wound through the elaborately re-landscaped garden – a gift from the doting Dorothy. George always knew where to go for help with an ambitious scheme. ‘He never listened to me,’ said his father. ‘He was his mother’s pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it.’
With his friend Melvin Cellini, who lived on the next street, George created one of his most complex ‘environments.’ Atmospheric lighting and careful arrangement of props converted the Cellini garage into a haunted house. Kids paid to see it, and there were queues for the first couple of days. George had the idea of encouraging repeat visits by changing the effects periodically. ‘George always was gifted with creative talent and business sense,’ says Cellini. Through Cellini, Lucas also made his first film. Melvin had a movie camera, and they did a stop-motion film of plates stacking themselves up, then unstacking themselves – Lucas’s first experiment in special effects. He never forgot the wonder of it: ‘We were so excited, like a pair of aborigines with some new machine.’
Modesto in general wasn’t a reading town, but comic books were ubiquitous, fanned by the momentum of the war years, when color printing and the demand for propaganda had turned them into an international enthusiasm. John Plummer’s father had a friend who ran a news-stand. Once a month he returned unsold comic books for a refund, but since wholesalers were satisfied with the torn-off covers, the Lucas gang got the books themselves. Georgie’s collection of five hundred comics became the envy of the town, and rather than have drifts of Captain Marvel and Plastic Man litter the house, his father resignedly added shelves to his backyard shed to accommodate it. His sister rescued the comics when George tired of them. Years later, she re-presented them to him. They became the nucleus of a large and valuable collection.
The first TV sets filtered into Modesto in 1949, and the Plummers immediately bought one. Georgie begged his father to do the same, but Lucas refused to allow such a distraction into his house. The Lucases didn’t get their own set until 1954. In their home, as in America in general, radio remained the primary entertainment. Eighty-two per cent of people still tuned in every night. ‘We didn’t get a television set until I was ten years old,’ Lucas recalled. ‘So for the first ten years, I was in front of the radio listening to radio dramas. It played an important part in my life. I listened to Inner Sanctum, The Whistler, The Lone Ranger – those were the ones that interested me.’
But TV couldn’t be stopped. So many people wanted to see the Plummers’ set that Mr Plummer put it in the garage and built bleachers to hold the crowd. George and his friends gathered there to stare at the tiny, bulging, almost circular screen of the old brown bakelite Champion. There was only one station, KRON-TV from San Francisco. It broadcast mostly boxing and wrestling matches, with the occasional cartoon, but the idea of an image piped into one’s own home awed them; they would have watched the test pattern. Lucas went round religiously to the Plummers’ every night at six for Adventure Theater – a twenty-minute episode of an old serial, with a Crusader Rabbit cartoon. Among the serials was Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Lucas never forgot it. Once the Lucases got a set, George sat in front of it for hours, especially during the Saturday-morning cartoon programs, with his black cat Dinky curled round his neck.
Lucas has often cited his early experience of television, but is more reticent about movie-going. ‘Movies had extremely little effect on me when I was growing up,’ he has said. ‘I hardly ever went, and when I did it was to meet girls. Television had a much larger effect.’
In 1955, George made the newspapers for the first time. The Modesto Bee reported that he and Melvin Cellini had launched a kids’ newspaper, the Daily Bugle. Cellini saw the idea on TV and co-opted his friend as star reporter, for reasons not unconnected with the family business: George Sr typed the paper’s wax stencils and ran them off on his office duplicator, though he insisted the kids paid for supplies from their profits.
In August 1955 they published their first daily one-sheet issue, printing two hundred copies. ‘You will get your paper free for two weeks,’ it announced, ‘but then it will cost 1 cent. Papers will be given out Monday to Friday. But this Friday it won’t be out because the press broke down.’ Even with George Lucas as reporter, however, the Daily Bugle didn’t flourish. Although the paper was padded out with jokes and riddles, they had trouble filling its pages with events around Modesto. George’s father had flown the family to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland, which opened in July 1955, and George described a different attraction in each issue, but by the second week even this resource was exhausted. ‘The Daily Bugle stops,’ announced their issue of 10 August. ‘The Weekly Bugle will be put out on Wednesday only. There is the same news.’
That the Bugle went out of business so soon is the oddest thing about it, since everyone who knew Lucas as a child agrees that his persistence and tenacity were prodigious. Once launched on a project, he would follow it through to the end. At eleven, given the job of mowing the lawn once a week to earn his pocket money, he saved his allowance until he had $35, borrowed a further $25 from his mother, and bought a power mower to lighten his task. His father, not recognizing the stringy resilience of his own father and grandfather in his son, was furious. Pushing the old mower round the yard every weekend was a valuable discipline. Getting through the job quickly with a power mower demeaned the lesson.
One could imagine Lucas devoting the same energy to the Bugle as to lawnmowing: hiring kids as reporters and vendors, making the paper a paying proposition, and ending up a professional publisher at fifteen. Though a team player, he would often in later life begin working with some charismatic and forceful individual, then gravitate to leadership, and finally supplant his mentor. Some people have suggested that this was his response to the lack of a sympathetic father, but Lucas’s explanation is more pragmatic: ‘That’s one of the ways of learning. You attach yourself to somebody older and wiser than you, learn everything they have to teach, and move on to your own accomplishments.’ He needed to be both part of a group and in charge of it; otherwise, he lost interest. In childhood, as in adulthood, Lucas belonged with the entrepreneurs who defined ‘teamwork’ as ‘a lot of people doing what I say.’
I love things that are fast. That’s what moved me toward editing rather than photography. Pictures that move – that’s what got me where I am.
George Lucas, Los Angeles Times magazine, 2 February 1997
George Lucas at fourteen, in 1958, was not much different to George Lucas forty years later. He had already, at five feet six inches, reached his full height. High-school class photographers habitually stuck him in the front row, where even classmates of average height loomed over him. The clothes his mother bought for him – jeans, sneakers, green polyester sweaters, open-necked blue-and-red-checked shirts with pearl buttons – would become a lifelong uniform.
By then, Lucas had discovered rock and roll. That was by no means typical. In the hit parade of 1958, ballads like ‘It’s All in the Game,’ ‘All I Have to do is Dream,’ and ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ far outnumbered Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ But Lucas raced home to spend hours playing Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, the Platters, the Five Satins. An autographed photo of Elvis adorned his wall. He adopted the personal style that went with rock. His hair grew longer, but no amount of Dixie Pomade could plaster its natural curl into the classic Elvis pompadour. His compromise – undulating waves at front and side, slicked down on top – only called to mind the Dick Tracy villain Flattop.
Lucas’s mood was unsure and often depressed: ‘I was very much aware that growing up wasn’t pleasant. It was just … frightening. I remember that I was unhappy a lot of the time. Not really unhappy – I enjoyed my childhood. But I guess all kids, from their point of
