|
Home
FAQ
The Book
Articles
Links
Contact
|
|
In Tribute to Marcia Lucas
Biographer Dale Pollock once wrote that
Marcia was George Lucas' "secret weapon." [i] Most people are aware
that George Lucas was once married, and probably some are aware that
his wife worked in the film industry herself and edited all of
George's early films before their 1983 divorce. But few are aware of
the implications that her presence brought, and the transformations
her departure allowed. She was, in many ways, more than just the
supportive wife--she was a partner as
well. "Not a fifty percent partner," as she herself admits, but
nonetheless an important one, and the only person that Lucas could
totally confide in back then. Today, she has been practically erased
from the history books at Lucasfilm. Looking through J.W. Rinzler's
Making of Star Wars, she is mentioned only occasionally in
passing, a background element, and not a single word of hers is
quoted; she is a silent extra, absent from any
photographs and only indirectly acknowledged, her contributions
downplayed. In the documentary Empire of Dreams, she is
barely even mentioned in passing, except when the narration states
that she edited the film and Lucas says he "got divorced as
Jedi was complete" in the last two minutes of the
supposedly-definitive documentary. Other products fare not much
better, since many of them are published through Lucasfilm; her
entire existence has nearly been ignored. Marcia Lucas, the "other"
Lucas, has basically become the forgotten Lucas.
Perhaps it is the painful memories of the final
unhealthy years of their marriage, during which Marcia finally left
Lucas for another man and got a large cash settlement, that has
prompted him to essentially never speak of her again. Indeed, it is
a rare day when her name is uttered by him, even as "my wife" and
other impersonal labels. Even in the 70s and 80s she was defined not
on her own merits but by her relationship to George--she was not just Marcia, she was "Marcia, the
wife of George Lucas", forever overshadowed. Yet nonetheless, Lucas
and every fan of his films owe her a debt of gratitude. She was an
instrumental part in the shaping of his scripts, and the primary
force behind their final form in the editorial stage, where she cut
the pictures herself. But more than that, she had a prolific and
successful career of her own as an editor, and was a key figure in
the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s; a secondary figure,
perhaps, yet unlike other secondary figures such as Walter Murch and
John Milius, her existence has been almost entirely
forgotten.
In this article I will be taking a look at the
life and career of Marcia Lucas (nee Griffin), and the impact and
influence she had on her husband's films.
Such a piece has never been attempted before,
whether in print, in video, or on the internet. Even on web pages
all one finds is a couple of piecemeal trivia bits; forget
about an actual quote from the woman herself or anything more
than a handful of sentences. This is the first-ever
biography of Marcia Griffin, and the reason why I decided to
undertake such a piece. Marcia was a charismatic and talented woman,
who had a significant--but basically
unappreciated--influence on 1970s
filmmaking, both directly and indirectly. In the direct sense,
she was the primary picture cutter for her husband, George Lucas, as
well as Martin Scorsese, in addition to the other films she edited
and assistant edited. Indirectly, she was part of the social scene,
as both Lucas' spouse and as a creative collaborator herself, and
part of the inner circle of the influential "Movie Brats". Her
opinions, her suggestions and her interactions formed and shaped the
collective movement, and her subtle influence in this respect is
especially unnoticed. She also, as I alluded to earlier, was a
profound part of the cinema of her husband, who himself is one of
the most successful and influential filmmakers in history. In fact,
the only Oscar the Lucases ever earned was hers, for editing
Star Wars .
Creating both a portrait of Marcia Lucas
and assembling a compelling biography of her and her work is a
difficult task. Whether in books or magazines, no matter the
publication, one finds only brief mentions of her, always as an
addition to the main piece about her husband, supplemented only by
the occasional rare glimpse into her thoughts and feelings; she
comes to us fragmentary, and often only in publications that are
obscure today because of their age. Author Denise Worrell, who was
one of the last journalists to speak to her before her divorce from
Lucas and subsequent disappearance, introduces her in 1983, when
Marcia was closing in on forty years old and had basically retired
from the industry to become a full-time mom:
"Marcia Lucas, thirty-seven, is spunky and
unspoiled. She wears a huge diamond on her left hand but often has
her brown hair in a ponytail on the top of her head, and dresses in
blue jeans, sweat pants, sweatshirts, and tennis shoes. She uses the
adjective real a lot." [ii]
Such a description, brief as it is, is
rare by comparison to most references, which gloss over her
existence or merely acknowledge her in passing. Because of this
dearth of sources, any survey of her is by nature somewhat limited,
and very George Lucas-oriented. Dale Pollock's Skywalking: The
Life and Films of George Lucas, published in 1983, is the
wealthiest source of info, and treats her as an active partner with
Lucas, even recalling Marcia's background history, and includes a
swath of interviews with her. Peter Biskind's Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls, published in 1997, includes participation from
her as well, and the only participation from her after the 1983
divorce, which affords us a unique view of an older Marcia Lucas
reflecting retrospectively on events (often with bitterness, it
seems). The remainder of her comes in cubist form by assembling
small sections from smaller publications; Denise Worrell's piece
contains involved, but still limited, participation from Marcia,
while she is heard from here and there in other publications such as
Time and People. John Baxter's book
Mythmaker (also titled George Lucas: A Biography)
provides her some attention, while she is briefly discussed in
A&E's Biography episode on George Lucas. One of the
only quotations from her in an actual Lucasfilm publication is in
John Peecher's 1983 The Making of Return of the Jedi, where
she shares an anecdote about editing the original Star
Wars.
Yet from this relatively small sampling, a
surprisingly detailed and compelling picture emerges, more than
enough to provide us insight and appreciation. "I love editing and
I'm real gifted at it," she stated in 1983. "I have an innate
ability to take good material and make it better, or take bad
material and make it fair. I'm compulsive about it. I think I'm even
an editor in real life." [iii] Today she has disappeared, and
routinely has refused to talk to press; my own efforts to contact
her, through a family connection, were unsuccessful, though she
wrote to me briefly to offer a small handful of corrections. At the
time of this writing, she would be about sixty-five years old. I
hope that the following suffices as an informed overview of Marcia
Lucas, and recovers her from the dustbin of
history.
Early
Life
Marcia Lou Griffin was born in 1947 according
to author Peter Biskind, but most publications state she is only a
year younger than George Lucas, who was born in 1944. Her date
of birth is not quite as significant as the location--Modesto, California. The sleepy town that was
home to about 20,000 people at that time was also the closest
hospital to Stockton Air Force, where Marcia's father was stationed,
and so, as if joined by fate, Marcia was born in the far-flung town
where Lucas himself lived. However, their paths did not cross at
that moment, and Marcia was in all likelyhood gone from Modesto as
quickly as she arrived. Marcia's father was a career military man,
and often had to move his family when he was re-assigned a new base.
His relationship with Marcia's mother, Mae, was "off-and-on"
according to biographer Dale Pollock, but they finally divorced for
good when Marcia was two. Mae took off for North Hollywood with her
two daughters, where the girls lived with their grandparents. When
Mae's father died, they moved into a small apartment in his
neighbourhood, and Mae got a job as a clerk for an insurance
agency.
Marcia's childhood was not the quaint, stable
one that her future-husband was blessed with, at the time still
blissfully passing through life in Modesto. Her family worked hard
to put food on the table, which was not easy for a working, single
mom, as Mae was. Marcia remembers the period as "a hard life" [iv].
The Griffin family didn't have the luxury of much money, and most of
Marcia's clothes were hand-me-downs. "It wasn't a sad, bad time,"
she says. "We had a lot of love and a very supportive family. But
economically it was very hard on my mother." [v] Marcia's father had meanwhile re-married and
was stationed in Florida, and, as Pollock reports, "financial aid
was not forthcoming" from him. Marcia, in fact, never knew him while
growing up. She went to live with him when she was a teenager, but
this never worked out; she left after two years, returning to North
Hollywood to finish high school, hoping to go on to college. Yet
Marcia felt responsible for her mother, who worked so hard to give
her and her sister a good life, and so she began working days and
going to school at night. This bold work ethic would characterise
both Marcia's life and career, but also her
success.
Marcia took night school courses in chemistry,
but by day she worked at a mortgage banking firm in downtown
Los Angeles. A boyfriend of hers worked for a Hollywood museum and
wanted to hire her as a librarian to catalog all the donated movie
memorabilia. Unfortunately, librarians had to apply to the
California State Employment office in order to work, and so she was
instead sent to the Sandler Film Library, which was looking for an
apprentice film librarian without any experience. It only paid $50 a
week--less than she made at the bank--but
she took it anyway. So began the editing career of young Marcia
Griffin. "That's how I started working in film," she says. "I just
walked in off the street." [vi] Dale Pollock describes:
"It was hard work. Marcia took orders for film
footage that producers required, such as shots of a 1940s Ford
turning left on a country road at night. If the material fit the
scene, she ordered the required negative prints, a highly technical
job that Marcia immediately grasped. She also found herself drawn to
the instant gratification of editing." [vii]
By the time she was twenty she had worked her
way up the ladder to assistant editor, but the road had been, and
would continue to be, a hard struggle. Breaking into the film
industry was tough for a woman in the mid-1960s, and like any
technical job the best gigs all went to men. She was lucky she was
in editing in the first place--most film
related positions, such as camera or lighting, were quite literally
all-male; film editing, since the birth of the medium, was the one
area where women were allowed in, since it was initially thought of
as a task comparable to sewing or cooking. Yet most
professional editors were nonetheless men. Marcia, however, was
driven and talented, determined to climb the union ladder
through her eight-year apprenticeship--commercial editors could make
$400 a week, a fact that she didn't forget, hopeful to have a
stable life for once. She cut trailers and promos to keep her skills
sharp, but nonetheless advancement was slow. "I thought I was a
tough cookie, but I didn't realise what I was up against," she
admits. [viii] She was told girls couldn't lift the heavy film cans
that the reels came in, or that editors used foul language
unsuitable for a girl. Marcia nonetheless forged ahead. "I would have
cut films for free because I enjoyed it so much," she insists.
[ix]
Verna Fields, one of the few respected women
editors in the industry at that time, had a job for Marcia in 1967.
