The Last Kings of Hollywood, page 4
Unlike crosstown UCLA, where the cinema department was folded into the theater department and the curriculum favored artistic expression, USC’s program emphasized the practical and technical aspects of filmmaking, or learning by doing. But the equipment was old and insufficient. The cameras were old navy-surplus Kodak Cine Specials, black-and-silver rectangular boxes that jammed all the time. Many of the light meters didn’t work because their glass was broken. The dozen or so Moviola editing machines had the look of antiques, film stock rationed as if a world war were still going on.
“It was,” Robbins says, “kind of a dump.”
* * *
Murch was in the darkroom one afternoon, developing some pictures, when the door to the hallway opened and closed and a short, skinny kid in glasses entered the room. Murch couldn’t quite make him out in the dim red light, though he’d seen him around: George Lucas didn’t speak much, but he had an intense presence. Murch kept working on his photographs as George stood against the wall and watched him.
“You’re doing it wrong,” George said finally.
“Get out of here,” Murch growled back. “What do you know?”
He soon found out. Early in 1965, the students directed their first shorts, in Herb Kosower’s animation class. The assignment: to create a one-minute film, using only still photographs cut together to convey a sense of either movement or emotion. Everyone went out to take a few photographs and assembled them into a sequence, awkwardly reaching for some semblance of dynamism or feeling. George, in contrast, pulled over fifty photographs from back issues of Life magazine—including shots of Martin Luther King Jr., dead soldiers, the KKK, Bela Lugosi, a basketball jump shooter, monkeys, puppies, a public health announcement entreating readers to “Help Stamp Out Runny Noses,” policemen unleashing dogs and horses at fleeing African-Americans, a swimsuit model standing in tall grass, couples embracing, and the word LOVE, atomized into abstract, extreme close-ups—and shuffled them together, smash-cutting and dissolving. He double-and triple-exposed a dancing woman so her hair seemed to bounce. He panned from faces to hands to create the impression of someone waving, and across crowd shots to give the feeling of people running. He inserted a skip, a fraction of a second long, over a close-up of an eye, to make it look like it was blinking. He broke down one photograph—showing a policeman, his dog, and a Black civilian—into three close-ups: the civilian’s startled face, a white hand clutching his collar; the policeman’s clenched features, eyes hidden behind sunglasses and cap visor glinting; and finally the German shepherd’s open, lunging jaws, from which George almost immediately match-cut to another policeman’s baton as it swung for a man’s head. The four images and their juxtaposition created an immediate, visceral impression of violence. George set his images to percussive calypso music taken from the main titles of Marcel Camus’s Orfeu Negro. Few of his fellow classmates had even thought of using a soundtrack, let alone considered the technical challenge of creating one. George, meanwhile, perfectly timed every one of his cuts to the syncopated beat. He interrupted the score near the end of his allocated minute to play the film’s only line of spoken soundtrack: a preacher shouting over a crowd to “please not the oppressor, for Hate stirreth up strife, while love covereth all sins!” The film ends with three title cards slowly receding from view: “ANYONE FOR SURVIVAL” and “END,” dissolving into a question mark.
Where did this kid come from? Murch asked himself. He’s a Modesto farm kid. How does he know how to do this stuff?
“Nobody there, including the teachers, had ever seen anything like it,” George said later. It was his first proper assignment, and already, “I realized I was able to run circles around everybody else.”
Suddenly, he had a lot more friends in the class. “If you went up and saw a student film and said, ‘Gee, this is kind of a boring film,’ you just didn’t ever associate with that guy,” Murch said. “But if you went and saw an exciting film, you became friends with this guy. That was the way we all got together.” George’s films weren’t just exciting; they were—as Robbins put it—“the most electrifying things you had ever seen.” A small group coalesced fast and firm around him. George bonded with Murch over their shared love of editing and related to Howard Kazanjian’s stolid friendliness and no-frills dependability. Willard Huyck, who had come to USC to study journalism, then switched his major to cinema without telling his parents, became a friend because they both loved fine art and the French New Wave. In his second year, needing a roommate to split the $150 rent on a place in Benedict Canyon, George took in Randal Kleiser, who also loved fine art. Kleiser would come home in the evenings and find George painting, canvases “like Margaret Keane, the girls with big eyes.” He figured Lucas would become a production designer.
“George made a few friends at USC and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life,” Huyck said. He was driven. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t party. He made films, “ate it and slept it 24 hours a day,” he admitted. He’d found his calling, the reason he had dodged death in the wreckage of his Autobianchi. “There was no going back after that.”
“George was a quiet person at USC,” remembered Kazanjian. “A quiet and patient person, until he [got] fired up.”
Or, as Murch puts it: “Yeah, talented. But, you know … kind of a blowhard.”
