George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  There were nearly 400,000 Jedi knights in England.

  That, at least, would be the official word from the census office of the United Kingdom, following the results of the country’s 2001 census, in which just over 390,000 of 52 million residents of England and Wales wrote “Jedi” in the blank on their census form asking for their religion. An online campaign claimed that if enough residents wrote in Jedi, it would be formally recognized as a religion by the British government—and while that wasn’t actually true, census officials credited a boost in returned forms from younger residents to their desire to see Jedi receive an official government designation. In the end, enough fans had written in Jedi to make it the fourth-largest religion in the United Kingdom—a phenomenon the census office recognized in a press release under a cheeky headline mimicking Yoda’s distinctive speaking pattern: “390,000 JEDI THERE ARE.”20

  As for Lucas, his own religious views had both mellowed and sharpened with age. “I’m a cynical optimist,” he told Time magazine, laughing. “I’m a cynic who has hope for the human race.”21

  There were times when it would be easier to be more cynical than hopeful. In August 2001, Lucas revealed on starwars.com that the title of Episode II would be Attack of the Clones—an announcement that met with near-audible groans and laughter from critics and fans. The official line from Lucasfilm was that the title “harken[ed] back to the sense of pure fun, imagination, and excitement” of the pulpy serials that had inspired Star Wars.22 Critics were having none of it. “When you’re managing a multibillion dollar toy franchise,” jeered Entertainment Weekly, “maybe you don’t have time to come up with cool titles.”23

  Things would improve in October, with the release of The Phantom Menace on DVD—the first Star Wars movie to be released in the new digital format. Lucas had pulled out all the stops for the double-disc set, instructing ILM to complete the special effects on deleted scenes and package them as part of the disc’s many bonus features. The DVD would take in a record-setting $45 million in its first week of release. Despite the thrashing the film had taken from fans and critics, everyone still wanted to take it home.

  Still, for Attack of the Clones, Lucas was going to scale back the merchandising significantly. Lucasfilm’s marketing executives conceded that Episode I had been “over-licensed, over-shipped… [and] over-saturated,” and announced they were cutting merchandising by nearly two-thirds. There would be no neckties, no fast food tie-ins, and—to the likely relief of Pepsi, which had circulated nearly 8 billion cans of soda featuring Episode I characters with little to show for it—no official soft drink. As he had done with Episode I, Lucas would tightly, and dramatically, coordinate the promotion for Episode II, hiding one trailer on the starwars.com website that could be accessed only by inserting a Phantom Menace DVD into a home computer. Lucas would also debut a full-length trailer in November, in front of the highly anticipated Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Lucas had deliberately played up the love story between Anakin and Padmé, a decision that left some fans cold. Furthermore, after all the hype and excitement that had surrounded the trailers for Episode I—and then the relative disappointment of the film itself—many fans were refusing to get fooled again.

  Lucas attempted some damage control by inviting webmasters of Star Wars websites—especially those who oversaw sites where he had taken a beating on Episode I—out to Skywalker Ranch, ostensibly to discuss the release of Episode I on DVD, but actually to win them over well in advance of the release of Episode II. The webmasters were given a tour of the ranch, autographed copies of the Episode I DVD, and twenty minutes to pepper Lucas with questions. But goodwill would go only so far. This time, fan excitement would be tinged with skepticism. Lucas had turned his own fans into cynical optimists.

  As the May 2002 release date approached for Attack of the Clones, Lucas was spending more time at ILM, screening dailies twice a week now instead of only once. Lucas would sit in the same place every time he entered the ILM theater, still always taking the center seat in the second row. In one corner of the theater stood a full-sized R2-D2 next to a totem pole listing all of the films for which ILM had received an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. With more effects companies embracing the digital technology ILM had pioneered, competition was getting tighter each year, and ILM hadn’t produced an Oscar winner since taking home the trophy in 1995 for Forrest Gump. Since then, they’d continued to receive a nomination each year—Mighty Joe Young in 1999, The Phantom Menace in 2000 (it had lost to the game-changing, time-stopping effects in The Matrix), and the most recent film on the pole, The Perfect Storm, which would lose the Oscar in 2001 to Gladiator.

