Читать книгу George Lucas: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 11

I should have been killed, but I wasn’t. I’m living on borrowed time.

Lucas on his accident

Lucas’s survival was miraculous. Had the seatbelt not snapped, had he not been thrown clear, had he landed on his head rather than his chest, he would almost certainly have died in the road in front of his own home.

Nobody inside the Lucas house heard the crash. Their neighbor opposite, Shorty Coleman, bolted out, saw him lying unconscious, face bloody, and rang immediately for an ambulance. With the hospital only five miles away, it arrived quickly. As Lucas was loaded in, he began to turn blue with cyanosis, and on the trip to the hospital he started vomiting blood.

At the hospital, the doctor on duty, Paul Carlsen, gave him a blood transfusion and inserted four needles into his stomach to check for the internal bleeding that would indicate ruptured organs. George Sr was telephoned, and he raced to the hospital, then home to collect Wendy and his wife. When they arrived at George’s bedside, they found him connected to oxygen and transfusion tubes, his forehead bandaged, his face ashen. ‘Mom, did I do something wrong?’ he muttered, half unconscious. Dorothy wept, and had to be led from the room. George Sr prayed. Wendy just stared at her brother, and wondered what would have happened had she gone to the library with him. From the look of the car, she would probably have been dead.

A photographer from the Modesto Bee took a spectacular photograph of the mangled Fiat, which the paper used on the front page next day, under the heading ‘Youth Survives Crash.’ ‘Just what part in saving his life the rollbar and a safety belt played is not known but George W. Lucas Jr survived this crash yesterday,’ said the Bee. Later, the circumstances of the accident would be subtly manipulated by the Lucas machine to shift any blame from him. A 1994 book authorized by Lucasfilm describes Ferreira as ‘driving behind him at eighty to ninety miles an hour’ – a charge not supported by the record – and ‘with his headlights off – hardly a crime at 4.50 p.m. on a summer afternoon. The local police were in no doubt about who was to blame. While he was still in hospital, they gave Lucas a ticket for making an illegal left turn.

The same book magnifies the extent of Lucas’s injuries, describing him as ‘without a pulse, his lungs collapsed and numerous bones crushed.’ In fact, to the surprise of Carlsen and the other medical staff, they proved less severe than they looked. Despite the gash on his forehead and the bruises on his shoulders, he had only two minor fractures, and his liver, spleen, and kidneys were intact, though bruised. The worst damage was to his chest, which had absorbed most of the force. X-rays revealed hematomas on his lungs, which were hemorrhaging. But that could be dealt with. The doctors injected anti-inflammatory drugs, and George, who was in good health generally, started to recover.

Paradoxically, his accident won him the high-school graduation which had been in doubt. On Friday, the day of commencement, someone from the school brought his diploma to the hospital, his failure to make up his courses conveniently forgotten.

Lucas was too dazed to relish his good fortune. If anyone were to ask him the question posed by the publicity for American Graffiti, ‘Where Were You in ’62?’, he would have replied, ‘In bed.’ Most of his summer was spent convalescing, and the legend has grown up of his Pauline conversion during this period to hard work, ambition, and the life of the mind.

It may even be partly true. A lot was happening in the world, and with leisure to contemplate it, Lucas may have seen his life in a new light. During 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in October, John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev over the missiles he’d sneaked into Cuba; America exploded a nuclear device over Johnston Island in the Pacific; Polaroid launched a new one-minute color film; and the first Titan inter-continental ballistic missile was installed in a concrete silo in the American heartland, targeted on Russia.

Lucas couldn’t get out to see the summer’s biggest movies, some of them destined to be among his favorites, like the first James Bond film, Dr No, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; but he watched plenty of television, none of it very significant. That year’s Emmys chose the thoughtful legal series The Defenders as the best show of 1961, but the networks, eyes ever on the ratings, premiered nothing as interesting in 1962, which saw the debut of The Beverly Hillbillies, the World War II series Combat, animated science fiction from Hanna-Barbera in The Jetsons, and the mindless comedy McHale’s Navy. The Tonight Show also got a new host, Johnny Carson.

It was a big year for dance music. The Twist was hot – Chubby Checker seemed to be on every TV pop programme – followed by Joey Dee and the Starliters doing ‘Peppermint Twist.’ Fads like the Limbo Rock, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi and the Lo-co-motion were sent up in ‘The Monster Mash’ by the Crypt Kickers, with Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, imitating the sepulchral tones of Karloff.

What caught Lucas’s ear, however, was a new presence on the air, from an unexpected source – Mexico.

Robert Weston Smith was born in Brooklyn in 1938. His resonant voice and interest in music made him a natural for radio, and by 1962 he was a disc jockey on KCIJ-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, where as ‘Big Smith with the Records’ he gained a following among admirers of rhythm and blues. In Shreveport, Smith began developing a fictional character for himself, one which would exploit a certain furtive quality in his voice, and his flair for the outrageous. He took his idea to XERF-FM in Del Rio, Texas. Most of the station’s clients were preachers, who paid generously for the right to broadcast their message all over the US via its massive 250,000-watt transmitter – five times the power allowed for stations within the US – sited just over the Mexican border.

