George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  There would be esoteric art films, he said, and maybe even another Indiana Jones movie. But of one thing he was certain: there would be no more Star Wars. “Star Wars is finished,” Lucas said. “I do have a lot of other movies that I want to make.… I don’t have to answer to anybody.… That’s what I’ve earned: to be able to do what I want to do.”60

  13

  Letting Go

  2005–2016

  George Lucas was in love.

  It happened—as love so often does—unexpectedly. At the age of sixty-one, Lucas was concentrating mostly on being a father. As corny as it sounded, he would always call it the job that made him the happiest. “There was a point there where I lived only for movies,” he said, “but now I know the truth: Children are the key to life, the key to joy, the key to happiness.”1 Still, he admitted, “there’s a lonely part to having kids alone.… Without two [parents], the emotional need is always there. You don’t have that level of sharing. But also, you don’t have to compromise. But let’s face it,” he added somewhat wistfully, “I’d rather be married. But I’m not. As you grow up, you understand that there is no such thing as a perfect life.”2

  When asked about his love life in 2005 on 60 Minutes, Lucas laughed out loud. “What love life?” he said. “It hasn’t changed much.… I’d love to get married again, but I’m not gonna get married unless it’s the right person.” He admitted that at his age, he was set in his ways and could be “difficult,” but thought that “whomever I’d be interested in now is also the same way.”3 Coppola, interviewed for a 60 Minutes piece on Lucas several years earlier, thought the problem was that Lucas had “very high standards. I mean, he wants Queen Noor or Grace Kelly or someone,” said Coppola. “She can’t be too tall, she has to be wonderful with kids.” But Lucas immediately dismissed the accusation that he was too picky. “I speak for those who are the single ones, to say, ‘I am not picky,’” he insisted. “But I want someone who’s right. And I’m not gonna walk into anything, because marriage is a serious thing.”4

  Lightning would strike where Lucas least expected it: at one of the endless conferences and fund-raisers he attended with mind-numbing regularity. At one crowded function, friends introduced him to thirty-seven-year-old Mellody Hobson, president of the Chicago financial firm Ariel Investments, one of the nation’s largest African American–owned money management companies. The Princeton-educated Hobson was smart and charismatic, with an admiring circle of powerful friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Warren Buffett, and former senator Bill Bradley. The Reverend Al Sharpton called her “black America’s business princess.”5 Princess or not, Lucas was immediately smitten. By early 2006, the two of them were quietly dating.

  For a while they kept their relationship private, succeeding so well that few of their friends realized they were an item. When Hobson casually mentioned to Arianna Huffington that she was having dinner with Lucas, Huffington recoiled in shock. “I said, ‘You can’t go,’” recalled Huffington. “I thought he was a ladies man”—an allegation that would likely have horrified Lucas.6 Eventually, he and Hobson would be seen at high-powered events together, showing up at a 2006 White House reception where Spielberg was being feted as a Kennedy Center honoree, and the 2007 Oscars, where Oprah gaped at the television screen in delighted disbelief as she watched her friend laughing in the audience, seated next to Lucas.

  For those observing them together, it was clear this was no casual fling. Lucas and Hobson would arrange their busy schedules to ensure they saw each other every weekend—and when they were together, they seemed to hold hands constantly. “I’ve known George a long time and I’ve never seen him this happy,” said David Geffen.7 Matthew Robbins, who’d known Lucas longer than most, was delighted for the couple. “They’re very much in love,” he said.8

  The difference in age and race didn’t matter to their friends—or to either of them. “[Our relationship] works because we are extraordinarily open-minded people,” Hobson told Winfrey. “And we’re open to what the universe brings us. I think we didn’t have preconceived ideas about what a partner should be, and so we allowed ourselves to discover something that was unexpected.”9 Lucas, too, knew they were an unlikely couple. “I’m a 60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed in the wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing. And she’s an East Coast, Princeton grad, Wall Street fund manager.… You would never think that we would get together, have anything in common,” Lucas explained. “But when we did… we realized we have everything in common.… I was attracted to her because she’s really, really smart.… If you’re more beautiful than I am and smarter than I am and you’ll put up with me, that’s all it takes. I’m there.”10

  As Anakin Skywalker had said in Lucas’s script for Attack of the Clones, “Unconditional love is essential to a Jedi’s life.” They were words he had written in 2002, and four years later, George Lucas had found it.