Fields often did business with Hollywood film libraries and asked
Sandler Films to send her an assistant editor to help on a small
project she was working on; it was a government-funded documentary
on President Johnson's trip to the far east for the United States
Information Agency, and there was so much footage coming in that
Fields needed an additional assistant. Fields had hired a bunch of
film school grads from USC to cut the picture, and Marcia was
assigned to work with one of them, a young man named George
Lucas.
Locked in a small editing room together, they
seemed like an unlikely pair, George shy and introverted and Marcia
bold and outgoing. "Marcia had a lot of disdain for the rest of us,"
Lucas remembers, "because we were all film students. She was the
only real pro there." [x] Yet Marcia too felt a sense of
intimidation which she didn't reveal, for she had never graduated
from the night classes she started taking a couple years earlier,
and felt intellectually inferior to university grads. But there was
something about the young brunette that George found compelling;
eventually he asked her to go to a screening of a friend's film at
the American Film Institute with him. "It wasn't really a date," he
says. "But that was the first time we were ever alone together."
[xii]
The awkward and closed-off Lucas was slow to advance,
however. It was weeks before they managed to have a serious
conversation, and even more weeks before they ever had a real date.
Lucas had also never had a serious relationship before; his
girlfriends usually only lasted a few dates. Slowly but surely,
however, Marcia drew him out of his shell enough to ask her out.
Their dates were usually at the movies, and they both
disliked the Hollywood social scene, content with spending time at
their apartments arguing about the film industry. The casual
atmosphere at Verna Fields' San Fernando editing house provided a
comfy environment for their relationship to grow in. Dale Pollock
writes:
"Marcia enjoyed being with George. He seemed so happy,
humming and tapping his foot to the ever-present radio music in the
editing room. When one of the other female editors asked her what
she thought of the shy young student, she had a ready answer: 'I
think George is so cute. If only he weren't so small.' Marcia
thought she outweighed George, who was as thin as he was short
(actually he is taller by a few inches). She loved his nose, set on
a handsome face with good features. But Lucas was hard as hell
to draw out in conversation. He might discuss the films he was
working on but rarely did he bring up personal matters."
[xii]
The Fields house also allowed for a good learning atmosphere
for George. While Lucas is well known for his editorial skills, and
immediately had an instinctive talent for editing even as a film
student, his first professional mentor outside of film school was
Marcia. They were paired up by Fields because he was the least
experienced editor and she was the most experienced assistant.
Pollock writes, "Marcia knew more than George about editing
technique, but her job was to help him." [xiii] She would often look
over his shoulder to make sure he was doing alright and lend a
helping hand when needed. She was also often impressed by him,
saying: "He was so quiet and he said very little, but he seemed to
be really talented and really centered, a very together person. I
had come out of this hectic commercial production world and here was
this relaxed guy who threaded the Moviola very slowly and
cautiously." [xiv]
Lucas for his part respected her as an editor. He says about
filmmaking, "It really becomes your life, and it was Marcia's life,
too. That's one of the reasons our relationship works--we both love
the same thing." [xv] Marcia also won Lucas' respect due to
her sense of independence. "Marcia and I got along real well," he
says. "We were both feisty and neither one of us would take any shit
from the other. I sort of liked that. I didn't like someone who
could be run over." [xvi]
Marcia felt that their relationship was kept in check by a
very real sense of balance."I always felt I was an optimist
because I'm extroverted," she says. "And I always thought that
George was more introverted, quiet, and pessimistic." [xvii]
Biographer Dale Pollock concludes that she supplies the
aggressiveness that Lucas lacks, while his low-key
temperment softens her abraiseness. "We want to complete
ourselves, so we look for someone who is strong where we're weak,"
Marcia says. [xviii] Lucas agrees: "Marcia and I are very
different and also very much alike. I say black, she says white. But
we have similar tastes, backgrounds, feelings about things, and
philosophies." [xix]
Marcia
surprised and impressed Lucas' friends as well. Most of them met her
when she was in the cutting room at USC, helping George
edit his short film The Emperor. [xx] "She was a knock-out," John Milius remembers. "We all
wondered how little George got this great looking girl. And smart
too, obsessed with films. And she was a better editor than he was."
[xxi] Marcia says that George has "a very childish,
silly, fun side, but he doesn't even like me to talk about that
because he is so intensely private." [xxii] His repressive
introversion even put off Marcia at times. "I'm capable of envy and
jealousy--I've felt those emotions throughout my life, and I think
they are normal emotions. But they are emotions George doesn't feel.
I honestly have never seen George envious or jealous of anyone."
[xxiii]
George kept quiet about his relationship with his parents,
but eventually the Lucases came down for a student film screening
where they finally met Marcia. Lucas' mother, Dorothy, remembers,
"The minute I saw them together, I knew that was it." [xxiv] That
Thanksgiving, he took Marcia to Modesto for a formal introduction to
his family. Marcia recalls: "He
was very, very open when he was with his family...It was the most
open I had ever seen him. He was open with me, but as soon as it got
beyond just the two of us and our intimacy, he was again very
quiet." [xxv] She
was especially touched by an exchange she overheard between George
and his brother-in-law Roland. "You know, Marcia is the only person
I've ever known who can make me raise my voice," he said. Roland
grinned and replied, "That's great kid, congratulations--you must be
in love." [xxvi]
As
their relationship grew, Marcia had to think about what she wanted
to do with her life. She was happy with staying in L.A. and working
her way up the union ladder as an editor, a comfy and secure living
that she could be content with. But her boyfriend had grander plans
of becoming an independent filmmaker and moving to San Francisco,
and thought they could make it there together. This wasn't exactly
what Marcia had seen for her future, but she did like San Francisco
and was willing to take the risk out of faith in Lucas.
"Everything was a means to an ends," she says about him. "George has
always planned things very far in advance." [xxvii] In the meantime,
Lucas was still finishing up at grad school at USC, and he and
Marcia soon moved into a house together in the L.A. area, on
Portola drive, while George made his final student project--THX
1138: 4EB . After it was shot, Lucas edited it on the Moviola
at Verna Fields' house, sometimes staying up until 3 or 4 in the
morning. It would be surprising if Marcia wasn't involved in giving
him a helping hand there.
Marcia
continued to work in the commercial world while her boyfriend won
student scholarships and eventually an internship on the set of
Finian's Rainbow, directed by a young ex-film school grad
named Francis Coppola. Lucas and Coppola became close friends, and
Coppola hired him as a documentarian for his next film, called
Rain People. The idea for Rain People was that he
would assemble a small crew, rent a few vans and travel across the
country, shooting a low budget movie--a very independent sort of
movie. Coppola's one rule, however, was that the women stayed
home--wives and girlfriends couldn't come along for the ride
(although this rule didn't apply to himself). Lucas had already
been away from Marcia because of Finian's Rainbow, and as
the Rain People crew assembled in New York in 1967 for the
start of the cross-country shoot, Marcia decided she would go there
too. "It was so wonderful and romantic and emotional to see
each other in New York because we had been separated for a long
time," Marcia remembers. [xxviii] Taking the train on a rainy
February day to the next filming location on Long Island, Lucas
finally proposed to her.
"I
was beginning to see where my life was going," Lucas says. "Marcia's
career was in Los Angeles and I respected that. I didn't want her to
give it up and have me drag her to San Francisco unless there was
some commitment on my side." [xxix] This was especially troublesome,
as Marcia's career was just beginning to pick up. If she had made
her way on her own willpower, it is due to Lucas' connections that
she was able to break into the feature-film world. Haskell Wexler,
who had known Lucas since he was a teenager in Modesto, wanted to
hire Marcia to come to Chicago to edit his directorial debut,
Medium Cool. But Marcia had a bit of a dilemma: Rain
People was in need of her services as well. The production had
settled down for a few weeks in Nebraska and editor Barry Malkin
needed an assistant to help organize the footage; Lucas mentioned to
Coppola that his girlfriend was an editor and he agreed to hire her.
Medium Cool promised not only a better salary but much
longer work, and her first credit on a feature--but on the other
hand, assistant editing Rain People in Nebraska would let
her see George. "I'm really going to have to think about this,"
she told him. "Don't you want to be with me? Don't you love me?" he
asked. Finally, she bit the bullet and went to Nebraska. Marcia
reflects: "I was poor, right? Financial security was very important
to me. I wanted to make it my own way. But we were engaged, we were
terribly in love, so I decided to go." [xxx] As it turned out, after
she was done on Rain People, she also ended up cutting
Medium Cool as well--and getting her first feature-film
credit.
Going to San
Francisco
When
Rain People was done, Lucas had miles of film footage that
he had shot for his documentary, called Filmmaker , and it
was Marcia that acted as assistant editor, a fun little project for
them to do together as they planned their wedding, cutting the film
together in their home on Portola Drive.
On
February 22, 1969, Marcia Griffin became Marcia Lucas. George and
Marcia were married at the United First Methodist Church in Pacific
Grove, not far from Montery, California. Among the friends in
attendance were Francis Coppola, Walter Murch, Hal Barwood, Matthew
Robbins--and Verna Fields, the woman who had brought them together.
They had a modest honeymoon in Northern California. While they were
there they visited Marin County, just outside of San Francisco; it
seemed to be the perfect place for them to settle down in. Marcia
was able to find a little house in Mill Valley for only $120 a
month. "We were really happy and optimistic," Lucas says, even if
the place was small. "In our lifestyle there were only two rooms we
used, the kitchen and the bedroom. We were in either one or the
other." [xxxi]
  
Coppola
was founding American Zoetrope in downtown San Francisco, and a lot
of his and George's buddies were joining them there, such as Walter
Murch and John Milius. Marcia's friends and family were still in
southern California. But she liked San Francisco and didn't mind
being there, figuring she would make new friends and find work soon
enough. She began to grow worried as time went by and she remained
unemployed and homesick. Marcia was ready to have a baby, but George
refused the idea, stating that they had only been married a few
months and didn't have a stable income. "He didn't want the extra
responsibility at that time because he might be forced into taking a
job that he didn't want to take," she
says. [xxxii]
Instead,
Marcia played the role of den mother while she waited to find her
opportunity, tending to their Mill Valley home while George set up
American Zoetrope with Coppola. The colorful social scene there at
least made for an interesting time: "There's never a dull moment,"
she says of life under Coppola's leadership. "There are always ten
or twenty or thirty people around, with somebody sitting down and
playing the piano in that corner of the room, and some kids dancing
in that corner of the room, and the intellectuals having a deep
conversation about art in another corner of the room. His life is
just in a constant state of upheaval." [xxxiii] Before the
production company collapsed, Lucas made his first film--THX
1138. The shoot was quick but hard, and Marcia did her best to
support George in whatever ways she could. George's mother
remembers, "Marcia spoiled George terribly when he was making films.