Smith convinced XERF that he could win just as many listeners in the late-night and early-morning hours with rhythm and blues and bluegrass music. His sponsors were the same preachers who dominated the daylight hours. Smith’s throaty musical introductions, occasional lycanthropic howls, yelps of ‘Mercy!’ and exhortations to ‘Get yo’self nekkid!’ interspersed with commercials for plastic effigies of Jesus, sanctified prayer handkerchiefs, and the collected sermons of his holy-rolling backers, soon became a feature of the American soundscape, and ‘Wolfman Jack,’ as Smith now called himself, an institution.

Lucas became a fan. Later, he would remark that, ‘People have a relationship with a deejay whom they’ve never seen but to whom they feel very close because they’re with him every day. For a lot of kids, he’s the only friend they’ve got.’

While he lay in bed listening to the Wolfman, Lucas contemplated his future.

There were plenty of alternatives. As he recovered, his father pressed the point that if there was a time for his son to go into the family business, this was surely it. George responded with the stubbornness which his father must have recognized, since it reflected his own. Lucas Sr saw that money bought power and freedom. So did his son. He believed in a hard day’s work for a fair salary. So did his son. He saw discipline, self-control, and self-reliance as the core of good character. So did his son. Lucas Jr rejected his father’s values in adolescence, but spent the next years attaching himself to surrogate fathers who would tell him the same things: work hard, make money, and use it to buy independence.

With his car wrecked and no chance of financing another, Lucas’s racing days were at an end, unless he took a job as a mechanic servicing someone else’s ride. On the plus side, he had, against the odds, graduated from high school; though this had its negative aspects too, since he now became eligible to be drafted. At the end of American Graffiti, Terry the Toad, the character with whom Lucas is most identified, goes to Vietnam, where he is listed as missing in action – a fate explained in ironic detail in More American Graffiti.

Vietnam posed a potent threat to teenagers like Lucas in 1962. Many, including his future partner Gary Kurtz, served their stint. Some were judged too unhealthy for the army, as Lucas would be, though he didn’t yet know it. Others found a way around it. Steven Spielberg would have been happy to hang out in San Jose, California after his high-school graduation (with grades as poor as Lucas’s), seeing movies and making a few of his own on 8mm, but the arrival of his Selective Service Notice in early 1964 – delivered by his father while he waited in line to see Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – concentrated his mind wonderfully, and he enrolled at California State College at Long Beach, thus gaining a student exemption.

As he convalesced, Lucas decided to continue in school, and enrolled in junior college. These halfway houses between high school and college offered two-year courses, usually vocational. In the fall of 1962, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College, assembling an arts major that even further exasperated his father: astronomy, sociology, speech, and art history – none of them any use in selling office supplies.

Except for speech, which Lucas hoped would improve his limited communication skills and eradicate his warbling croak of a voice (it didn’t; he admits he was ‘terrible in Speech class’), the other courses were those traditionally chosen by adolescents who, having rejected religion, are looking for a new belief system based in rationalism. Reason and science become the new gods. The new believer finds himself worshipping the Divine Order, the Power of the Mind, the Inevitability of Historical Change.

Already, an ambitious science fiction writer named Lafayette Ron Hubbard had cashed in on this thirst for certainties by inventing his own quasi-scientific religion, Scientology, which, with notable shrewdness, he’d launched via an article in the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The same magazine gave generous publicity to the experiences of Dr Joseph Rhine of Duke University in hunting the elusive signs of what he christened ‘psi powers’: telepathy and telekinesis.

Lucas later read the basic works of sociology and anthropology which traced modern religion and morality back to their roots in tribal rituals and earth magic. But though he has been credited, retrospectively, with a near-lifelong interest in cultural studies and science fiction which blossomed in the Star Wars films, nobody can remember him being interested in anything but television and cars until long after he left Modesto.

In 1964 Lucas graduated from Modesto Junior College with an Associate in Arts degree, and an A in astronomy and Bs in speech, sociology, and art history. His grade average hovered around C, but that was enough to get into all but the most demanding colleges. John Plummer urged him to try USC with him. But Lucas decided he didn’t want to move that far from home. Instead he enrolled at San Francisco State, which had the added advantage of being free.

He still had no clear idea of what career he might follow. At junior college he’d drifted back to photography, this time with an 8mm movie camera bought by his father. Though he no longer had ambitions to drive competitively, he also spent time around the race circuits, hanging out with Allen Grant and other old friends, but filming rather than tinkering with their cars. ‘I wasn’t the hot guy any more,’ he recalled. ‘I was sort of over the hill, though I still knew all the guys.’

