Читать книгу George Lucas: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 14

I pattern my life on Hitler. He didn’t just take over the country. He worked his way into the existing fabric first.

Francis Ford Coppola, Newsweek, March 1967

One of the crumbs from the Hollywood table that occasionally fell into the eager hands of institutions like USC was the Samuel Warner Scholarship. The winner spent six months at the studio on a salary of $80 a week, doing what he wanted, learning what he could. He could even nominate the department in which he interned.

In 1967, the shortlist for this perk comprised Lucas and Walter Murch. On the day the decision was announced, they hung out on the USC patio and discussed what they’d do if they won. Whoever got the job, they agreed, the other would do everything he could to help. That was the trouble with Old Hollywood, Lucas argued: its primary directive was ‘divide and rule.’ It would never be like that with the next generation, he assured his friends. At USC, everyone worked with everyone else on every project. That’s how it would be in New Hollywood too.

Lucas won, and in June 1967 he drove his Camaro to Burbank and checked in at the gate. Traditionally, he has said he wanted to spend his six months with the legendary animator Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and Speedy Gonzales. Directed to the animation department, he found it reduced to a single office with ‘one guy, who was sort of head of the department, and he would just sit in his office and twiddle his thumbs all day.’ The department had been closed.

Legend also claims that Lucas arrived on the Warners lot on the very day that Jack, last of the four Warner Brothers, cleared out his office. ‘From my point of view, the film industry died in 1965,’ says Lucas, amplifying this story. ‘It’s taken this long for people to realize the body is cold. The day I won my six-month internship and walked onto the Warner Bros. lot was the day Jack Warner left and the studio was taken over by Seven Arts. I walked through the empty lot and thought, “This is the end.” The industry had been taken over by people who knew how to make deals and operate offices but had no idea how to make movies. When the six months was over, I never went back.’

The skinny, bearded kid in jeans and running shoes ambling across the lot, passing the dapper, impeccably suited Jack Warner with his hairline mustache and insincere smile, trudging into oblivion, is such a Hollywood moment that one wishes it were true. Unfortunately for myth, when Lucas arrived, Warners’ animation department had been closed for five years. Since 1962, Chuck Jones had been attached to MGM, turning out versions of Tom and Jerry which even he himself rated as inferior. As for Jack Warner, his departure from the lot was as prolonged as a soprano’s farewell performances. He sold his stock to Seven Arts in November 1966, but the company encouraged him to stay on in his old office as an independent producer. Long after Steve Ross’s Kinney Services bought out Seven Arts in 1969, Warner remained on the lot. Only when Kinney told him they wanted to convert his private dining room into offices did the last of the Warners move over the hills into Century City, on what had been part of the old Twentieth Century-Fox, and set up Jack L. Warner Productions.

Lucas found the Warners lot a ghost town. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz commented soberly of that time, ‘I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that any minute I’d look out and see tumbleweeds come rolling past.’ Only one film was shooting: Finian’s Rainbow. Howard Kazanjian from USC was second assistant director, and got Lucas onto the set. He stood at the back and watched a man with a beard and a loud voice order people about and wave his arms a lot. If this was the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, the first film-school student of their generation to penetrate the Hollywood establishment, Lucas wasn’t impressed.

In 1968, Coppola, in the estimation of everyone who knew him, had the bucket in his hand and was headed for the well. Before he’d even finished his postgraduate degree at UCLA film school, this ebullient voluptuary with a thick black beard and a tendency to corpulence had directed two soft-core porn films, The Peeper and The Belt Girls and the Playboy, written both music and lyrics for a musical, finished a feature screenplay, and worked in Roger Corman’s film factory, turning foreign sf films into fodder for the drive-ins.

Producer Ray Stark recognized Coppola as someone he could use, and offered him a job as hired gun and script fixer at Seven Arts, for which he was then head of production. Lured by promises of an eventual directing credit, and Stark’s flattering assurances of his genius, Coppola accepted. The day he did so, an anonymous sign went up on the UCLA bulletin board. It said simply, ‘Sellout.’

In between fixing broken-down movies for Stark, Coppola turned out at least three screenplays a year, in the hope that Stark would let him direct one. Each time, however, Seven Arts assigned them to someone else. Grown cold and canny, Coppola optioned a 1963 British novel called You’re a Big Boy Now, offering author David Benedictus $1000 if the film was ever made. He scripted it as a wise-ass comedy with music about a shy boy who spends his days roller-skating round the stacks of the New York Public Library, replacing returned books, and who falls into the bizarre world that surrounds a febrile young library user.

