Filmmaker: a diary by george lucas | |
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Directed by | George Lucas |
Written by | George Lucas |
Produced by | Francis Ford Coppola (uncredited) [a 1] |
Starring | Francis Ford Coppola Shirley Knight Robert Duvall James Caan Ron Colby |
Cinematography | George Lucas |
Edited by | George Lucas Marcia Griffin (uncredited) |
Production companies | |
Release date |
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Running time | 32 minutes [a 2] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $12,000 |
Filmmaker, or "Filmmaker: a diary by george lucas", is a 32-minute documentary made in 1968 by George Lucas about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's 1969 film The Rain People .
Coppola was working on The Rain People as a small, intimate film about real-life people, and Lucas decided to make a small, intimate cinema-verite documentary about the making of Coppola's film. Lucas pitched the idea of a documentary to Coppola, who gave Lucas the go-ahead, with the film paid for from Rain People's still photography budget. [1] [3]
The budget of the documentary was $12,000. [1] [3] Lucas filmed and recorded sound for the documentary himself, using an otherwise unutilised 16mm production camera and a Nagra tape recorder. [1] [3] [4] [5] Mona Skager, an associate on Rain People, often saw Lucas on the floor, shooting up through glass-topped tables. "It was basically because the camera was too heavy", she recalled. [1] Ron Colby, producer on The Rain People, described Lucas's work habits: "George was around in a very quiet way. You'd look around and suddenly there'd be George in a corner with his camera. He'd just kind of drift around. But he shot the camera, did his own sound. He was very much a one-man band". [5] Lucas would spend nearly every day shooting the documentary, while working on the script for THX 1138 at night. [6]
Coppola was tolerant of the documentary's production process, although occasionally appeared unhappy when the camera invaded his privacy. Lucas filmed some confrontations between Coppola and actress Shirley Knight, but ultimately rejected most of the footage. "I decided to be discreet, I didn't want to destroy anyone's career", Lucas said later. [1]
Lucas and his then-girlfriend/future wife, Marcia Griffin, edited Filmmaker. [a 3] Lucas described the documentary as "more therapy than anything else… I hadn't shot film for a long time". [9]
The closing shot says the film was made at "Transamerica Sprocket Works", a fictitious company name that Lucas liked the sound of. The film was copyrighted by American Zoetrope/Lucasfilm Ltd.—the first film credit for the unofficial, then-new names of Coppola's and Lucas's respective companies. [8]
Filmmaker was shown at the first incarnation of what would become the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 1977, and later at the first official MVFF in August 1978, both times shown along with The Rain People. [10] [11]
Dale Pollock, author of Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, wrote of the film in 1983: "Filmmaker remains one of the best documentaries about the production of a movie, as fresh and insightful today as it was in 1968… The thirty-minute film has the fluidity and detail of a written journal coupled with a cinematic sense of movement as the Rain People company goes from location to location". [7] In 1989 Peter Cowie, author of Coppola: A Biography, wrote that Filmmaker was "one of the most important analyses of Coppola's craft and his incipient philosophy". [12] In 1999, Michael Schumacher wrote, "Lucas's documentary, Filmmaker, caught the essence of the ups and downs of making The Rain People, from the exuberance of working on a risky yet fulfilling project that flew in the face of the way movies were normally made in Hollywood to Coppola's angry telephone confrontation with a Warner Bros.-Sever Arts official […]" [3]
Coppola himself later admitted that the documentary "may be better than [The Rain People]". [11] In a behind-the-scenes segment on the film Tetro , Tetro: How to Make Movies, Coppola mentions how he used the same camera dolly on Tetro as he did in The Rain People and as seen in Filmmaker. [13]
According to Pollock, Lucas himself was proud of Filmmaker, his most ambitious effort at that time, and a film that contributed to advancing his career. [7] It was to be his last short film before making his first feature, THX 1138 . [14] [15]
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood film movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time. Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).
George Walton Lucas Jr. is an American filmmaker and philanthropist. He created the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founded Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012. Nominated for four Academy Awards, he is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers: he directed or conceived ten of the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. He is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement, and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster. Despite this, he has remained an independent filmmaker away from Hollywood for most of his career.
THX 1138 is a 1971 American social science fiction film co-written and directed by George Lucas in his directorial debut. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and co-written by Walter Murch, the film stars Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, with Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie, and Ian Wolfe in supporting roles. The film is set in a dystopian future in which the citizens are controlled by android police and mandatory use of drugs that suppress emotions.
American Graffiti is a 1973 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by George Lucas, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and Lucas, and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Bo Hopkins, and Wolfman Jack. Set in Modesto, California, in 1962, the film is a study of the cruising and early rock 'n' roll cultures popular among Lucas's age group at that time. Through a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures throughout a single night.
