Inside the Star Wars Empire Page 6

  At the cocktail get-together after the film, I was approached by a serious-looking group of history professors who were disturbed by the implications of what I had just shown them. They thought this was dangerous. It was some kind of a reassemblage of history that reminded them of such German propaganda films as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

  “It’s a movie, fellows,” I replied. But they would not be deterred. Why could I not see that the implications here were disturbing? I tried every way I could think of to say, “This is entertainment; we make stuff up for a living.”

  It’s not like I hadn’t thought about these things a lot, especially after we made the incredibly realistic-looking dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I had even made a documentary on the making of that film in which I interviewed one of the principal creators of the effects, Dennis Muren, the man with nine Oscars. Dennis was an especially keen critic of anything visual. He had spent his entire career, as we all had, studying images we had recently faked, trying to make them look, even better, trying to make them look real. What was his reaction to these creatures we had created? He said, “I have studied them and studied them, and I cannot find a flaw.”

  Talk about powerful images. These were powerful enough to add creepy to them. These dinosaurs were creepy powerful. I even went out to a movie theater and filmed some of the very first patrons as they came out of the show. “What did you think? How do you think they were made?” Those were the questions I had been thinking about since I had seen what we were about to unleash on the moviegoing public, a year earlier. How will people react when they see something so realistic? Something that they simultaneously know is fake? Something that cannot be real?

  Well, they didn’t care. They just didn’t know or care how it was done. To them it was just a cool movie. “I liked it when the dinosaur ate that guy.” That was the most articulate response I ever got.

  So no, I wasn’t concerned that our techniques would be used for evil purposes. I did, however, always think we could have made the most incredible UFO film ever captured by an amateur. We would fake it so it looked like some home-movie geek had shot footage of an alien spaceship landing or something, and leave it in an old 8mm camera at a flea market for someone to find. I never could get anyone to go along with me on that, but we did have fun debunking a book of supposed UFO still photos that some conspiracy guy brought in one time.

  * * *

  2. Star Wars, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom (Raiders 2), Cocoon, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, The Mask, and The Lost World (Jurassic 2).

  Film School

  In the generations before mine, ambitious young men wanted to be famous novelists. For many in my generation, they wanted to be famous filmmakers. To write you need a pencil and a piece of paper. To make a movie no clear path seemed to exist except for film school, and almost all of my contemporaries went. Lucas, Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, etc., all went to film school in either New York or Los Angeles. I went to San Francisco State, starting in 1968.

  Here I could have access to a lot of expensive movie cameras and editing equipment that was otherwise unavailable to me. It wasn’t so much the instruction that mattered, it was getting my hands on the tools by which I could make movies. Also, the environment was important. Just being around other filmmakers who shared the same interest was stimulating because that gave us all an audience to critique our work.

  The Hollywood film schools were designed around the theatrical studio films that had been made for years, while State had become a haven for independent films. We made art films, underground films, and protest films. Hollywood had disdain for us. One studio mogul remarked, “Independent? Independent of what?” Yet, some of the techniques we developed out of poverty and ignorance were starting to have an effect, like rapid editing, abrupt jump cutting around a scene, snap zooming in on a face, and swooshing a handheld camera around a set. Many of these things slowly began to creep into major feature films.

  At State I had several interesting teachers. One was the screenwriter Lester Cole, who was one of the Hollywood Ten that were blacklisted as communist sympathizers in the 1950s in the witch hunt set off by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Cole had written more than forty screenplays that were made into motion pictures, an incredible record. After the blacklisting he wrote under cover names and only had a few reach the screen, but one was Born Free, which was a big success. Lester introduced me to his agent to help me sell my Jack Johnson film.

  Lester was the real thing, a guy who had actually been a major player in Hollywood. Most of the rest of the instructors were artist types or mostly had worked in television, but I learned something from all of them. James Broughton was a well-known poet and independent filmmaker, and his lectures inspired creativity. He used to live with the film critic Pauline Kael, so it was a cultured group. One guy had been a crowd arranger in Westerns, and another worked sound on The Lone Ranger.

  Some students were only interested in film theory; they watched movies and wrote papers. The rest of us took production courses. We had instruction in filming, sound recording, and screenwriting. But the real divide was whether you could make a movie that would work for an audience. One guy made a very artsy porn film and tried to sell it to one of the grind houses on Market Street. They told him if he “cut out all the artsy crap” he had a deal.

  I was born in San Francisco, but was only able to move back to the city in the late 1960s, for school, amid the cultural revolution that was exploding among my age group all across the country, but especially here. All of a sudden, fresh off the Summer of Love, in the middle of the Vietnam War and the Sexual Revolution, San Francisco was the place to be. The flight to the suburbs was officially over for the young people who were coming to town in droves, and I was comfortable with the whole thing except that I wasn’t a joiner. I would find my own way to contribute.

