Essay by xXSK0MPURXx originally published in Field Report Vol. 1.
Spengler and Toynbee, two of the great historians of the 20th century, agree that the will to higher civilization in any cultural context is composed of the will of an exceedingly small minority of minds. This minority is distinguished by their possession of creativity. Despite its frequent occurrence in common parlance, 'creativity' points to an extremely rare attribute. At its semiotic core, creativity is an ability to conjure thoughts that have no dependency whatsoever on the spiritual inertia of the masses.
The access of the masses to culture, which in turn determines their volition, is via mimesis of this creative minority. The minority serve as idols, and their ideals propagate throughout spacetime with a will to life of their own. The question that you must ask yourself is thus: is your pursuit creative, or is it the product of a truly creative idol's mimetic influence?
For Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, two of the largest successes in the entertainment industry of the last century, their founding pursuit was creative indeed.
To set the scene, Hollywood was in a transitory phase in the late 1960s. The executives at all of the major studios of the time were old croakers — often the jaded, decaying founders of the companies themselves. Even amongst the crew workers, the average age on a set was nearly 60 years old. Everyone operated with the same formulaic approach to movies: get a few big name stars to act in simple stories that appealed to normal post-war American families. All that was needed for a smashing success in the box office was to construct an aesthetic experience that would greatly please ‘Bob’, a construction worker in the booming American economy, his wife ‘Beth’, a housewife with floral apron, and their two kids ‘Little Billy’ and ‘Sweet Sally’.
Unfortunately for this Old Hollywood, great cultural change was afoot. The 50s and early 60s were disappearing. The American family was changing. Drugs, free love, and rock n’ roll were becoming popular, quickly. Swooning love stories and blissfully simple Westerns no longer appealed to the American public as they had just a decade prior. To hammer the point home to the old guard of the industry, in 1969 the film Easy Rider made $60 million in the box office on a budget of $400K, telling the story of two motorcyclists gallivanting through the American Southwest rich with cash from a recent cocaine sale.
Around the same time, a two-tailed comet from the West was coming into sight. LA, at the time, had two premier film schools — USC and UCLA (the poor bastard Steven Spielberg, then a student at Cal State Long Beach, was denied acceptance to USC because of poor grades in high school). USC was seen as the more technical school where students learned the nitty gritty of filmmaking, the theory. UCLA was seen as the more artsy-fartsy school, telling every student upon arrival that they were already a filmmaker and sticking a camera in their hand. There was immense rivalry between the two schools, with a real culture full of shit-talking and lore.
Among an absolutely stacked list of film students at USC, George Lucas was the stand-out. Universally respected by his peers and accepted as the best among them, his films had a professionalism and patina that couldn’t be touched by anyone else there at the time. In a short-film festival with students from both schools participating, Lucas blew all the other participants out of the water with his entry entitled THX-1138.
Among an absolutely stacked list of film students at UCLA, Francis Ford Coppola was the stand-out. Coppola was known by every film student in the country at the time, including Lucas, because he was the only one of them that had been able to break into the croaker-dominated industry of Old Hollywood. No young people made industry-sponsored feature films at the time except Coppola because no one was as convincing (or talented). He was revered and reviled for his histrionic approach to everything in life, whether it was directing or parlaying with the top dogs in Hollywood.
Rival geniuses from rival schools, it was only a matter of time before they were together on set. Coppola was directing the film Finian’s Rainbow, a lame puff-piece that was given to him by Warner Bros. Lucas was a student observer, an honor granted to him for winning a scholarship from Warner. Lucas was a ballsy kid who was willing to test the limits of Coppola’s massive authority. Coppola liked George’s ‘fuck you’ attitude and willingness to tell him he was wrong. Given the dearth of people below the age of 50 in the industry, Coppola didn’t have any younger friends, and was glad to have Lucas on set with him.
Sick of the old Hollywood scene and the influence of the fogeys on what he could and couldn’t do, Coppola decided to pair up with Lucas and go balls to the wall by starting to make their own films. They engaged in a form of filmmaking that was almost completely independent, and began the endeavor by making a film while doing a roadtrip from LA to NYC. They rented a van and took a dozen of their closest friends. The editing machine lived in the backseat of the van, and the wardrobe hung on random protrusions inside the car as they drove.
In taking this creative leap, Coppola realized that movies could be made from anywhere, and certainly did not need to be confined to LA. The spiritual success of the trip drove him and Lucas to start a new film production company, to be based in San Francisco. Lucas was from nearby Modesto, and SF’s proximity to LA made trips to schmooze the LA execs a bit more palatable.
Seeking inspiration for the company, Coppola went to a German film conference and found a set of German editing machines which he thought would work perfectly for a new studio in SF, so he bought them. In his immense naïveté, he had zero financing in place, and thought that he would be able to scrape together the necessary funds by selling his car and the property he owned. As it turned out, the finely-machined German technology cost more than four times his personal net worth.