  At Lucasfilm, there was one question on everyone’s mind: Now what?

  Lucas had gotten Episodes I, II, and III out of the way—but would there be a VII, VIII, and IX? Lucas threw cold water on expectations; he insisted that he was finished with Star Wars for good. “I get asked all the time, ‘What happens after Return of the Jedi?’ and there really is no answer for that,” he told a reporter patiently. “The movies were the story of Anakin Skywalker and Luke Skywalker, and when Luke saves the galaxy and redeems his father, that’s where that story ends.”11 What that meant for Lucasfilm, however, was turning off what had been a very profitable spigot; the prequels alone had generated $2.4 billion at the box office, with much of the profits going right back into the company.

  With no new Star Wars films on the horizon, then, Lucasfilm would be “a widget-driven” company, said Lucas, not entirely kidding. There would be books and video games and music and special effects—but with the exception of another Indiana Jones film, there would be no more movies. “I have no intention of running a film company. That is the last thing in the world I’d do,” Lucas told the New York Times. “I’m trying to get back to that place [where] the company functions without me and Star Wars, where they don’t need some genius at the head to run the company. What I am doing is so I don’t need to be a visionary.”12

  At the moment, Lucasfilm was in an enviable position; the company had virtually no debt (“I don’t believe in debt,” Lucas had growled years earlier, and he still meant it), and Lucas wanted as much of the company as possible to be self-sufficient. ILM, THX, and Skywalker Sound were doing the most to earn their keep, generating the bulk of their revenue from non– Star Wars projects. But ILM was now just one of many digital effects companies that offered their services for hire—the grand old man with the coolest car, perhaps, but still just one among many. Revenge of the Sith, in fact, marked the first time ILM failed to receive an Oscar nomination for its effects in a Star Wars film. Chrissie England, the new president of ILM, was committed to making the company even more deft and flexible by lending its people out to other effects outfits or consulting with directors.

  LucasArts, however, was more problematic; an aggressive internal review of the organization by vice president Jim Ward hadn’t gone well. “I walked into quite a mess,” remembered Ward.13 The division had misjudged the rising popularity of console game systems like PlayStation and Xbox, and was still aiming its games largely at the PC market. Furthermore, both Ward and Lucas were frustrated by LucasArts’ inability to come up with original game concepts; most of its games were now deeply rooted in the Star Wars universe, a habit Lucas was hoping to break. Trying to cut costs and refocus, the division slashed staffing and recalled a number of games in progress, but would continue to struggle for several more years.

  One Lucasfilm vice president wondered aloud whether “George’s challenge is coming up with the next creative generation.” Lucas dismissed that suggestion outright. “It’s not like we have to come up with a movie every year. I don’t want to be Pixar,” he said with just a touch o
f derision. “I’m not depending on these people to take the company into a megahit reality. I’m trying to build a company where we don’t make miracles, but we do a good job.”14 But the Pixar comparison was apt—and probably stung a bit. After selling the company to Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s, Lucas had watched his rival produce one animated blockbuster after another. He’d learned his lesson. After dismissing computer animation for fifteen years, Lucas was determined to get into the game now himself, and had recently established Lucasfilm Animation, with offices at nearby Big Rock Ranch and in a sandcrawler-shaped building he was constructing in Singapore, officially giving Lucasfilm an international presence.