George also befriended John Milius, a blustering, larger-than-life Jewish twenty-year-old, born in St. Louis but raised in affluent Bel Air. Milius, who claimed surfing as his religion and dying in Vietnam in a blaze of glory as his life’s ambition, was five foot eleven but gave the impression of being several inches taller, a bear of a young man with a round face and a strong nose and hairy forearms the size of many people’s thighs. He longed to join the pantheon of great, larger-than-life writers he lionized—Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Kerouac—and, before failing his army medical due to chronic asthma, had dreamed of enlisting with the marines to “go prove [himself] in battle.” In truth, he was a privileged young man, raised by a father who had become so rich selling shoes in Missouri he’d retired and moved the family to California when he was only fifty-six. The closest the young Milius had ever come to danger was the months he’d spent, as a boy, at Lowell Whiteman boarding school in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, skinning rabbits and sleeping under the stars with other well-off boys sent away for being troublesome at home. He’d chosen USC for film school, he said, because it trained the elite. As if making black-and-white short films were a director’s equivalent of being accepted into West Point.
Along with George, Milius was the star of that class, the one his peers thought most likely to succeed. His tastes ran much more mainstream than George’s. The two of them liked to sit on the grass outside the film buildings and chat girls up as they walked by, though Milius did most of the catcalling. He teased George for doing so much chasing women and so little catching them, though no girls ever stopped for him, either. George protested that he did fine for himself, even dismissed his alleged conquests as “dumb things.” This was before George finally got a part-time job, working as an assistant to the editor Verna Fields, a USC teacher who also cut newsreel and propaganda footage for the United States Information Agency. At Verna’s, George met Marcia, another assistant; she was small and lovely, with dark hair and elfin ears. She had a joyful sense of humor and happily identified as a “motormouth.” Milius, along with everyone else, was jealous of George for claiming her attention. He told George his girlfriend was prettier than him, smarter than him, and, worse still, a better editor than him.
When Milius wasn’t trying to get laid, he and George held court on that same grass, surrounded by other film students, and talked movies. One day, everyone was out there praising Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove, and they got to talking about ideas for a similar satire of the Vietnam War. Milius brought up Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, a book their screenwriting teacher had told him was so unadaptable for the screen, even Ben Hecht and Orson Welles hadn’t been able to crack it. “It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” Milius remembered. He told his classmates that he had first read Heart of Darkness in Colorado, in the middle of winter, laying a trap line, carrying a knife and a rifle. He felt that, to survive in the woods, you had to become the woods, the same way that to survive the jungle, you had to become part of the jungle.
“You give yourself to that anger, that’s exactly what Heart of Darkness is, and Kurtz had become part of that,” he lectured. “He’s given himself to these forces, he’s befriended them.” Milius had friends coming back from Vietnam, and he was so inappropriately, obscenely jealous. He plied them with questions about the experience. They spoke of being swallowed up by something primordial and visceral; of doing drugs to cope and experiencing the savagery of war like a psychedelic trip. All the fresh, groundbreaking stuff that people like Verna Fields had to censor and edit out.
That would be how he would adapt Heart of Darkness, Milius said: in Vietnam, as an allegory. Kurtz as America, consumed and corrupted.
“You should write this down,” George said.
Milius started doing just that, in scraps of scenes and ideas that came to him over the coming weeks. He kept the central throughline of Heart of Darkness as a guide: As Charles Marlow, in the novel, travels downriver into the “blank spaces” of Africa to find Kurtz, an ivory trader who has “gone native,” so Milius’s own Marlow, renamed Willard, would go into Vietnam to recover or terminate Colonel Kurtz, a Special Forces officer who has gone insane. But Milius refused to read Conrad’s book again so he would be inspired only by the emotion he had felt in the woods in Colorado, and he wasn’t sure how to shape the journey itself, what anecdotes to use, what tone to strike.
“Put all the neat stuff in it,” George said.
By early summer, Milius was getting somewhere. One hot day, he sat on a bench under the sun with classmate Mike Rachmil and said, “Mike, I want to run this by you.” He told Rachmil he was writing something set in Vietnam and calling it Apocalypse Now, a riff on one of the more popular slogans on hippie peacenik badges of the day, “Nirvana Now.” George was maybe going to direct it, in a cinéma vérité, low-budget style, like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, which had come out the year before.
Rachmil said sure, he’d listen.
Milius told Rachmil to imagine coconut trees, seen in a haze. Rock music on the soundtrack. Skids of helicopters, as Milius wrote in his draft screenplay, hard shapes that glide by at random. And then, without warning: bombs, the jungle ripped apart in a bright red-orange glob of napalm flame.
He pitched Rachmil the whole story while they sat on that bench, from first frame to last. It took him two hours. Rachmil, sitting sweating under the sun, hung on every word, “spellbound.” All he could think was:
This is insane.
4
THE FEAR THAT THRILLS
The first minute of George Lucas’s Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB is all black screen. The next minute and a half is made up of grainy close-ups, in the style of a surveillance camera, showing a man and a woman communicating, almost unintelligibly, over a radio. The strings and Gregorian chanting of the Yardbirds’ “Still I’m Sad” kick in over an endless card of the endless title. A runaway in an all-white jumpsuit, the numbers 1138 tattooed across his forehead, runs down a maze of all-white passageways, tracked every step of the way by an electronic surveillance system. Torturous mind-control techniques are applied through speakers and screens.