She'd bring him breakfast in bed after the nights he worked late."
[xxxiv] When the shoot was over, George got to work cutting the
film, with Marcia assistant editing. Marcia was more than just a
pair of hands, however, for the two were a partnership more than
anything else; Marcia was always full of good ideas, and she was one
of the few people Lucas actually listened to. At the same time,
however, THX was outside of her tastes; she didn't go for
the strange, abstract filmmaking style Lucas was so fond of, and
ultimately she felt non-plussed by the film because she felt it did
not engage the audience emotionally. This is the essential
difference in approaches between the two Lucases--George more
technical and graphic oriented, while Marcia more character and
storytelling oriented in her approach.
It
also led to some tension in the editing room. Cutting the picture
together in the attic of their home, the long work hours and
strenuous circumstances of its making sometimes brought out
unpleasantries.
"I like to become emotionally involved in a movie," she says.
"I want to be scared, I want to cry, and I never cared for
THX because it left me cold. When the studio didn't like
the film, I wasn't surprised. But George just said to me, I was
stupid and knew nothing. Because I was just a Valley Girl. He was
the intellectual." [xxxv]
Still,
the two had a relatively healthy and happy relationship. Dale
Pollock writes that they were "the picture of domesticity," with a
cute little hilltop house with a white fence. George's parents
remember a visit from their son and daughter-in-law during which
George playfully ordered Marcia around. "Wife, do this, do that,"
George's mother remembers. "He was just playing, but they had a
wonderful relationship." [xxxvi]
But
Marcia needed more than just domestic bliss--and she needed work
that wasn't something made by her husband. To make matters worse,
THX had bombed, Zoetrope basically folded, and the future
was looking bleak for them--she would take any job she could get. As
the ruins of Zoetrope settled from the company's collapse, George
was often on the phone in the Zoetrope office, trying to hustle
editing gigs for Marcia and get himself another directing job. Mona
Skager, an associate and assistant at Zoetrope, opened the phone
bill one day and was furious--"You've run up a $1,800 bill with all
these calls and none of them are about Zoetrope business." George
felt humiliated and had to ask his father for money, a difficult act
for a conservative man like George Sr., who felt his son was wasting
his time in the industry in the first place. Marcia came in and gave
Skager the check. Looking back, Coppola says that he would never had
done that to George and didn't realise Skager had confronted him
about it; "I always believed that incident was one of the things
that pissed George off and caused a breach." [xxxvii] In spite of
the slim work available in the area, George and Marcia decided to
stick with San Francisco, hoping they would be able to make
it.
Coppola
meanwhile was making The Godfather to get himself out of
debt and gave the Lucases jobs whenever he could--Marcia could edit,
so he had her cut together the many lengthy screentests, and George
could use the animation camera so he had him film the newspaper
montages. Fortunately,
opportunity soon came knocking--Bay-area filmmaker Michael Ritchie,
whom George knew through Zoetrope's connections, was making a film
starring Robert Redford called The Candidate and wanted to
hire Marcia as assistant editor. Not only was it a job on a decent
film, but the income came at a time when they were nearly broke, and
for the next few months she would be the sole supporter of their
household.
Making
Graffiti
George
had been searching for another project to put food on the table, but
he wanted it to be on his own terms--he turned down a $150,000
salary to direct a movie called Lady Ice, even as he and
Marcia struggled to get by. Seeking a more commercial vehicle, if
only to get them out of debt, Lucas decided to do a
coming-of-age story about young teens in Modesto with a rock and
roll soundtrack. Lots of his friends thought the idea was silly, but
Marcia was one of the few who had full faith in Lucas, and
encouraged him to do a more emotional, character-oriented
piece. She says:
"After
THX went down the toilet, I never said, 'I told you so,'
but I reminded George that I warned him it hadn't involved the
audience emotionally...He always said, 'Emotionally involving
the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get
a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.' All he
wanted to do was abstract filmmaking, tone poems, collections of
images. So finally, George said to me, 'I'm gonna show you how easy
it is. I'll make a film that emotionally involves the audience."
[xxxviii]
George
was borrowing money from his parents, relatives and friends to stay
afloat, but eventually Universal signed on.
American
Graffiti was shot in less time and with less money than Lucas'
first picture, and the gruelling shoot made him sick and caused him
innumerable stresses, so much that he felt that he no longer wanted
to direct; no doubt, his inability to communicate did not make this
any easier. The film told a simple human drama which relied on
editing to interweave four stories in the narrative. Getting her
first crack as a feature editor, Marcia stepped up to the
plate--working alongside Verna Fields. It was, in fact, Universal
executive Ned Tanen who insisted Fields be on the picture, since he
feared that George was just using Marcia as an excuse to cut it
himself, but both Lucases probably didn't mind since they had
already worked with her when they first met, and George hoped she
would be a good buffer between himself and the studio. Minor
controversy surrounds Verna Fields' role on the film--given her high
status as one of the great editors of her time everyone assumed she
was the genius behind the film's masterful editing; Marcia, many
dismissed, was only on the film because of her husband. Yet Fields
only was onboard for half of the film's editorial lifespan; Fields'
next big editing gig, for Jaws, has a similar situation, in
which she admits she gets too much credit.
The
two of them--plus, of course, George--cut the film in the spare room
over Francis Coppola's garage, for he had just bought a house in
Mill Valley at George's urging; he was off writing The
Conversation in an adjacent house (one of the refugee projects
from the Zoetrope fiasco). There were frequent boccie bowling games
on the lawn, picnics, and sunbathing. It was the closest they ever
got to the original dream of Zoetrope, envisioned as having
such a casual atmosphere.
Lucas
looked at Graffiti footage every day and explained what he
wanted from Marcia and Fields--the only time he ever spoke to his
wife during the hectic post-production schedule. Walter Murch came
onboard as sound editor, and they together collaborated on the
difficult task of cutting the music to fit the scene. Marcia argued
George out of his original approach to the structure of the film,
which depended on a more rigid construction of cross-cutting the
different narratives, and she also was crucial in giving scenes
longer time to breathe, as Lucas then insisted on cross-cutting much
more frequently (as seen in Attack of the Clones--Marcia's
criticism was that the scenes either never developed or they lost
their dramatic momentum by aborting so
quickly).
Verna
Fields left once the rough cut had been assembled, since she had
another job lined up, but the film was almost an hour too long,
so for the next six months Marcia cut the film down along with Lucas
and Murch. For the next cut, Marcia listened attentively to George
and made the film the way he instructed. It was a disaster. Because
of the interlocking narrative structures, the film could not simply
be trimmed up in a conventional sense because removing one scene, or
part of a scene, affected the next narrative thread and threw off
the rhythm of the film. Lucas remarks: "You literally can have a
film that works fine at one point, and in one week you can cut it to
a point where it absolutely does not work at all." [xxxix] Now it
was Marcia's turn at bat--she took over and re-cut the film on her
own this time, while George worked with Walter Murch on the sound
design.
By
January 1973, Marcia had assembled the film for a test screening.
The release would be controversial--the test audiences absolutely
loved the film, yet the studio executives thought it was terrible.
Lucas was heartbroken as Ned Tanen called the film
"unreleasable," but Coppola defended Lucas at the screening,
offerring to buy the film from Tanen and whipping out his chequebook
to make the deal on the spot (after Tanen slinked away, he and
Coppola didn't speak for another twenty years). George was
devastated by the studio's negative reaction. Marcia believed in
American Graffiti and was irritated by her husband's
inability to fight for his movie, but he didn't seem to share in her
confidence. At the same time, Marcia realised the reality of the
situation: "George was just a nobody who had directed one little
arty-farty movie that hadn't done any business. He didn't have the
power to make people listen to him." [xl]
Eventually,
the film was released, though the studio trimmed off a couple
minutes of footage. It nonetheless won rave reviews--while most of
the post-Easy Rider films of the "New Hollywood" wave of
filmmaking had done relatively unremarkable box-office, American
Graffiti was a powerhouse hit that was an absolute
audience-pleaser. It grossed over $100 million dollars, and when
calculated in terms of budget-to-gross may be the most profitable
film ever made (Blair Witch Project cost less to produce,
but Graffiti only had a marketing budget of $500,000). It
also turned George and Marcia into overnight millionaires. After
years of struggle, years of living on the edge of poverty, they
finally made it big. They bought a large Victorian house in San
Anselmo--a bit of a fixer-upper, but a beautiful find nonetheless.
Marcia named it Parkhouse (it was on a street called Park Way) and
it would become the business centre of Lucasfilm until Skywalker
Ranch in the 1980s. One of Lucas' best films, Graffiti's
entire existence might not have been were it not for Marcia's
influence of expanding his tastes--"I made it for you," he
once told her. [xli] Later, in 1974, the film was nominated at
the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay--and
Best Editing. Marcia desperately wanted to win, but the picture
failed to nab any of the above. George didn't really care; producer
Gary Kurtz was disappointed; Marcia cried. It would be another four
years before she would get her dream.
