George Lucas Is A Lousy Storyteller, Episode One

Feb 24

Feb 24 George Lucas Is A Lousy Storyteller, Episode One

Let’s talk about the naked emperor elephant in the room: George Lucas is a lousy storyteller.

He’s been lucky in his personal career, fouling out with his first feature, hitting a respectable double with his second, and then a grand slam bases loaded outta-da-park home run for his third.

The considerable media empire he started typically succeeds better when they hand over his projects to more skillful storytellers than to rely on Lucas’ own storytelling abilities.

The ancillary successes of Star Wars hinge off side projects he provided little direct input into. The more closely involved he is, the less likely a project is to succeed.

And to those of you thinking this is sour grapes, no: This evaluation is based solely on Lucas’ own words and on his own films.

Lucas seems supremely disinterested in the basic structure of storytelling. His interest as a filmmaker lies more in sight and sensation as opposed to a coherent story (and by coherent story I mean one where characters and theme work together to form the plot, not one where they are a jumble of discordant elements thrown together). Carrie Fisher famously observed Lucas did not know how to direct actors, not even to the most basic degree of helping them shape their performances.

Lucas himself long boasted of his disdain for conventional filmmaking and storytelling, a boast clearly evident in his earliest films. He ignored USC’s film school rules, adding unapproved elements to his films to overshadow fellow students who followed school constraints. When USC got him a chance to work on a making-of documentary short about the 1969 film MacKenna’s Gold, he turned it into a meandering, pointless, and unfocused -- in every sense of the word -- string of desert landscapes and obscure behind-the-scenes shots where one couldn’t tell what was going on.

In fairness, MacKenna’s Gold isn’t a very good movie, but if the task at hand is to tell people about it, Lucas failed miserably.

Let’s start at the very beginning, with his USC student films:

Look At Life (1965) is a photo collage film, a series of fast paced intercuts of various contemporary images against a music backtrack, ending with an ironic comment. The technique goes back to the early experimental film makers of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, later reintroduced in America with Bruce Conner’s A Movie in 1958. It seems every young filmmaker at some point dose a movie like this because they’re cheap / fast / easy.
Herbie (1966) is an abstract film showing the play of light on cars. To be fair, every young filmmaker also shoots a movie like this at some time. Call it a rite of passage.
Freiheit (1966) shows a frightened young man in a white shirt and a tie running through the woods. He sees an object (a sign? Surviving prints are too murky to make this out clearly) and runs towards it, only to be gunned down from off camera. A soldier comes out to examine his body while various voice overs talk about how important freedom is. Presumably, Lucas intended this as some sort of comment on the draft and the Vietnam war, but it seems more pretentious than profound and frankly looks amateurish. The title is German for “freedom”.
1:42.08 (1966) is a short documentary about a driver making a time trial run in a sports car. It’s well directed in terms of camera placement and editing, but it’s nothing but a guy getting in a car and driving around a track. It’s the kind of footage that would serve well a as a show reel for someone wanting a job shooting commercials or sports videos as it focuses entirely on motion and sensation, not story. While other students in class were limited to black and white film, Lucas shot his in color, giving him an unfair edge. His passion for cars comes through, however, and from this short one can see how he visited the topic in American Graffiti.
Electric Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967) is Lucas’ most famous student film and to be frank, it does mark the highwater mark of his college career. Assigned the task of instructing USAF officers in the basics of filmmaking, Lucas dragooned them into making a dystopian sci-fi short using real locations such as Los Angeles International Airport (yes, back then you could simply go to the airport late at night and shoot a sci-fi film in the empty corridors without a ton of security descending on you). The film does run a bit longer than truly necessary to tell the story, and the story is very basic (guy flees oppressive society by running through empty corridors until he finds a door leading outside), but the sound design really helps sell the mood and sense of the future.
The Emperor (1967) is a short documentary about then popular LA DJ “Emperor” Bob Hudson. It’s essentially a pretentious puff piece and the best elements in it seem to be taken from commercials shot by somebody else, but Lucas intercuts between Hudson and young people on the streets of Los Angeles. Hudson boasts of his appeal to young people and perhaps in the day he really was thought of as a counter-culture figure, but 55 years later he seems more like a mellower, less toxic Rush Limbaugh. Without the context of the era, the importance of radio in general and Hudson in particular is lost on modern audiences while the !960s sexism wears thin. This short is notable for the first glimpse of how Lucas would later handle Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. For reasons known only to him, Lucas inexplicably puts the credits at the midway point of the film.
Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town (1967) is about a magical (?) photographer popping in and out of existence as he follows a young couple, taking their picture yet never finding an image that satisfies him. This film feels like a throwback to Lucas’ earliest efforts, with a very amateurish look and performances. It seems heavily inspired by Carson Davidson’s Help! My Snowman's Burning Down (1964) and Jim Henson’s Time Piece (1965), both of which were well known to film students of the era.
6.18.67 (1967) is the aforementioned abortive making-of documentary and we needn’t repeat ourselves.
Filmmaker (1968) is a behind the scenes documentary on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) and boy howdy, it sure didn’t do Coppola any favors in how it portrayed him and his sixth or eighth feature film (depending on whether one wants to count The Terror and Battle Beyond The Sun as actual Coppola directed features). It depicts a chaotic, unfocused production with a lot of waste, not the sort of thing one hopes major studios would take note of. The end titles are over a group shot of The Rain People’s cast and crew, and Lucas zooms in tight on himself standing on a truck, towering above the others as bombastic music plays. Keep that image in mind.
Bald: The Making Of THX 1138 (1971) seems to me to be the most disturbing of Lucas’ short film. It’s another making-of doc, this one about the feature version of his award winning student sci-fi film. It focuses on the actors Robert Duvall, Johnny Weissmuller Jr., and actresses Maggie McOmie and Irene Forest getting their heads ritually shaved by a sardonic barber dressed in black, and dwells with sadistic glee on the discomfort of the two actresses as their hair is shorn off. Remember this was shot in 1971, and during the 1960s long hair marked a cultural sea-change in the US and around the world. For the actors of THX 1138 to shave their heads marked no small emotional trauma (Sid Haig excepted; that was his look from Spider Babyonward). Lucas never shied away from exploiting actors, he just stayed careful enough to do it in a not so obvious manner. This film is genuinely painful to watch and diminishes enjoyment of the feature.

