A dystopian disaster: how George Lucas waged war on Warner Bros to make THX 1138
Anyone who suffered through George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels might be forgiven for believing that their creator never possessed even the most basic modicum of talent as either a screenwriter or a filmmaker. Their flat dialogue, boring plots, ridiculous characterisation and ludicrous twists were only matched by uninspired direction that had all of the grandeur and beauty of a mid-Nineties computer game’s cutscenes.
Yet Lucas’ reputation as a cinematic pioneer had been established by his direction of the first, and far more successful, Star Wars film and his work within Lucasfilm, not least his creation of the Indiana Jones series. And, ironically enough, he began his career as an experimental filmmaker, a form that he occasionally hints at embracing once again. As he said in 2015, when asked whether he would return to his early, low-budget roots, “That is exactly what I’m going to do. I’m tired of all the people saying you’re going to go back. I’ve always wanted to do it.”
Lucas’s first film THX 1138, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, is a demonstration of what he was capable of as a first-time director in his mid-twenties. Those who have carped at his apparently infantile stories of good and bad and broad brushstroke dialogue would do well to watch his Orwellian science-fiction satire, depicting a society in which emotions are forcibly suppressed by a mixture of drugs and implacable robotic law enforcers.
It is visionary, bizarre and witty, with fine performances by Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance and Maggie McOmie. None other than Steven Spielberg has called it “one of the greatest science fiction films that I have ever seen.” Yet it was a box office failure that its studio detested and tried to butcher, forcing Lucas to demonstrate the autocratic, even blinkered belief in his own abilities that would later make him a billionaire.
As a 20-year old student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1967, Lucas became fascinated by the idea that, rather than science-fiction films being the preserve of the distant future, he and his contemporaries were now living in a brave new technological world that the likes of Aldous Huxley and HG Wells would have found both inspiring and terrifying. His friend and subsequent collaborator Walter Murch had co-written a short script with the filmmaker Matthew Robbins that he termed “our underground film”, and Lucas was excited by the potential that he could bring to it.
As he said, “I was excited by the idea of a brave new world, and I wanted to do something extremely visual, with no dialogue…I wanted it to be a cross between a theatrical and a non-theatrical experience.” Showing impressive ambition even as a young man, he collaborated with the US Navy, who financed the film’s production, acted as its crew and cast, and allowed him access to contemporary locations that gave his film a chilly, detached quality – ideal for its dystopian setting.
The eventual short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB attracted acclaim and interest far beyond a usual student production. Spielberg said of it that “it had such huge vision in a very few minutes…it spoke volumes about the future.” It won a major prize at the USC’s annual awards and brought Lucas to the attention of the director Francis Ford Coppola, who was already an established filmmaker. Coppola hired Lucas as his production assistant on his next film The Rain People, and promised the young director that he would use his influence and industry clout in order to turn THX 1138 into a feature film.
Yet even at this nascent stage in Lucas’s career, it was clear that his visual sense was far stronger than his literary skills. Coppola told him, explicitly, “you’ll never be a good director unless you’re a good writer”, to which a surprised Lucas said “Francis, I can’t write a screenplay!” Coppola was sceptical until Lucas showed him his finished draft, and then said “Boy, you’re right. You cannot write a screenplay.”
Lucas then turned to his old USC student Walter Murch to turn his ideas into something more coherent. As the originator of the concept, Murch proved both a willing and valuable collaborator, and the revised screenplay met with Coppola’s approval. By now, Coppola and Lucas had formed a production company called American Zoetrope, financed by Warner Bros, and THX 1138 was to be its first release. The two men complimented each other in terms of personality and approach. Coppola was the charismatic showman, walking into sceptical film studios' offices and exciting them with his vision and force of personality, and Lucas was the shyer but equally brilliant visual stylist, happiest when allowed to pursue his unique vision without corporate interference.
Filming began in September 1969 in San Francisco, after Lucas’ initial desire to film in Japan proved impractical for both budgetary and practical reasons. The actors who were cast were somewhat surprised to be informed that, firstly, they would have to shave their heads (with the notable exception of the famously bald Pleasance) and, secondly, that they would have to work for scale, or union minimum wages. Nonetheless, the combination of Lucas, Coppola and the provocative screenplay was enough to convince Duvall, who had worked with both men on The Rain People, to sign up to play the film’s lead, the titular THX 1138.
The production took place over seven weeks, using a largely inexperienced (and therefore inexpensive) crew, on the budget of $777,777.77 that Coppola had obtained from Warner Bros. Murch called it “like working on a very large student film”, and its production designer said that the futuristic world was put together with “spit and rubber bands.” The filmmakers took the expedient decision to recruit most of the shaven-headed extras from the nearby drug rehabilitation programme Synanon, which has subsequently been described as “one of the most dangerous and violent cults that America has ever seen.” The looks of fear in the lead actors’ eyes as they are surrounded by gangs of jostling, angry men, being paid $30 a day each for the privilege, are not simply down to excellent acting.