  There has been a lot written about this youth revolution that I was in the middle of here, but with the exception of Abbie Hoffman, most have failed to get it right. In his last speech he said, “In the 1960s, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation—Jim Crow—ended . . . We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now it doesn’t matter who sits in the Oval Office . . . We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong . . . and we were right! I regret nothing!”

  Looking at the job listings in the San Francisco Chronicle back then, I used to see a whole column labeled “Colored.” When my girlfriend took the mathematics test for a job at IBM, hers was the highest score they had ever tested, yet she was simply told at the placement interview that “we don’t hire women.” You can’t do that anymore.

  I was in my third month of film school when the Black Student Union shut down San Francisco State University over access to higher public education. Our film group started making films about the strike itself, and I continued to work on my documentary on the black boxing champion Jack Johnson and his struggles with racism in America. I supported the strike but thought it foolish to give up access to the movie tools that were needed to make a consciousness-raising documentary on the very topic the strike was about.

  Governor—later president—Ronald Reagan used an age-old tactic to end the strike: overwhelming force. He flooded the campus with police in riot gear, and it worked. They brought in a whole squadron of mounted police, their horses equipped with rubber caps over their metal horseshoes so they wouldn’t slip on the pavement while running down students. Cops were stationed everywhere, even in the main library.

  In the end, however, the students got what they wanted out of it, which was a Black Studies Department and a revised entry policy for minorities. Both sides had been radicalized by now. The anger over the Vietnam War put young people in the streets and also brought the right wing back to prominence fighting �
�communists” and leading directly to Nixon’s anti-crime/anti-black Southern strategy that would give the Solid South to the Republicans, who own it today.

  One member of my film class decided to shoot himself in the foot as a protest and exit strategy to the Vietnam War and the draft. A friend of mine at the time, Warren Haack, filmed the guy shooting himself, stuck the printed version of the Selective Service Act on a title card at the head of the film, and won the National Student Film Award that year. George Lucas had also won the same award but for a very different kind of film. His was called THX 1138 and was about a time in the future where technology was used to dehumanize people. This was the difference between my film school and Hollywood’s. Our films were about hard-core reality and theirs were fables. Fables are successful.

  George expanded his student film into a feature motion picture released by a major studio. My student film was developed as well, just not by me (The Great White Hope). I had the right topic, just not the pathway to get it there. I didn’t understand the game yet, or how powerful fables are.

  I was like most people who have no idea about how movies are made or the fantasy world movies spin for them. If they did, they wouldn’t show up in Atlanta, Georgia, looking for the Tara mansion from the movie Gone with the Wind, which was actually shot on a back lot in Hollywood. Even people in my own family were not immune.

  By 1973 I was living in a two-bedroom flat in a 1912 building in the Cow Hollow section of San Francisco. An older Italian couple named Agnese owned the building and a couple of others around town. This couple became my model in later years for how to retire and live comfortably. The husband puttered around the apartment buildings, and they lived well off the rent roll. When asked about his credit rating, he would reply, “What do you care? I pay cash.”

  One of my girlfriend’s cousins had been a police detective in Detroit for many years. He was a really cool guy, very worldly-wise, and he loved living the good life of fancy vacations and fine restaurants. When David first came to San Francisco to stay with us, he was such a Humphrey Bogart fan that he wanted us to show him where Brigid O’Shaughnessy had shot Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, in The Maltese Falcon. David was quite disappointed when we had to tell him that it was all filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood. Once again I was struck by the power of the spinning fable. Here was a tough Detroit cop in a swoon over a movie.

  We made it up to David by taking him to Ernie’s, which had been featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo and was probably the fanciest restaurant in the city at the time. David loved movies and wanted to see any place where they had been made. Hitchcock himself was often at Ernie’s when he was in the city. In fact, he had some of his favorite wines stored in the restaurant’s wine cellar.

  But David’s fantasies didn’t end with movies. Like all film fans he also had heroes, and there was someone else David wanted to see in San Francisco. So the detective in him went to work.

  Cow Hollow, where we lived, was just one block from the Marina District, which runs right down to San Francisco Bay. This was the neighborhood where detective David struck gold. For many years after David made his Marina District find, I would drive visitors to this nearby area and stop in front of a modest house saying, “Two of the most famous people in the world lived in that house at the same time. Can you guess who they were?”

  No one ever guessed it, and though I haven’t asked anyone in years, I still don’t think anyone could guess. It was Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. They were married at San Francisco City Hall in 1954 and had lived there in Joe’s family home. The receptionist at the recording studio where I worked said that when she was in high school, she remembered seeing Marilyn shopping on Chestnut Street in the Marina several times. David had been a seasoned police detective and he knew how to find stuff out. “Just talk to the mailmen,” he used to say. “They know everything.” So David tracked down the mail carrier for that route and bluffed his way to the address. I had been steeped in the reality filmmaking of San Francisco State documentaries, but I was starting to appreciate this even more powerful form of heroes and our journeys to find them.