  With Star Wars films phased out, Lucas was now putting all of his efforts into developing a number of series for television. Partly it was a matter of cost; for the same $200 million he might spend on a movie, he explained, he could make fifty two-hour movies for television. “In the future market, that’s where it’s going to land, because it’s going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable,” he predicted—a remarkably prescient statement, essentially anticipating on-demand and streaming services for television and film ten years before such technology was widely available.15 But then this was the same George Lucas who, in a 1994 interview with the Wall Street Journal, had foretold that people “will really go for” computer-based home shopping services, “to order up things at home and not have to go out,” practically defining the appeal and convenience of Amazon.com a year before the company publicly announced its existence. In the same interview, he predicted the popularity of what he called “party-line” video games, which would be played “with two or three other people, you can see them all as you play,” accurately describing the complex multiplayer functionality of today’s video games at a time when Internet service still required a hardwired telephone.16

  Despite his No More Star Wars decree, Lucas excited Star Wars fans by announcing he had in production two Star Wars–related television series. One was a live-action series eventually called Star Wars: Underworld, following criminals and gangs (McCallum would later compare it to Deadwood in space) and set in the era between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars franchise. (It would languish in development hell, and never be produced.) The other was a computer-animated series called Clone Wars, a follow-up to Genndy Tartakovsky’s similarly named micro-series for Cartoon Network, which had charted the adventures of Obi-Wan and Anakin in the Clone Wars. Tartakovsky, however, thought it was a terrible idea, and accused Lucas of going back to the well one too many times. “I think it’s the easiest thing to do, because he doesn’t need to come up with a whole new thing,” said Tartakovsky. “There’s so much more he could explore.”17

  “It’s not a matter of trying to prove anything to anybody,” Lucas insisted. “I don’t have to.”18

  And still Lucas—who called himself “semi-retired”19 at this point—was determined “to go off and make my own feature films, which are more about exploring the aesthetics and conventions of cinema… [the] kind of moviemaking I haven’t done since I was in college, so I’m looking forward to getting back to the basics of cinema.”20 Lucasfilm CEO Micheline Chau had heard it all before. Lucas could pursue his great art all he wanted; her concern was to “think about what life is like after Star Wars, and after George.”21

  Except Star Wars, it seemed, wasn’t really going anywhere. Star Wars merchandising had surged and would be enough to keep Lucasfilm in the black for years, if not decades, to come. Episode III merchandise alone brought in more than $3 billion worldwide, and Hasbro saw its own profits jump by 15 percent on the coattails of Star Wars toys.22 At this point, fans would buy nearly any figures based on the Star Wars universe, no matter how obscure or brief their screen time—Major Bren Derlin!—or, in some cases, whether they’d even appeared in the movie at all. There were figures of Threepio and Artoo based on Ralph McQuarrie’s original concept paintings and—one of the more popular though hard-to-get figures—a stormtrooper with a removable helmet that revealed the face of George Lucas underneath (and for those who wanted Lucas fighting for the Alliance, he was also available as an X-wing pilot named Jorg Sacul—“Lucas” spelled backward).

  There may have been no more Star Wars movies on the horizon, but under their Lucasfilm licensing agreements, there were plenty of comics and novels in which fans could follow their heroes—and villains—and which added so many new characters, planets, ships, and aliens to the Star Wars universe that they would be officially classified as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The galaxy grew so large, in fact, that Lucasfilm eventually hired its own staff to keep tabs on and catalog everything, though it was Lucas, and Lucas alone, who would ultimately decide what was considered to be “canon”—that is, officially part of the Star Wars universe.

  Still, in the grand scheme of things, his was a tenuous hold on the mythology he’d created—for Star Wars no longer belonged to Lucasfilm, or even to George Lucas; it belonged to everybody. And there was no better time to drive that point home than in 2007, the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Star Wars. On the first day of the year, Lucas served as the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, accompanied by hundreds of fans dressed as stormtroopers, Jedi knights, Sand People, and Imperial officers. For the rest of the year, Star Wars would be celebrated around the world. The U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative postage stamps, and painted four hundred mailboxes across the country to resemble R2-D2. In May, Celebration IV would draw 35,000 people, making it one of the largest Star Wars conventions—and two months later, 30,000 European fans filled the ExCel Centre in London as part of Celebration Europe, the first Lucasfilm-sanctioned Star Wars convention outside the United States. In Paris, the Official Star Wars Fan Club of France would host a showing of all six movies at its Reunion II convention at the Grand Rex, the largest single-screen theater in Europe.

