Over the next two years Lucas would keep rewriting and revising, even while working nearly full-time on Attack of the Clones. Despite continued grumbling from Ford and Spielberg, he was sticking with aliens, and he’d recently come up with a new MacGuffin. “We’d actually written an [unproduced] episode of Young Indiana Jones about a crystal skull, which was found in Guatemala,” said Lucas. “I thought it was kind of cool, because it’s a supernatural object. So we started to say, ‘Well, what if it was an alien skull?’” Spielberg agreed it was an object worthy of being pursued by Indiana Jones, and he and Lucas brought in Frank Darabont, the talented writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, to work on a new script. It was the beginning of what Darabont would later describe as a “wasted year or more of my life.”27
With Lucas spending most of 2002 working on Revenge of the Sith, Darabont consulted regularly with Spielberg instead, embedding Spielberg’s sensibilities and preferences, rather than Lucas’s, into the script. Little wonder, then, that when Darabont turned in his script, titled Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods, in May 2003, “Steven was ecstatic,” according to Darabont. “We both were. It was going to be his next film. He told me it was the best script he’d read since Raiders of the Lost Ark.… As a screenwriter, you dream of making a guy like Steven Spielberg happy and excited.” But Lucas was neither happy nor excited. “George Lucas read it, didn’t like it, and threw ice water on the whole thing,” said Darabont with a touch of bitterness. “The project went down in flames.… It was just such an awful surprise, after all my hopes and effort. I really felt I’d nailed it, and so did Steven.”28
Lucas and Spielberg sat on the project for another year, with Lucas picking at Darabont’s script before finally bringing in another writer, Jeff Nathanson, who’d written Catch Me If You Can for Spielberg. Lucas, who admitted that the writer “was kind of caught between Steven and me,” also rejected Nathanson’s revision, called Indiana Jones and the Atomic Ants. In stepped writer David Koepp, no stranger to franchises, as he’d penned two Jurassic Park movies and the first Mission: Impossible. Koepp worked mostly with Spielberg, though he found Lucas to be “a fountain of ideas,” and in July 2006 turned in a script with a suitably dramatic atomic age title, Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds. Lucas still wasn’t entirely pleased—he was determined to keep flying saucers in the story—but after a few more revisions and tweaks, he was finally happy by Christmas 2006, nearly fourteen years after coming up with his “can’t miss” concept. Even with the script complete, naming the movie would be a point of contention. Lucas wanted it to be Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, while Spielberg wanted it to be a single Crystal Skull—a debate Spielberg would win. “Steven and I have both gotten more curmudgeonly as we’ve grown older,” sighed Lucas. According to Spielberg, Lucas had finally thrown up his hands in mock surrender. “I don’t care what you call it,” Lucas told him. “Just get the word kingdom in there somewhere.”29
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull went into pre-production with most of the familiar cast and crew returning. While Spielberg was unsuccessful in coaxing Sean Connery out of retirement, both Ford and Karen Allen were back, as were producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, who had continued to produce one powerhouse movie after another over the past thirty years. But there was a big change, at least for Lucas: before one minute of film had been shot, Spielberg made it clear to Lucas that he wanted to use as few digital effects as possible. “Steven said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to do the real deal,’” said Lucas. “And we’re doing it.” There were few complaints. “I love being on a physical set,” said Harrison Ford, who, at the age of sixty-five, would be doing most of his own stunt work with only minimal digital assistance. “I don’t so much love being in front of a blue screen.”30
Filming would take place at the same rapid pace Lucas had established for every Indiana Jones movie. Production bounced from New Mexico to Connecticut to Hawaii—a homecoming of sorts, as this was where Lucas and Spielberg had dreamed up Indiana Jones on a beach in 1977—then finally settled onto soundstages in Los Angeles, and all within a span of eighty days. Spielberg said that directing it was “a recreational activity”—and in truth, after directing a string of darker and more cerebral films like Munich and War of the Worlds, he was more than happy to yield to Lucas’s more pulpy, pop vision and tastes… even when he didn’t entirely share them.31 “I never liked the MacGuffin,” Spielberg later confessed. “George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend,” he noted with genuine warmth. “When he writes a story he believes in—even if I don’t believe in it—I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisioned it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”32