  DiMaggio was still alive then. I knew that because this was in the 1970s and Joe had come into our sound recording studio one day to do a voiceover commercial for Mr. Coffee, the widely sold and nationally advertised coffee machine. Joe was the spokesman for the company, and he was in all their ads at the time. One could say that at that time, Joe was “Mr. Coffee.” Since we knew that he was a pretty private guy, we had him come in on a Saturday when we were closed. As he was settling in at the microphone, my friend George, who was doing the recording, asked him if he would like a cup of coffee. Joe looked at him, and in a slightly gruff manner said, “I hate coffee.”

  “Francis Coppola Wishes to Speak with You”

  I was always trying to learn more about how to make movies back then, but in the late 1960s there were no movies available to study except in theaters, no old movies to see except in revival houses. I had to go to the UCLA film library in Los Angeles to find original screenplays. The ones that I could find that had been published were invariably the finished movie in print—which is not something you can really learn much from, because if it was a really good film, the finished product looks impossibly perfect. That published screenplay is not what they started with, and it will just discourage you into thinking that you could never write something as great as that.

  I found it best to look for the earlier versions of the screenplays that I wanted to study and discovered they are not at all like the film that went through months of shooting and editing. They are not always blueprints for great films—they became great films while they were being made. If you look at the original screenplay for Annie Hall (if you can find it), you will see that the screenplay is not even about the character Annie. That story was crafted in the cutting room and by rewriting the commentary. The original screenplay versions of Star Wars were so long and shaggy that they had to be made into three films. I take nothing away from screenwriters saying this—their writing is the genesis of movies—just don’t beat yourself up in thinking the published screenplays are so perfect, you could never do that. Most people can’t do it, even great writers can’t necessarily do it, but you can learn a lot by studying the originals.

  Since there was no way to watch older films, even classics, unless you could catch them at a revival house, I sought out the movies I wanted to study and made sound recordings of them by sneaking a tape recorder into the theaters. It worked surprisingly well. The audio quality was excellent, and I got the bonus of the audience’s reaction. This was a distraction until I realized how carefully the writers and directors plotted those reactions. Richard Zanuck told the story of his hearing the audience during a preview screening of Jaws. “We didn’t know what we had until we took it to Texas. I was out in the lobby while the film was being screened, getting a cup of coffee. I’ll tell you when that shark first jumps out of the water, the audience screamed so loud it shook the building. That’s when I knew we had a monster on our hands.”

  I only had these tapes and what original screenplays I could find (I would buy bootlegged ones in Hollywood) to learn from—that and watching new movies and revival-house classics—but there were some surprise benefits. I learned how important the quality of an actor’s voice is to the performance. My God, in some of these old classic black-and-white movies the voices have so much authority and nuance. Yet, when watching the same film in its entirety, not just a soundtrack, there is so much going on visually that the voice quality can escape your notice, as well as how the music works to undergrid the filmmaker’s direction or misdirection of the audience’s attention.

  Another thing I learned from these old movies concerned the mystique of a movie character and the mysterious power that a movie star can have over the audiences. There is a story that Clark Gable took Carol Lombard on a date while he was courting her. Both were already
famous and they later married, but this was an earlier time. When he got her home, he parked his car in front of her apartment and said, “Can I come up?” To which she replied, “Who do you think you are, Clark Gable?”

  There is actually a little more Hollywood to this story than might first appear. Many in show business are famous by their professional names, which are quite unlike their real names or real personalities. Woody Allen’s real name is Allen Konigsberg; Michael Caine, Maurice Micklewhite; Judy Garland, Frances Gumm; Natalie Portman, Natalie Hershlag. It is very hard for the public to separate the actor from the real person. Humphrey Bogart was often challenged by tough guys simply because he became famous for playing tough guys. He was far from a hoodlum, having come from a wealthy East Coast family. His father was a surgeon and his mother a wealthy heiress. In fact, his mother’s illustration of him was used for the original Gerber baby food ads. The point is that he was the opposite of the characters he played.

  My first encounter with anything to do with Hollywood feature films as an adult occurred when the two most successful film school graduates, Francis Coppola and George Lucas, decided they were going to locate in Northern California, not Los Angeles.

  It was 1970, and I was fresh out of film school myself. I had been lucky enough to get a job at a small film company in San Francisco owned by a distinguished inventor and audio engineer named Bill Palmer.

  During World War II, American intelligence suspected that Germany had developed some new kind of recording device because though they sent bombers to every city where Hitler appeared to be giving a live broadcast, they were having no luck in killing him. Intelligence thought that they could tell “live” from “recorded” broadcasts because all known recording methods had a lot of background hiss. No loud hiss, must be a live Hitler broadcast, send in the bombers. But they never got him, so this made army intelligence suspicious.