From Scorsese to
Star Wars
Even
before Marcia Lucas was an Oscar-nominated editor, her career was
taking off--Michael Ritchie was impressed with the young woman when
she had worked on his The Candidate, and recommended her to
his friend Martin Scorsese, who was looking for someone to edit his
feminist road movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. "We
knew her, we liked her, and she was in the union," associate
producer Sandy Weintraub recalls [xlii] ; Scorsese was looking to
crew the picture with women in the hopes of making the film more
emotionally honest. Once again, George's connections had given
Marcia a crucial stepping stone. It also was an important point of
departure in her career--she had worked on things not made by George
before, but this was a really important film and she would be the
editor, not an assistant editor. Sandy goes on: "It was good for her
to get away from George and his house. Here she was, a wonderful
editor working on her husband's films. I don't think she got taken
seriously." [xliii] Marcia remembers the
time:
"Marty
called, and asked if I would do his first studio feature. He was
terrified of the studio executives, that Warners was going to give
him some old fuddy-duddy editor or a spy--the studios were
known for having spies on such projects. Marty liked to edit,
and I felt like I was being hired to cut a movie so I wouldn't
cut it, so I'd let the director cut it. But I thought, if I'm ever
going to get any real credit, I'm going to have to cut a
movie for somebody besides George. 'Cause if I'm cutting
for my husband, they're going to think, George lets his wife
play around in the cutting room. George agreed with that."
[xliv]
In
the end, Marcia won Scorsese's approval, and he let her cut the
picture herself.
Lucas
meanwhile made Parkhouse his office, and also rented out rooms to
his friends to use as offices, such as Hal Barwood and Matthew
Robbins. They would go down the street to cafes and share ideas and
check in on what each other was doing--Lucas was working on writing
his next project, The Star Wars. As production on Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore went on, Marcia had to go to Tucson,
Arizona, where the film was shooting, to begin cutting the
footage. George didn't like being separated from her and so he
packed his things and joined her, trying to hash out his first draft
screenplay. Alice's post-production was finished in
Hollywood once production wrapped, again separating the two
Lucases.
As
far as evidence suggests, Marcia stayed out of Lucas' way when he
first started writing the space epic. He made two attempts at a
treatment in early 1973, but the success of Graffiti kept
him from completing the first draft until the spring of 1974. Marcia
was busy with her own career at the time, cutting for Scorsese and
dealing with their newfound success like George was. Like many of
Lucas' friends, she didn't quite know what to make of the first
draft of Star Wars when Lucas showed it to her; she wasn't
a fan of the action serials like Lucas was, and found a lot of it
too bizarre, and without strong characters or dialogue. Lucas
listened to her and his friends' criticisms, but it would be another
year before he finally finished the crucial second and third
drafts.
After
that time, Marcia landed another high-profile gig. Martin Scorsese
had really liked the work she had done on
Oscar-winning Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and
wanted to have her edit his next film as well, the dark character
study Taxi Driver. Marcia was excited to be part of
Scorsese's circle, to be part of what were considered some of the
most significant American films being made. Marcia's respect for
Scorsese and non-plussed disposition towards Star Wars
seems to have rubbed George the wrong way--he would often
tell how his friends thought he should do an "important film"
like Taxi Driver but instead he wanted to make an action
B-movie for kids, to their puzzlement. Taxi Driver was
also cut by Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro, but it was Marcia who
was the supervising editor on the project, a task probably made
more challenging by Scorsese's heavy drug addiction at the time.
Marcia was set to cut the film on her own, and had seen the dailies
as Scorsese was shooting, but after a break in production there
wasn't enough time, and so Rolf, and later Shaprio, was added to the
roster; Rolf describes the three trading off scenes in a "homogenous
cutting process," a situation to be repeated on her next
film. [xlv] Taxi Driver, to everyone's
astoundment, became a commercial hit when it was released in 1976,
and it is today considered one of the greatest American films ever
made. Marcia received a BAFTA nomination for her editing work on the
film, and was later featured, at Steven Speilberg's
recommendation, in an ad by Kodak hailing women in the
film industry. John
Milius remembers:
"She was a stunning editor...Maybe the best
editor I've ever known, in many ways. She'd come in and look at the
films we'd made--like The Wind and the Lion, for
instance--and she'd say, 'Take this scene and move it over here,'
and it worked. And it did what I wanted the film to do, and I would
have never thought of it. And she did that to everybody's films: to
George's, to Steven [Spielberg]'s, to mine, and Scorsese in
particular." [xlvi]
Marcia's
rising career did not come without its troubles. For one, she had to
work in L.A., where Scorsese cut his movies. "What Marcia was doing
was very difficult," says George's close friend Willard Huyck.
"George wasn't going berserk or anything, but he wasn't happy about
the situation." [xlvii] The Lucas family tradition had never allowed
a woman to have an independent career--Gloria Katz notes, "That was
actually a very big step for George; it was consciousness raising."
[xlviii] George hated cooking and cleaning, and hired a
housekeeper while Marcia was away. Meanwhile, The Star Wars
still had not been green-lit, even if Fox had agreed to develop it,
frustrating him further.
Lucas
had re-configured much of The Star Wars for his second
draft, completed in January of 1975. He had finally come up with the
basic backbone of the film--the heroic journey of farmboy Luke
Starkiller--but his characterisation and dialogue were arguably even
worse than his first draft. Lucas, however, acknowledged that he was
a poor writer, and sought the guidance of others. "I'm not a good writer," he says in 1974. "It's very,
very hard for me. I don't feel I have a natural talent for it...When
I sit down I bleed on the page, and it's just
awful." [xlix] He had attempted to hire writers for
every one of his previous films, but experience taught him a
different technique--he would listen to the suggestions others had,
but write the words himself. Marcia, along with many of
George's friends, critiqued which characters worked, which ones
didn't, which scenes were good, and Lucas composed the script in
this way. Marcia was always critical of Star Wars, but she
was one of the few people Lucas listened to carefully, knowing she
had a skill for carving out strong characters. Often, she was a
voice of reason, giving him the bad news he secretly suspected--"I'm
real hard," she says, "but I only tell him what he already knows."
[l] Pollock notes, "Marcia's faith never
waivered--she was at once George's most severe critic and most
ardent supporter. She wasn't afraid to say she didn't understand
something in Star Wars or to point out the sections that
bored her." [li] She kept her husband down to earth and
reminded him of the need to have an emotional through-line in the
film. Mark Hamill remembers: "She was really the warmth and heart of
those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of."
[lii]
As
Hamill has also noted, she wasn't afraid to tell George if he was
headed in a questionable direction. Dale Pollock writes, "only
Marcia is brave enough to take Lucas on in a head-to-head dispute
and occasionally emerge victorious." [liii] Marcia explains: "I
don't think George is real close and intimate with anyone but me.
I've always felt that when you're married, you have to be wife,
mother, confidant, and lover, and that I've been all those things to
George. I'm the only person he talks to about certain things." [liv]
Walter
Murch comments further: "Marcia was very
opinionated, and had very good opinions about things, and would not
put up if she thought George was going in the wrong direction. There
were heated creative arguments between them--for the good." [lv]
When Lucas was having difficulty coming up with ideas or ways
of solving scenes and characters, he would talk about it with her;
she even helped come up with killing off the mentor figure of Ben
Kenobi when Lucas couldn't resolve the character in the last
quarter of the film. Lucas says:
"I was rewriting, I was struggling with that
plot problem when my wife suggested that I kill off Ben, which she
thought was a pretty outrageous idea, and I said, 'Well, that is an
interesting idea, and I had been thinking about it.' Her first idea
was to have Threepio get shot, and I said impossible because I
wanted to start and end the film with the robots, I wanted the film
to really be about the robots and have the theme be the framework
for the rest of the movie. But then the more I thought about Ben
getting killed the more I liked the idea." [lvi]
Often, Marcia reeled in Lucas' own sense of ego. She
encouraged him to do interviews as a way of raising his spirits, but
was also irritated by the auteur theory of critics
to credit every element of Lucas' films to himself; passing by
his office as she heard a journalist use the phrase "master
director," she snorted. "Doesn't he like that description?" the
journalist asked. "Oh, he loves it." [lvii] Mark Hamill also notes
in 2005 how her sensibilities influenced the content and structure
of his films:
"You can see a huge difference in the films that he does
now and the films that he did when he was married. I know for a fact
that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that
little 'kiss for luck' before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the
chasm in the first film: 'Oh, I don't like it, people laugh in the
previews,' and she said, 'George, they're laughing because it's so
sweet and unexpected'-- and her influence was such that if she
wanted to keep it, it was in. When the little mouse robot comes up
when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he
roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to
cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it."
[lviii]
One
interesting bit of trivia relating to her and Lucas' cinema is that
Indiana, the Alaskan malamute that gave Indiana Jones his name and
also gave Lucas the inspiration for Chewbacca, was in fact Marcia's
dog, not George's. [lix] On the subject of Indiana Jones, Dale
Pollock provides an anecdote which demonstrates how Marcia's
presence in her husband's life influenced his films in subtle but
significant ways--in this case, changing the ending for Raiders
of the Lost Ark:
"[Marcia] was instrumental in changing the ending of
Raiders, in which Indiana delivers the ark to Washington.
Marion is nowhere to be seen, presumably stranded on an island with
a submarine and a lot of melted Nazis. Marcia watched the rough cut
in silence and then levelled the boom. She said there was no
emotional resolution to the ending, because the girl disappears.
'Everyone was feeling really good until she said that,' Dunham
recalls. 'It was one of those, "Oh no we lost sight of that." '
Spielberg reshot the scene in downtown San Francisco, having Marion
wait for Indiana on the steps on the government building. Marcia,
once again, had come to the rescue."
[lx]
Star
Wars had a hectic shoot in 1976. This wasn't anything like the
low-budget pictures George had made before--this was a big,
expensive epic, shot in north Africa and on giant U.K. soundstages.
George was often miserable and homesick, and his inability to
connect to strangers left the foreign crews hostile to him. Marcia
went with him to Tunisia, but the months in England during
pre-production were lonesome; he wrote Marcia letters all the time,
and kept a picture of her taped to the inside of his briefcase.
Eventually Marcia moved there, renting a cottage for them in
Hampstead; while they were away in Tunisia, burglers broke in and
stole his video equipment.