With relatively few digital shots to complete, post-production on Crystal Skull moved along quickly. Spielberg, defying the high-tech Lucas, had edited the movie manually on film; Lucas could only shake his head in amusement, calling his friend “a sentimental sort of guy.” But Lucas knew his audience was sentimental too. “There’s a lot of anticipation on the part of the older audience, because they loved the previous films,” he said, knowing full well he was running the very real risk of disappointing fans who had waited twenty years for another Indiana Jones movie—a frustration he’d experienced firsthand with his return to Star Wars.33 “All we can do is hurt ourselves,” Lucas admitted to Time magazine. “All it’s going to do is get criticized. I mean, it’s basically Phantom Menace we’re making. No matter how you do it, no matter what you do, it won’t be what the other ones were in terms of the impact or the way people remember them.”34
It seemed at first he had reason to be concerned. Mediocre reviews of the film trickled out in advance of the May 22, 2008, premiere, though mostly on Internet fan sites, despite Lucas’s attempts to control media access tightly. Most reviewers, however, took a more measured approach, with some, like Roger Ebert—under the headline “I Admit It: I Loved ‘Indy’”—feeling practically a moral obligation to defend the film. “It takes a cold heart and a weary imagination to dislike an Indiana film with all of its rambunctious gusto,” wrote Ebert.35 More typical were lukewarm reviews like the one in the New York Times that found the film pleasant enough but lacking “any sense of rediscovery,” laying the blame on Spielberg, who had “just grown out of this kind of sticky kids’ stuff.”36 Newsweek, borrowing a metaphor from Sunset Boulevard, provided perhaps the briefest and most cogent analysis of Crystal Skull: “Indy is still big; it’s just that, in the new world of movie franchises, the Crystal Skull feels smaller.”37
Still, the film took in $151.1 million in its first five days, an impressive though not record-breaking number, even with a major push from Paramount and Spielberg, who were promoting the movie aggressively.38 Lucas was doing his best, too, but he would always be miserable during promotional tours, his annoyance nearly palpable.
“I love making movies; I’m not the biggest fan of selling them,” he told the New York Times in late June. “I’m doing all my selling for two more weeks. Then I’m sold out.”39
Lucas had vowed that once he got Indiana Jones out of the way, “then I’m going to go and do my own little movies—theatrical movies, but I’m not sure if they’ll get shown anywhere.”40 Coppola, meanwhile, had done exactly that, writing, directing, and producing Youth Without Youth on a budget of $5 million. The film had been released in December 2007 in only eighteen theaters and, perhaps predictably, had quickly sunk out of sight. Coppola offered no apologies for pursuing his art. “We make films for ourselves,” Coppola said. “If no one wants to see them, what can we do?”41 But Lucas, despite his art-for-art’s-sake posturing, found he had little patience with that kind of martyred artist mentality. �
��If you’re making a work of art or a film and nobody sees it, I don’t see where it does anybody any good,” Lucas argued.42 At any rate, his own esoteric films would have to wait once again. “You get sidetracked easily,” he admitted. “I do, anyway.”43 Especially when it came to Star Wars, “a sandbox I love to play in.”44
This time it was The Clone Wars, the computer-animated series Lucas was moving ahead with, producing it with the critical assistance of director, writer, and animator Dave Filoni, who’d impressed Lucas with his work on Nickelodeon’s animated hit Avatar: The Last Air-bender. Filoni was a good “get”; besides his experience and talent as a director and animator, he was a Star Wars fan who could talk Imperial politics as easily as Lucas. Together they plumbed early drafts of Star Wars for abandoned ideas they could weave through a new cartoon series, writing scripts out at Big Rock Ranch with a team of equally devoted Star Wars fans, which would eventually include Lucas’s daughter Katie.
