George Lucas’ 1971 short Bald: Actors Required to Shave Their Heads — Sometimes in Public — to Make THX 1138’s Dehumanized Future

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George Lucas’ 1971 short Bald: Actors Required to Shave Their Heads — Sometimes in Public — to Make THX 1138’s Dehumanized Future

Bald: The Making of THX 1138 / THX 1138 / 1970s

When George Lucas completed his first feature THX 1138 in 1971 (produced by Francis Ford Coppola), he and Coppola also released a short documentary, Bald: The Making of THX 1138, to promote the picture. The film is as much a production document as it is a manifesto: intercut with a candid conversation between Lucas and Coppola about Lucas’ aesthetic (including the embryo of his “used future” idea) are scenes showing the cast literally being stripped of distinguishing features. Lucas mandated that actors who would appear in the film submit to head-shaving — not simply in private makeup chairs but sometimes in public places — because the shaved heads were integral to the film’s sterile, dehumanized society. The documentary records Maggie McOmie having her head shaved outside San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, Robert Duvall catching a sporting event while his hair is removed, and character actor Marshall Efron amusingly trimming his own hair in a bathtub. The short makes plain that the haircuts were a production requirement for casting and for selling a particular visual and social idea on screen.