Universal appeal
Peter Ackroyd
Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas Dale Pollock (Elm Tree Books £9.95) Cleorge Lucas, at the age of 39, has directed or produced nine films among them are five of the most successful in cinematic history. (The success is finan- cial, of course, which is perhaps the most difficult to quarrel with.) Star Wars, American Grdffiti, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi have generated enthusiasm on a vast scale — Mr Pollock tells us, in this ad- mirable although sometimes uncritical study, that Lucas and his cast receive 2d0,000 letters each year from the Star Wars-struck fantasists of the dark.
Under the circumstances, it would be dif- ficult to withhold the title of 'popular art' from such crowd-pulling extravaganzas, although the term itself is so loose that it need only be a synonym for 'good enter- tainment'. But there is more to Lucas and his films than the mere obeisance to mass taste: two of his earliest successes, American Graffiti and Star Wars, claim a permanent place in the history of the cinema not because they are a skilful con- coction of audience research and public relations but because they represent one man's sensibility creating or at least seduc- ing public taste. Both films were made by Lucas in the face of scepticism and even hostility from the film companies themselves; despite a sequence of misadven- tures and disasters which would have over- whelmed a less confident or more conven- tional director, he held fast to his original conception and worked himself into a state of nervous exhaustion in order to fulfill it.
The films can easily be dismissed as the junketings of an infantilist showman; and yet they are superbly constructed, with an understanding of visual tone and pace which is close to genius. They seem bland and impersonal, yet paradoxically they all bear the stamp of Lucas's-particular vision. The idea of a 'popular artist' is in this sense also a paradoxical one — here is a man who has difficulty in spelling, and yet demonstrates a high level of sophistication in the manipulation of words, music and images; a man who has no particular in- terest in 'character' or 'emotion' and yet can generate excitement and sometimes awe even in Japanese audiences.
Perhaps it is not as paradoxical as all that, however, if one remembers the coun- try and the culture from which he springs. Lucas was born, appropriately, in the small town of Modesto, California — in a flat, hot region on the edge of the civilised world. His childhood and teenage years, as recounted here by Mr Pollock, were quite unexceptionable. He read comics and watched television; then he raced cars. The fact that he was indistinguishable from every other American adolescent is of course the most important thing about him — every other American adolescent now goes to see his films. His is a sublime or- dinariness which, since we are all touched by it in one degree or other, is a most potent commodity.
He grew up in that period of the 'American dream', from the end of the se- cond world war to the mid-Fifties, which he was then able effortlessly to reconstruct in American Graffiti: millions of Americans thought that he was recreating their own adolescence and went to see themselves upon the screen. In a similar fashion, in the space sagas, he was able to combine popular fantasies of technology with a recrudescence of standard folk-loric themes. The banal, at such a high level of manipulation, becomes magnificent.
Having been weaned on television, assimilating all those moving images with the blank absorption of a bored child, he decided to attend film school at the Univer- sity of Southern California. He was the bright boy of the class, and quickly became a prominent member of that extraordinary group of young film-makers who emerged in the late Sixties: Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg among them. They have some claim to being the most influential American artists of our period: they manag- ed to achieve what two generations of American writers and artists had failed to do, to create an entirely non-European sen- sibility out of the materials and images of
indigenous American life. • They were, after all, the first generation to be raised in the age of television and did not have to pass through that period of ad- justment which marked the work of older film-makers. With the possible exception of Coppola, they were not interested in the dramatic or 'literary' possibilities of the medium, nor were they cramped by any at- tention to the 'aesthetics' of the cinema. They knew instinctively all they needed to know; ours is the age of visual information, manifested in computer graphics and the television news, and young men like George Lucas grasped the popular need for spec- tacle and display.
His progress was rapid and ineluctable. He graduated from film school, having dabbled in 'avant-garde' short films (really, just a succession of images, television with the sound turned down), and with what seems to be a characteristic mixture of stub- bornness and canniness persuaded Univer- sal Studios to finance and release American Graffiti. Its success — it is the most pro- fitable film 'in Hollywood history', as Mr Pollock puts. it — made the path straight for Mr Lucas. Star Wars arrived next. Mr Pollock pays a great deal of attention to the mechanics of Lucas's film-making (with the appalling obstinacy of English unions acting as comic relief throughout), but his emphasis is right. Lucas is a technician essentially, more concerned with the mechanics of his film than with eliciting a good 'performance' from one of his actors. His real work is done in the editing room here the tone, pace and story are actually created. Dialogue and acting are merely rough 'footage' to be discarded or re- arranged as the occasion demands. And perhaps, to make successful films, you have to possess the heart of a mechanic.
If he possesses genius also, and I suspect he does, it is like that of a water diviner. He is able to tap popular fantasies which might otherwise remain concealed, and is so im- mensely susceptible to the atmosphere of his time that he can create enduring images of its obsessions — an apparently polite, unobtrusive, rather cold man who says of his success that 'It wasn't my fault'.
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