When
Lucas returned home, he was exhausted and disappointed in his film;
Marcia had to rush him to the Marin General Hospital because of
stress-induced chest pains not long after they got back. Lucas
had hired a U.K. union editor--John Jympson--to cut the film while
they were in England, but when Lucas had seen the rough cut he was
horrified; the film was dull and without any of the kinetic energy
he had envisioned. Jympson was fired, and Marcia took his place,
starting over from scratch with George once they were back in
California, working in the Parkhouse carriage house which was
converted into an editing building. "He asked Marcia to work on
the final battle sequence, so ILM could start, but he needed someone
else to start at the beginning," says Richard Chew, [lxi]
whom Lucas knew from Coppola's The Conversation and
John Korty's films, and was hired not long after Marcia began
cutting. With the entire Jympson cut junked wholesale, the film
needed to be re-ordered back into dailies so that Marcia and Chew
could totally start over, a laborious task for the editors,
assistants and film librarians. "No one had been editing on the
movie for several months," Lucas states in The Making of Star
Wars, "so the first thing we had to do when we got back to San
Anselmo was to reconstitute everything that had been cut in England,
put it back in dailies form, and start from scratch. It turned out
to be even more of a tremendous job than we thought it was going to
be. We were running against a terrible time problem, so we hired
[another] editor, Richard Chew. He and my wife Marcia, who was also
an editor, raced to get a first rough cut of the movie ready by
Thanksgiving." [lxii]
The
workload was daunting. Carol Ballard walked in Parkhouse one
day at 6AM to find a bleary-eyed Marcia still cutting. Lucas was
cutting the Falcon gun-port battle himself, Chew states, "then
he went upstairs to his editing room and his Steenbeck editing table
and looked through all the trims, while I continued working from the
beginning of the film and Marcia was working on the
end." [lxiii] A third editor, Paul Hirsch, whom Lucas knew from
De Palma's Carrie, was later hired since there was so much
to do. "Marcia Lucas called me," Hirsch recalls. "And she said,
'Things are going a lot slower than we had hoped; our editor in
England didn't work out and we're having to recut everything. We've
got Richard Chew on the picture--but we're not getting enough
done!'" [lxiv] He accepted the offer but admits being nervous. "I
was a little intimidated," he says, "because both Marcia and
Richard had been nominated for Academy Awards before, and I was
just this kid from New York, but they were great." [lxv] He was
stationed on the Moviola, but it did not agree with him. "I had
forgotten how many years it had been since I had worked on one, so I
was all thumbs, breaking the film, dropping it, and wasting a lot of
time just trying to get the film to go through the machine. So
Marcia said, 'I don't care, I'll work on the Moviola.' After that, I
was working upstairs in George's room on the Steenbeck."
[lxvi] Marcia and Chew remained downstairs, closer to the
assistant editors and coding machine (used for syncing ILM shots).
Marcia
continued to work on the film as the months went by, trying to
fashion a more emotional experience from what she had to work
with.
The
Death Star trench run was originally scripted entirely different,
with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port; Marcia had re-ordered
the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking
in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the
most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction
of the original assembly, which is surprisingly
unsatisfying). She warned George, "If the audience doesn't
cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium
Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader,
the picture doesn't work." [lxvii]
One
curiosity of note is that she was one of the few people
who was in favor of the Jabba the Hutt scene (before the Greedo
dialogue was re-written), and initially argued in favour
of keeping it in the film. She describes:
"Jabba was a big debatable item. George had never liked
the scene Jabba was in because he felt that the casting was never
strong enough. There was an element, however, that I liked a lot
because of the way George had filmed it. Jabba was seen in a long
shot and he was yelling, while in the foreground, in a big close-up,
Han's body wiped into the left corner of the frame and his hand was
on a gun and he said, 'I've been waiting for you, Jabba.' Then we
cut to Han's face and Jabba turned around. I thought it was a very
verile moment for Han's character; it made him a real macho guy, and
Harrison's performance was very good. I lobbied to keep the scene.
But Jabba was not terrific, and Jabba's men, who all looked like
Greedo, were made of molded green plastic. George thought they
looked pretty phony, so he had two reasons for wanting to cut the
scene: the appearance of Jabba's men and the pacing of the movie.
You have to pick up the pacing in an action movie like Star
Wars , so ultimately, the scene wasn't
necessary."
[lxviii]
2007's The Making of Star Wars treats Chew as the
primary cutter and only credits the space battle and the (deleted!)
Anchorhead scenes to Marcia as a solo editor, but given the book's
tendancy to downplay her (not even including her photo on the
editors page) and the fact that she was not spoken to for the book,
this is suspect (other publications, like Baxter and Pollock, treat
her as the main cutter). By October or November 1976, the editing
team had prepared a new rough cut; in the final crunch, the three
editors began to trade off scenes as a trio. "We put it all together
and spent about three or four days as a tag team," Hirsch says.
"George, Richard, Marcia and I would sit at the machine each for a
couple of hours, taking turns and making suggestions. The last day,
we did this for about twelve hours." [lxix] Alan Ladd Jr. flew in
for the screening, and walked out elated--he was convinced the film
would be a hit.
As
Marcia continued to re-work sequences as late as December of 1976,
Martin Scorsese called her up--his editor of New York, New
York had died, and he needed her to finish the film. Marcia
was, frankly, sick of working on Star Wars, and was looking
forward to something not made by George and something she
considered more artistic. George had another two editors onboard and
the film was on its way to being finished. Even still, he was not
pleased. "For George the whole thing was that
Marcia was going off to this den of iniquity," Willard Huyck
explains. "Marty was wild and he took a lot of drugs and he stayed
up all night, had lots of girlfriends. George was a family homebody.
He couldn't believe the stories that Marcia told him. George would
fume because Marcia was running with these people. She loved being
with Marty." [lxx] Things at Lucasfilm weren't as unremarkable as
they seemed; Marcia would later confide in Lucasfilm marketing
genius Charles Lippincott that if she ever had to work with her
husband on a film again, "it would be the end of their marriage."
[lxxi]
In late spring of 1977, Star Wars was
screened for studio executives and many of Lucas' friends. When
the house lights came up there was no applause in the silent
room, and Marcia, who was always apprehensive about the
film, was in tears. "It's the At Long Last Love of
science fiction," she cried. "It's awful!" Gloria Katz took
her aside. "Shhh! Laddie's watching," she hushed. "Marcia, just look
cheery." [lxxii] Marcia tried to raise George's spirits and
give him some feedback, but when the Lucases and a bunch of friends
went out to dinner to discuss the film, Brian De Palma mocked and
joked about how cheesy it all was; Marcia was terribly upset with
him for kicking George while he was down. She later called him up
and asked him to talk to George, cheer him up; "he respects you,"
she said. De Palma eventually ended up re-writing the opening crawl
with Jay Cocks.
Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew finished the edit after Marcia left
but she stopped by and helped her husband out when she could as
George raced to the finishing line. Marcia, meanwhile, was busy
finishing up New York, New York. Marcia and Scorsese
invited Lucas to take a look at the movie in the editing room, and
he recommended that if the lovers had a happy ending the film would
make millions more; such an ending would not have fit the characters
or film and Scorsese became depressed, knowing he could never make a
movie for the masses. By May, the picture cutting on New York,
New York was done, but Marcia was also supervising the film's
sound editing at MGM studios--the same place George was mixing sound
on Star Wars. Their two jobs overlapped at a critical point
that both had been too busy to even realise: Star Wars had
opened. Lucas recalls:
"I was mixing sound on foreign versions of the
film the day it opened here. I had been working so hard that,
truthfully, I forgot the film was being released that day. My wife
was mixing New York, New York at night at the same place we
were mixing during the day, so at 6:00 she came in for the night
shift just as I was leaving on the day shift. So we ran off across
the street from the Chinese Theatre--and there was a huge line
around the block. I said, 'What's that?' I had forgotten completely,
and I really couldn't believe it. But I had planned a vacation as
soon as I finished, and I'm glad I did because I really didn't want
to be around for all the craziness that happened after that."
[lxxiii]
The vacation was
in Hawaii, their first one in years, and they desperately deserved
it. Steven Spielberg and his wife soon joined them, bringing news of
the growing Star Wars mania, and Alan Ladd Jr., president
of Fox, excitedly phoned up Lucas every night to report the
staggering box office grosses. George and Marcia were stunned.
George wondered how he would spend all the millions of dollars that
would be coming their way, but all he could find was a frozen
yoghurt franchise on the resort, which he toyed with buying. He then
thought of restoring the Parkhouse office to its full
splendor--which probably led to his vision of Skywalker Ranch. For
Marcia, the success of Star Wars meant something else--they
could finally settle down. Graffiti had made them
millionaires, but George had funnelled much of it into his film, and
neither was sure if the success would last--Star Wars was
the darkhorse investment return. George was planning on retiring.
Marcia was planning on having a baby. Finally, it seemed like they
could have a real life.
The Beginning of
the End
Or so it
seemed. Marcia is quoted in a summer 1977 article in
People magazine as saying "Getting our private life
together and having a baby. That is the project for the rest of the
year." [lxxiv] After trying to get pregnant, the Lucases got
some bad news from the doctor: George was sterile. As Pollock notes,
the news was a bit difficult to accept at first, and must have
returned the strain to their relationship that just seemed to have
been lifted; Marcia and George would never be able to conceived a
child together. But if the thought of adoption seems obvious, it was
not something the two of them were ready to jump into just yet. And
George, despite claiming to be ready to retire, was about to embark
on his most ambitious project to date.
"The idea for [the Ranch] came out of filmschool," Lucas
explained at the time. "It was a great environment; a lot of people
exchanging ideas, watching movies, helping each other out. I
wondered why we couldn't have a professional environment like that."
[lxxv] With Star Wars becoming the most
successful film of all time by the year's close, Lucas saw what
opportunity he was now given. Here was his chance to institute the
dream that his mentor Coppola never had the resources to do. Lucas
decided to turn Star Wars into a franchise, intended to
support the costly facility. This also meant that Lucas had to use
much of his earnings from Star Wars to buy the real estate,
in Marin County--an action that no doubt must have worried Marcia.