  Lucas would continue to edit the film even from his seat in the second row, asking that characters be moved from one scene to another, blending together different takes of the same scene, or zooming in on a particular section of the frame. On April 8, 2002—only a little more than a month before Attack of the Clones would open—Lucas signed off on the final effects shot. Days later, he met with the art department again to ask them to start thinking about designs for Episode III, once more without benefit of a script or even any notes. Really, the only set he could describe at the moment was the volcano world where Anakin Skywalker would be cut down and Darth Vader would rise from the ashes. Lucas had loved the concept drawings of Vader’s castle on a sea of lava that Ralph McQuarrie had done for him more than two decades earlier, during pre-production on The Empire Strikes Back. He wanted to see that in the next film—or at least something like it. “We never truly know what George is doing,” lamented McCallum.24

  Ben Burtt put a final edit of Attack of the Clones in Lucas’s hands on April 10, and Lucas would host a special preview for staff and crew at Skywalker Ranch’s three-hundred-seat Stag Theater. But there would be no film spooled onto enormous reels and placed on a projector; because the entire movie had been put together digitally, Attack of the Clones could be stored on a DVD and shown with a digital projector. That, at least, was the ideal scenario. At the moment, most theaters still relied on film projectors, so for the majority of theaters showing Episode II, Lucas would have to scan the digital version of his movie back onto film—an expensive process that would also result in a loss of picture quality. Nevertheless, just as he had encouraged cinema owners in the mid-1980s to install new speakers and reconfigure their theaters for THX by promising them Return of the Jedi, now he would spur them toward digital technology simply by assuring them that such technology was the wave of the future. They could evolve—and show films like Attack of the Clones—or slowly go extinct.

  Most chose to evolve. Studios and cinemas alike would follow Lucas’s lead; studios would begin distributing movies both digitally and on film, while theaters would begin slowly converting to digital projection systems. As Lucas prepared to release Attack of the Clones in 2002, only about thirty theaters in the world could accommodate digital films. The technology was expensive: digital projection systems would cost a theater about $100,000, ten times more than the traditional 35 mm projectors. But studios like Paramount—which, by 2014, would be the first to distribute its films entirely in a digital format—worked with theaters to finance the conversion to digital systems, and by 2014, 92 percent of the 40,045 screens in the United States would have digital capability.25 And Lucas had led the charge, clenching a DVD of Attack of the Clones in his upraised fist.

  Attack of the Clones was released on May 16, 2002, in 3,161 theaters. It would reap $110.2 million in its first four days, on its way to a worldwide gross of $649 million by the end of the year—a staggering number, to be sure, but well short of Phantom Menace, and only enough to make it the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year.26 The film may not have set a record, but it was wildly profitable, a box office success that was not merely inevitable, thought New York Times critic A. O. Scott, but downright predictable; after all, everyone was going to see Star Wars. “Like weary Brezhnev-era Muscovites, the American moviegoing public will line up out of ha
bit and compulsion,” wrote Scott, “ruefully hoping that this episode will at least be a little better than the last one.”27

  And indeed, some critics were kinder to Episode II, with Rolling Stone applauding it for being “crammed with action, grand digital design and a dark side Lucas hasn’t flaunted since 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back.”28 Nearly every review praised the digital effects, though Episode II would ultimately lose the Oscar to director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the middle part of another epic trilogy that was unfurling on movie screens at the same time as Lucas’s prequels. Roger Ebert spent a lot of time on the digital technology in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, complaining that the images were often “indistinct,” which he blamed—to Lucas’s likely delight—on the fact that his local theater lacked the digital projection system that Lucas favored.