John Frederick Milius is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer. He was a writer for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now (1979), and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion (1975), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and Red Dawn (1984). He later served as the co-creator of the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television series Rome (2005–2007).
An independent film, independent movie, indie film, or indie movie is a feature film or short film that is produced outside the major film studio system in addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies. Independent films are sometimes distinguishable by their content and style and how the filmmakers' artistic vision is realized. Sometimes, independent films are made with considerably lower budgets than major studio films.
American Zoetrope is a privately run American film production company, centered in San Francisco, California and founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a 1988 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Jeff Bridges as inventor Preston Tucker. The film recounts Tucker's story and his attempt to produce and market the Tucker 48, which was met with scandal between the Big Three automobile manufacturers and accusations of stock fraud from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Joan Allen, Martin Landau, Elias Koteas, Frederic Forrest and Christian Slater appear in supporting roles. For his performance, Landau was nominated for the Academy Award and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Roman François Coppola is an American filmmaker. He is the son of Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola, and is known for his film collaborations with Wes Anderson.
A zoetrope is a device used for animation. It makes motion pictures using rotating images viewed through occasional slits to give it a moving feel.
Verna Fields was an American film editor, film and television sound editor, educator, and entertainment industry executive. In the first phase of her career, from 1954 through to about 1970, Fields mostly worked on smaller projects that gained little recognition. She was the sound editor for several television shows in the 1950s. She worked on independent films including The Savage Eye (1959), on government-supported documentaries of the 1960s, and on some minor studio films such as Peter Bogdanovich's first film, Targets (1968). For several years in the late 1960s, she was a film instructor at the University of Southern California. Her one major studio film, El Cid (1961), led to her only industry recognition in this phase of her career, which was the 1962 Golden Reel award for sound editing.
Marcia Lou Lucas is an American film editor. She is best known for her work editing the Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983) as well as other films by her then-husband George Lucas: THX-1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). She also edited Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and New York, New York (1977).
The Rain People is a 1969 American road drama film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Shirley Knight, James Caan and Robert Duvall. The film centers on a middle-class housewife (Knight), who runs away from her husband after learning she is pregnant.
Tetro is a 2009 drama film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich and Maribel Verdú. Filming took place in 2008 in Buenos Aires, Patagonia, and Spain. An international co-production between the United States, Argentina, Spain and Italy, the film received a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on June 11, 2009.
John Korty, was an American film director and animator, best known for the television film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and the documentary Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?, as well as the theatrical animated feature Twice Upon a Time. He has won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and several other major awards. He is described by the film critic Leonard Maltin as "a principled filmmaker who has worked both outside and within the mainstream, attempting to find projects that support his humanistic beliefs".
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr, is loosely inspired by the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Willard, who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces officer who is accused of murder and presumed insane. The ensemble cast also features Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper, and Harrison Ford.
Scott Bartlett was one of the premiere abstract/experimental cinematic artists of the late 1960s and the 1970s. His acclaimed work, such as his intensely abstract 16mm movie Moon 1969, is greatly admired by many movie directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. His notable abstract movies and visual avant-garde motion pictures includes Serpent, Medina, Metanomen, Lovemaking, and the poignant interior documentary 1970. His 1967-1972 experiment OffOn, shot on 16mm, was groundbreaking for its use of new video imagery technologies.
Richard Franklin Chew is an American film editor, best known for his Academy Award-winning work on Star Wars (1977), alongside Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas. Other notable films include One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Risky Business (1983), Waiting to Exhale (1995), That Thing You Do! (1996), and I Am Sam (2001). His career over a variety of films spans more than four decades.
Todd Boekelheide is an American composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, best known for his work scoring documentary films. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound and was nominated for another in the same category.
Megalopolis is a 2024 American epic science fiction drama film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Set in an imagined modern America following a devastating disaster, the film features an ensemble cast, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.
In October 1977, [Mark Fishkin] and fellow film buffs Rita Cahill and Lois Cole organized a three-day film festival. It featured three film tributes, Coppola's Rain People, and George Lucas' The Filmmaker.
Sunday, August 12 […] George Lucas created the documentary on the making of The Rain People while assisting Mr. Coppola on the production. This is a rare screening of one of Mr. Lucas's first films, which Coppola candidly admits 'may be better than the picture'.
George Lucas, then "a skinny kid" who had met Francis on the set of Finian's Rainbow, wanted to work with The Rain People. Francis let him make a documentary about the shooting, and the result, entitled Filmmaker, remains one of the most important analyses of Coppola's craft and incipient philosophy. It describes the romantic agony of living in trailers and converted buses, arguing with guilds, unions, and local authorities, and all the time fighting over the phone with the studio backing the production.
I bought this dolly over thirty years ago […] it really warms my heart, the fact that I saved this piece of equipment that I've used through thick and thin. It was used it on The Rain People.