For the craft classes, film lighting, editing, and animation, the end-of-year examination was a film, culminating, in the senior year, in a graduate exercise in film direction; Course 480 of the curriculum. For the first year, everyone in Herb Kossower’s animation class was given one minute of black-and-white 16mm stock and told to use the Oxberry animation camera to make a film. Most of them animated drawings or manipulated objects in stop-action. Lucas decided to make a film that was both serious and professional. A Look at Life was a collage of photographs from Life magazine. Its zooms, cuts, and pans across contrasting images of girls in bikinis, lovers, babies, politicians, vampires, and civilians being shot in the Congo might have been meant to illustrate the popular slogan ‘Make love, not war.’ Kossower, impressed, urged him to enter it in student film festivals, where its brevity and pace made it a favorite. It won a number of prizes.
Thereafter, Lucas became Kossower’s star pupil, and a faculty favorite, a role he cemented with his second film, Herbie. An exercise for the lighting class, Lucas made the film with Paul Golding, another above-average student who, like so many, left the industry after graduation. They edited together abstract close-ups of night-time reflections in the polished surface of a car. The vehicle isn’t a Volkswagen, though it is normally described as one, since two years later Disney chose the name ‘Herbie’ for the sentient VW of its fantasy The Love Bug. The Herbie of Lucas’s title is jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, whom Lucas approached to supply a few minutes of background music. A voice, presumably Hancock’s, is heard on the soundtrack saying, ‘What can I do for ya?’, then, ‘Not like sittin’ at home, I can tell ya.’ In between, the camera of Lucas and Golding watches light ripple over the car’s gleaming fenders and spotless windscreen. The credit reads: ‘These moments of reflection have been brought to you by Paul Golding and George Lucas.’
Lucas was initially rejected by the film-school fraternity, Delta Kappa Alpha, because of his nerdy image, though once it approved him, he took almost no part in its activities except to grab something from its snack bar when the cafeterias were closed. By day, the editing machines were in almost constant use, but Lucas and others sneaked back at night, missing dinner. A diet of candy and junk food finally undermined his frail constitution and brought him down with mononucleosis.
Even when he wasn’t working, Lucas didn’t mix much, least of all with women. Flirting was integral to college life, and there was a lot of sex about – much, though not all of it, playful. The film-school patio was a short-cut to other parts of the campus, and girls from the nearby women’s dorm passed through constantly, to be hit on by the more aggressive male students. Others borrowed telephoto lenses from the camera store to peek into the dorm windows, at which the girls occasionally staged discreet stripteases, tantalizingly terminated at the last moment, to the chagrin of the watchers.
‘George was chasing girls,’ says Milius. ‘He didn’t catch them, but he was chasing them.’ Richard Walter agrees that Lucas was no Lothario. ‘I’ve read books that claimed George was a ladies’ man. It’s nonsense. He was very, very reticent.’ Randy Epstein’s girl ‘fixed up’ Lucas with a friend of hers, with an unconventional result. ‘He spoke to her on the phone for many hours over many days before he got the courage to ask her out,’ says Epstein, ‘and the fascinating thing is, he asked her to describe herself. Then he did an oil painting of what he thought she would look like. Not a sketch, but an actual oil painting. It was amazingly like her. It was like he’d cheated and got a look at her somehow. The girl was just overwhelmed that he had the talent to do this without even seeing her.’
In his second year, Lucas rented a house off-campus, a rickety wooden building on Portola Drive, in the Hollywood hills. His father grudgingly paid the $80 a month rent. To reach the upper floors of the three-level house, you climbed a ladder, and the furniture was minimal, but Lucas felt secure there. After a few months, Randal Kleiser moved in to share the rent. Both were friendly with another of the Clean-Cut group, Christopher Lewis. Lewis’s mother, Loretta Young, after a fairly lurid youth, had found God in middle age and, with her husband Tom Lewis, embarked on the production of a pietistic TV series, The Loretta Young Show. Since the show ended in 1961, Tom Lewis’s production facilities were often unused, and his son persuaded him to let his USC friends edit and record there. For Orgy Beach Party, an unfinished parody, produced by Christopher Lewis and directed by Don Glut, of the then-popular ‘beach party’ films, Kleiser played the handsome hero and Glut the monster who carries off the girl. Lucas shot stills, and they used the Lewis studio to record the theme song with Glut’s garage band, the Hustlers. In between, Lewis’s friends, including Lucas, often hung out at the sumptuous home of his parents. In their senior year, Lucas and Lewis even formed a production company, Sunrise Films, but it never made a film.
By the start of his second year at USC, Lucas had found his level. His Modesto wardrobe remained, though he’d ditched the unfortunate jackets. He’d also grown a beard, which gave character to his face, and disguised a weak chin, as well as earning him honorary credentials as a radical. At the same time, he remained shrewdly aware of the advantages of good faculty relations. While students like Glut, Milius, and Epstein drew fire from their teachers for turning out pastiches like Superman and the Gorilla Gang, which Glut not only wrote, directed, and edited, but for which he also composed the music, built the models, and did the special effects – which were impressive, given the minuscule budget – Lucas went for solid production values and certified liberal sentiments. For his second-year directing project, Freiheit (‘freedom’ in German), introduced as ‘A film by LUCAS,’ he persuaded Randal Kleiser to play a young man running away from a battle, suggested by sounds of artillery in the distance. He reaches a frontier, evidently that between East and West Germany, but is shot down by a soldier (Christopher Lewis). As he lies bleeding, voices on the soundtrack discuss the significance of freedom and the need to endure sacrifices to protect it.
Whatever else USC taught Lucas, the key concept he absorbed was the importance of teamwork. With so few resources and so little time, nothing got done unless you enlisted people to help you. Projects risked becoming incestuous. Basil Poledouris’s senior film, Glut, wove a fictional story around the character of USC’s most dissident student. Milius wrote it, Lucas recorded sound, and most other students had walk-on parts. It’s an effective and amusing little film from a man who would later become best known as a composer. At the start, Glut, playing himself, tries out for a job as a stuntman with Sam Fuller, who asks him if he can do a back-flip. Glut admits he can’t, but says he can fall off the back of a truck like Dave Sharpe in one serial, or do a fight like Dale van Sickel in another. ‘You’re not a stuntman,’ says Fuller dismissively. Disconsolate, Glut goes to a party wearing his Purple Monster costume. Scorned by everyone, he leaves, complaining, ‘Men don’t feel grandeur any more’ – a classic Milius line – only to achieve his moment of glory by rescuing a girl from a purse-snatcher.
The USC students helped one another because their instructors made it clear from the start that only results mattered. Not ignorance, nor sickness, nor acts of God excused failing to deliver an exercise on time. ‘A student would show his workshop project,’ says Richard Walter, ‘and someone would say, “Gee, that doesn’t make sense to me …” And the film-maker would go into a dissertation of explanations. “Well, that day the sound man didn’t show up, and the landlady came in and ran us out, and I just had time to get this one angle …” And the instructor would say, “Well, put it on a title card at the head of the film. Say, ‘This is why the movie is the way it is – because we had all these problems.’”’ To those in the class really listening, the moral was clear: in the outside world, excuses bought nothing. Later, Lucas would put the lesson into the mouth of Yoda, the Jedi master of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke Skywalker says he’ll try to harness the power of the Force, the sage says, ‘Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.’ What people took for Zen was really USC.
Nobody was more generous with assistance than Lucas. He recorded sound and helped edit Milius’s animated film, Marcello, I’m so Bored, and there were few USC films of the period in which he didn’t take a hand. Some people resented his dismissive manner and impatience with the maladroit. Finding Walter Murch developing