Actors lament his failure to give them any guidance towards character. Harrison Ford, recalling the making of American Graffiti in Modesto, remembers staring for hours out of the windscreen of his car at the camera car towing it. ‘The cameraman, the sound man and the director could all sit in the trunk, and every time I looked at George, he was asleep.’ Cindy Williams, one of the film’s stars, was flattered when Lucas called her performance ‘Great! Terrific!’, until she found he said exactly the same thing to everyone.
It is easy to forget that Lucas, for all his fame and influence, has only directed four feature films in almost thirty years. Repeatedly he’s handed the job to others, supervising from the solitude of his home, controlling the shooting by proxy, as Hollywood studio producers of the forties did. As critic David Thomson remarks, ‘Lucas testifies to the principle that American films are produced, not directed.’
Martin Scorsese agrees that Lucas differs radically from both himself and others in New Hollywood, especially Spielberg. ‘Lucas became so powerful that he didn’t have to direct,’ he told Time magazine. ‘But directing is what Steven has to do.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I love the work the way Patton loved the stink of battle.’
Lucas has less in common with Scorsese and Spielberg than with a producer like Sam Goldwyn, who fed the public taste for escapist fantasy and noble sentiment forty years before him, with films like Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a young critic, the British director Lindsay Anderson met Goldwyn, and was impressed by his conviction that nobody knew better what his public wanted and needed. ‘Blessed with that divine confidence in the rightness (moral, aesthetic, commercial) of his own intuition,’ Goldwyn was, Anderson decided, one of the ‘lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears that it likes to weep.’ Today, the grandchildren of Goldwyn’s audience laugh at Chewbacca the wookiee, cry at the love of Princess Leia for Han Solo, feel their hearts throb in tune to John Williams’s brassy score for Star Wars.
‘He came from a very practical era,’ the supervisor of Stanislaus County said of George Lucas Sr when he died in 1991. ‘There was never a day that I didn’t see George hailing me over. He’d be gesturing with his hands and pointing, and everyone knew that George was on the warpath with the government.’
The Lucases arrived in central California from Arkansas in 1890, after having left Virginia a century before. Before that, the family history is shadowy. ‘Nobody knows where we originally came from,’ George Jr said later. ‘Obviously some criminal, or somebody who got thrown out of England or France.’ The remark wasn’t made out of embarrassment. In a sort of reverse snobbery, his father had taught him that it was better to trace your roots to Billy the Kid than to the Mayflower.
In 1889, Washington and Montana achieved statehood, and California, with its orchards blossoming, its fishing industry thriving and oil being pumped along its central coast, looked like the place to be. Just before World War I, Walton Lucas, an oilfield worker, settled in Laton, a grim little town south of Fresno, where his son George Walton Lucas was born in 1913. George Walton Sr, the film-maker’s father, never lost the wiry look of a frontiersman, nor the sense, reinforced by Methodism, that life and work were two sides of the same coin. ‘He was one of those people who, at the dinner table, always had little talks about those kind of things,’ his daughter Kate recalled. ‘He quoted a lot of Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true.” He said a lot of things like that.’
In 1928, when George Sr was fifteen, his father died of diabetes, a disease whose gene would skip a generation and pass to his grandson. His widow Maud moved into Fresno, shuffling her son from school to school while she looked for work, a commodity in short supply as America’s economy imploded in the worldwide slump. In 1929 they relocated sixty miles from Fresno, to Modesto, and George enrolled in Modesto High School with the idea of studying law. Already convinced by events that the Lord only helped those who helped themselves, he was a serious student, becoming class president in his senior year. His vice president, who also co-starred with him in the senior-class play, was pretty, dark but frail Dorothy Bomberger, daughter of Paul S. Bomberger, a wealthy local businessman who’d built his father’s property interests into a large corporation that also included a seed company and a car dealership. They married in 1933, the year Lucas graduated. He was twenty, Dorothy eighteen.
With a wife to support, Lucas abandoned any thought of a law degree and found work in an old established Modesto stationery store, Lee Brothers. Shortly afterwards, one of the biggest stationery stores in the state, H.S. Crocker in Fresno, offered him a job at $75 a week. The couple moved, but Dorothy missed her family, so they returned to Modesto. With Dorothy’s father in real estate and her uncle Amos in loans, there was no problem finding a place to live. Lucas and Dorothy moved into an apartment repossessed from a defaulting borrower.
Lucas went to work for LeRoy Morris, who owned the town’s oldest stationery supplier, the L.M. Morris Co. Morris had been in business since 1904, and his shop showed it: school supplies and office materials shared space with books, gifts, and toys. With no children of his own, Morris was on the lookout for someone to whom he could hand on the thriving business. Lucas Sr wasn’t backward in making it clear he was a candidate.
‘This is the next-to-last move I plan to make,’ he told his boss. ‘By the time I’m twenty-five, I hope to have my own store.’
‘That’s a very ambitious goal,’ Morris said mildly.
But the young man’s directness had impressed Morris. Two years later he sought out Lucas in the basement where he was shifting boxes, and asked, ‘Are you satisfied with me?’
When Lucas looked blank, Morris continued, ‘If you are, I’m satisfied with you. Do you think we could live together for the rest of our lives? You know, a partnership is like getting married – maybe harder in some ways.’
‘But I have no money,’ Lucas said.
Morris shrugged this off. ‘You’ll sign a note you owe me so much. This business is no good if it won’t pay it out.’
Lucas switched from earning wages to owning 10 per cent of L.M. Morris. His employer’s generosity reinforced his belief in patriarchy. When he had a son, he would put him into the family business too, and help him run it until he was ready to take over.
In 1934 the Lucases had their first child, Ann, and two years later Katherine, always called Kate. The pregnancies sapped Dorothy’s strength, triggering the ill-health that was to haunt the rest of her life, and looking after her two daughters placed a further strain on her frail constitution. Nevertheless, she encouraged her husband, accepting his decision to spend six days a week at the store, and helping with the book-keeping on Sundays. She even got pregnant again, though two miscarriages had convinced her doctors she should not have any more children. Confident of prosperity, Lucas bought a $500 lot on Ramona Avenue, a wide street on what was then the edge of town. With $5000 borrowed from Paul and Amos Bomberger, he built a single-story house at number 530. It was here that his only son, five-pound nine-ounce George Walton Jr, was brought home after his birth on 14 May 1944 – Mother’s Day.
I might be a toymaker if I weren’t a film-maker.
George Lucas to critic Joseph Gelmis, 1973
Ramona Avenue has changed little since 1944. Only two blocks long, and twice as wide as more modern streets, it illustrates the generosity of space with which town planners could indulge themselves in those days of unrestricted development. By comparison, its homes, all bungalows, appear cheap – though now, as in 1944, this corner