Half flower-power comedy, half pop-art musical, You’re a Big Boy Now evolved into an American version of Richard Lester’s films with the Beatles, with a mobile camera (critic Rex Reed called Coppola ‘the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera’), musical numbers erupting into the action, and characters as much comic-strip as Actors’ Studio. Seven Arts was sufficiently impressed to sign a new deal with Coppola. He would write three films for them – two, The Conversation and The Rain People, from his original stories, and the third, The Scarlet Letter, from Nathaniel Hawthorne. In return, he could direct the fourth.

You’re a Big Boy Now lost every penny of the $800,000 invested in it. In fact, Seven Arts estimated it lost over $1 million, once they counted advertising and print costs. But by the time it came out, the company’s mind was elsewhere. Having just bought a tottering Warner Brothers, it wanted something in production quickly. Dusting off the 1947 E.Y. Harburg/Burton Lane Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, a whimsical tale of an eccentric Irishman wandering the rural Southern United States looking for a leprechaun’s buried pot of gold, Warners-Seven Arts, as it was now known, exercised an outstanding option on the services of a tottering Fred Astaire, assembled a low-cost supporting cast led by British unknowns Petula Clark and Tommy Steele, and assigned the film to their cheapest and hungriest director – Coppola.

In June 1967 he started shooting Finian’s Rainbow on Warners’ Burbank lot. Distracted, he didn’t look around for a few days. When he did, ‘I noticed this skinny kid watching me. I was curious who this young man was, and I think I went over to him and said, “Hi. See anything interesting?” and he said, “Not much.” That was the first time I met George Lucas.’

This first encounter between two men who were to become pivotal not only in each other’s careers but in the growth of New Hollywood typified their relationship. Coppola never ceased to think of Lucas as that grubby boy watching from the shadows. ‘Actually,’ said Lucas, ‘he calls me a stinky kid. He says, “You’re a stinky kid. You do what you want.”’

Each day, Lucas came in and stood about on Coppola’s set, a thin, silent guy, habitually dressed in a white T-shirt, black pants and sneakers. The crew ignored him, and even Coppola, once he’d established who he was, only spoke to him in passing. It didn’t escape Lucas’s notice, however, that he and Coppola were the only people on the crew under fifty, and the only ones with beards.

After two weeks, Lucas had had enough. He thought the animation department might have a 16mm camera he could borrow to shoot a film. Also, Carl Foreman had suggested that if he wrote a treatment for a feature version of THX1138 4EB, he would see if he could interest Columbia in it. Either way, he felt he had nothing more to learn by watching Coppola.

‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ Coppola blustered when Lucas told him. ‘Aren’t I entertaining enough? Have you learned everything you’re going to learn watching me direct?’

Lucas shrugged.

Coppola found he would be sorry to see the kid go. ‘I was like a fish out of water among all these old studio guys,’ he said. With Lucas, he could talk about movies – something Old Hollywood never did, except to discuss what they cost and what they earned. To keep him around, Coppola put him on the payroll as his ‘administrative assistant.’ On 31 July 1967, Lucas signed a contract for six months’ work at a total salary of $3000. His first job was to shoot Polaroid pictures of the set to check that props and furniture stayed in the same place between set-ups. Once there was footage to edit, he spent his time in the cutting room with the studio’s longtime head of editing, Rudy Fehr. The THX treatment went into the bottom drawer.

Just before Thanksgiving, 1967, Coppola confided to Lucas that he was starting work on his next film for Seven Arts, and that he had a spot for him in the crew.

The shoot on Finian’s Rainbow was expiring in a gaudy sunset of mutual congratulation. For $3.5 million, Coppola had delivered a film that looked as if it could well have cost $15 million. But he knew the film would fail. The important thing was to get another one up and running before anyone at Seven Arts realized it too. Fortunately, his stock stood so high with the company that they agreed not only to produce his original screenplay, The Rain People, but to let him direct it as well. Armed with their backing, Coppola persuaded IATSE to waive its rules and let him shoot the film his way, with a small crew, moving from location to location as the mood took him. Technically, a unit shooting outside Los Angeles was supposed to hire men from the district branch, or ‘Local.’ If they insisted on using their own technicians, they still had to pay a local crew, as had happened on Mackenna’s Gold, even if the men simply sat about playing pinochle.

Coppola told IATSE his film was actually a documentary, and so should be exempt from union rules. The union cautiously agreed to at least discuss giving Coppola special consideration. Taking this for carte blanche, he wheedled some money out of Seven Arts and assembled a scratch crew with an old friend, Bart Patton, who became the film’s line producer.