Lucas discovered the pleasures of watching, ideally through the lens of a camera. People didn’t ask awkward questions when you filmed them; they just let you be. And, seen through the camera, they themselves came into sharper focus. You could observe, comment, categorize, without saying a word.

What Lucas found more interesting than human beings, however, were objects. On occasional visits to Berkeley, he saw films of the new American ‘underground’ – Stan Brakhage’s jittering 8mm diaries, Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees (1961), the abstractions of Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, Robert Breer, and in particular Jordan Belson, who projected his wobbling psychedelic creations on the walls of the San Francisco Planetarium.

The hot documentary from 1960 was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the Newport Jazz Festival, the first and only film by fashion photographer Bert Stern. Stern didn’t bother much with interviews. He preferred to stand back and film faces, or the reflections of yacht hulls on the surface of the water, which he cut to music by Mose Allison. There was no commentary, no point of view except that of the camera, no judgments, no argument, no plot. Lucas must have said to himself with some satisfaction, ‘I can do that.’ A year later, his student film Herbie would be made up entirely of reflections on the hubcaps and polished surface of a car, set to jazz by Herbie Hancock. Lucas’s first film, made as a child, had been of plates, not people, and he didn’t much change as an adult. His early student films would all be about cars. He shot them from a distance and up close, noticing the reflections on a polished fender or a windscreen; or clipped photographs from magazines and cut between them to create a narrative that bypassed performance. The idea of directing actors was, and would remain, distasteful.

No two people agree on how Lucas made the first step in the journey from Sunday cameraman to the most successful film-maker in history, but there’s little doubt that cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Haskell Wexler came into it.

The early sixties saw the arrival of new lightweight 16mm cameras and the documentary movement they engendered, cinéma vérité. The image of the cameraman with a 16mm Arriflex on his shoulder and a Nagra tape recorder close to hand – though not in hand; most professional tape machines still weighed twenty pounds – became a potent one, and even more so when Eclair launched its NPR, a sleek, updated version of the hand-held 16mm camera. With such equipment, a film-maker was independent, able to shoot where he liked, and with as little light as fast new film stocks would accept. Albert and David Maysles began turning out films in what they called ‘Direct Cinema.’ They were soon joined by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, who, as Drew Leacock Pennebaker, set most of the benchmarks with films like Primary, The Chair, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, the 1960 Eddie, about racing driver Eddie Sachs.

Haskell Wexler was thirty-six, and widely respected as a cameraman with a penchant for realism and a strong leftist political commitment. In 1958, Irvin Kershner had persuaded producer Roger Corman to finance Stakeout on Dope Street, a low-budget thriller about three boys who find a case full of drugs, and are pursued by the gang who owns it. Kershner co-wrote and directed. Wexler shot part of the film, adapting hand-held, low-light documentary technique to drama. He also lit Kershner’s The Hoodlum Priest (1961), and A Face in the Rain (1963). In between, he worked on low-budget experimental films like The Savage Eye (1960), and on documentaries. It was one of these that brought him to Modesto.

How he met George Lucas has long been a subject of rival mythologies. Dale Pollock, in the semi-authorized Skywalking, says simply, ‘Wexler took a liking to the weird skinny kid whose head was bursting with ideas. He went so far as to telephone some friends of his on USC’s film school faculty and advised them to watch out for Lucas. “For God’s sake, keep an eye on the kid,” Wexler told one faculty member [presumably Gene Peterson, who had been his assistant and who now taught cinematography there]. “He’s got the calling.” But Wexler did not get Lucas into USC, as legend has it. Lucas had applied to the film school prior to meeting Wexler, and to George’s and his father’s amazement, he was accepted.’

Other sources make a more direct link, and emphasize Wexler’s role. Charley Lippincott, who was at USC with Lucas and who would become his head of publicity and marketing, discounts the later story, encouraged by Lucas, that he had already made up his mind to enter film when he met Wexler: ‘Wexler was up there doing a film about cars [probably The Bus, a documentary Wexler wrote, shot, and directed], and George helped him out, working on the film as production assistant or something.’

As an aficionado of car racing, Wexler inevitably ran into Allen Grant. As they talked, Wexler complained that he was having trouble with his Citroën-Maserati, notorious for its tricky timing. Grant said he knew someone who could help, a guy who’d been his mechanic and co-driver, and who was interested in movies too. ‘George met up with Haskell Wexler,’ says Lippincott, ‘and told him he didn’t know what he wanted to do, but that he was interested in film. And Haskell got him into USC. He’s the one who persuaded him. I don’t think George really knew that much about film at the time.’

John Plummer also played a part. His grades were better than Lucas’s, and he wanted to enter USC in Los Angeles as a business major. He was going to LA to take the admission tests, and asked Lucas to keep him company. In fact, why didn’t he take the test too? ‘So I said, “All right,”’ Lucas recalled, “‘but it’s a long shot, ’cause my grades aren’t good enough to get into a school like that.” So I went and took the test and I passed. I got accepted!’