Hot off the runaway success of 1973’s
American Graffiti, which becomes one of the most profitable movies ever made, 29-year-old George Lucas tries to write a script about a moral, expansive universe filled with mysterious power and mythological heroes and villains. The first treatment he produces is, by many accounts, incoherent. Discouraged by the negative response, he decides to take up
his friend Francis Ford Coppola’s offer to direct a Vietnam War movie called
Apocalypse Now, written by their other friend, John Milius.