Which leads us to his first three features:

THX 1138 (1971) expanded his student film. It’s not a bad film, it deserves praise for a lot of what it achieved, but it’s ultimately soulless and by the numbers, the sort of dystopian sci-fi tale found in Ace Doubles through the 1960s. In a very odd way it’s the mirror twin of Zardoz (1974), with each film in that pair doing right what the other did wrong and vice versa. It’s another film that doesn’t quite jell and lacks the panache to steamroll through those patches. In 2004 Lucas released an expanded director’s cut that added CGI special effects, thereby undercutting one of the original version’s chief strengths, that it looked and felt real because much of it was filmed in real futuristic looking locations. This is another example of Lucas’ weakness as a storyteller, a belief that making things Bigger! Brighter! will also make them better. Keep that in mind when we get to Jar Jar Binks.
American Graffiti (1974) marked Lucas’ first box office success, not on the scale of blockbusters that followed, but a solid hit nonetheless. Lucas found a balance between his interest in car culture and rock & roll with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck’s thoughtful and poignant screenplay. Lucas is never able to rise above his collaborators, and the better his crew, the better his productions. A far more low key and more human /humane film than THX 1138, American Graffiti put him in excellent field position for his next and career-wise most important film.
Star Wars [none of that sub-titled / roman numeral / retconned / CGI enhanced crap but the original theatrical Han-shoots-first version] (1974) was the lucky break every creative soul dreams of. Famously, Lucas wanted to get the rights to Flash Gordon but couldn’t cut a deal (he previously included the trailer for the old Buck Rogers serial at the start of THX 1138). Frustrated by their refusal, he wrote several drafts of a script originally called The Star Wars. Comparing them and early production art to the final film show Lucas doesn’t think creatively in terms of clear and consistent storylines but rather disjointed scenes and characters. When at the top of his form (as with the original Star Wars) it produces a light-hearted audience pleasing romp that easily sidesteps its own plot holes.