The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (257 page)

Lucas has been producer or executive producer on the following, and no mere figurehead. He has been involved at every step. No one should question his sense of storytelling, writing, casting, design, and editing. In opting not to direct, Lucas does not signal withdrawal or superiority. Rather, he testifies to the principle that American pictures are produced, not directed.

The pictures are:
More American Graffiti
(79, B. W. L. Norton);
The Empire Strikes Back
(80, Irvin Kershner);
Kagemusha
(80, Akira Kurosawa)—which Lucas backed, out of admiration for Kurosawa;
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(81, Steven Spielberg);
Return of the Jedi
(83, Richard Marquand);
Twice Upon a Time
(83, John Korty and Charles Swenson);
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(84, Spielberg);
The Ewok Adventure
(84, Korty);
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
(85, Paul Schrader);
Latino
(85, Haskell Wexler);
Ewoks: the Battle for Endor
(85, Jim and Ken Wheat);
Howard the Duck
(86, Willard Huyck), his first unmitigated failure;
Labyrinth
(86, Jim Henson);
The Land Before Time
(88, Don Bluth);
Powaqqatsi
(88, Godfrey Reggio);
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
(88, Francis Ford Coppola);
Willow
(88, Ron Howard); and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(89, Spielberg).

Lucas was a home-movie maker while in junior college in Modesto. From the start, he was interested in special effects and camera tricks. He was encouraged by Haskell Wexler, the photographer, and he went on to the University of Southern California film department. While there, he made a science-fiction short,
THX 1138: 4EB
, which won a prize at the National Student Film Festival.

He was the friend and protégé of Francis Ford Coppola, who allowed Lucas to attend the shooting of
Finian’s Rainbow
. Lucas made promotional shorts on the filming of Coppola’s
The Rain People
and J. Lee Thompson’s
Mackenna’s Gold
. Then Coppola’s sponsorship enabled him to turn his student movie into a feature debut.
THX 1138
is Lucas’s only flop: its Orwellian allegory is very cursory, but its imagery is more distinctive than anything in the later films. On screen, the future world of white interiors and shaved-head creatures in white uniforms is beautiful and disturbing. Nothing else Lucas has done has such an intriguing fusion of cleanliness and death.

Coppola stayed in Lucas’s corner, and helped him set up
American Graffiti
at Universal. Very cheaply made, it is itself one of cinema’s largest grossers, the source of many TV spin-offs, an easygoing endorsement of youthful complacencies, and the debut of many good young players. But
Graffiti
is very wholesome, very careful to skirt problems in its subject matter—a smooth amalgam of social observation and sweet marketing. Its solemn endnotes about the destiny of the four young men are superficial and pompous, and filled with the wish to keep pain at arm’s length. No human situation is ever probed beyond its stereotypes; the mood is drunk on Coke. For all the teenage bounce, the music, and its screen omission of parents, there is nothing to alarm the middle-aged. It reflects Lucas’s bland ideology that so many TV series sprang from the film with relatively little dilution. It is a movie full of the prospect of Muzak cinema, a light show where the music never stops, a diversion without delight or distress. Boredom and malice have been subtly erased, along with misery and ecstasy—all the real, untidy ingredients of adolescent experience.

Star Wars
, too, overlaps with TV. Its acceptance marks the first occasion on which a movie reminded viewers of cozy modes and icons learned on the small screen. It is
Star Trek
with richer tricks, and a thinner dramatic or intellectual thread than the TV show generally offered. The film does not risk disapproval or recognize adults. Rebukes about its pretty mindlessness can seem grumpy or heavy-handed. But its excitement is never rooted in character or moral ordeal. There is no danger to the people on film, and no challenge to those watching. Its people are raised on junk food; they are pink, puffy, and anonymous. Good and evil are reduced to the level of opposing sides in electronic Ping-Pong. The film is sterile from lack of atmosphere or sensuality, and chilly with its own brittle humor. Above all,
Star Wars
and the Lucas empire raise the worry that brilliant film students know too little about life, and are then protected from learning more by their outlandish success.

He produced an intriguing series,
Young Indiana Jones
, for TV, and in 1991 he won the Thalberg award. Lucas remains in Marin, master of a magnificent facility, devoted to sound, special effects, and research. The future belongs to his work, but will he aid it or direct it?

