FANTASIA OBSCURA: You Can Thank George Lucas’ Futuristic Flop For ‘Star Wars’
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, when you score a really big success, everyone wants to give the first draft just one more try…
THX 1138 (1971)
(Dist.: Warner Brothers; Dir.: George Lucas)
Before there was the legend, there was the man.
Before he turned Hollywood on its ear and helped turn the summer spectacle tent pole film into a business necessity; before co-creating Indiana Jones with Stephen Spielberg and bringing to life the saga of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader; before all of that, George Lucas was a 25-year-old recent graduate from the USC Film School who got work in the film industry. He took a position at Warner Brothers under Frances Ford Coppola as a camera operator on his pic Finian’s Rainbow, then operated a camera for the Maysles on the documentary Gimmie Shelter.
And like a lot of normal folks going into the business, he hated his first few gigs. Which made him very receptive to the offer Coppola gave him to form American Zoetrope, the production company that gave Lucas a chance to put together his first feature.
In terms of having a “personal vision” to build a film around, Lucas embraced the chance to go all out in presenting his. His story, set sometime in the future (but showing lots of connections to current consumerist culture), occurs after humanity is forced underground due to ecological collapse up above, where society and humans are highly regulated, if not efficiently so. The populace is encouraged to produce, consume, avoid accidents, and be happy — or at least compliant. Humans become more machine by this stage, almost an afterthought to a repressive regime that lost all its humanity and expects everyone else to now do the same.
Our main focus, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) works in assembling machines in a dangerous environment. He has a roommate, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), who for reasons unspecified decides to switch out the mandatory drugs THX is on for mood suppression (which everyone else is supposed to be on) in order to get him to be more intimate with her. This causes problems with her supervisor, SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasance), who himself has a physical attraction to THX, making for an awkward triangle that can’t get too complicated before the state arrests all three of them, sentencing THX and SEN to a featureless gulag from which they try and escape.
In the film’s favor, Lucas’ aesthetic sense was quite well developed at the time, and the conceit that to best build a film about the future, you required things that exist in the present in order to give it a live-in feel and thus make it more believable, was a revolutionary approach at the time that became common wisdom afterwards. Having already experimented with this concept on an earlier version of the work, his student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, Lucas built his future out of locations that included unfinished at the time sections of the BART system in San Francisco, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the underwater highway tunnels that connect Oakland to Alameda, getting a lived-in environment that supports his ambition nicely.
Assisting the visuals in building this immersive future are such touches as the aural collages built by sound editor Walter Mursch. His work was certainly influential on where Lucas would go in the future; the only thing that prevented the two of them working more closely years later was his commitments to Coppola for Apocalypse Now.
While the film is a great indicator of George Lucas’ strengths as an innovative filmmaker, it’s also a clear warning as to his limits as a script writer. There’s plenty of cool looking things to see in this future, but very little of it makes sense. The origin of LUH’s desire to get amorous is never explained, and the fact that it’s her screwing with THX’s drugs that makes him a focus that’s more victim than hero; why instead of asking for help from the state he lets LUH then SEN bully him into things is never really earned. And small things that come up in the script just undercut any potential engagement, like the ability to override a human body not being used more effectively to control the populace (and cut 50 minutes of run time from the film), the importance of keeping every action the police undertake under budget, why the robot police look menacing but never actually pose a threat, or why a repressive state living underground needs cars when forcing people to use the train would do a better job of controlling everyone.
With a script that repelled as many audience members as the visuals drew in, the film was not a financial success when first released. Its cold ascetics and full immersion of the audience into an oppressive existence did not sit well, and Warner Brothers was wary of ever doing anything with George Lucas in the future.
Lucas, for his part, would not let his vision go. He was not closed to feedback, however, and after a brief side project, he returned to his theme of a society that used cybernetic repression to strip humanity from its subjects.
This time, instead of setting his piece in our coming future under San Francisco, he recast it as a tale placed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… with much, much better results.
With his reputation secured, Lucas’ first commercial film got its fans while continuing to be hard to embrace. Between the use of imagery inspired by the film in such places as the video for Queen’s “Calling All Girls” and the 2009 film Fanboys, people still find it difficult to sit through. We can assume that this might be a frustration for Lucas, who named his sound business spinoff from Lucasfilm THX Ltd. (the subsidiary with the “Deep Note” audio logo), which explains his revisiting the film in 2004:
In doing this, giving his first film the same treatment he gave the first Star Wars trilogy in the decade before, he added glitz and chrome without the further understructure needed to make the story work better. In so adding considerable bits of CGI elements to a film that was originally intended to show the future with things found on hand, Lucas abandoned the original aesthetic and showed how far he’d come from his early days just out of USC.
In becoming a dehumanized product of consumption, THX 1138 makes the ultimate statement about that future by becoming the dystopia it warned us about.
NEXT TIME: A tale of ghosts and curses, in a film that was not half as harrowing to the two comedians who were in it as the production itself was…
