the quality was excellent, and remained so until they abandoned this method.
Other inventors found equally ingenious ways around the patents on various wide-screen systems. Paramount embraced VistaVision (‘Motion Picture High Fidelity!’), in which the film ran horizontally through the camera, offering a larger image than conventional 35mm. The clarity was superb, but the fact that it needed special cameras and projectors limited its use. Special-effects technicians, who loved the system for its large negative size, would rescue and restore Vista-Vision cameras to shoot the next generation of science fiction films, including Star Wars.
Lucas was delighted to be directing his first feature film. His budget might not be much in Hollywood terms, but his family was astonished at his achievement at only twenty-five years old. On the other hand, directing was daily torture, a constant process of revision and improvisation, with the ten-week production period ticking off in his brain every instant.
San Francisco’s new subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), was under construction, and Lucas persuaded them to let him shoot in the completed tunnels. Other sequences were shot in parking stations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre in San Rafael, and at the Lawrence Livermore atomic energy laboratory. The tiny crew moved between locations in one of the vans in which Coppola had crossed the country during the shooting of The Rain People.
Robert Duvall from The Rain People played THX, and Maggie McOmie LUH. Veteran Ian Wolfe was one of the prisoners windily discoursing on the nature of freedom. Knowing Lucas’s discomfort with actors, Coppola told Ron Colby to choose people who wouldn’t need more than a hint from the director, but Lucas still wrangled with them. Using a technique he would continue on American Graffiti, he shot most scenes with two cameras simultaneously. ‘That captures emotional stunts it’s hard to get after the first take,’ says Duvall.
Coppola imposed his crony Larry Sturhahn on the film as producer. If Lucas could ever have been comfortable with any supervisor, it was certainly not Sturhahn, who, he charged, spent most of his time on the phone, and hung up only to interfere. Coppola later confessed that he knew the two men wouldn’t get on. ‘George,’ he said, ‘needed someone to hate.’ As long as he could direct his animosity towards Sturhahn, he wouldn’t be blaming Coppola.
The pressure of too little money and not enough time encouraged improvisation, some of it inspired. Lucas tinkered together models and fireworks to create the film’s few special effects, like an explosion on the robot assembly line. Nobody was happy to have their head shaved, as was required of the whole cast, and there was a shortage of extras until someone thought to approach the drug rehabilitation centres Synanon and the Delancey Street Foundation. Enrolment required addicts to shave their heads as a sign of commitment, and most were happy to earn a few days’ wages as extras in the film.
Working with limited lights and a hand-held camera fitted with a thousand-meter telephoto lens pushed Techniscope to its limits. Warners, who, as the financing company, automatically saw the daily rushes, began muttering about the photographic quality. There was a growing sense that Coppola had sold them a pig in a poke. They held off breaking openly with him for only one reason: Patton. Franklin Schaffner’s film of Coppola’s screenplay opened on 5 February 1970, and, despite reviews which fretted about its jingoism, proceeded to make a fortune. Anyone that good, reasoned some within Warners, was worth cutting a little slack. But only a little. Lucas characterized their attitude as: ‘We’re the king and you’re the serfs.’
The attic at Mill Valley became a cutting room, and Lucas spent most nights there with Marcia, editing. At the same time, Walter Murch cut the sound – ‘Not,’ Lucas agrees, ‘the way things usually were done.’ Traditionally, movie mixers aimed for clarity, arguing that most cinemas had such poor sound systems that the audience was lucky to hear anything. Lucas wanted THX1138 to have a ‘musical’ quality, which Murch took to mean a sense of continuous ambient sound, sometimes almost inaudible. The layering of sounds had always fascinated Murch, and he’d developed a technique called ‘air-balling,’ in which one sound envelops but never quite obscures another. Renaissance composers for the unaccompanied voice routinely employed this effect, which may be where Murch got the idea, but nobody had yet applied it to film. Murch’s experiments spurred Lucas to pioneer better cinema sound. The new system would be called ‘THX Sound,’ and its slogan would be, ‘The Audience is Listening.’
For the soundtrack of THX, Murch created, in his phrase, ‘a Dagwood sandwich of sound and music, with no clear split between them.’ Recorded music was slowed down, speeded up, played backward, mixed with natural sounds or those of machines. For the prison scenes, he used the bass note of a large room humming with machinery.
The credits of THX1138 ascend the screen, suggesting a steady descent underground, an idea borrowed from an inter-title in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Before them, Lucas inserted one minute from a trailer for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Over scratchy, poorly-copied images of spaceships fizzing like firecrackers and a blond Buster Crabbe straight-arming aliens as if they’re the Notre Dame defensive line, the voice-over urges audiences to see how this American football hero copes with the threats of the twenty-fifth century – an implied comment that the future might be very different from the one imagined by Hollywood.
Lucas, probably coaxed by Murch, later justified the elaboration of THX1138 by calling it ‘a Cubist film – the story, the sound and the images were all views of the same thing simultaneously.’ He defended its didactic tone: ‘Everyone else calls it science fiction,’ he said. ‘I call it documentary fantasy. The film is the way I see LA right now; maybe a slight exaggeration. Duvall comes off drugs and discovers he’s been living in a cage all his life with the door open. It’s the idea that we are all living in cages and the doors are wide open and all we have to do is walk out.’
Marcia for one didn’t buy these justifications. She found the film cold, humorless, and arrogant – a summary of the negative elements of Lucas’s character. Coppola agreed. He would later tell Lucas to ‘write something out of his own life; something with warmth and humor that people can relate to.’ Even Lucas got the message. When he shot a few pick-up scenes in a Los Angeles studio and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz came to watch, he told them, ‘I have an idea I’d love you guys to do. It’s a rock’n’roll movie and it takes place in the fifties and it’s about music and cruising and deejays.’ He sent them his notes, and over the next month they worked up a five-page outline of what Lucas had first entitled ‘Another Quiet Night in Modesto,’ but now preferred to call American Graffiti.
Preoccupied with the slide of American Zoetrope into anarchy and bankruptcy, Coppola took only a fitful interest in the progress of Lucas’s film. The first time Marcia showed him a completed reel, he simply shook his head and murmured, ‘Strange. Strange.’ After that, he didn’t see any more until the whole film was edited.
He was more concerned about extracting a long-term commitment to Zoetrope and its program from Warners, which summoned him to a meeting of the studio management on 21 November 1969. Ever the showman, Coppola created a ‘black box’ for each executive containing the screenplays for all seven proposed films, bound in black with the emblem of American Zoetrope. These boxes in turn went into a crate, ominously coffin-like, which two men carted into the Warners office.
They carted it out almost as quickly. Warners wanted no part of the projects, or of Coppola. His frantic pitch, handing round cigars and assuring them that he and he alone had the secret of making successful films, only alarmed them more. Even before he had seen any of THX1138, Frank Wells, head of business affairs, told Coppola they wouldn’t be putting up any more money, and they expected him to refund the $300,000 already spent. ‘Warner Brothers not only pulled the rug out from Francis,’ said Walter Murch grimly, ‘they tried to sell it back to him.’