On his way back to the US, Coppola stopped in Denmark to see the studio of a friend of his, Mogens Skot-Hansen. Hansen’s company was called Laterna Film, and they had made commercials, soft porn, and a few feature films. They lived and worked in a mansion near the sea, and had converted all of the rooms into various workspaces. The setup that Hansen had crafted influenced Coppola hugely, “They would have lunch together in the gardens, and there were all these beautiful Danish girls there with the boys working together, and I said, ‘Ah, so this is what we want.’”
Hansen gifted Coppola a relic of early European filmmaking — an old Zoetrope machine, which created the impression of continuous motion by rotating a strip of paper with hand-drawn frames around a cylinder. Coppola decided to name his new company American Zoetrope in an evocation of American revival to the early European style.
Upon arriving back in SF, Coppola went into a slight panic realizing that he didn’t have nearly enough money to get things started with American Zoetrope. Employing his strategic and histrionic abilities, he flew to LA and attempted to pitch one of Lucas’ screenplays to the old guard at Warner Bros. — an elongated version of THX-1138, the short film that had won the competition a few years earlier at the USC-UCLA short-film festival. They rejected it. However, in a master-stroke of timing, Coppola learned that a regime change at the major studio was happening the day after his failed pitch attempt.
New guard execs at Warner Bros. had their first day in the office, and Coppola sent them a note about American Zoetrope as an enterprise and the new screenplay from Lucas. The new execs had no idea that the screenplay had already been turned down by the old guard, but they had heard tell of the talent of both Coppola and Lucas, so invited Coppola to come down to LA. Coppola, already in LA, successfully convinced the new guard execs to fund American Zoetrope to the tune of 7 films, including THX-1138.
Skipping forward a bit in the story, American Zoetrope opened a studio in a grungy part of SF and successfully completed their first film, THX-1138. THX was filmed guerrilla-style. Lucas and his small crew sometimes had shooting location access for only 2 hours, but they made do. It was a grungy, dystopian, artsy film that displayed the auteurial genius of Lucas. It was not a family-friendly movie to take ‘Little Billy’ and ‘Sweet Sally’ to. Coppola went to LA to screen the film to Warner Bros. and was met with disdain. They hated it, and refused to release the film unless Lucas would allow significant recut. Lucas hated that idea, likening their demand to a doctor cutting off a digit from a proverbial daughter’s hand to make her more beautiful.
Despite the artistic disagreement, Lucas eventually authorized a recut and Warner Bros released the film. It was not a commercial success, so Warner cut off American Zoetrope’s funding. It was the end of a miniature era for Lucas, Coppola, and many other future greats of the movie business. Their utopian studio was shut down, and they all went their separate ways with immense apprehension of what the future would entail.
Despite the failure of American Zoetrope, both Coppola and Lucas obviously went on to have incredibly successful careers both artistically and financially. The Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and The Outsiders all owe their existence to Coppola, and Indiana Jones, the practically eponymous Star Wars universe, and American Graffiti all to Lucas. Both are generational filmmakers, and through Hollywood’s global influence have told stories which resonate in the minds of nearly everyone on the planet.
Reading this story may perhaps come across as a bit pastiche — sure, two guys that went on to be successful made an artsy new film studio in SF instead of LA to start their careers. Sure, two guys couldn’t break into an old industry so decided to go do their own thing. ‘It’s just a startup, bro’ you’ll perhaps say. ‘It’s just a few art mfs’ you’ll perhaps follow up with.
But Coppola and Lucas did not undertake this pursuit in blind, copycat fashion, following in the footsteps of a multitude of other ‘creatives’ before them. They pioneered it. They were among the first people in filmmaking who had the wherewithal to eschew the canonical ladder-climbing bullshit of an old, brittle institution and instead forge their own path.
This leads us to the second major realization you should have from hearing this story: the path to enormous success does not lie in the identification of prestigious institutions and subsequent employment of a slavish ‘grindset’ which puts you at the top of the hierarchy after 30 years. It lies in the creative creation of new institutions.
It is not hard to see that in Hollywood, the most prestigious institutions are household-name studios. It is not hard to see that in writing, the most prestigious institutions are household-name magazines and publishing houses. And it is not hard to see that in software engineering, the most prestigious institutions are household-name tech giants. Everyone sees it, in fact. By joining such an institution and dedicating your life to ascendancy therein, you are signing up for a grueling, life-long slog, rife with intense competition and politicking. You’ll probably fail anyways. Why do this when you can create something genuinely new, use the full creative facilities that you were imbued with, and hang out with your friends in a serene, garden-like community? Too many bright young souls eschew Providence in favor of false mimetic appetites.
Coppola and Lucas did not imitate. They pioneered, creatively, a type of destiny that was and is unique to them. The gestalt of the world they inhabited allowed for it. It took balls up-front, it took genuine creativity (recall the semiotic core of that word), and it took strategic interfacing with the extant regime, a.k.a household institutions. I implore you to do the same. All the best.