Coppola based The Rain People on an incident from his childhood when his mother, after a family argument, left home and checked into a motel for two days. His heroine, Natalie Ravenna, is a married woman who, finding she’s pregnant, goes on the road to ‘discover herself She drives across country, picking up hitch-hikers, falling into relationships with people, only to shed them and move on. She discovers something about herself, but only at the expense of others. ‘Killer’ Kilgannon, a brain-damaged football player she picks up, calls her ‘a rain person.’ In one of Coppola’s more portentous lines, he explains, ‘The rain people are made of rain, and when they cry, they disappear, because they cry themselves away.’ In the end, after having been unable to help Killer, and watching him cheated and humiliated, Natalie stands by helplessly as he battles with Robert Duvall, a cop with whom she has become involved sexually, and Duvall’s daughter shoots him.

Killer was played by James Caan, who’d been at Hofstra University with Coppola, and had gone on to Hollywood stardom in Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 and El Dorado, and Robert Altman’s Countdown. Coppola flew Caan to Hofstra to shoot a crucial sequence: the football game in which Killer is injured. The trip delighted Lucas, as did the way Coppola brushed away the problems of guerrilla filmmaking as if they were fluff on his jacket. They couldn’t afford a cinematographer or lights? Why not shoot everything with a 16mm Bell & Howell, hand-held? It would look more authentic anyway. No sound recordist? Didn’t matter – George could record sound. George, as it turned out, could also carry the camera equipment, find props for the few staged scenes, act as production manager, and almost everything else.

It was a reminder to Lucas of his student film days, and of his time on the race-car circuit. Nothing could have been more different from the elephantine shoot of Finian’s Rainbow. This was surely the filmmaking of the future, an American nouvelle vague, distinguished by the qualities that François Truffaut had described as typical of American film-making – ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, and speed.’ Walter Murch said, ‘I think for Francis and George, that film was the prototype. If they could operate making a film out of a storefront in Ogallala, Nebraska – and do it successfully – then there was no reason why they should live in Hollywood.’

But Coppola almost immediately chilled Lucas’s enthusiasm. How was the THX treatment going? Lucas confessed he hadn’t looked at it in weeks.

‘You’ve gotta learn to write,’ Coppola told him sternly. ‘Nobody will take you seriously unless you can write.’

Lucas explained that writing exhausted him, both physically and mentally, but Coppola told him he was going about it the wrong way. ‘He said, “Look, when you write a script, just go as fast as you can. Just get it done. Don’t ever read what you’ve written. Try to get it done in a week or two, then go back and fix it, and then go back through as fast as you can, and then go back and fix it – you just keep fixing it. But if you try to make each page perfect, you’ll never get beyond page ten.”’ He also suggested Lucas read Shakespeare, his own personal inspiration.

Coppola persuaded Warners to option THX for $3000, then told Lucas that that would be his salary for working on The Rain People. Throughout the shoot Lucas got up at 4 a.m., laboriously wrote a scene for THX, in pencil, in crabbed capitals in the sort of lined ‘blue books’ he’d used for school exams, then started the day’s work. Not all such stories have happy endings, however. ‘I finished it,’ says Lucas, ‘and showed it to him, and he said, “This is terrible. I think we ought to hire a writer.”’

Coppola found a playwright with some feature-film credentials prepared to work for very little, and set him to work rewriting the screenplay. Meanwhile, Lucas scrounged a 16mm camera and a Nagra tape recorder, and suggested making a documentary on the production. Coppola, a pushover for self-promotion, skimmed $12,000 from the publicity budget to pay for it.

Spending more and more time in New York while Marcia continued to work on commercials in Los Angeles was placing a strain on their relationship, and Marcia finally flew east in February 1968. One of Lucas’s jobs was scouting locations, and on a wet Sunday in February he took Marcia to the next one on his list, in Garden City, Long Island, and proposed to her.

In April 1968 Coppola went back to Hofstra to shoot another football game, and late in the summer the Rain People caravan of seven vehicles and twenty people started to roll across America. Lucas was on board, but not Marcia. At the start of filming, Coppola magisterially banned wives and girlfriends from the shoot, ignoring the fact that a VW van trailing the caravan carried his wife Eleanor, their two children and, as babysitter, a teenager named Melissa Mathison, later the screenwriter of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and wife of Harrison Ford.

As well as the cast, the caravan included a recreational vehicle fitted with a Steenbeck so that editor Barry Malkin could cut the film as they went along. The cameraman was Bill Butler, who later shot Jaws for Steven Spielberg. Everyone kept in touch via two-way radio. Footage was airlifted to New York every day, and rushes normally caught up with them three days later – too late to reshoot if Coppola had second thoughts. In Ogallala, Nebraska, editor Malkin finally called a halt. He needed time to assemble the mountain of material, so the crew camped at the Lakeway Lodge while Coppola occupied an old shoe store downtown as a production office, where Malkin spent five weeks making a preliminary cut.

