In the beginning, there were the five studios: Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers,
RKO, and Twentieth Century Fox. These studios not only controlled the
production and distribution of all major motion pictures made in the United States,
but they also owned and operated the theaters in which those movies were shown,
controlled the film processing laboratories, and kept directors, actors, and other crew
on tight contractual leashes. In 1948, however, the United States Supreme Court
affirmed a lower court decision that the Hollywood studio system was an oligopoly
in violation of antitrust laws, and that the big five needed to break up their
vertically integrated business model to allow for more competition.
Thus was born the American independent film.
After 1953's independently produced and distributed Little Fugitive won
international awards and helped inspire the likes of Francois Truffaut in the
French New Wave, Hollywood knew it needed to find a way to counter
the growing market for smaller, more artistically driven movies,
so the 50's saw a boom in sweeping, cinematic epics with bloated budgets
and an intense focus on spectacle. However, throughout the 1960's,
the big budget epics began to wane in popularity, and a few high profile flops
made them too risky to rely on, so Hollywood changed tactics.
The studios started giving money to young filmmakers with artistic visions
under promises to let them make whatever they wanted, no matter how experimental.
Thus was born the American New Wave.
In an underground society dominated by rigid social control, THX 1138 is beginning
to feel emotions for the first time in his life. He is learning about love, jealousy, and anger.
Before long, he is caught and captured for his transgressions, and he must find
a way to break free, to see if he can find freedom above ground.
Before we go any further, if you could hit that like button, blessings
of the state be upon you. If you really are a subject of the divine, don't forget
to subscribe as well. Let me be thankful in advance. With that out of the way,
let's get back to the subject at hand. Struggling to make money off of bigger
productions, Warner Brothers, in 1967, decided to produce the long-gestating
film version of the popular musical, Finian's Rainbow, with a reduced budget.
One way they saved money was by hiring as director the UCLA wunderkind
Francis Ford Coppola. During production, an up-and-coming USC star, George Lucas,
who had made a big splash in the academic world with his short film
Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, was given a six-month, all-expense-paid
internship at Warner Brothers, and he came to the set of Finian's Rainbow and
began giving Coppola ideas. Coppola, impressed with Lucas' insights, let him
help throughout the rest of the film's production.
Not long after, Coppola decided to make his own independent film, The Rain People,
starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, and George Lucas was one of the few
people he brought along with him, promising him that, as they traveled the
country to make Coppola's movie, Lucas would be afforded plenty of time to
write an independent movie of his own, a feature-length version of
Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB. Electronic Labyrinth had originally been
based on a story idea for a short film called "Breakout" about an underground surveillance
state, written by Lucas' classmates Matthew Robbins and Walter Murch,
who dropped the project in favor of something else and gave Lucas
permission to make it himself. When he set about expanding it to
feature-length, though, Lucas, who had never written a screenplay, had
difficulty writing it. With a first draft that he and Coppola agreed needed a lot
of work, Lucas got in touch with Walter Murch and had him help work
on a second draft, which became the final version of the script.
As principal photography on The Rain People came to an end, Coppola and Lucas,
along with a select handful of like-minded filmmakers including Murch,
founded their own production company based in San Francisco, American Zoetrope.
After finishing the post-production on The Rain People, the first film on the
fledgling company's slate was Lucas's film, the title of which had been
shortened to just 'THX 1138.' They then secured funding from Warner Brothers,
which was eager to take advantage of the already legendary and youthful talents
of both Coppola and Lucas, and in September of 1969, after Warner Brothers
signed off on the screenplay, production on THX 1138 began
on a budget of $777,777.77, a nod to Coppola's belief in
the lucky number seven. Principal photography took
less than two months, with a lot of guerilla-style filmmaking in multiple
locations throughout San Francisco, including the still under construction
Bay Area Rapid Transit System, the Caldecott Tunnel, the Marin County Civic
Center, a Pacific Bell switch room, and a nuclear power plant. Most of the
pre-production, including most of the location scouting and casting, had
already been finished by Lucas before the budget had even been secured, which
helped to accelerate proceedings. Lucas, a fan of Akira Kurosawa, had originally
wanted to film in Japan, the land of consumerism and social regimentation, but
after visiting the country and learning of the difficulties--not to mention the
cost--in getting permission to film there, that idea had to be scrapped.
The title role was given to Robert Duvall, who had starred in The Rain People
and had always been Lucas' first choice. As a character actor who'd had
roles in To Kill a Mockingbird, Bullitt, and True Grit, he was eager to play the
lead and was intrigued by the project as Lucas had described it to him.
To play opposite him in the role of SEN, Lucas wanted a well-trained but relatively
inexpensive character actor, and he settled on Donald Pleasence, known at the
time for his roles in The Great Escape, Fantastic Voyage, and You Only Live Twice.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld."
The female lead, LUH, was a bit trickier. Lucas wanted somebody who could be
vulnerable and strong, while also being attractive with a shaved head.
A few actresses turned down the part before Lucas found Maggie McOmie,
a relatively unknown stage actress. For the holographic SRT, Robert Duvall
recommended Don Pedro Collie, who got the part. Minor roles were also given to
Sid Haig, who plays the handsy prisoner NCH, David Ogden Stiers, who voices the narrator,
the incredibly prolific Ian Wolfe as prisoner PTO, and a handful of
improvisational comedians, including Henry Jacobs, who provides the voice and
almost all of the dialogue for one of the two off-screen technicians in this scene:
"That's it. Ok, now watch that reading and as it--" "Uh-oh."