Well, he returned as a director (after an interval of more than twenty years) with a retrospective first episode of
Star Wars—The Phantom Menace
. The special effects were delirious—the actors (from Liam Neeson to Ewan McGregor) were glum. The film was another massive hit, but there was a new mood—people hadn’t enjoyed this picture. Those always averse to the
Star Wars
legend began to feel vindicated.
Episode II
was Lucas again, with a love story—but there was more passion felt for the clones and the computer. One day, for sure, all six episodes will exist—and maybe robots will watch them.

Tom Luddy
, b. New York, 1943
I have been lucky with friends, and ever since moving to San Francisco (in 1981) Tom Luddy has been an essential companion and connection. I wonder how many more people in this book, or in the large world of film, would say the same. From that one easily reaches this conclusion: that while Tom is every film lover’s ally (he is truly the friend of film as an idea and a practice), still it is his knack to make every one of us feel individually blessed with his advice, his recommendations, and the dinners where he may introduce you to … Chris Marker, Manny Farber, Pierre Rissient, and so on, and so on.

I met him first in New York at Nick Ray’s birthday party (his last, I think). Tom had done so much by then, including the attempt to look after the ailing Nick in the Bay Area, to put up with his scandals, excesses, and tantrums, trying to nurse him toward some project. Tom had come west originally to attend the University of California at Berkeley. While there he shifted his major from physics to English (and found golf as the marriage of the two), and attached himself to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley as viewer, helper, and eventual director (1972–79). In addition, he fell in with Alice Waters, lived with her, and helped her found the restaurant Chez Panisse (named after Pagnol’s character, and a favorite place for the film community).

One service Tom did at the PFA was to offer and show movie classics to Francis Ford Coppola as his career bloomed—this was the late sixties and the seventies. It’s fair to say that Zoetrope’s great interest in foreign directors (from Gance to Kurosawa, from Syberberg to Godard) owed a lot to Tom’s urgings. So it was natural that when Tom left the PFA (officially) in 1979, he became director for special projects at Zoetrope. Those ventures included the restoration and showing of Gance’s
Napoléon
and Syberberg’s
Our Hitler
.

Over the following years, therefore, Tom served as a producer on a number of exceptional ventures: he assisted on
Sans Soleil
(82, Chris Marker); he produced
Mishima
(85, Paul Schrader);
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
(87, Norman Mailer);
Barfly
(87, Barbet Schroeder);
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
(90, Dominique Deruddere);
Wind
(92, Carroll Ballard);
The Secret Garden
(93, Agnieszka Holland);
My Family, Mi Familia
(95, Gregory Nava)—and had a helping hand in many other productions. I’m sure there are more to come.

Beyond that, in 1974 (with Bill Pence and James Card) Tom founded the Telluride Film Festival, a unique event, still led by Tom and Bill. It is a film festival that occurs over the Labor Day weekend in a small town in Colorado; it is intimate, it regularly mixes retrospectives and early viewings of important new works. It has a claim to be the most rarified and exhilarating film festival in the world.

Of course, it takes place at nine thousand feet, with thirteen-thousand-foot peaks looming overhead. This is not incidental. In 1982, Tom took me and my wife to Telluride on a drive that took in Nevada and southern Utah—Goosenecks, Bryce, Zion, Monument Valley. As it turned out, the landscape meant as much or more to me than the films—but Tom has always regarded that slight divergence on my part with fond amusement. We like most of the same films, and we have both driven the Burr Trail.

I cannot omit his ability to remember all telephone numbers; his wife, Monique, a brilliant, intuitive reader of films; his haunting appearance in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(78, Phil Kaufman); the fact that on my first Telluride trip he was also introducing Athol Fugard—not exactly a movie man, but Tom’s sense of the movies is as large as the great deserts we crossed; the chance that even now there is a carrier bag on my doorstep containing one or two unexpected tapes, a copy of the latest piece by Christopher Hitchens and … well, I’d better go and find out for myself.