Lucas hired Irvin Kershner to direct Empire Strikes Back,
thinking that the film would be relatively quick and easy to
make--which turned out to not be the case at all. Even as Lucas said
he was going to step back he saw himself becoming more and more
involved in the film--Marcia was supposed to take a vacation to
Mexico with him in 1978, along with their friends the Ritchie's, but
with screenwriter Leigh Brackett unexpectedly passing away Lucas
spent much of the trip in the hotel room writing. He also began
spearheading Raiders of the Lost Ark into production, which
he was writing and producing as well. Things weren't as simple as
they planned.
A peak of joy
finally appeared for Marcia amidst their increasingly hectic
lifestyle. On April 3rd, 1978, the 50th Academy Awards
ceremony was held, with Star Wars drawing a wealth of
nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best
Screenplay--and Best Editing as well. George was unsurprised that he
walked away empty-handed, but for Marcia there was a shock of
another kind. Star Wars won the Best Editing award, and she
and fellow co-editors Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch were all awarded
the golden statues. For Marcia, it was the culmination of a constant
uphill struggle since she entered Sandler Films in the 1960s and her
proudest professional moment. She was also one of the few women to
win an Oscar for the craft (only 5 others before her had, including
Verna Fields for Jaws two years
earlier).
Her husband,
meanwhile, was about to enter a world of hurt as Empire Strikes
Back began production in early 1979. Lucas wasn't interested in
making Star Wars films so he stayed home in California
while Kershner directed it in England. It was much more logistically
complicated than anyone had anticipated, and ended up weeks over
schedule and millions of dollars over budget. Lucas flew to England
a few times, but otherwise watched the picture disintegrate from a
distance, horrified as he saw his investment go to waste. He
re-edited the film out of desperation but it was a disaster, and
Kershner had to re-cut it (sometimes Marcia is thought to have
uncreditedly edited the film, though she probably just offered some
input). Tensions with producer Gary Kurtz became so great that the
two never worked together again. Lucas was soon diagnosed with an
ulcer and experienced the same anxiety-related symptoms that had
caused him to be hospitalised during the production of Star
Wars. Empire was not the fun romp he had envisioned in
1977, and his personal life was not any more
improved.
What was Marcia
doing during all of this? Apparently, not much. Scorsese had been
her number one employer over the previous half decade, but he was
between films at the time, New York, New York having done
bad business. But did she even want to work? Scorsese finally made
Raging Bull in 1980, but he went with Thelma Shoonmaker to
edit the picture, whom he hired as editor for virtually every single
film he has made since then. Lucas was able to coax Marcia into
sorting out the split-screen edits on More American
Graffiti, released in 1979, but she did so begrudgingly;
Eleanor Coppola asked her to edit her documentary Hearts of
Darkness, but she told her she was "too busy putting her house
in order." [lxxvi] Offers apparently continued to role in for her to
edit, and even to produce and direct. Marcia, however, seems to
have been waiting for George to settle down so that they could get
back to starting a family like he said he would do. "She worked so
hard for so many years without stopping that she just wanted to stay
home for a while," Eleanor Coppola remarked. [lxxvii]
Marcia busied herself by helping out on the business
end of Lucasfilm, and doing trivial things like organizing the
company softball and sailing teams. Empire later
opened to much success in 1980 and with its massive box office and
the flood of Star Wars merchandise produced in the
interggenum the Lucasfilm corporation had begun to rival Disney. But
instead of slowing down, Lucas went straight into production of
Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, and then began
construction of the massive Skywalker Ranch, an involved and
stressful undertaking which left him perpetually distant. "I don't
know how one person has that much energy," production co-ordinator
Miki Herman observed. [lxxviii]
The company meanwhile had expanded to include many smaller
divisions, such as Sprocket Works and the computer division, and
Skywalker Sound, requiring careful management and a ballooning
business team. In 1979, the company fourth of July picnic included
less than fifty employees, but by 1982, there were over a thousand
of them--friends and employees began referring to the sprawling
complex as "Lucasland." Producer Gary Kurtz looks back on this stage
in Lucas' life, when the Lucasfilm empire swallowed him up, and
muses:
"The saddest thing about watching that process
was the slow takeover by the bureaucracy...With that slowly came
this thing about dress code, company policy, and nobody talking to
press, and a firm of PR people, and it was quite frustrating really.
I was there longer than anybody, and had been with him for the
longest period of time, and I just felt that I didn't like it...The
bureaucracy grew and grew. You couldn't talk to George. You had to
talk to his assistant. It became more Howard Hughes, in a way. I
decided I was more interested in working on interesting films than
in being tied to a machine like that." [lxxix]
Skywalker Ranch was Lucas' biggest project yet, and Marcia
begrudgingly found herself a business person with her husband,
overseeing management on the facility. Sacrificing her career, she
tried to find some kind of creative outlet by involving herself in
the Ranch's design, hoping that her husband would soon diminish his
imperial reach. George's reciprocation, conveniently, was to
continue to work on his Ranch project, rationalising that she could
use the facility as well. "Marcia has sort of put her editorial
career on hold," Lucas said in 1981, "and is now working as an
interior designer. I don't really know if she'll go back to
editing--and she's a good editor. Usually the offers are to go to
New York or to go to Los Angeles, and that's no fun for us. It's
like six months apart, and coming home at weekends maybe. But once
we get our facility up here, if a director wants her to edit, it
will be much easier to convince him to do it up here rather than
wherever he lives. The whole reason for the ranch actually--it's
just a giant facility to allow my wife to cut film in Marin County."
[lxxx] As author John Baxter notes, however, the joke was probably
lost on Marcia, who stood by, befuddled why a man who was supposed
to be retiring was building a multi-million-dollar mini-studio at
the expense of his personal life.
Marcia saw the
same process occurring in Lucas' friend and mentor, Francis
Coppola, though Lucas agreed that Coppola's ego had become
unfathomable since Godfather, Godfather II and
Apocalypse Now turned him into the biggest director in
history, and she especially empathised with Eleanor, Francis' wife.
"It was no secret that Francis was a pussy hound," Marcia
remarks bluntly. "Ellie used to be around for half an hour or so,
and then she'd disappear, go upstairs with the kids, and Francis
would be feeling up some babe in the pool. I was hurt and
embarrassed for Ellie, and I thought Francis was pretty disgusting,
the way he treated his wife." [lxxxi] Following in the steps of
Lucas, Coppola too became distant with his grandiose ambitions and
attempted to build his own studio as well, alienating even
Lucas.
George, however,
had been mulling over things after the
Empire Strikes Back fiasco, as his life continued to be
consumed by work. When he began making the Star Wars sequel
in 1977, he thought it would be the first of eleven sequels that
would provide the funding for Skywalker Ranch to maintain its annual
million-dollar overhead. By 1979, he altered this number to eight
sequels. Yet after the film was done production, much had changed,
and the business drama of 1980, which included re-organizing
Lucasfilm and firing president Bob Greber, left him suffering
chronically from headaches and dizziness. He was quite literally
working himself to death, not having realised just what an
undertaking he was immersing himself in, and Marcia begged him to
step back while their relationship still had a chance of surviving;
as business partner in Lucasfilm, things were no fun for her either.
"He's doing a thousand things all the time," she said. [lxxxii]
George agreed--and they also began seriously thinking about adopting
a child, finally.
"I see [my family] a couple hours a night and maybe on
Sundays if I'm lucky," Lucas said at the time, "and I'm always real
tired and cranky and feeling like, 'Gee, I should be doing something
else.' I sort of speed through everything...It's been very hard on
Marcia, living with someone who constantly is in agony; uptight and
worried, off in never-never land." [lxxxiii] His contract
with Fox was for three Star Wars films and so that's what
he would make--his next Star Wars sequel would be his last.
It would also be his final ace-in-hole to pay off the Ranch, which
he vowed would be his final mega-project before settling down and
enjoying the fruits of his labour.
But life wasn't
all bad, of course; the Lucases struggled to remain normal, and
remain attached to each other. For George, this was most difficult
of all, constantly distracted by his workaholic mindset and often
leaving him physically absent, but Marcia's down-to-earth
sensibilities kept him grounded and offered a much-needed alternate
perspective for him, and she helped him grow as a person. Pollock
writes:
"Marcia admits it has been a struggle. She was never
pleased that George's hobby was also his work. She nags him to read
books for recreation, not research. Almost grudgingly, he now reads
contemporary novels by James Michener and James Clavell and classics
by Robert Louis Stevenson and O. Henry...Marcia also gets George to
play tennis with her, his sole form of exercise, as a small paunch
testifies. Marcia can still make George laugh--'She's a funny lady,'
Bill Neil says approvingly. 'She's loosened him up considerably.'
She also serves as the butt of her husband's dry, sardonic humor: at
the Raiders wrap party in Hawaii in 1980, George persuaded
producer Frank Marshall to tumble into Marcia's birthday cake and
was ecstatic when the stunt came off flawlessly. Marcia's off-color
remarks still make Lucas blush, but he's more affectionate now than
in the past--he'll even put his arm around her in public."
[lxxxiv]
Marcia said to Denise Worrell: "I've been after him for
years to get some other interests to help him relax. He's been
skiing twice now, and he's a little more interested in exercise.
From time to time we have parties if a friend is getting married, or
two to three times a year we have six or eight close friends over
for dinner and then go see a movie in the projection room."
[lxxxv]
In 1981, an
unusual lull in their lives, a child finally entered. Marcia and
George adopted a daughter, Amanda. Hoping to clear the table for
family life, Lucas hired Lawrence Kasdan to finish writing
Return of the Jedi , Richard Marquand was brought in to
direct, and producer Howard Kazanjian ensured a smooth
production--things seemed like maybe they would be better. Marcia
recalls with fondness this one brief glimpse of domestic
happiness:
"I make everyone leave at six o'clock so that
when George comes home, it's just the two of us and Amanda. Now that
we have Amanda we actually have dinner at the table. I cook, I do
the dishes, and we give Amanda a bath together. George sometimes
feeds her a bottle in the TV room. We just decided to try to keep
our lives as normal as possible. We both have very traditional
values. When you get a big jolt of money, it's very easy to be in
awe of it and lose touch with reality. I don't want to raise
children in a fantasy." [lxxxvi]
Yet it was not to
last. George became more and more involved in Return of the
Jedi, becoming a permanent figure on the set in England. He
supervised each days filming and even directed portions of the
material himself, becoming a full-time second-unit director, while
in his spare moments he was busy prepping the much-anticipated
Indiana Jones sequel. Instead, Marcia was left behind in their empty
mansions and hotel rooms.
