Marcia Lucas died of cancer last week at 80. She’s best known to the general public as the first wife of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who walked away with about $50 million in their 1983 divorce settlement. That’s too bad, because she was a great editor in her own right. She worked not only with her husband on the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but on his 1972 debut “THX-1138” and its follow-up, 1973’s “American Graffiti” (her first Oscar nomination for editing, along with her mentor Verna Fields, who won another Oscar for solo-editing “Jaws” one year later).
She was the editor on Scorsese’s fourth feature, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and he was so pleased with the work that he promoted her to supervising the editing teams on “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York.” She was assistant editor and a location scout on “The Rain People”—the first feature by Francis Ford Coppola, who’d been friends with the Lucases ever since he met George on the set of his 1969 film “Finian’s Rainbow.” She was also an assistant editor on 1969’s “Medium Cool,” the directorial debut of the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
Winning an Oscar for cutting the original “Star Wars,” alongside Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, is often marked as her career peak, but personally, I’d put “Taxi Driver” alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ‘70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave playfulness, particularly in the driving sequences and in the “You talkin’ to me?” scene, which was made of behavioral bits invented on the spot by star Robert De Niro.
Some have made the case that throughout their relationship, which began in 1967 when they met at the University of Southern California film school, Marcia was the secret heart of Lucas’ productions as well as his domestic life, and that after they split up, his movies never recovered the magic they’d once had. There’s a lot of truth to that. Lucas is a legendary figure in movie history, perhaps more so in filmmaking technology, but he was never considered a “people person.” But his wife was. She was famed for her ability to add warmth and recognizable humanity to material that might otherwise seem too mechanical or theoretical, as well as for figuring out which pieces of the story were guaranteed to make the audience happy.
Mark Hamill told Film Freak Central, “I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in [“Star Wars”].” He said, “‘Oh, I don’t like it—people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected.” She also convinced him to keep the brief bit inside the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at a mouse droid and makes it skitter away in terror, a foolproof laugh-getter that the director had initially deleted because he worried it was too silly.
But Marcia wasn’t just good at the stereotypical “girl stuff.” She had an unerring sense of when to cut out of one storyline and into another, which came in handy on all three of the original “Star Wars” movies. The first cross-cuts between Leia and Luke’s individual stories before they meet at the Death Star, the second spends a full hour cross-cutting between the Millennium Falcon fleeing from Darth Vader and Luke traveling to Dagobah to train with Yoda, and the third has a much-imitated ending that jumps between three storylines: Luke confronting Vader and the Emperor in the second Death Star’s throne room; Luke and Leia trying to disable the Death Star’s shield down on Endor; and Lando Calrissian leading the rebel’s fleet’s attack from space.
Marcia Lucas’ majestic architecture in that last act has a symphonic heft and goes a long way towards convincing viewers that they aren’t just seeing a puffed-up retread of the first movie’s ending. She was the perfect person to supervise that complex sequence, having partnered with her mentor Verna Fields on“American Graffiti,” a nostalgic teen epic that cuts between multiple storylines happening in the same town on the same night; New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun wrote, “American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place.”
She told George that the Death Star battle at the end of the movie lacked tension and said he needed a “ticking clock.” So she created one: the Death Star wasn’t traveling to Yavin to destroy the rebel base in the original script, but Marcia made it seem as if it was, by pulling alternate takes from the destruction of Alderaan earlier in the movie, adding a disembodied “official” voiceover narrating the Death Star’s progress, reusing the shot of Peter Cushing’s bad guy stating, “You may fire when ready,” and timing Luke’s one-in-a-million shot so that it entered the exhaust port just as the space station’s planet-pulverizing laser cannon was about blast Yavin to pieces. If you watch the sequence closely, you’ll see that at no point do any of the major characters talk about the Death Star advancing on Yavin. But you feel as if they did, because of the editor’s cleverness.
According to Brian Jay Jones’ book George Lucas: A Life, Marcia told George she wanted to split up in 1982. The third film in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “Return of the Jedi,” was still in production and racing to meet its Memorial Day weekend 1983 release deadline. George asked if she could wait to announce their divorce until after “Jedi” came out, so bad news about their personal lives wouldn’t detract from the movie’s publicity campaign. She agreed. But even though the Lucases knew that their marriage was functionally over as early as the summer of 1982, they continued to work together on “Jedi.” A 1983 Time Magazine cover story about Lucas, dated three days before the film’s theatrical release, states that the filmmaker has “an apparently blissful marriage [to] a charming, attractive wife,” which ought to tell you how good the couple was at keeping secrets.
By that point, the legal papers were already signed, and although the Time writer announces that George is about to start a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical “to spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies,” the sabbatical never happened. George moved out of the family home weeks before the Time story hit newsstands and went back to the workaholic lifestyle that ruined his marriage. Over the next seven years, he developed and produced ”Howard the Duck,” “Willow,” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and helped finance his hero Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” and supervised postproduction on his penultimate film “Dreams,” among a sampler of 1980s projects spread across film, TV, and video games.
Marcia had good reason to want a slower-paced life with more personal time: she’d gotten pregnant before the start of post-production on “Star Wars” and was expected to give birth while cutting “Taxi Driver,” but miscarried, then went on to help finish “Star Wars” and “Taxi Driver,” then went straight into “New York, New York.” In an interview with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind, Marcia said that her inability to have children with George was a source of tension and unhappiness in the marriage, almost as much as his inability to stop working even for a moment. She had more miscarriages and gave up trying to conceive.
In 1981, they adopted a daughter, Amanda, but rather than clear his schedule to get to know her, George threw himself into preproduction on “Return of the Jedi”; spun Industrial Light and Magic, a division of his company Lucasfilm, into its own company; and oversaw the creation of the sound quality assurance company THX, among other obsessions. She didn’t want to go down that road, so that was the beginning of the end of their union.
After leaving the entertainment industry, Marcia seemed content to be an editor in life. She produced just two projects in the ‘90s, one of them a short film, and consulted on other people’s movies, but that was it. She continued to go to theaters and watch films at home, always with a ruthless eye. (After seeing the first “Star Wars” prequel, “The Phantom Menace,” she cried, not because she was moved, but because she thought it was awful. Audiences were certainly poorer without her. But they were no longer her concern. She mainly wanted peace and happiness for herself and Amanda, who went on to become a professional MMA fighter. The same year she and George divorced, Marcia married Tom Rodrigues, a stained glass artist and painter who had formerly been a production manager at Skywalker Ranch from 1980 to, well, 1983. In 1985, she gave birth to their daughter, Amy. That union lasted ten years. Marcia never married again.
In the book In the Blink of an Eye, legendary editor Walter Murch asserts that after watching a film, “What audiences finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.” Marcia Lucas had an innate understanding of how to accomplish this and proved it in multiple all-time classics.