  Lucas himself would even get into the act, presiding over a showing and panel discussion of the film on its official birthday, May 25, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles, where he would crack wise about wanting to go back and tinker with it again. (“It’s a JOKE, people!” he said as he pirouetted away from the crowd.)23 More and more now, Lucas was willing to make himself the butt of the joke—a mood shift that could likely be traced directly back to the influence of Mellody Hobson—and had even cooperated with the creators of the sketch comedy series Robot Chicken and with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane for affectionate, and often biting, parodies of both Star Wars and himself. For Robot Chicken, in fact, Lucas would lend his own voice to the stop-action version of himself, muttering a pitch-perfect “Oh, dear God…” as he stepped off an elevator in front of hundreds of adoring fans—a moment likely rooted in personal experience.

  For most filmmakers, getting mobbed by the eager fans of one iconic film franchise would be more than enough. But Lucas had one other brand name to attend to that summer. In June, he and Spielberg would travel to rural New Mexico to begin principal photography on a film they were disguising with the code name Genre, but which Lucas would usually refer to by a more casual title: Indiana Jones IV.

  Perhaps appropriately, getting Indiana Jones to the big screen again had been an adventure twenty years in the making, leaving multiple wounded writers in its path and generating some friction between old friends.

  For a long time, things hadn’t looked good for the wily archaeologist, starting with perhaps the most important element of any Indiana Jones movie after Indy himself: namely, what object would Dr. Jones be looking for? Lucas thought he had found his answer as early as 1992, only a few years after the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. After working with Harrison Ford on the 1950s-era Young Indiana Jones episode, Lucas was convinced the next film should be set in the atomic age. “[I thought] if I did it in the ’50s, maybe we could change [it] into a ’50s movie,” said Lucas, “[and] I thought, Hey, that could be fun… so I thought, That’s the MacGuffin: aliens. For God’s sake, it can’t miss.”24 />
  Except it did. Both Ford and Spielberg vetoed the idea, with Spielberg standing particularly firm in his objections. “I had done E.T., I had done Close Encounters; I’d had my fill of extraterrestrials,” said Spielberg, “so I resisted that [idea] for many years.” But Lucas, stubborn as ever, eventually persuaded Spielberg to let him take a crack at a story treatment, and brought in screenwriter Jeb Stuart—hot off Ford’s hit The Fugitive—to lend a hand with the writing. He and Lucas completed their first draft, called Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, in May 1994. “It was a lot about Indiana Jones being involved in Roswell,” said Lucas—and, as promised, “the alien was the MacGuffin.”25 Lucas would continue to revise the script over the next year, first with Stuart and then with Jeff Boam, who’d written Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. By 1996, both Lucas and Spielberg were pleased enough with the script to think about moving into pre-production by summer.

  And then came Independence Day, the sci-fi blockbuster of 1996, most of which involved aliens and flying saucers. Spielberg suddenly lost his nerve. “We’re not doing a flying saucer movie,” he told Lucas flatly, “and that’s it.” The script went into Lucas’s desk drawer, and there it sat until February 2000, when Harrison Ford’s tribute at the American Film Institute brought Lucas, Ford, Spielberg, and Indiana Jones producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy together again. As the group drank and talked backstage, Ford casually asked, “How is Indy IV coming?” Two months later, Ford, Lucas, and Spielberg huddled to discuss possible stories for the next Indiana Jones adventure. Lucas’s only requirement: “I won’t do it without aliens. That’s the only thing that’s going to work.” Spielberg finally conceded. “Working with George is still the same,” he reported affectionately. “We still argue, we still compromise, and we still deal with each other like the brothers that we are.”26