"Watch the needle on five, now. Watch it." "This--this knob is loose." "Oh."
One cameo that is impossible to really notice is the original story's writer,
Matthew Robbins, who doubles for Robert Duvall in the final shot of the film.
For the extras, they hired patients from a drug rehab center called Synanon,
who had no problems shaving their heads and walking around
aimlessly as though heavily medicated. Not long after THX 1138, Synanon became
the more cult-like Church of Synanon, which was permanently shut down in 1991
after being at the center of numerous controversies and lawsuits,
which included a few acts of violence, murder, and even terrorism.
Ironically, the Church of Synanon, which started to require shaved heads for its
members, began to feel a little too close to the society seen in THX 1138.
Once principal photography was completed,
Coppola gave Lucas a whole year to do the post-production. George Lucas edited
the film himself in his attic, with Walter Murch coming in at nights to do
the sound. They had no delusions about the kind of
film they were making. Lucas, a fan of Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave,
was trying to make an abstract, avant-garde movie, utilizing deliberately
disorienting techniques like atmospheric, subliminal storytelling, off-kilter
framing, violations of the 180° rule, and static cameras, and he knew that,
if the studio backers saw what he was doing, they would have stopped him.
He told himself he didn't particularly care if he broke into Hollywood writ large,
that if the movie turned out to be a disaster, he could always do other things
with his life. Lucas knew this was his one chance to do something bold and
daring, and he wasn't about to squander the opportunity by trying to please the
men he and Coppola had all but hoodwinked into financing it. When Warner
When Warner Brothers finally saw the first cut of the film, they were dismayed at its
experimental nature, and they tried to make changes to make it more commercial.
They toyed with drastically recutting the film, but after several prolonged,
heated arguments between the studio, Coppola, and Lucas, Warner Brothers
ultimately only made a few minor edits, if only to assert their will over a film
they felt was doomed. Though they decided to distribute it, they did demand that
Coppola give all of the money back. THX 1138 released in March of 1971 with
very little fanfare, to mixed reviews, and poor sales. It made $945,000
in rentals, which while slightly profitable, was deemed a
massive failure by Warner Brothers. The failure of THX 1138, whether on its own
merits or because of Warner Brothers' unenthusiastic distribution, almost sunk
American Zoetrope, and with it, the careers of both Francis Ford Coppola
and George Lucas. However, right before THX hit theaters,
Paramount had hired Coppola to direct The Godfather.
Coppola wasn't particularly interested in the project, but Lucas convinced him
to do it, if only to save American Zoetrope. Needless to say, The Godfather
did save the company, as well as the reputations of its founders.
To be fair, THX 1138 is a bleak, unrelenting little film that isn't going to resonate with
everybody. It deals in a lot of heady, sociological issues, trying in its own
way to reflect the anxieties of the late 60's and early 70's, things like the
growing surveillance state, rampant consumerism, authoritarianism, and
McCarthyism. Even though George Lucas approached things from a distinctly
left-of-center direction, the movie doesn't have an overtly partisan
political message. Indeed, in addition to being critical of right-wing political
views, it can also be read as being anti-communist, with its uniforms,
oppressive conformity, focus on employment for everyone, and anti-individualism.
As such, it presents a dystopia that isn't afraid to come from multiple directions,
and it paints a portrait of a world where society itself has become the main
oppressor. There is no central antagonist, as Lucas was intent on showing a kind of
emergent bureaucratic system--think Brave New World meets Cube--not the fruits of
any individual evil or societal ill. It is this that THX must escape, and that's
the central thread that carries the entire film, the idea of breaking free, of
choosing the freedom of the unknown over the oppression of security. The movie
plots a series of escapes, from philosophical stagnation, from prison, and
ultimately from the city itself. Another useful way to look at it is that
the world of THX 1138 has itself become a machine, with its inhabitants mere cogs.
THX has been awakened, a living thing looking around at the wires and
mechanisms and deciding that there must be something better. In this scene, where
characters are coyly named after philosophers like Plato and Sartre and
where SEN speaks in Nixon quotes--
"We need dissent, but we need a creative dissent!"
--THX realizes that he is in a prison without walls,
that all he has to do to assert himself is to simply walk out.
One thing about its design aesthetic that would prove to be particularly
influential is dubbed by Lucas as "used futurism," the idea that technology is
never completely replaced, that it isn't anachronistic to mix the old and the new.
He wanted everything to look worn, as though people really live and work in
this universe. This aesthetic would reappear not only in Star Wars, but also
in several other films, most prominently Ridley Scott's pair of influential
sci-fi classics, Alien and Blade Runner.
THX 1138 isn't just an essential science- fiction film, though. It also serves as a
landmark in the history of film itself, an early example of what we now call
independent filmmaking, even though it was financed by a major Hollywood studio.
It convinced dozens of other young filmmakers that they could succeed
without being beholden to studio mandates and Hollywood clichés,
that with a camera, a vision, and a little bit of chutzpah, anyone can make a film.
And that's all for today, fellow Earthlings. What do you think of THX 1138?
Let me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like and
subscribe if you haven't already. If you'd like to support what I do even
more, head on over to my Patreon to get access to bonus videos, vote on future
topics, and more. You can also check out my website at emagill.com, where you'll
find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature.
Until next time, though, when we'll search for a place to put this katra, this is
The Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love,
...as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Here and straightforward, and plain as the nose on your face!" (whap!)