by Edward Gross
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
First of all, it was a big decision on his part that he was ready to see sequels made; I think he’d really decided at that point that there weren’t going to be any more. Just making that decision was a big one, and we spent quite a bit of time talking about it. It was George who actually made the first inquiries to Carrie [Fisher], Mark [Hamill], and Harrison [Ford] about whether they would be interested, and, obviously, if any or all of them had said no, then it would have been a very different conversation creatively. But luckily, they all said yes, and that [prompted] some decisions about how far [in the future the story would be from the time frame of Return of the Jedi], and what it might include. George also felt very strongly about this idea of creating other Star Wars stories inside the universe, and he had actually written up a few different ideas.
GEORGE LUCAS
I turned seventy and my whole life centered around me doing these avant-garde experimental films. Films that you don’t know whether they’re going to work or not, or you’re kind of playing with the medium, which is what I wanted to do. All my student films are like that. Everything I did for a long time was like that. Even THX is vaguely like that. And I always say, “Well, if this fails, I’m going to go back to doing my experimental films.” Right now, all of my friends—Marty and Francis and Steven—are like, “Well, what are you going to do?”
Well, I got caught in this tar baby called Star Wars and lots of opportunities, a lot of things that accompanied it. So, I said, “Well, I like Star Wars. I fell in love with it and I want to complete it.” And then after I completed it, I produced films and did things. At the same time, I came back and did the backstory to the whole thing. Then I felt, “Well, at some point there are three more stories,” but it takes ten years to do all three of them. I didn’t think I could do that. I wanted to go do my little experimental films. I was commuting between Chicago and San Francisco and all of that stuff, and I just said, “I’m going to take my life and make it so I can live in Chicago, a little in San Francisco, make my little art films, build a museum, and take care of my daughter.” That’s what was important to me.
The other thing is that at the height of my career, after Jedi, I had a daughter who was a year old. I was married and we got divorced and I was left with a baby, who was adopted. When I first held her in my arms in the hospital, lightning bolts went through me. I said, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” So, when she left, I just took the baby and I said I was going to retire; I’m not going to direct any more movies, because you can’t raise kids and direct movies, because it’s literally four in the morning until ten at night, working weekends and working all the time. So I said I think I’m going to retire from directing movies and I’m simply going to try to work my company a little bit, because I can go to work at eleven in the morning and come home at three in the afternoon and not work weekends.
Then, after that, I ended up adopting another baby on my own, and then another baby on my own. So I had three kids that I raised for fifteen years. Then I came out of retirement and started directing again. At the same time, I think I reached the end of what I could contribute to Star Wars.
* * *
It was that revelation that resulted in a seismic shift in a galaxy far, far away when, in October 2012, it was announced that Disney actually did acquire Lucasfilm in a $4 billion deal that would see Lucas selling the company and all its assets, with Kathleen Kennedy shifting over to be “brand manager” (just as Kevin Feige was so successfully on the Disney-acquired Marvel Entertainment).
BRIAN JAY JONES
(author, George Lucas: A Life)
I think Lucas walked away from Lucasfilm with his head held high. What I always say about Lucas, Star Wars movies, and fandom is that he’s not disposed to worry about your emotional well-being. If you like it, great. If you hate it, he doesn’t really care. But his decision is something that I wish I had a good answer for. I don’t necessarily know what prompted it, but I think partly it was the fact that he’d get to pick his heir apparent. I don’t think he wanted to have the Jim Henson problem where he would die and then the company went into insolvency and lawyers got involved and they got to decide the direction of Lucasfilm and what happened to the characters. Again, it gets right back to his need to control things. He wants to be the one who’s like, “I’m approaching my seventies, I’m not going to be around forever. I want to be sure I’m in charge of where this company goes, where it lands, who’s taking care of it.”
JONATHAN RINZLER
(author, The Making of Star Wars)
It’s funny how many times George tried to divest himself from his own company. From the very beginning, George was trying to get rid of the company he himself had started. It’s kind of funny to go through and see: 1977 he said he was retiring, 1980 he said he was retiring, 1983 he said he was retiring. ’84, ’85, ’86 … So finally, he’s done it.
BRIAN JAY JONES
With Disney, he knew it was a company he could kind of trust: “I’m going to bring Jim Henson back into it”; I think Disney was a big part of it for him. Disney was a very different company even in the seventies, and Jim Henson at the time knew that. He was like, “Look, they managed Mary Poppins.” They manage a million characters and it’s like, this is where you park your icons. And Lucas, we’ve got to remember, had been with Disney with [former CEO Michael] Eisner, he’s got projects going on in the theme parks. That’s the other thing people forget as well. When Star Tours first went in the Disney parks, it had absolutely nothing to do with Disney; it was just one of the attractions completely outside the Disney purview. It was like Star Wars literally dropped in from another galaxy into the middle of the Disney park.
