George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
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Kurtz was the same age as Coppola, whom he knew from their days with Corman, but in his gravity, stability, and morality the direct antithesis. ‘I worked for Roger Corman as a student on lots of little films,’ he says, ‘most of which I can’t even remember the titles of now; some of which we didn’t even know the titles of then. Shooting little bits and pieces. That’s how I met Francis. I was on Dementia 13, his first film. He shot most of it in Ireland but we did little bits of it in Los Angeles.
‘When I got out of the Marines in 1969, I went back to doing a few low-budget films and doing odds and ends, and another friend of mine whom I’d worked with with Roger, Monte Hellman, wanted to do this film, Two Lane Blacktop. We got Universal to buy into it under their under-$1 million-budget program. I went up to talk to Francis about using his Techniscope equipment for Two Lane Blacktop. He said, “We’ve just finished shooting this film on Techniscope. I’ll take you out to meet George, and he’ll show you some of the material on the Steenbeck.” We went out to Mill Valley. George was editing in his attic. He was very gracious. He showed me the footage, and we had a chat about Techniscope, and I went back to San Francisco. I called George a couple of other times about technical aspects of using Techniscope in the next week after that.’
Aside from Radioland Murders and American Graffiti, Lucas had one more idea: a science fiction story, a movie comic-book inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Flash Gordon serials and Dune, but shot in a style inspired by old Hollywood action films. At some point, wearying of turning images into words, he created an outline in collage, with images cut from comic books and science fiction magazines.
Lucas didn’t aspire to compete with Hollywood science fiction like Forbidden Planet or Planet of the Apes. Another kind of science fiction film had always existed parallel to them. This strain was disreputable, catchpenny, its plots vulgar, its costumes cheap. It encompassed Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, Roger Corman’s The Beast with a Million Eyes and Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Japanese imports like Godzilla. Its market was revival houses or drive-ins, its audience teenagers with one hand up their girl’s skirt and the other clutching a Coke.
Whenever Hollywood got more money for a science fiction film, it splurged on state-of-the-art special effects, good mainstream writers, well-known stars. Forbidden Planet was directed by the director of Lassie Come Home. Its scriptwriter wrote Tarzan the Ape Man. Its cameraman photographed Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant. It starred Walter Pidgeon, one of MGM’s oldest and most respected leading men. To do what Lucas proposed with his science fiction film, i.e. spend money not on making the product more intellectually respectable or scientifically authentic, but on amplifying the sleaziness and vulgarity, seemed absurd to Hollywood. One might as well take some cheap old car, give it a lustrous paint job, and tart it up with chrome and flashing lights …
In 1971, Lucas wasn’t pushing the sf project too hard. He still hoped he might acquire the rights to the Flash Gordon comic strip and incorporate his ideas into a remake of the serial version. At the same time, he began looking at some of the work being done by new people at the edge of the sf movie world. Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, trying to find backing for a science fiction script called ‘Star Dance,’ had asked an artist named Ralph McQuarrie to create some concept paintings in the hope of interesting possible investors. The film never got made, but Lucas spent an afternoon in McQuarrie’s tiny garage apartment going through slides of his work. As a technical artist at Boeing, McQuarrie had drawn the illustrations for the company’s parts catalogue. After that, he did ‘artist’s impressions’ of space and other planets for NASA and CBS News, and worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica
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