By the time Lucas
realised how far he had slipped it was already 1983, where he was
simultaneously finishing post-production on Return of the
Jedi and flying to and from the set of Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom in Sri Lanka. He states early in the
year:
"When I was in film school, [work] was 24-hours a
day, seven days a week--that was all I thought about and did. I
didn't do anything else! Then when I started working
professionally and got married, I had to work all the time in
order just to get anywhere. And I didn't have a vacation until I
finished my first film and went to Europe. I had a couple of bucks
in the bank, and I said, 'It's now or never.' My wife had been
bugging me. I'd been at it for four or five years straight, and she
said, 'You can't go on like this.' That was in 1973. I didn't have
another vacation until 1977--when I went to Hawaii, after Star
Wars. My wife likes to have vacations. She doesn't like not to
be able to go anywhere, year in and year out. She'd like to be able
to say, 'Look, let's take off for two or three weeks and just cool
out.' So I promised her that after Star Wars every
year we'd take two vacations--two to three weeks each year. That
lasted for one year. Now, I try to get in one vacation a year, for a
week or so, it always comes down to saying, 'Next week. Just let me
get past this thing...' By the time you get past this thing, there's
always something else, and you can't leave." [lxxvii]
Dale Pollock's biography, written at the
time, offers some sad clues to the state of the Lucases
marriage. Both Marcia and George seem to reflect bitterly on the
current state of their life. Marcia remarks: "Getting here was a lot more fun than being here."
[lxxxviii] Coping with fame and celebrity was a challenge for Marcia
as much as it was for her husband, and his emotional distance only
compounded matters. Pollock
writes:
"Marcia's
biggest transition was leaving their Medway home, where she and
George had lived for nine years; it was so small she could clean it
herself. Now she lives in a mansion, dependent on a household staff.
'Once in a while, it's a little uncomfortable feeling you really
can't do it all by yourself,' she says. When Marcia Griffin married
George Lucas in 1969, she thought he would never be more than a
director of weird movies. So when he became the most successful
filmmaker in Hollywood history, Marcia didn't know how to react. She
felt guilty of her sudden prosperity; both she and George feel they
don't deserve it. Marcia resented her rich friends when she was
young; now she wears a large diamond ring and does her errands in a
Mercedes Benz. 'I think some of the striving has been taken out of
my life,' Marcia says quietly. 'I was a great achiever, a self-made
girl who started from nothing and worked hard and got rewarded. In a
way, I regret having all the obstacles removed.' "
[lxxxix]
Things did not improve over the months, and
despite now sharing a child the emotional coldness only grew.
Richard Walter saw the Lucases at a party at Randal Kleiser's house
just before the divorce and recalls:
"I ended up in the corner with Marcia, chatting with her, and
what she told me underscored a sense I'd always had that [intimacy]
was not a gigantic part of George's life...She just sort of blurted
it out that it was extremely isolating; it was like Fortress Lucas.
I'd heard this from people who worked with him at that time. They
would say, 'I can't stand it. He's brilliant, but it's so cold. I
feel like I'm suffocating. I've got to get out of here.' Marcia told
me she 'just couldn't stand the darkness any longer.' " [xc]
Marcia had since
become a business partner for Lucas, and while he was away shooting
Return of the Jedi in 1982, Marcia was overseeing the
interior design of Skywalker Ranch as it underwent its final phases
of construction, with a staff of twenty-five working under
her. She gave the campus-like environment dark-green walls with
burnished wood trim, antique desks and tables and a polished oak
balcony overlooking the courtyard. "I remember working at Sandler
Films, sitting in a dark cubicle. I want every employee to have a
decent place to work," she said. [xci] The facility had a great
library which was capped with an elaborate stained glass dome; a
local artist named Tom Rodrigues was hired to create the elaborate
piece, also acting as production manager of the stained glass
studio on-site that created other garnishes for the facility.
Somewhere in that time, Marcia fell in love with
him.
Given the state of
the Lucases' marriage and the emotional state of Marcia, this is not
surprising. Despite having finally adopted a baby, her marriage was
in ruins, and Marcia seems to have been in a state of depression.
Yet at the same time, she knew she had obligations to George and
their daughter as well and stayed with George for the meanwhile.
Marcia swore to me, though, that while she was attracted to
Rodrigues and later married him, she never had a physical affair
with him when she was still with George. Even still, the event
shocked George, traumatized him even--which perhaps speaks
to the extent he was out of touch with things in his personal life.
The Rodrigues incident is often emphasized by him in interviews, but
in reality it was simply the visible manifestation of a separation
that was already long underway.
Lucas, however,
had come from a conservative family that did not get
divorced. Perhaps it is because of this that George hired Marcia to
edit Return of the Jedi--a last-ditch attempt to bring them
closer together, a project to collaborate on, just like in the old
days. Journalist Denise Worrell reports, Marcia's husband says she
is "great with emotions and characters, the dying and crying
scenes," and she edited Yoda and Darth Vader's death scenes, and the
space battles as well--"George listens to her very carefully,"
Worrell notes. [xcii] Yet according to author John Baxter, it
was producer Howard Kazanjian who suggested to George that
Marcia come onboard as an editor; "you'll have to ask her," Lucas
replied. [xciii]
But the act wasn't
enough to mend the wounds that their marriage had been laced with.
Baxter reports that staff noticed a general air of coolness between
them, and they would leave the office separately each day.
[xciv] Marcia tried to do something to save the marriage--she
suggested they go to a marriage counsellor to try to work things
out. George said no to the suggestion. Marcia then suggested that
they have a trial separation, but again George refused (attitudes
Marcia surmises were picked up from his conservative father [xcv]).
He begged her to wait until Return of the Jedi was
finished, swearing that he would settle down and give her and Amanda
the attention they deserved--in between flights to the Indiana Jones
set, across the world, that is. It was the same old story. "I know
George wanted me to stay but it was just too little too late,"
Marcia says. [xcvi]
Her husband's comments in May of 1983, just
weeks before their divorce, show a sharp bitterness undercutting:
"It is hard to describe the amount of detail,
the amount of work involved [in making a film]...You can do it for a
couple of months, but year after year its gets to be grim. I've been
doing it for god knows how long. It's more and more pressure and I'm
more and more unhappy, and tired and exhausted and dragging home
endless problems at the end of the day. I'm not having much fun.
It's all work. It's very anxiety-ridden, very hard, very frustrating
and relentless. The extent to which one's personal life is usurped
cannot be overestimated. It has made me less of a happy person than
I think I could be. It has disrupted my family life. I have a wife
and a two-year-old daughter, and they are the most important things
in my life. My family is it for me. Amanda is two years old now, and
she's magic. She's this little girl and she ain't going to wait for
me. She's going, she's growing. The last thing in the world I want
is to turn around and have her be eighteen and say, 'Hi, dad, where
have you been all my life?' " [xcvii]
It seems, however, that Lucas' outreach to re-claim his
personal life came much too late to be of any effect. Author John
Baxter writes that in early June, 1983, Lucas called his staff into
his office and as he and Marcia held hands they announced they were
divorcing after fourteen years of marriage. The news was made
public soon after. The June 27th, 1983 issue of Time ran a
small announcement under the headline "divorce":
"George Lucas,
39, movie mogul who is the Force behind Star Wars. The Empire
Strikes Back and the new supergrossing ($100 million in the first
three weeks) Return of the Jedi; and Marcia Lucas, 38, film editor
(Taxi Driver, American Graffiti) who won an Academy Award for her
work on Star Wars and also cut parts of Jedi; after 14 years of
marriage, one adopted daughter, Amanda, 2, whose custody they will
share; in San Anselmo, Calif."
Aftermath
Such
is one of the final contemporaneously public mentions of Marcia in
the mass media. Lucas too faded away, and by the close of the decade
would be regarded as a recluse. But what exactly happened here?
There's a tangle of confusion, and very few sources on the matter.
In fact,most of this article is based on Dale Pollock's
Skywalking and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls--because they are the only publications that have
acknowledged and spoken to Marcia, and Pollock's book was released
before their marriage ended.
A fuzzy
picture emerges nonetheless. As Time reported, custody of
Amanda was split between Marcia and George. In the divorce trial,
Lucas lost much of his fortune--she walked away with between 35 and
50 million, depending on the source. Marcia bought a house with Tom
Rodrigues in the San Francisco suburb of Belvedere--and quickly
became pregnant with her first natural daughter, Amy. Marcia was
thirty-eight years old.
Just
as Marcia was finally finding happiness, one presumes, George was in
a state of depression. He spoke to 60 Minutes about the
event decades later:
Lucas: It was very hard. The divorce kind of
destroyed me. It did take me a couple of years to sort of unwind
myself and come out of it.
Lesley Stahl: You didn't see it coming?
Lucas: Oh, no, I didn't.
Lesley Stahl: You were happy, everything was fine and--there was
another man. And you didn't know.