Lucas took the same approach to selling an animated series that he had with Young Indiana Jones, waiting several years for animators to produce at least twenty-two episodes of the series before he began making the rounds of the networks, looking for takers. Typically, he had no intention of negotiating; he was the one financing the series—each episode cost him between $750,000 and $1 million—and was asking the networks to pay only the licensing fee to distribute and broadcast the show. As he saw it, networks should be falling over themselves at the very idea of having an officially sanctioned Star Wars program in their lineup. Furthermore, there would be no cherry-picking the series; a network had to take all twenty-two episodes or lose out altogether. “It’s much easier for me to just do the show I want, [then] say, ‘Here it is, do you wish to license it or not?’” Lucas said with only a hint of exasperation. “That’s it. There’s no notes, no comments. I don’t care what your opinion is. You either put it on the air or you don’t.”45
Most passed. Even Cartoon Network, which had run the Clone Wars micro-series in 2003, was only lukewarm toward the new one. But once Lucas promised Time Warner he would combine several episodes to make a theatrically released Clone Wars movie, the studio—smelling future Star Wars–related projects if it got involved with Lucas—agreed to distribute the film and strongly encouraged its corporate cousins at Cartoon Network to take another look at Lucas’s remaining episodes. This time, Cartoon Network agreed to pick up the series, promising to debut it in the autumn of 2008, following the summer release of the Clone Wars movie in August.
Unfortunately, the movie was a dud. Some viewers were put off by the character designs, in which the heads appeared to be made of carved wood—a look Lucas said was deliberately inspired by the 1960s television marionette series Thunderbirds. Others found they didn’t like having to root for Anakin, knowing he would soon become Darth Vader. Whatever it was, The Clone Wars hadn’t worked. While it would easily recover its $8 million budget on its way to earnings of $65 million, ticket sales dropped off so sharply between the first and second weeks that critics rushed to brand it the first true Star Wars–related flop. The New York Times seemed to take particular glee in pointing out the film’s dismal financials, practically cackling under a headline reading “The Empire Goes Slack.”46
Still, a deal was a deal. On the evening of Friday, October 3, Cartoon Network debuted the first episode of the Clone Wars series, and hoped for the best. Four million viewers tuned in, making it the most watched series premiere in the history of the channel.47 Lucas had also shrewdly promoted the series across media, offering exclusive content online, including games and episodes with commentary. The New York Times, eating crow, conceded that while Clone Wars hadn’t worked as a feature-length film, it made for an entertaining half hour on television. Cartoon Network would air twenty-two episodes in the first season, then renew the show annually for another five seasons. More important, Lucas had successfully moved Star Wars into yet another medium. Star Wars truly was always on now, and on everywhere.
Lucas was enjoying his respite from filmmaking. As he had hoped, the company was doing fine in what he still referred to as “the widget business,” though in truth, much of its revenue was still coming in from Star Wars–related merchandising and licensing. LucasArts, recently unshackled from Lucas’s initial No Star Wars directive, had returned to developing games set in the Star Wars universe, providing endless opportunities for fans to play as Jedi knights, bounty hunters, stormtroopers, and X-wing pilots, or even take the controls of the Millennium Falcon. It would strike pay dirt with its Battlefront series, permitting players to direct armies fighting for the Rebel Alliance or the Empire, and its hugely successful Lego Star Wars games, allowing players to play through the six movies using Lego vehicles and minifigures.