It doesn’t relate to anything Disney owned, but they were smart enough to know that. The whole point of this is that Lucas has been puttering around with Disney. He’s comfortable, I think, with Disney and the people and they’re deferential to him, which he likes. At one point he had expressed interest when people forget how badly Disney was doing before they sort of revitalized themselves with cartoons like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast in the early nineties. He actually considered at one point running that company, so Lucas was comfortable with Disney and, again, they’ve been around a lot longer than Lucasfilm and they really know how to handle their icons. He knew it was a good place to put them and that they had the resources to promote them and distribute them, which was always the biggest fight he had with his movies. So I think he knew that that was the place to go where everything that he thought was important about the suit side of the equation would be well cared for.
TODD FISHER
(brother of Carrie Fisher)
When Carrie heard that Disney bought Lucasfilm, her first reaction was her rolling her eyes like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this.” So the initial reaction was not like, “Oh, this is great.” The initial response was lukewarm at best, if not cool. But then when she saw the script and saw how it was being treated, she thought, “Oh, you know, this isn’t too bad.” And, of course, when she saw how much they were going to offer her to do it financially, that also made it brighten in her eyes. Let’s face it, actors do do things for cash.
ROBERT A. IGER
(chief executive officer, Walt Disney Company)
George Lucas is a visionary, an innovator, and an epic storyteller—and he’s built a company at the intersection of entertainment and technology to bring some of the world’s most unforgettable characters and stories to screens across the galaxy. He’s entertained, inspired, and defined filmmaking for almost four decades and we were incredibly honored that he entrusted the future of that legacy to Disney.
GEORGE LUCAS
One of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. And it was time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the tran
sition during my lifetime. I felt confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
I feel a huge responsibility to that. I think about it all the time. In fact, looking at The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars—[J.R.R.] Tolkien and George Lucas—that kind of defines modern mythology for our generation. What George has created is a meaningful mythology, a history to draw from. I have often said that there’s a fragility to it, too. We have to take everything we do seriously; we put a great deal of effort into what it is we’re creating.
RAY MORTON
The sale of Lucasfilm had a definite impact on the development of the sequels. When the sale closed, Lucasfilm ceased to be a stand-alone company and became a division of Disney, alongside Pixar and Marvel. Lucas retired and Kennedy became the president of the division, reporting to Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn. With all of these changes, it was initially unclear what would happen to the sequels Lucas was developing. Disney bought Lucasfilm primarily to acquire the Star Wars brand, so it was definitely interested in making a sequel trilogy. However, it did not want to make Lucas’s sequel trilogy. Lucas did not want to repeat himself and wanted to push the Star Wars concept into new territory, so, as he had done with the prequels, he intended to give his sequels their own look and feel and take the story in unexpected directions. This is exactly what Disney did not want. Feeling that part of the reason so many fans were dissatisfied with the prequels was because Episodes I to III didn’t look or feel like Episodes IV to VI, Disney wanted the sequels to look and feel as much as possible like the original trilogy.
* * *
When Lucas retired from the company, he also retired from making any more Star Wars movies—he would no longer be the creative force behind the sequels, nor would he direct Episode VII. Kennedy would now be in charge of developing and producing the new movies, on which Lucas would serve only as a consultant. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they also bought Lucas’s outlines and treatments for the new trilogy. The impression Lucas got from Iger was that Disney would be doing so. Disney CEO Robert Iger wrote in his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, “We decided we need to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plotlines he’d laid out.”
PETER HOLMSTROM
George sold the company with the handshake agreement with Disney that Lucasfilm would “carry on business as usual.” And he’s not completely wrong for thinking that—Disney bought Marvel and more or less let them carry on with their plans for a while. But here it was not the case. Lucas said at the time that he sold Lucasfilm because he couldn’t see a way to produce new $150 million films, and keep his two thousand Lucasfilm employees employed. So he sold the company because he felt people keeping their jobs was more important. Then we see what Disney/Lucasfilm does to those employees after the sale. Lucasfilm threw out George’s plans for the sequel trilogy, canceled The Clone Wars TV show and declined to broadcast Detours—firing both staffs along with them—closed LucasArts, ended the long-standing relationship with Dark Horse Comics, and fired a large amount of the Lucasfilm staff. They cleaned house and firmly stated, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
RAY MORTON
When Lucas later found out the company was going in its own direction, he became upset and withdrew from the project entirely. Iger later admitted that he was not as forthright with Lucas about his intentions as he should have been.