It was an alienating, anti-commercial short film. On the student circuit, it played like a blockbuster. At UCLA’s red-brick-and-tile Royce Hall, where the National Student Film Festival awards were held the evening of Sunday, January 21, 1968, crowds of curious kids from colleges up and down the coast turned up to see it—and to catch a glimpse of George Lucas, the graduating student rumor said was apprenticing under Francis Coppola, himself the biggest celebrity in the film school community.
Invisible in the throng that night sat a wide-eyed twenty-one-year-old with a mop of brown hair and the eager, expressive enthusiasm of a teenager. He was in his third year at California State College in Long Beach, pursuing a bachelor of arts. Cal State didn’t have a film department. That bummed him out. Young as he was, he had made dozens of shorts and thought of himself as a filmmaker already. To tell the truth, movies were Steven Spielberg’s whole life.
But he looked around himself as the theater filled, and his heart sank. As a seventeen-year-old in Phoenix, he had written and directed a whole feature film, Firelight, for five hundred bucks, shooting weekends and in the evenings after school, devising all the special effects himself for a story about scientists chasing UFOs. They had even shown it at the local cinema. The paper had celebrated him as a precocious prodigy. The summer of ’67—around the same time George and Francis met—Steven had gone on the bus tour at Universal Studios, snuck off during a bathroom break, and somehow convinced Chuck Silvers, the studio’s head librarian and head of editorial, to issue him a three-day pass around the lot so he could come back and see how everything worked.
“The only thing I want to do,” Steven told Silvers, “is direct before I’m twenty-one.”
Silvers had encouraged him, told him his dream was “really original and terrific.” Surrounded by real film students inside Royce Hall, however, Steven no longer felt very original. “I realized that there was an entire generation coming out of NYU, USC, and UCLA,” he said later: hundreds of kids as young as he was, as talented as he was, as hungry as he was, who shared the same dream and studied in environments where they could exercise their creativity. From being ahead of schedule, he suddenly felt like he had fallen behind.
Of all the films shown that night, THX 1138 4EB blew his mind and filled him with dread. It made him “jealous to the marrow of my bones,” he said. “This little movie was better than all of my movies combined.” At the end of the night, feeling like a fraud and an outsider, Steven filed out of the hall and followed a small pack as it made its way to the after-party. There, he sought out the director of THX 1138. George was only a year and a half older than him, but the gulf was daunting. He’d won the National Student Film Festival award, been on real film sets, worked with Coppola. He could even grow a full beard, for God’s sake.
Steven inched forward to George, introduced himself, and told him how much he admired his film. As he told it later, he and George vibed right away. “We just became friends,” he recalled. George’s experience was different. When he and Steven crossed paths again, almost exactly a year later, and Steven brought it up, George confessed he couldn’t remember meeting him at all.
* * *
Steven Allan Spielberg, born a week before Christmas in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio, had lived all over the place and never really fit in. His dad, Arnold, worked as an electrical engineer, and the family, which consisted of Steven, three younger sisters, and their mother, Leah, followed him wherever the work called.
In the early days of 1952, just weeks after turning five years old, Steven saw his first movie on a big screen, in Haddon Township, New Jersey. His parents told him they were taking him to “The Greatest Show On Earth,” and little Steven was so excited—he had never been to the circus before. He imagined a big-top tent, elephants, giraffes, a lion tamer. Instead, he found himself standing with them outside a building in town, waiting in line for hours in the freezing cold with dozens of other people. They filed into the structure, and Steven saw rows and rows of red seats, all facing a big red curtain. He took his own seat by his parents, and within minutes, the curtain parted to reveal a huge screen. Steven’s chest stung with betrayal.
“You said you were taking me to a circus,” he whined.
Soon, however, he was spellbound. He didn’t understand much of the story on the screen, the grown-up dialogue and interpersonal tension, but he was dazzled by the Technicolor hues, the huge, emotive faces, the staged circus acts. Near the end of the picture, the circus train crashes into another locomotive, a loud, violent collision, a horrible wreck that pushed Steven back into his seat as if he’d felt the whiplash himself. He sank down, averted his eyes, reached blindly up for his parents. He muttered that he wanted to leave. “It was a really terrifying, traumatic thing,” he said later, “and it never left me. My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off, and I’ll never forget that.”
And he didn’t. As soon as he stepped back outside into the dark gray cold of January, his small hand in the warmth of his mother’s palm, the train wreck took on the quality of a dream, just as real and just as false. His parents told him it hadn’t really happened. No one had been hurt. Steven went home to his own electric train set. He laid it out so it would crash, over and over again. His father told him to stop or he’d have to take the train away. Steven didn’t stop. He made the little wrecks bigger and bigger. He found new, creative things to crash the locomotive into. He tinkered with speed and the layout of the tracks, and studied the way the boxcars and cabooses tipped. For the first time, he took a fear and asserted control over it. It wasn’t happening to him; he was happening to it. “I was the one causing something,” he remembered, and immediately, his mind made a connection: “something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people, but no longer myself.”
Movies, little Steven found, walked the line between wonder and terror like a tightrope. And the people who made them—people Steven learned were called “directors”—controlled the emotion. Directors weren’t scared of the unknown. They led you into it and decided what you would find.
* * *