As a director, Lucas remained more interested in what he was able to accomplish cinematically than in working with his cast. One actor, Bruce Chesse, later said of the production that “George didn’t pay much attention to actors. He was not very communicative. He didn’t even give us a chance to rehearse or even do a read through.” Part of this might have been down to his innate shyness, but it was also indicative of a cavalier attitude towards performance and writing that would later lead Harrison Ford to famously tell Lucas, of his Star Wars screenplay, that “you can type this sh_, but you sure can’t say it.” This led to particular embarrassment in the film’s sex scenes, although Duvall subsequently expressed tongue-in-cheek disappointment that his co-star McOmie was not prepared to “go Method” and continue their embraces once the cameras had stopped rolling.
Once the film was completed, Lucas spent a year editing it in collaboration with Murch, who was particularly interested in developing the innovative techniques of sound montage that he would later revisit, to Oscar-winning effect, in such films as Apocalypse Now and The English Patient. Its San Francisco production had allowed it largely to evade Warner Bros’ scrutiny, but when Lucas finally showed the executives a finished cut, they were disappointed and irritated. The low budget had meant that THX 1138 was never expected to be a blockbuster, but they had expected a science-fiction drama along the lucrative lines of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What they were presented with instead was an opaque, anti-establishment exercise in experimental cinema, demonstrating a timely ambivalence towards corporations and consumerism. It did not exactly scream “commercial success.”
Warners presented Lucas with a series of notes that they believed might help salvage something. In particular, they asked him to make it less mysterious, and to explain its futuristic setting. In desperation, they seized upon the frightening-looking shell-dwelling monsters that appear at the end of the film, and asked that Lucas bring them forward to the beginning instead, so that audiences might be tantalised by the prospect of alien creatures. An outraged Lucas refused to compromise his vision, and informed the surprised executives that they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
Fearing that Warners would forcibly make damaging cuts to his film, Lucas and Murch simply stole the workprint after yet another unsuccessful studio screening. Nonetheless, the studio retained final cut and released a compromised version of THX 1138 in 1971 with five minutes of footage missing, much to Lucas’ anger. It attracted respectful, if somewhat baffled, reviews (The New York Times recommended viewers overlook the film’s “slightly old-fashioned anxiety dream” and focus on the “very potent material”, while the Los Angeles Times praised it as “stunning… dazzling… chilling and terribly powerful”), but was a box office failure, eventually ending up on a double bill with the forgotten horror film The Brotherhood of Satan. Lucas later commented that he had been “cruelly used” by the studio and refused to work with them again. This meant that the vast commercial success of his next film American Graffiti benefited Universal Pictures, the more simpatico distributor. Then he directed Star Wars, and the rest is history.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how THX 1138 prefigures Lucas’ more famous work both structurally and aesthetically. Murch calls its vision that of the “used future”, and its combination of surface sheen with grittiness was undeniably on Lucas’ mind a few years later when he was creating the battered Millennium Falcon and the grimy worlds of Mos Eisley and Tattooine. And thematically, THX 1138 prefigures his later films in its depiction of a grimly uniform and autocratic world, from which the free-thinking individual must both rebel and escape. Luke Skywalker, trapped on his home planet and desperately seeking adventure, is the spiritual cousin of THX 1138, who Lucas described as being “a man who is shut in a cage where the door is unlocked, but he is afraid to go out.”
Lucas, for all of his social awkwardness, remained every inch a San Francisco flower child of the Sixties, forever keen to defy “The Man”, even as he himself metamorphosed into one of the most successful impresarios in the history of cinema. Perhaps inevitably, he revisited THX 1138 in 2004 for an expensive and visual effects-laden new director’s cut that restored the footage that Warners had compelled him to remove and expanded the scope and feel of the film. Gone was the scrappy, down-at-heel feel that the original cut possessed; in its place was an assured and gleaming vision of a dystopian future that felt every inch a George Lucas production.
Perhaps Lucas will never fulfil his desire to make another experimental low-budget film like THX 1138. His former colleague Coppola’s most recent pictures, self-financed and made outside of the studio system, have been all but unseen, indicating that changing tastes and a very different motion picture industry have made life harder for bloody-minded visionary directors.
And yet, as long as Lucas is still working and engaged with the possibility of innovation, there remains the possibility, half a century later, that he will return with something of the spirit and wit of his first film. As the director himself says, “I haven’t changed much over the years. If you see all my films, you’ll see that there is a certain continuity of eccentric taste that flies through those movies.” It is this eccentricity that he should be celebrated for, even if its subsequent big-budget expressions are far more regrettable than his quirky, unique debut. T
THX 1138 is available to watch on YouTube and Amazon Prime