Out at the Letterman complex, ILM was still working hard for others, and had become the effects shop of preference for a number of hugely successful film franchises, including the Iron Man, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean series. ILM would also contribute effects to what would become not just the biggest film of 2010 but the most successful of all time: James Cameron’s ambitious and almost entirely digital blockbuster Avatar. Cameron intended for Avatar to be the first film in a trilogy, and Lucas—who knew a thing or two about the challenges, perils, and expectations that came with wrapping oneself up in a franchise—publicly wished Cameron well. “Creating a universe is daunting,” Lucas told The New Yorker. “I’m glad Jim is doing it—there are only a few people in the world who are nuts enough to. I did it with Star Wars, and now he’s trying to challenge that. It’s a lot of work.”48
Skywalker Sound, meanwhile, was handling the sound duties for nearly forty films and television shows at a time, and its scenic location—nestled inside the Tech Building on Skywalker Ranch—had made it a destination of choice for a number of filmmakers, including Kevin Smith and documentarian Michael Moore, who had made extensive use of the ranch’s facilities. Lucas, in fact, had built an inn where visiting filmmakers could stay, with twenty-six themed guest rooms named for artistic icons like John Ford, Winsor McCay, and George Gershwin. There was a Skywalker Ranch fire brigade, which responded to calls both on the ranch and in the Marin County region, in fire engines painted in USC cardinal red. “There’s a little film community up here, and we have a different way of looking at things,” Lucas said. “We’re actually more interested in making movies than making money.”49 Except Lucasfilm really was making money.
He and Hobson were still seeing each other regularly, with Hobson flying to San Francisco to stay with him at the ranch, or Lucas jetting to Chicago to spend the weekend with her. Lucas, liberal though never overtly political, began to take a more active interest in politics with the encouragement of the politically savvy and plugged-in Hobson. A friend of hers from Chicago, Senator Barack Obama, could often be found working out of Hobson’s offices at Ariel while setting up more permanent headquarters for his campaign for president of the United States. Hobson was actively involved in raising money for Obama, and Lucas, too, quickly became a fan, calling him “a hero in the making.”50 He would find himself at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2009, Hobson at his side, buttoned up to the neck in yet another suffocating tuxedo shirt.
There were times, too, when Lucas seemed to be looking for things to do. In early 2010 he showed up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—one of the few television shows, along with Law and Order, that he regularly watched—ostensibly to promote a book he hadn’t even written.51 Instead, he talked about Clone Wars and let Stewart tease him about Star Wars minutiae and the general awfulness of The Phantom Menace. “My son says his favorite movie is The Phantom Menace,” Stewart deadpanned. “And I explained to him: No, it’s not.” Striking a more serious tone, Stewart asked Lucas how he reacted to both the love and anger he generated in his devoted, passionate, and sometimes irrational fan base. Lucas smiled wryly. “It’s a work of fiction. It’s a metaphor. It’s not real,” he said matter-of-factly. “And therefore you can eithe
r like it or not like it. Whatever.”52
And yet, as dismissive as he might have been, Lucas seemed determined to keep picking fights with his fans, going in yet again to make minor changes to the original Star Wars trilogy for its release on Blu-ray in 2011. There was more fiddling with the Han-Greedo showdown—Lucas couldn’t ever seem to leave it alone—and Ewoks at last were given eye blinks. But the latest heresy, fans thought, was giving Vader an anguished “Noooooooo!” as he lifted the Emperor off Luke and threw him over the railing to his death at the end of Return of the Jedi. Star Wars fans were apoplectic all over again, and took to social media to complain loudly. “George Lucas hates Star Wars fans,” tweeted one of them, “and happens to find himself in the best position to hurt them.”53 But as usual, even the angriest of fans still had to have Star Wars in the newest format; the Blu-ray release of the complete saga would sell nearly 3 million copies, grossing $258 million. Whatever, indeed.
In May 2011, Lucas headed for Walt Disney World to attend the celebration marking the reopening of Star Tours, the attraction Lucas had created for the parks back in 1987. The ride had aged relatively well, but with all that had been achieved in special effects over the intervening two decades, Star Tours had been closed for some time for a thorough reconfiguring. With digital technology and improved mechanics, ILM and Disney Imagineers had since created a new and more convincing experience for the ride, in which the riders would have the opportunity to visit several different planets. Lucas had been checking in on the project twice a month for two years; he especially liked the Disney Imagineers, who didn’t seem to know the word no, and he was fond of Disney CEO Bob Iger. The feeling was mutual.
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