In the last edition I worried that one friend—Kieran Hickey—could never be replaced. Well, it’s true: great friends are beyond replacement. But Tom has redefined friendship, and he has simply done wonders to help me without looking for thanks, reward, or credit. I daresay a hundred people in this book could say the same. Let me speak for the rest—thank you, Tom.

Bela Lugosi
(Bela Blasko) (1882–1956), b. Lugos, Hungary
While everyone knew that the Boris Karloff who played Frankenstein’s monster was an upright Englishman, amused by the genre, Lugosi was a captive of horror. Small, dark, and severe in features, his acting was so florid and yet so macabre that only some fanciful notion of Hungarian mythology could explain it. He could be frightening in a way that other actors in horror never achieved: because he appeared to believe in the literal meaning of the films, and because it was possible to be persuaded that he was himself possessed. “I am Dracula”—his first words, were less introduction than assertion. While later in
Dracula
there is a moment when Lugosi’s daringly slow delivery admits to his philosophy: “To die, to be really dead, that might be glorious.”

There is the man tortured by half-life. His Dracula was an original that the cinema never attempted to match: after Lugosi, the Count became tall and handsome, as likely to kiss as bite. Yet Lugosi’s pinched lips and his skullcap of hair were as black as congealed blood and his pallor was that of imminent extinction. Just as Peter Lorre, another Hungarian, became trapped by Hollywood in squalid spoofs of his earliest successes, so Lugosi lived on, tormented by the Ritz brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Old Mother Riley. The dross never affected his place in the history of cinema: for when the bell tolls and the door creaks, Lugosi is the one to be feared. So dire an actor smacks of authenticity in the horror game.

As Arisztid Olt, he made a few films in Hungary and a small part in
Der Januskopf
(20, F. W. Murnau). He came to America in 1921 with a touring theatrical company. By 1923 he had made a movie debut in
The Silent Command
(23, J. Gordon Edwards);
The Rejected Woman
(24, Albert Parker); and
The Midnight Girl
(25, Wilfred Noy). In 1927 he played Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. After
Prisoners
(29, William A. Seiter),
The Thirteenth Chair
(29, Tod Browning),
Such Men Are Dangerous
(30, Kenneth Hawks),
Renegades
(30, Victor Fleming), and
Wild Company
(30, Leo McCarey), Lugosi took the part intended originally for Lon Chaney in
Dracula
(31, Tod Browning).

He made very few “straight” films after that:
Broad Minded
(31, Mervyn Le Roy);
Women of All Nations
(31, Raoul Walsh), and later,
Ninotchka
(39, Ernst Lubitsch). For the rest of his career he was, with Karloff, the touchstone of frightening intentions: as Dr. Mirakle, scientist kidnapper, in
Murders in the Rue Morgue
(32, Robert Florey); as
Chandu the Magician
(32, William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel); as Murder Legendre in
White Zombie
(32, Victor Halperin);
The Death Kiss
(32, Edwin L. Marin); as a mutant in
Island of Lost Souls
(33, Erle C. Kenton);
Night of Terror
(33, Benjamin Stoloff); Dr. Vitus Verdegast, skinning Karloff alive in
The Black Cat
(34, Edgar G. Ulmer);
Gift of Gab
(34, Karl Freund); as the vampire in
The Mark of the Vampire
(35, Browning);
The Raven
(35, Lew Landers);
The Invisible Ray
(36, Lambert Hillyer);
Dracula’s Daughter
(36, Hillyer); as Ygor, charming the monster with a mournful pipe tune, in
The Son of Frankenstein
(39, Rowland V. Lee);
Dark Eyes of London
(39, Walter Summers);
The Gorilla
(39, Allan Dwan); the remade
The Black Cat
(41, Albert S. Rogell);
The Wolf Man
(41, George Waggner);
The Ghost of Frankenstein
(42, Kenton);
Return of the Vampire
(43, Landers);
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
(43, Roy William Neill);
The Body Snatcher
(45, Robert Wise);
Zombies on Broadway
(45, Gordon Douglas);
Devil Bat’s Daughter
(46, Frank Wisbar);
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
(48, Charles Barton);
Mother Riley Meets the Vampire
(52); and
The Black Sleep
(56, Reginald le Borg). Death may have come mercifully, for Lugosi died a year after having been admitted to a hospital for drug addiction.