George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter

and in theory, I found out later, they could have done that forever.’ Whether Lucas presented himself for military service voluntarily or when he received his Selective Service Notice, he was almost certainly rejected for the same medical reasons that finally kept him out of the forces permanently. The standard physical examination revealed that the diabetes that had killed his grandfather had jumped a generation and reappeared in him. Rating him 4F, the medical board warned him to seek help for what would be a lifetime problem.

      Lucas drove shakily to Modesto, where Roland Nyegaard, the physician who’d married his sister Wendy, confirmed the diagnosis. Nyegaard put him on Orinase, an oral drug that replaced the traditional daily insulin injections of most diabetes sufferers, and warned Lucas to start watching his diet: no drugs, no alcohol, above all no sweets. Farewell to chocolate malts, chocolate chip cookies, and Hershey bars, which he’d consumed in quantity since childhood. It was a rite of passage of sorts. With one of the last great pleasures of adolescence denied him, he had no choice but to grow up.

      The discovery of his diabetes freed Lucas to launch his adult career. His first thought was to re-enter USC as a graduate student and get his Master of Fine Arts degree, but he was too late for the 1967 intake. All the same, the faculty was sufficiently impressed with his student work to offer him a part-time job in its night school, running a refresher course for navy and Marine Corps cameramen: ‘The whole idea of the class was to teach them they didn’t have to go by the rulebook,’ Lucas said.

      He accepted, then went looking for a day job. Bob Dalva, a USC student who would become one of the moving forces of Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, and who was already adept at keeping his ear to the ground, had a job with Verna Fields, who was compiling a film for the United States Information Agency called Journey to the Pacific, about Lyndon Johnson’s seventeen-country tour of Australia, Korea, and points east in pursuit of consensus on Vietnam. Dalva proposed Lucas as assistant editor, and Fields hired him.

      Burly and aggressive, Fields had grown hard and cynical in a business that routinely demeaned women. She’d been sound editor for Fritz Lang and worked on big productions like Anthony Mann’s epic El Cid, but never made it past the eighth or ninth panel of the credits. In between projects, she freelanced from her ranch house in the San Fernando Valley, the garage of which she’d converted into cutting rooms. When Gene Sloan went on sabbatical from USC, she taught his editing class, and got to know Lucas. Early in 1967, shortly after USC confirmed he could enter their 1968 graduate course, Lucas began driving out into the Valley every day to help cut the LBJ documentary.

      Also heading there was Marcia Griffin, whom Fields had hired from a private film company, Sandler Films, to find and log the thousands of miles of Johnson footage. Space was tight, so Fields put the two newcomers in the same cutting room. Marcia, even shorter than George, had a clean, pastel prettiness that implied an upbringing in some upper-middle-class San Fernando suburb like Encino or Reseda. In fact, she grew up in air force bases all over America as her father hauled his family wherever he was posted, before finally abandoning them. With maintenance and child support patchy at best, Marcia and her sisters became accustomed to doing without, and to getting what they wanted by their own efforts. During her teens, Marcia went to live in Florida for two years with her father, moved back to Los Angeles, took a clerical job and studied chemistry at night school, then dropped out. Always interested in movies, she fell into a job as an apprentice film librarian at Sandler. After that, she embarked on the eight-year apprenticeship demanded by the Motion Picture Editors’ Guild as the price of a union card.

      Though she looked archetypally Angeleno, Marcia had been born in Modesto while her father was stationed at nearby Stockton. It took her some days to discover that Lucas was from the same town, since her presence in the cutting room reduced him to a near-paralysis of shyness.

      ‘I used to say, “Well, George, where’ya from?”’ she recalled.

      ‘“Hmmm, California.”

      ‘“Oh, OK, where in California?”

      ‘“Ummm … Northern California.”

      ‘“Where in Northern California?”

      ‘“Just up north, the San Francisco area …”’

      They found common ground in movies, though most of the time they argued about them. Lucas was ruthless at dismissing Marcia’s enthusiasms. ‘He was the intellectual,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was just a Valley girl.’ She responded to Dalva’s and Lucas’s pose of high seriousness by patronizing them too: they were just film students – she was a professional. Lucas put a softer complexion on their early relationship: ‘We were both feisty, and neither one of us would take any shit from the other. I sort of liked that. I didn’t like someone who could be run over.’ But he would consistently underestimate Marcia’s commitment to her craft. ‘I love film editing,’ she said later. ‘I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair. I think I’m even an editor in life.’

      The Johnson documentary progressed slowly. Its USIA producer demanded as many flattering shots as possible of the president. Above all, any film showing his thinning hair must be avoided. When Lucas edited footage of LBJ’s visit to South Korea to suggest, through scenes of students being brutally pacified by the police, that the Korean administration was fascistic, the producer demanded he recut it. Furious, Lucas swore never again to edit other people’s films: ‘I realized that I didn’t want other people telling me how to cut a film. I wanted to decide. I really wanted to be responsible for what was being said in a movie.’

      His insistence on protecting his films against any interference in the cutting room would become obsessive. Friends would roll their eyes and say, ‘Lighten up, George,’ but on this he was utterly intransigent. Marcia, whom George was now desultorily dating, never came to terms with his emphasis on the sacrosanct nature of editing decisions. It wasn’t her style to walk out on a project. One stuck to it and, little by little, got one’s way. Her persistence would make her one of the most sought-after editors of New Hollywood. Producer Julia Phillips even rated her ‘the better – certainly the warmer – half of the American Graffiti team.’

      ‘She was an absolutely stunning editor,’ says John Milius. ‘Maybe the best editor I’ve ever known, in many ways. She’d come in and look at the films we’d made – like The Wind and the Lion, for instance – and she’d say, “Take this scene and move it over here,” and it worked. And it did what I wanted the film to do, and I would never have thought of it. And she did that to everybody’s films: to George’s, to Steven [Spielberg]’s, to mine, and Scorsese particularly. He’ll attest to the fact that she was a great editor. She was a genuinely talented film-maker. She should have become a director.’

      But in 1967 people defined Marcia Griffin, as they defined most women in Hollywood, with reference to their men. She was George’s girlfriend and, eventually, wife, and very little beyond that. In general, Lucas shared that perception, as did most of New Hollywood’s husbands about their wives. Not surprisingly, divorce became the group’s norm. The first marriages of Lucas, Spielberg, Milius, Scorsese and most other newcomers of the sixties ended in divorce, their unwillingness to deal on screen with contemporary human situations replicated in their lives. Many marriages expire in the bedroom, but that of George and Marcia Lucas was rare in coming to grief in the cutting room.

      Whatever claims were made later, Lucas had little or no interest in science fiction films until after he graduated from USC in August 1966. He wasn’t alone in his indifference. The doyen of Hollywood sf, George Pal, hadn’t made a movie since The Conquest of Space in 1955. The benchmark of big-budget studio science fiction, MGM’s Forbidden Planet, was a decade old. In Britain, Stanley Kubrick was preparing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that wouldn’t be released for two years. Only starvation producer Roger Corman consistently turned out sf films, though he hadn’t actually shot one for years. It was cheaper to buy Russian or Japanese movies with lavish special-effect sequences, dump their dialogue scenes, then find some hungry young American film-maker to invent a new framing story.

      Almost nobody saw these cheap sf movies in the big cities,