TRaFoSW: Part 2

THE RISE AND FALL OF STAR WARS, BLOG #2

Two Sides of the Bay

Circa 1974, while George Lucas was writing his rough draft of “The Star Wars” in San Anselmo, California, I was attending Martin Luther King Junior High School, across the bay in Berkeley, trying to survive a pretty tough place.
Although seemingly separated by the San Francisco Bay, an age gap, and circumstances, my circle of family and friends were closer to those of various filmmakers and Lucas than I knew. Given the crowded temporal spaceways of present, future, and past, those two worlds often overlapped as the decade went on, in a case of colliding individuals and interconnected free-wheeling destinies.
Our Berkeley neighbor on North Street, a steep dead-end block of shingle houses, was Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, a skinny, thoughtful man who wrote Ecotopia and was the long-time editor of Film Quarterly. George Lucas and other young directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, and movie nuts would stop by Chick’s house to hang out and talk about the latest films, new techniques and equipment, cameras, and the business during the early 1970s.
I doubt I crossed paths with them then, but Chick was often around, getting in and out of his Citroen DS, and I got to know him because his son, Hans, and I were part of a neighborhood gang of kids who played together. They also had a dachshund that ate bees. Film Quarterly, which Chick founded in 1958, helped galvanize Bay Area filmmakers, an eccentric community that wanted to be independent of the stagnant entertainment industry 500 miles to the south.
Published in 1975, Chick’s Ecotopia was a groundbreaking novel about a similar kind of thinking, where northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States to form a more civilized, more balanced society, ecologically, in terms of gender, and in its sexuality and politics. (Decades later, Chick gave me the videogame rights to Ecotopia and asked me to find a publisher, but I was unsuccessful in sparking interest.)
My father* had been lured to Berkeley by the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner. So in 1970, we’d all moved from New York City to the West Coast where he became the magazine’s Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the division Straight Arrow Books. My father, Alan, had edited and published Chick’s first book, Living Poor With Style, at Straight Arrow in 1972, but had rejected Ecotopia.
A short walk away from the Rolling Stone offices, at 746 Brannon, was American Zoetrope, at 827 Folsom, the fledgling independent film company co-founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Workdays, my father would take the bus or drive into the city to work at Rolling Stone/Straight Arrow’s funky offices south of Mission. Often, he would take me with him, on school holidays, anytime I was sick, and many weekends. We never strolled over to Zoetrope, even for a peek, but a common denominator of the two groundbreaking enterprises was drugs.
Throughout these years, so many people, particularly in the arts, were on so many drugs, that, as a kid, I had an almost permanent contact high. I didn’t take drugs, didn’t smoke pot, wasn’t interested, but didn’t need to. When the so-called grown-ups around me were tripping on LSD in Tilden Park, I could see Godzilla coming over the yellow hills. Jann Wenner tried to put my five-year-old brother, Peter, in a refrigerator; joints were passed around at pool parties—and there’s another connection. A young Rolling Stone photographer named Annie Leibovitz often came to those laid-back shindigs, took a shot of my brother Peter he still treasures, and, decades later, having become world-renown, she would take exclusive photos of George Lucas and the cast of each Prequel Trilogy Star Wars film for Vanity Fair.
My parents divorced the year after we arrived in California, but they both stayed in Berkeley. Alan bought a house in the hills above the Claremont Resort Hotel, where one of his partners in drug-addled madness, writer Hunter S. Thompson, came to work with him. At that age, about 12, all I knew about Hunter Thompson was what I’d read about “Uncle Duke”—the crazy character modeled on Hunter in “Doonesbury,” Gary Trudeau’s comic strip. I read it every morning in the newspaper without fail. Uncle Duke was a narcotics-fueled fiend with a violent streak, and my experience with Hunter only confirmed that.
I remember splashing and swimming around in the water at the Claremont while Thompson sat chain-smoking by the hotel’s swanky pool in a bathing suit and cowboy boots, with bare, skinny torso and dark sunglasses, crouched over a round, white metal table littered with ashtrays and typed pages.
He and my dad were working on some book—they would collaborate on several, which is another story—but one day circa 1974 my father was supposed to drive Hunter to the airport. He took me along for the ride, probably because it was a weekend and I was staying with him.
We arrived at the Claremont early one morning, took the elevator up to the honeymoon suite just under the flagpole tower, and found Hunter’s room. My father knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder. No answer. Then, because my father had no patience at all—we’re talking none—he pounded and kicked at the door, stretching its hinges and screaming at Hunter to open up. Moments later, Hunter appeared, scowling and unshaven, wearing a towel. Behind him I saw a half-naked woman in a messy bed. Hunter had completely forgotten about his flight.
As editor and babysitter, my father stormed in and began furiously throwing Hunter’s shirts, pants, and underwear into a suitcase.
We made it to the car—a long open convertible—and I sat in the back with Hunter as we tore down the highway across the Bay Bridge toward the San Francisco airport. I looked up at him and asked, “What would you do if you met Gary Trudeau?”
Hunter looked down at me. He had a long, haggard face, and, with a cigarette dangling from his lip (I swear), he drawled (Hunter was from Kentucky): “I’d rip his lungs out.”
A colorful and aptly phrased response, which I never forgot. Later I read a few of his books and it turned out Hunter Thompson wasn’t just some insane drug freak. He could write. I read a lot as a kid, but I never considered writing; in those days I liked to draw. “Writing” my comic books was secondary to drawing.
George Lucas didn’t take drugs and he began work on his third draft of “The Star Wars” in 1975, the year Jann Wenner fired my father (“for no good reason,” my dad told me, “but I’d lasted longer than any other Rolling Stoneexecutive”). I’d never liked Wenner, who was abrasive and, even in a kid’s eyes, manipulative. With the money from his severance deal, my father decided to become a film producer.

Next: A Kid at Universal Studios (don’t worry—will get to Lucasfilm next week)

Twitter: @jwrinzler

*See alanrinzler.com for a list of some of the classics my father edited. The Max Perkins of his generation? Alan worked with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison, and Hunter, among many others, and published Manchild in the Promised Land, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the photographs of Danny Lyon, among other projects. Today he’s a freelance editor.