Lucas: Ten years younger than I was. It was one of those classic
divorce situations." [xcviii]
Marcia, however, insists that Lucas uses the "affair" as a
crutch--the problems in his marriage were complex and the two were
headed to separation long before this, while Marcia was physically
faithful to George the whole time. "It was such an easy out for him
to say 'I left him for another man'," Marcia wrote to me. In many
ways, it allows George to avoid having to take responsibility for
his very active part in the deterioration of their relationship by
pointing to Marcia as the culprit in it's failure. His incredulity
seems nonetheless genuine--perhaps it hadn't actually crossed his
mind that she would leave him. Lucas' close friend Steven Spielberg,
whom Lucas would be working with on the Indiana Jones sequel as the
divorce was occurring, remembers the time: "[The divorce] pulverized
him. George and Marcia, for me, were the reason you got married,
because it was insurance policy that marriages do work...and when
that marriage didn't work, I lost my faith in marriage for a long
time." [xcix]
As
Return of the Jedi was released and the Ranch completed,
the sacrifice that he thought would grant him personal and financial
freedom, Lucas was left in desertion. Yet at the same time, the end
of George and Marcia is one of tragedy. George's preoccupation with
work, in many ways, was rationalised as being done for Marcia and
his family, in order to guarantee them security; celebrities come
and go and no one was sure that Star Wars would last, so it was
strategically wise to capitalise on it as much as possible while
George was still the flavour of the month. Once things were in place
and the Ranch completed, they would be set for life. In many ways,
however, this was merely rationalising his own empire
aspirations--he claims he was doing it for her, but they were
already millionaires many times over, and had been for almost a
decade, while Lucas was claiming that he just wanted to make little
personal films like he had been doing before, which would not
require a million-dollar state-of-the-art facility. Marcia didn't
want or need Skywalker Ranch, she just wanted to have a normal life,
and being multi-milionaires they had the ability to settle down, and
settle down in luxury, while George could continue to have a career
as one of the most successful filmmakers of his time. Lucas was
simply too wrapped up in his empire building to see that his
personal life was disintegrating, or else recognized it
but convinced himself that it was okay. In many ways, it is
surprising that Marcia stayed with him for so
long. Marcia
recalls:
"By the time George could afford to have a film
facility he no longer wanted to direct. After Star Wars, he
insisted, 'I'm never going to direct another establishment-type
movie again.' I used to say, 'For someone who wants to be an
experimental filmmaker, why are you spending this fortune on a
facility to make Hollywood movies? We edited THX in our
attic, we edited American Graffiti over Francis' garage, I
just don't get it, George.' The Lucasfilm empire--the computer
division, ILM, the licensing and lawyers--seemed to me to be this
inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars
trilogy. But he wasn't going to make any more Star Wars, and
the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be
left with this huge facility with its enormous overhead. And why did
he want to do that if he wasn't going to make movies? I still don't
get it." [c]
Yet
perhaps some fault also finds her way for not leaving him, for
instead putting up with it to the point where things got as bad as
they did; that George resents her is not completely surprising,
especially given that she was granted so much money in the trial, so
much in fact that his dream of independence crumbled and the
Lucasfilm corporation was put in dire straits for most of the 1980s.
In Marcia's defense, however, her settlement, either 35 or 50
million depending on the source, was fair when one considers her
importance not just as Lucas' spouse but as his legitimate partner
as well--as Lucasfilm president Bob Greber noted to Dale Pollock in
his 1983 book, "people sometimes forget that Marcia
Lucas owns half of this company and is a very important part of it."
[ci] George himself may have even forgotten this; Marcia was not
merely a gold-digger.
At
the same time, the separation has a circular irony to it;
George emotionally neglected Marcia for years in the hopes of
securing his private empire, yet in the end this pushed her away
completely, and when she left she took away the private empire that
had instigated the process in the first place. His greed cost him
his wife, and his empire. It is my opinion that Lucas chose to shape
Anakin Skywalker's arc in the prequels in a similar manner because
of his reflections on his own self-created loss.
Walter
Murch offers his view on the collapse, stating, "I
think what Marcia saw was that his success was winding him tighter
and tighter into a workaholic control-driven person, and she thought
that this was destructive, which it probably is in the long run."
[cii] Their friends Ronda Gomez and Howard Zieff were
unsurprised by the split. "He just didn't want to
have fun," Gomez says of Lucas. "Marcia wanted to go to Europe and
see things. George wanted to stay in the hotel room and have his TV
dinners." [ciii]
Finally,
Marcia revealed her side of the story in a rare interview in Peter
Biskind's 1997 book:
"I felt that we had paid our dues, fought our
battles, worked eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day. I wanted
to stop and smell the flowers. I wanted joy in my life. And George
just didn't. He was very emotionally blocked, incapable of sharing
feelings. He wanted to stay on that workaholic track. The empire
builder, the dynamo. And I couldn't see myself living that way for
the rest of my life.
I felt we were partners, partners in the ranch, partners in our
home, and we did these films together. I wasn't a fifty percent
partner, but I felt I had something to bring to the table. I was the
more emotional person who came from the heart, and George was the
more intellectual and visual, and I thought that provided a nice
balance. But George would never acknowledge that to me. I think he
resented my criticisms, felt that all I ever did was put him down.
In his mind, I always stayed the stupid Valley girl. He never felt I
had any talent, he never felt I was very smart and he never gave me
much credit. When we were finishing Jedi, George told me he
thought I was a pretty good editor. In the sixteen years of our
being together I think that was the only time he complimented me."
[civ]
If
George was bitter about the experience, it seems Marcia, with
characteristic verve, has a chip on her shoulder as
well.
Lucas
eventually began dating pop singer Linda Rondstat. Yet the divorce
remained a sensitive issue--Marcia's social circle was the same as
George's social circle, but George was not exactly in the mood to be
around the woman who left him and took half of his fortune. With
most of their mutual associates being friends to George firstly, he
was in a position to dictate terms. "He was very
bitter and vindictive about the divorce," Marcia remembers. "Francis
and Ellie [Coppola] used to have an Easter party out in Napa, and
the first couple of years after the divorce, I used to get to see
everyone, the Barwoods, the Robbinses, and then I stopped being
invited. Years later I ran into Ellie down in L.A., and she said, 'I
always wanted to call you to explain that when Francis and George
were working on Tucker, George asked him not to invite you,
because he was very uncomfortable around you.' That really hurt.
It's not enough that I'm erased from his life, he wants to blackball
me too, with people who were my friends. It's like I never
existed." [cv] Marcia was slowly fading
away.
Lucas
and his media interviews seems to give the strong impression that
Amanda was raised by him alone--Marcia remarked to me that
the 60 Minutes interviews and whatnot portray him as
"Mr. Mom," without any mention of Marcia. While this may be
true with his other two children, such is not the case with Amanda.
"I might have left George," Marica wrote to me, "but I never left
Amanda!" She had a 50% time share of her daughter, and raised her
with George, even though they were divorced. Marcia wrote to me that
she has been actively "involved in every aspect of her life. She has
become an amazing, wonderful, really good human being." Marcia
legally kept the last name Lucas so that her daughter would have
parents with the same last name. Amanda was "Amanda Lucas" while Amy
was "Amy Lucas-Rodrigues". Besides, she told me, it was her
professional name for all her years as an editor and the name
everyone knew her as. "I had no connection to my birth father's name
because he had abandoned us," she told me. "I was a sort of a Marcia
No-Name but I did have a professional name, the name on all my film
credits...I am proud of the work I did as Marcia Lucas. I was part
of an amazing era in American cinema."
Sadly,
Marcia did not continue working as an editor. With her and Rodrigues
being millionaires, she finally was able to find the sort of normal
life she had always been searching for. Still, her talent is missed.
John Milius muses, "One of the great losses is that
Marcia never became a filmmaker and continued as an editor." [cvi]
Indeed--and Denise Worrel reports that Marcia, by 1983, had
gotten offers to direct. Dale Pollock notes this as well, but says
the scripts weren't very good, and Lucas wisely advised her that if
she wasn't passionate about the story then the film wouldn't turn
out well. [cvii] However, since Marcia began family life,
Pollock reports that the idea of directing or editing had lost it's
appeal to her. Her number one interest, it seems, was being a mom.
After the
Aftermath
Perhaps
even more sadly, her marriage to Tom Rodrigues ended prematurely as
well, divorcing after ten years of being together, as Tom told me in
a personal communication. Marcia told me that she was "married to
Tom Rodrigues for less than five years," and that "he
turned out to be a bit of a scoundral." Take it
as you will. "I didn't really want his name," she wrote to
me, "but during the marriage I wanted our daughter Amy to have
a mom and dad with her name, so I was Marcia Lucas
Rodrigues." Rodrigues and his current girlfriend (wife?) Linda
Stutz, moved to Maple Creek, California in 2001 to start a
vineyard together. His website includes a brief
bio:
"Tom
knew he would be an Artist from an early age, in fact, at 14 he was
apprenticing in a stained glass studio and by 17, he was teaching
adult education classes in stained glass. Tom has always followed
his dreams and passions. His love and talent for baseball brought
him an offer to play for the NY Mets farm team when he was a senior
at Los Gatos High School. But Tom chose to pursue his art and
continue to develop his talent in art. In the early 1980's, he was
the Designer and Production Manager of George Lucas's Skywalker
Ranch Studio that created incredible custom glass work [...] He has
since designed many wine labels, several which reflect the influence
and his love of Art Noveau. Then, in 2001, he decided to combine his
passions for Art and Wine, and he and his sweetheart Linda moved to
Mendocino to embark on a new life at Maple Creek and start Maple
Creek Winery."
"Marcia
Lucas" meanwhile is listed as an executive producer on an
independent film called No Easy Way from 1996, but there is
no further information on her involvement here, or if this is even
her. Her memory survives at USC, where the Marcia
Lucas Post-Production Building serves as the premiere editing
facility of the esteemed cinema school.
Amy
was Tom and Marcia's only child, and it is unlikely that Marcia had
any more, given her age when her relationship with him ended.
Today,
Marcia would be about sixty-five years old. Her whereabouts are
unknown.
Marcia
Griffin filmography:
-Freelance
commercial assistant
editor (1964-1969?)
-Filmmaker
(1968; editor)
-Medium
Cool (1969; assistant editor)
-Rain
People (1969; assistant editor)
-THX
1138 (1971; assistant editor)
-The
Candidate (1972; assistant editor)
-American
Graffiti (1973; editor) *Oscar
nomination
-Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974;
editor)
-Taxi
Driver (1976; supervising editor) *BAFTA
nomination
-Star
Wars (1977; editor) *Oscar win
-New
York, New York (1977; supervising
editor)
-More
American Graffiti (1979; uncredited
editor)
-Return
of the Jedi (1983; editor)
End
Notes
01/06/10
Web site and all contents © Copyright Michael
Kaminski 2007-2010, All rights reserved.
Free
website templates |
|
