How is George Lucas is connected to the Altamont disaster?
Whether it be Star Wars or Indiana Jones, it goes without saying that George Lucas has significantly impacted popular culture. Singlehandedly, he’s created whole universes, characters and sequences that rank among some of the most beloved in fiction. Whilst his cinematic achievements are the stuff of legend, most people remain unaware of one aspect of his early career. Lucas was a cameraman at the Altamont Free Concert in December 1969. The incident was one of the darkest days of the counterculture, a glaring signifier that the movement hadn’t achieved its dreams.
A free concert held just outside of San Francisco, California, Altamont was organised in conjunction with The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and boasted some of the most prominent rock acts of the day. The event had the potential to be the last hurrah of the 1960s and was even touted so as the west coast’s very own version of Woodstock. Although the New York festival was a logistical disaster, what occurred in California went far beyond that failure, resulting in widespread violence and the stabbing of Meredith Hunter. The counterculture would never recover. Retrospectively, it seems a fitting way to welcome in the mire of the 1970s.
The violence throughout the day served as a precursor to what unfolded when The Rolling Stones finally took to the stage. As they pounced into ‘Under My Thumb’, Hunter, a Black teenager, got into an altercation with a group of Hells Angels – the infamous motorcycle club employed to protect the generators. After Hunter pulled a gun from his suit jacket, Hells Angel Alan Passaro stabbed him. Hunter died to the side of the stage whilst The Stones continued to play, unaware of the tragedy that was unfolding.
The day’s events are immortalised in Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s 1970 documentary, Gimme Shelter. The film chronicles the final weeks of The Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour of the US, culminating in the Altamont catastrophe. One of the camera operators credited on the movie is a young George Lucas. Allegedly, his camera jammed after he had recorded around 100ft of film, meaning that barely any of his footage made it into the final cut.
When speaking as an 83-year-old during an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2010, Albert Maysles reflected on the young George Lucas and Gimme Shelter. In the film, after The Stones’ set, the band and their entourage fly out in a helicopter while the attendees’ silhouettes stumble around, attempting to find the exit. “George Lucas was one of our young cameramen and shot that,” Maysles said. “It’s like a sci-fi scene.”
It makes you wonder what hellish parts of the day Lucas saw with his own eyes.
