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George Lucas: Maker of Films (1971)

The Binary Bonsai has posted a fascinating interview with George Lucas from 1971, when THX 1138 was released. It’s a rare look into the mind of a young Lucas, giving insight into the man who would change science fiction for generations to come. The interview itself is over an hour but is well worth the listen. I’ve embedded the interview below but here’s a link to the Binary Bonsai site if you want to visit it directly: http://binarybonsai.com/2009/06/20/george-lucas-maker-of-films-1971/

And this is where we come to the heart of the matter.

It is 1971, THX 1138 was released on March 11, American Zoetrope is spiraling towards certain doom, Lucas has become even more disillusioned with Hollywood than he was during his stint on McKenna’s Gold, and where exactly things go from here for the upstart and its members is all up in the air. And while American Zoetrope and Coppola had slowly started to cause waves — mostly due to THX’s failure as it were, though also because Coppola wasn’t afraid of touting American Zoetrope a state-of-the-art facility which could outmatch Hollywood, and that the company (and thus himself) was the future of filmmaking — Lucas was little more than a promising student who had made an obscure sci-fi film which opened small and died fast.

During the summer of ’71, as all of this is happening, Gene Youngblood interviewed the then 27-year-old Lucas for a Los Angeles-based educational TV station, KCET in an hour-long program called George Lucas: Maker of Films.