Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 127

cil 20th Century-Fox Photo had one big hit to his name when he battled uphill to make (1977) directing Alec Guinness left as Ben Kenobi away muttering Universal understand the movie remarked producer Gary Kurtz a tall plain-talking ex-Marine with a big square-cut Amish beard The low-budget ($750000) movie about a high-school graduating class took place between sunset and dawn on an evening in 1962 the year Lucas finished high school In the film said Kurtz was our fix on the end of an era of innocence before the riots and turmoil of the For Lucas the title referred to symbols of a past civilization was built around a medley of rock songs set in a small town in California and focused on car-crazy adolescents in heat The songs (written between 1954 and 1962) 600 period cars a restored circular burger drive-in and a huge ensemble of young actors were perfectly integrated during the time-strapped 28-night shoot into a plotless multicharacter rock musical Even the machines were choreographed as they glided up and down main street in pairs and singly The next morning I drove up the coast to meet Lucas and his wife Marcia at their house in San Anselmo near San Francisco big furry dog an Alaskan Mala-mute named Indiana pounced around like Tigger A glittering juke box played rock songs on 45 rpm platters Lucas was very proud of his toy The old house was an elegantly simple space furnished sparingly Money was tight We drove to Sausalito They been eating out much lately and were pleased when I suggested we do the interview over lunch at a seafood restaurant facing San Francisco across the bay Although just celebrated his 29th birthday Lucas looked like one of the teenage characters in his movie He wore sneakers and white sweat socks with a pink long-sleeved button-down striped shirt hanging out over nonflare denims a trim beard (the only new feature since his teens) nerdy tortoise-shell glasses and thick hair combed in a big pompadour George Walton Lucas Jr was born May 14 1944 in Modesto a Northern California town whose size befits its name Time had stood still for him since he was 18 and his Italian sports car wrapped itself around a walnut tree should have been killed but I he has said living on borrowed That sense of his own mortality was reinforced when he was rejected for military service and he learned he had juvenile diabetes His paternal grandfather had died young of diabetes His illness made it dangerous for him to smoke drink do drugs binge on sweets A pragmatist Lucas knew better than the studio and critics what he had achieved with but allow the rejection to warp him He set out to make a crowd-pleasing serious comedy: wanted to prove that I could make a warm funny film and that I just a science-fiction director George Lucas a filmmaker anyway not a director I like the physical part of making the movie I might be a toy-maker if I a George Lucas 1973 been trying to get the suits at the studios interested in his live-action comic book with high-tech special effects Trust me going to be cool he told them Samurai knights Laser swords Space combat Bizarre creatures Comedy He already saw it in his head But once again the accountants lawyers agents and MBAs who ran Hollywood were clueless Instead of giving him a blank check three studio chiefs had told him to get lost The only one who had any faith in him Alan Ladd Jr at 20th Century Fox was waiting to see a first-draft script Later in Ladd green-lighted for about $10 million But Ladd had a running battle with the Fox board which insisted it was uncommercial right till it opened on May 27 1977 and became the new archetype of a commercial movie holy grail Lucas retired from directing after exhausted by the monumental ordeal of being the focus of hundreds of cast and crew members rumored however that he will direct at least the first movie in the planned trilogy to He thereafter retained control of the script and budget as executive producer and supervised hired directors like Irvin Kershner for Empire Strikes (1980) the late Richard Mar-quand for of the (1983) and Steven Spielberg for the Indiana Jones trilogy Childhood is the source of his magic He plan to lose touch with it After years of wanting children (he believes family is the basis of any meaningful life) he now spends much of his time raising three adopted children as a doting single parent (His wife divorced him in the Although his adventure films transported a billion people to other times and other worlds a homebody Fabulous dreams are fine but for George Lucas as for Dorothy no place like home with stainless steel in my veins a filmmaker anyway not a director I like the physical part of making the movie I might be a toymaker if I a filmmaker relied on what I knew best visuals not story or character was done to test myself with personalities My next film hopefully Star a four-million-dollar space opera in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs will be an attempt to deal with He had tried to buy the rights to but the price was too high So he wrote his own script and invented his own mythology The studio brass at Universal felt threatened by prodigious talent which seemed to them squandered on a plotless movie They understood a Hollywood schlockmeister doing a Around the kind of flick in the to exploit the New Thing But Lucas was an original His was so different from the cookie-cutter movies they were comfortable with that it scared them and they got angry in self-defense They tormented him with a plan to bypass theaters and just show it on television And when they finally decided to release it in theaters almost at end honcho Ned Tanen humiliated Lucas by cutting four and a half minutes Which made Lucas determined to never again relinquish creative control to someone else was an instant word-of-mouth hit with its target audience and rave reviews brought in adults It ulmately grossed more than a $100 million and preceding by several years precipitated the 1950s nostalgia boom in movies and television In January 1974 when I saw him next Lucas had come to New York to pick up a screenplay award for from the critics Marshall Efron an actor in 1 presented the award In accepting Lucas said that he had come to get a close-up look at the critics He peered at us as though we were a zoological exhibit thanked us in a bemused tone as if faced some personal challenge and survived Had critical respectability and box-office success made Lucas bankable? I asked him Not when he was pushing his own projects he said He got only $15000 to direct and $25000 for His price had risen to $150000 if he was willing to work in the open market for some producer with a project not his own I get my price he predicted I want to make my own movies in my own SUNDAY JANUARY 26 1997 FanFase.