Lucas began his filmmaking career at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, one of the first American colleges to have a school devoted to movies. He fell in with a group unofficially titled the Dirty Dozen, which included a bunch of future Hollywood movers and shakers like John Milius, Robert Robert Zemeckis and some kid called Steven Spielberg? Not sure what happened to him. Anyway, whilst there Lucas got into the most un-Lucas-like of film styles: arty French nonsense. A course titled "Filmic Expression" exalted the virtues of colour, light, movement, space, and time in a film, above trivial elements like a decent script, plot or dialogue. Which, looking back, might have been the earliest indication that Harrison Ford may struggle to say the, ahem, stuff Lucas typed. Falling in love with the concept of "pure cinema", Lucas set about making "16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems" with names like Look at Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, Filmmaker, and 6-18-67. And if they all sound awful and pretentious on paper, man, you should try watching one of the things. Eventually one of those lead to his first foray into sci-fi, THX 1138, but for the most part it was a load of arty rubbish that nobody outside of his classroom should be subjected to. And yet you can find them all on the internet, if you really want to. Don't. They're awful. He's awful.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
