranquillized, and their sex drive numbed by drugs. They wear only white, and their heads are shaved. Most, including THX – pronounced ‘Thex’ – who works on a production line assembling robots, have been grown parthogenetically, by artificial insemination, but his girlfriend LUH7117 – ‘Ler’ – is a ‘natural born,’ and therefore suspect.
A god, OMM, dark-eyed, Semitic, with a sensual mouth and a short black beard – the physical antithesis of his predominantly Caucasian subjects – watches unblinking from every wall. He offers benign moral supervision, urging: ‘Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.’ Citizens commune with him in electronic booths that also fulfil the function of psychoanalysts. A taped voice – Murch’s – welcomes them with ‘My time is yours,’ and responds to their pleas for help with anodyne recorded comments, and an absolution that ends in the exhortation to get back to work. Anyone who demands more is likely to be arrested and beaten by police, sometimes to death, on television.
Robots, uniformly tall, dressed in the black leathers and white helmets of Californian Highway Patrol motorcycle cops but with blank chrome faces – another gibe by Lucas at the bêtes noires of his adolescence – impose law and order. During the film we see one of these robots, malfunctioning, walk repeatedly into a wall. Another, ominously, is seen shepherding a tiny child into an elevator.
In the feature version, LUH seduces THX by reducing the medication that suppresses his sexual instinct. Previously satisfied with telecasts of ritual beatings and callisthenic-like dancing by a bald, naked black woman, THX is persuaded to make love to LUH. ‘It manages to have a lot of nudity in it,’ says Richard Walter of the film, ‘but to be anti-erotic. George’s work is extremely non-sexual. He is uncomfortable with sexuality’ – a view borne out by close-ups of LUH and THX’s pale, hairless bodies pressed together in joyless union.
Typical of Lucas’s later work, and of his life, the sexual initiative is taken by the woman. The film also has an undercurrent of homoeroticism. THX’s superior, SEN5241, played by British actor Donald Pleasence, is homosexual. His room-mate has just been ‘destroyed’ for unspecified reasons, and he reprograms the computer to have THX assigned to his living space.
LUH becomes pregnant, and both she and THX are arrested for drug evasion and sexual perversion. In the original screenplay, LUH is raped, then beaten to death on TV, but Lucas never shot these scenes, and we know no more of her fate than the fact that her name is reassigned to one of the countless embryos growing in ranked bottles in the city’s labs.
THX and SEN, convicted of interfering with the computer, are sent to a featureless white prison whose inmates remain out of fear of the surrounding formlessness, expending their energy in aimlessly plotting to escape. Exasperated, THX simply walks out, followed by SEN. In the white emptiness they meet SRT, a large, amiable black man convinced he isn’t real at all, but a ‘hologram’ who couldn’t make it on TV. They find their way back to the crowded corridors of the main complex, but SEN loses his nerve. Stumbling into the TV studio which broadcasts OMM’s image to the psychoanalysis booths, he humbly confesses his shortcomings to the poster-sized picture of the god stuck on the wall.
Awaiting arrest, he watches a group of children playing. All of them have bottles attached to an arm, from which ‘liquid education’ drips into a vein. One asks SEN to reconnect his tube, and he reminisces about the much larger containers through which one acquired knowledge when he was a boy. As the children gape in astonishment, the police arrive to take him away.
Meanwhile, THX and SRT steal jet cars, but the maladroit SRT can’t get his started, and when he does, promptly drives it into a pillar. THX rockets down a series of tunnels, pursued by the motorcycle police. At the end of the line he abandons the car and continues on foot. Lucas shot a scene in which THX falls into a garbage compactor and is menaced by a rat-like creature, but dropped it as unconvincing, only to recycle it in Star Wars. THX has less trouble with some scavenging Shelldwellers – bearded dwarfs, the progenitors of Star Wars’ Jawas, who live in tunnels – and starts climbing a huge ventilation vent towards what he calls ‘the upper positive place.’ Two police are close to catching him when, abruptly, Control calls off the pursuit: it’s exceeded its budget. THX emerges on the surface, where he faces a presumably hopeful sunrise.
Lucas visualized the film in Panavision format, but that would have meant hiring expensive equipment. He compromised with Techniscope, a format popular with cost-cutting European and Asian producers looking to achieve wide-screen without special lenses. It simply cut the frame in half horizontally, producing an image half the height of conventional 35mm and twice the width, which nevertheless could be blown up to normal 35mm in the lab. Its deficiency was obvious: with half of a 35mm frame filling the same screen area as a full frame, the image risked being dark and grainy.
