Director reintroduces 'THX 1138'

Lucas says the film's themes are especially relevant now.
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. (AP) -- In his most soothing voice, George Lucas has these important messages to share: Work hard. Prevent accidents. Increase production. Buy more. And most important, be happy.
Those mantras come from 1971's "THX 1138," Lucas' comparatively unknown first film, which he is reintroducing to audiences with a limited theatrical release that began Friday and its DVD debut coming Tuesday.
In a way, Lucas views this as the true premiere of "THX 1138," a dark sci-fi satire starring Robert Duvall as the title character, struggling to escape a dehumanized society whose inhabitants are mere numbers to a government that preaches boundless consumerism and keeps the population happy through mandatory sedatives.
"It's almost like it's a new movie, because a lot of people don't know about it," Lucas told The Associated Press over lunch at his 2,600-acre Skywalker Ranch. "And I think this time in terms of the way the release is going, it's much more the kind of release that it should have had in the first place, which is mostly for college students. It's kind of an arty film."
Puzzled by flick
In 1971, distributor Warner Bros. did not have a clue about how to handle Lucas' avant-garde flick, so the studio hacked a few minutes out of it then dumped the movie into theaters, where few saw it. Warner gave it a rerelease in the late 1970s to take advantage of Lucas' "Star Wars" fame, but "THX 1138" still failed to find an audience.
Most who have seen it caught it on television or videotape in a bad full-screen format that spoils the effect of Lucas' carefully crafted wide-screen images. The new version is a director's cut restoring the footage Warner took out and giving the film a thorough digital restoration.
The two-disc DVD set has terrific background material about "THX 1138" and the era of young Hollywood lions from which it emerged.
The first film from Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio, "THX 1138" sneaked into Hollywood during the transition between the old movie-mogul days and the rise of corporate-run studios.
"Easy Rider" had proved there was a viable youth market, but studios had no idea how to exploit it. Without any real understanding of the projects, studios simply began tossing money at promising new filmmakers.
"'THX' was as strange then as it is today, and I think if I took this same movie in to anybody today, they would look at me and roll their eyes," Lucas said. "When I did 'American Graffiti' a few years later, they thought that was a far-out movie and that it was too avant-garde to be shown on the screen, so you can imagine what they thought about this one."
Left alone
Through Coppola's bullheaded persuasiveness, Warner agreed to back Zoetrope, and Lucas was left alone to make the film he wanted to make. The early communal optimism at Zoetrope, nicely captured in a documentary in the DVD package, was dashed when Warner executives screened "THX 1138" and came out totally befuddled.
Much of the film is told without conventional dialogue, the soundtrack filled with mechanical human voices and machine noises that Lucas calls a sort of "techno-poetry." The film's middle passage is set in an endless, snow-white expanse without sets. The characters, women included, have shaved heads. (The DVD has archival footage of co-star Maggie McOmie, who plays THX's roommate, wincing tearfully as her long hair is shaved off.)
Instead of a traditional three-act structure, the film essentially tells the same story three ways. Duvall's character breaks society's mold in each section, first when his self-aware roommate cuts off his drug sedatives, second when he escapes from a prison for defective citizens, third when he makes a high-speed run from his underground city for the forbidden planet's surface.
Rather than a portrait of a grim tomorrow, Lucas intended "THX 1138" as a future-is-now metaphor of '60s complacency and mass consumption.
The themes are more relevant now than ever, Lucas said.
"George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature," Lucas said. "I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program."
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