Lucas persuaded Coppola to hire Marcia as cutting-room assistant. When Lucas rang to tell her, he sensed some resistance. Haskell Wexler had asked her to work on his feature Medium Cool, which he was both directing and shooting against the background of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Once the convention became the focus of riots over the war in Vietnam, he’d had the audacious idea of setting a fictional story about a reporter at the heart of the disturbances, and shooting it with lightweight camera and fast stock, just like the cinéma vérité directors. Wexler’s invitation to work on the film excited and flattered Marcia, but she loved Lucas enough to turn it down and leave for Ogallala. Fortunately, Wexler delayed editing, so she was able to work on both films.

All the time, Lucas was shooting his diary of the production, snatching shots of Coppola which, in retrospect, showed him more revealingly than he had either expected or wanted. This Coppola is a blustering, filibustering dynamo, living on his nerves, inventing both the film and himself as he goes along, and relying on his imposing, near-biblical stature and commanding manner to steamroller any opposition.

The documentary shows him hectoring the Warners head office by phone, yelling, ‘The system will fall by its own weight! It can’t fail to!’ Later, he moans, ‘I’m tired of being the anchor when I see my world crumbling.’ Lucas also glimpsed the paper-thinness of this persona when Coppola decreed that everyone, himself included, should be short-haired and clean-shaven when they rolled into the midwest. (In Easy Rider, roughly contemporary with The Rain People, long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are blown away by a redneck with a shotgun.) But Coppola without his patriarchal beard proved a different, less imposing person. Nobody took him seriously, not even the crew he’d dominated for so long. Some didn’t even recognize him. So startling was the change that Lucas had to add a line to the commentary of his documentary explaining the radical mass-depilation.

When there was time, Coppola and Lucas kicked around ideas for future projects. One was inspired by Medium Cool. Why not make a film about Vietnam the same way, shot like a documentary, on 16mm, in black and white, while battles were actually taking place?

Nobody now remembers who first thought of it – or, more correctly, everyone is certain that they first proposed basing such a film on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s story, a man goes up the Congo River to investigate reports that Kurtz, the local agent for a Belgian trading company, has gone crazy and set himself up as a sort of god. He finds Kurtz ill and raving, and he dies with the words: ‘The horror! The horror.’

No factor of Coppola’s working methods complicated the making of The Rain People more than sex. It suffused the production. James Caan was a notorious seducer, an habitué of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion who boasted he’d slept with seventeen consecutive Playmates of the Month. Coppola was also, in the words of a friend, a ‘pussy hound.’ He would halt production to fly back to New York, supposedly for conferences but actually to pursue some new mistress.

On one occasion, Coppola abandoned the crew in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in a motel with no phone, TV, or restaurant. ‘I got a little angry about that,’ says Lucas. ‘Francis was saying all this “all-for-one” stuff, and he goes off and screws around in New York. He felt he had a right to do that, and I told him it wasn’t fair. We got into a big fight over it.’ Throughout all this, Coppola’s wife Eleanor stood by patiently, bringing up the children and accepting the sympathy of everyone.

Coppola fought too with Shirley Knight, his star. Knight, like her character Natalie, was pregnant, and her nerves were on edge. The semi-nude bedroom scenes, dictated by Coppola’s conception of Natalie as a woman looking to experience sex with other men before she settled down to motherhood, disturbed her. They wrangled over interpretation, over the problems of this kind of shooting. In reaction, Coppola trimmed her part and built up that of Robert Duvall. Knight protested, and the situation deteriorated still further, exacerbated by Coppola’s evident attraction to her.

The tensions increased as production went on. When Marcia came out to Nebraska to work on the film, Coppola took an obvious interest in her. ‘Everybody wanted Marcia,’ says John Milius. ‘Part of [Lucas’s] disagreement with Francis is, I’m sure, because Francis attempted to hit on Marcia, because he attempted to hit on the wives of everybody. But that was Francis. What was it Talleyrand said of Napoleon – “He was as great as a man can be without virtue”? Francis was for Francis – but Francis was great; a truly great man. He’s still my Führer.’

The production of The Rain People was as close to a honeymoon as Lucas and Coppola ever got. ‘George was like a younger brother to me,’ said Coppola, ‘I loved him. Where I went, he went.’ But Lucas was less sanguine. ‘My life is a kind of reaction against Francis’s life,’ he mused. ‘I’m his antithesis.’

All this would be grist to the Star Wars mill, but for the moment confidence was in the ascendant. Like everyone else on the unit, Lucas struggled to save The Rain People and Coppola’s reputation. He filmed some of the arguments between Coppola and Knight, but didn’t use them in his documentary. Francis had become his Führer too.