  But beyond the special effects, most critics found the film unremarkable, even boring—a trait Ebert blamed on Lucas’s dialogue-heavy script. “They talk and talk and talk,” Ebert complained,29 a gripe that Peter Travers seconded, adding snarkily, “Lucas still can’t write dialogue that doesn’t induce projectile vomiting.”30 David Ansen, writing in Newsweek under a headline reading “Attack of the Groans,” complained bitterly about nearly everything, from the script to the digital effects to the wooden acting—which Ansen also blamed on Lucas’s screenwriting. “Yes, it’s better than The Phantom Menace,” Ansen conceded. “No, it’s not great.”31

  Lucas was typically dismissive of the criticism. Anything the critics didn’t like—clunky dialogue, over-the-top extended battle sequences—Lucas claimed had been done intentionally. And what about those eye-rolling love scenes that the New York Times had called “the most embarrassing romantic avowals in recent screen history”?32 “I was very happy with the way it turned out in the script and in the performances, but I knew people might not buy it,” he said defiantly. “It is presented very honestly, it isn’t tongue in cheek at all, and it’s really played to the hilt.… [T]his film is even more of a melodrama than the others.”33 He had done it all on purpose, he claimed.

  One critic at the Los Angeles Times wasn’t buying it. In a scathing article headlined “SECLUSION HAS LEFT LUCAS OUT OF TOUCH,” critic Patrick Goldstein argued that one of Lucas’s biggest problems as a filmmaker was that there was no one in his organization who would tell him that intentional melodrama was a bad idea. “No one seems to deliver bad news,” wrote Goldstein. “Lucas’s best work was made with strong collaborators.… [His] talents are probably better suited as a conceptual thinker and producer than director.”34

  Lucas bristled at the very suggestion that he needed collaborators rather than subordinates. “That’s one of the problems of a democracy. You get these individual voices that are very loud, and very dysfunctional,” he sighed. “And if you cater to those voices, you end up with a very dysfunctional society.”35

  The solution: Create. Oversee. Control everything.

  The cramped attic space of Skywalker Ranch’s Main House had been converted into a makeshift art department. Artists’ tables butted up against one another, and piles of art books and journals teetered on low tables. Space was tight: artists worked practically elbow to elbow, and some wore earphones to listen to music privately as they sketched; some of the more gadget-savvy even had the new Apple iPod on their table, white earbuds dangling. It was here under the eaves that Lucas had installed his concept artists to begin work on designs for Episode III. Lucas would stroll the room—stepping past a bathroom door with a sign reading DOOKU’S THRONE ROOM hanging on it—peering over shoulders or spreading drawings out on the side tables. As usual, the artists were flying without a net. It was June 2002, a month after the release of Attack of the Clones, and Lucas hadn’t written a word of the new screenplay yet. McCallum, once more tasked with watching the bottom line, grimly compared Lucas’s creative process to “building backward, designing a twenty-five-floor skyscraper without foundations,” then sighed gustily. “Do you know what it’s like to budget a film without a script?”36

  But Lucas wasn’t going to be rushed. The script for Episode III would be critical; not only did he have to finish telling the story of Anakin Skywalker’s descent into the Dark Side, but also he had to make sure that Episode III logically led back to the original Star Wars. “I’ve painted myself into a corner,” he said, using a metaphor his artists could understand. “I have to get from there to here, and I have to connect these two things [the original trilogy and the prequels] in a very precise way.… Writing is a lot of puzzle-solving.” But even as pencils flew and McCallum fretted, Lucas left for Canada with his children for a vacation. While on vacation, he’d jot down ideas for Episode III, as well as for another film he was hoping to put into production soon, and which as yet had only a working title: Indiana Jones IV.