* * *
In his memoir, Iger further illuminated the growing chasm between Lucas and Disney. “George immediately got upset as [the plot of the new film was described] and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations,” he wrote. “George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better … George felt betrayed, and while the whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
BRIAN JAY JONES
I think with The Force Awakens Lucas had a bit of seller’s remorse. You watch your company, you watch your characters, and they’re in someone else’s hands; someone else is controlling it. You can’t do anything about that. They’re somebody else’s responsibility now. That had to be hard for him, but on the other hand, he was paid very well to shut up and walk away. And even with that payout, The Force Awakens comes out and he takes a few shots at it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he picked up the phone and is like, “What did you do? What are you doing?” “Shut up. You were paid very well to be quiet.”
RAY MORTON
Of the three Star Wars trilogies, the sequel trilogy is the worst. It’s the worst, because it is based on a really terrible premise, which is that all of the heroes in the original trilogy turned out to be screw-ups or failures and that none of their victories were real. Return of the Jedi ends with the Rebel Alliance vanquishing the Empire; a redeemed Darth Vader killing the evil Emperor; Han and Leia in love; and Luke finally becoming a full Jedi Knight and poised to restart the Jedi order. Yays all around!
But then the sequels tell us the Alliance did not defeat the Empire—while the destruction of Death Star II dealt the Empire a pretty strong blow, apparently enough personnel and equipment remained that it was able to quickly reconstitute itself as the First Order. Vader did not kill the Emperor—sure, he fell down a miles-high shaft into a reactor and exploded, but to paraphrase Monty Python, apparently he got better. Attempting to revive the Jedi, Luke decided to take his nephew Ben as his pupil. However, when Luke sensed Ben might possibly turn evil, he decided to try and kill him. Luke’s action understandably upset Ben, who then did turn evil and ran off to help the First Order destroy the New Republic. Having unleashed this terrible monster on the galaxy, Luke did the brave thing and ran away.
After siring the worst person in the galaxy, Han apparently couldn’t hack it and also ran away. Throwing away all of the character growth he experienced in the first trilogy, Han abandoned all his responsibilities and went back to being an itinerant smuggler. In addition to giving birth to a monster, Leia apparently wasn’t able to create a New Republic that was strong enough to withstand whatever it is that the First Order did to undermine it. She loses her government and so is once again on the run and leading a resistance movement.
These are really depressing concepts that make losers and cowards out of Luke, Han, and Leia and completely invalidate all of the triumphs of the original trilogy. It’s hard to fathom why the sequel creators felt these ideas were good ones or that anyone who enjoyed the original movies would embrace or be entertained by them. The sequel trilogy certainly has its good points, but it is harder to emotionally invest in these newer films when their narrative foundation is built entirely on negating so much of what made the original films work (and beloved).
* * *
When Star Wars Episode VII—ultimately titled The Force Awakens—went into development in a fairly accelerated manner, and with Disney’s mandate to create a new trilogy that closely resembled the original films in mind (at one point, Disney attempted to pressure J.J. into resurrecting Darth Vader, which they felt was the key to the success of the franchise), Kennedy turned to J.J. Abrams to develop and direct the first of the sequels.
RAY MORTON
Abrams got his start as a screenwriter in the 1990s, writing and cowriting features such as Taking Care of Business (1990), Regarding Henry (1991), and Armageddon (1998). He then moved into television, creating, producing, and directing series such as Felicity, Alias, and Lost. He returned to features as a director in 2006 with Mission: Impossible III. Abrams followed that film u
p with Star Trek (2009), Super 8 (2011), and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). His specialty as a film director has been to take ideas from older movies and TV shows and reboot them into energetic new packages, which made him the ideal person to helm Disney’s back-to-basics-mandated approach to Star Wars.
J.J. ABRAMS
(cowriter, director, The Force Awakens)
The obvious challenge with Star Trek was that we wanted to make our own brand-new thing and at the same time embrace and honor what had come before. As a director who didn’t know and love the world of Star Trek by default—Star Wars was much more my thing—I ended up telling a story for people like myself that love fun movies, but are not necessarily familiar with the archaic details of the Star Trek canon. If you look at the Star Wars films and what technology allowed them to do, they covered so much terrain in terms of design, locations, characters, aliens, ships. So much of the spectacle has been done and it seems like every aspect has been covered, whether it’s geography or design of culture or weather system or character or ship type. Everything has been tapped in those movies.