  It would take Lucas a long time to really begin writing Episode III—and with each passing day, artists and designers became more and more anxious. In a November 1 meeting with McCallum and Rob Coleman, who would again be animating Yoda, Lucas casually mentioned that he’d start writing “when reality hits.” McCallum was stunned. “You said you’ve been writing,” he said gently. Lucas waved him off. “I’ve been thinking about it,” said Lucas. Three weeks later, Lucas met with designers to review drawings of planets and a few characters. “Keep up the good work. The stuff was great, guys,” he told them as he left the room. “I just have to figure out a movie to go with it.”37

  By mid-December, he’d finally forced himself to sit at the desk in his office for four days a week, trying to get anything at all down on the page. McCallum would beg Lucas for tidbits of information about sets, any information he could convey to the crew at Fox Studios in Sydney, where carpenters anxiously hung on any word from Lucas about what a particular set should look like. Lucas continued writing through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, scrawling his draft in pencil on lined paper, as always. “This is all subject to change,” he insisted as he reviewed with designer Gavin Bocquet a list of sets and characters—including a ten-year-old Han Solo, whom Lucas envisioned working with Yoda to track down the villainous General Grievous.

  Lucas finally completed his fifty-five-page rough draft—already titled Revenge of the Sith, a nod to his abandoned title for Return of the Jedi—on January 31, 2003. Even then, only McCallum was given the completed draft; rather than hand over a script to the design crew, Lucas preferred to describe the look of the sets personally to Bocquet and his team, “so they know what’s going on and can plan,” he told McCallum, “but not enough information so they lock something down—because everything is going to change.”38 And then back he went into his writing room to work on the next draft. McCallum, more amused now than annoyed, left for Sydney to confer with production heads about the sets and props they would begin building, based on a script they still weren’t permitted to read.

  It’s likely, too, that Lucas’s focus was elsewhere, at least in the early part of 2003. On Saturday, February 8, with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi beside him, Lucas presided over the official groundbreaking for his Digital Arts Center on the grounds of the Presidio. It had taken longer than he had hoped for the day to arrive; the official agreement with the Presidio Trust hadn’t been signed until August 2001, nearly two years after the deal was announced. Even then, work had stalled for yet another two years, but Lucas was determined that the $300 million project would now proceed quickly and smoothly, shooting for a grand opening sometime in 2005.

  But this time, work would proceed without him. While Lucas had presided over nearly every element of the design and construction of Skywalker Ranch, Lucasfilm CFO Micheline Chau—who was on her way to replacing Gordon Radley as president and COO—politely but firmly informed Lucas that he couldn’t visit the Presidio site unless he was invited. As Chau delicately put it, “George and I had a conversation about freedom and letting go.”39 Over the next year and a half, Lucas would be invit
ed to the site only three times, which was just long enough for him to obsessively review twenty different window designs and more than a hundred fabric swatches for the walls of the movie theater.

  Chau’s directive probably kept work on Revenge of the Sith on track. With the Presidio facility unavailable to him, Lucas had to go back to his desk each day, writing from 8:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. Even after forty years of writing scripts, it hadn’t gotten any easier. “I can be chained to my desk and I still can’t write it. [But] I do it, you know,” he added proudly. “I do get it done.” On April 10, a group of designers came into his office to find him sitting at his desk, pencil down, head bowed. “I just finished the first full draft,” he told them.40 He would start the second draft immediately; filming at Fox Sydney was scheduled to begin in two months.

  On the morning of May 1, Lucas walked into the art department and threw the recently completed script down on a table. Even at 10:00 in the morning, he already looked tired. “Next week… I’m bringing in a guest director so I don’t have to do this anymore,” he told his artists calmly. “I’ve done pretty much everything I can do.… The director’s coming in on Thursday, so I want to go through all this”—and here he gestured to all the art plastered on the walls and scattered across the tables—“and show him everything that’s here.”41 Nervous glances were exchanged; concept design supervisor Ryan Church remembered wondering if he would need to move back to Hollywood to look for work. For the next week, the ranch was buzzing with excitement and nervousness, everyone speculating on the identity of the mysterious director. On Thursday, May 8, Lucas introduced his guest director to the crew: Steven Spielberg.