Lucas’s involvement with his other beloved franchise, however, seems secure—at least for now. With Disney willingly in his corner, Steven Spielberg announced he wanted to bring back Indiana Jones for a fifth time—and that he intended to bring along not only Harrison Ford but also George Lucas for Dr. Jones’s next adventure. “George is going to be an executive producer on it with me,” said Spielberg during the promotion of The BFG—and then, in a not-so-subtle dig at Disney, explained that “I would never make an Indiana Jones film without George Lucas. That’d be insane.”98 Take that, Force Awakens.
Lucas still hoped, too, to return to making the kinds of small, personal, arty films he’d been promising to make his entire career—documentaries, tone poems, avant-garde ramblings, “whatever I want to do,” said Lucas, “regardless of whether it has any commercial potential or not.”99 His personal films are his “real gift,” said Coppola affectionately.100 “I still hope that he made so much money out of [Star Wars] that he will just make some little movies. He promises me that he will.”101 Added Steven Spielberg, “We’re still waiting, George!”102
Lucas in his early seventies was reflective, though good-natured, about his legacy as a filmmaker—and as a human being. He hoped to be remembered first and foremost as a great dad. After that? “I’ll probably be forgotten completely,” he said, only half-joking. “I hope I’ll be remembered as one of the pioneers of digital cinema. In the long run, that’s probably all it will come down to.” Then, with a twinkle, he added, “They might remember me as the maker of some of those esoteric twentieth-century science fiction movies.”103
More likely he would be remembered as the fiercely independent creator of some of cinema’s most memorable and profitable films, as well as some of pop culture’s most iconic characters. Lucas changed the way audiences watched—and rewatched—movies; he demolished then reinvented the way movies were made, marketed, and merchandised. He changed the way fans embraced and adored not just movies and characters and actors but directors, producers, and composers—all of whom Lucas made active and visible collaborators on his films. He redefined the way movie studios financed, distributed, and controlled—and then, ultimately, didn’t control—the art of filmmaking.
Lucas also unapologetically invested in what he believed in the most: himself. As a result, the film empire he created would empower not just him but other, similar-minded filmmakers to produce movies exactly as they envisioned them, without a studio imposing its own priorities, grousing about budgets, or micromanaging the process. George Lucas—the small-town son of the owner of a stationery store—had said no to the family business then built a cinematic empire based on his own uncompromising vision of the film industry not as it was, but as he thought it should be. Much of that vision lay in the possibilities presented by new technology—technologies Lucas developed with his own money—an inherent ability to hire the right people, and a preternatural knack for asking the right questions. “I can’t help feeling that George Lucas has never been fully appreciated by the industry for his remarkable innovations,” said director Peter Jackson. “He is the Thomas Edison of the modern film industry.”104
Lucas, mellowed with age, easily dismissed such sentiments. He knew what he’d done. He knew his place, and he seemed comfortable with it. When asked by interviewer Charlie Rose in December 2015 what he thought the first line of his obituary might say, Lucas gave perhaps the best summation of his lengthy career, or at least the kind of response one could expect from someone at once so modest and audacious, in two single-syllable words.
“I tried,” he said, laughing.
Lucas was a week away from barely graduating high school when he was in an automobile accident serious enough that it made the front page of the local newspaper. He was thrown free of the car just before impact. Surviving the crash changed Lucas’s outlook on life and persuaded him to pursue studies in anthropology at Modesto Junior College and, later, film at the University of Southern California. (Courtesy of the Modesto Bee)
Lucas with actor Robert Duvall on the set of Lucas’s 1971 science-fiction film THX 1138. Artfully filmed and brimming with interesting ideas, THX 1138 fascinated critics but bewildered audiences. Its failure spelled the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope dream, and very nearly ended Lucas’s filmmaking career. (Moviestore Collection, Ltd. / Alamy)
American Graffiti (1973) was Lucas’s rock-and-roll ode to his high school days cruising Tenth Street in Modesto. Lucas raged when executives at Universal lost faith in the film and cut four minutes from the final movie—a slight that further fired his longing to break away from the Hollywood system entirely. The studios, he growled, were filled with “sleazy, unscrupulous people.” (Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)
Gary Kurtz (left) served as Lucas’s producer on American Graffiti, Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back, arguing budgets with executives and trying to keep Lucas’s vision intact. Lucas grew increasingly disenchanted with Kurtz over cost overruns on Empire, and their relationship fractured for good over a disagreement on the story for Return of the Jedi. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
“Making a movie is a terribly painful experience,” said Lucas, shown here on the set of Star Wars with (from left) Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher, and Dave Prowse, sans his Darth Vader helmet. Star Wars baffled Fox executives, who refused to provide Lucas the money he requested to finish the movie to his liking. Lucas never forgot it, and vowed he wouldn’t go begging for money for one of his own movies again. (AF Archive / Alamy)
Lucas personally tapped John Dykstra to create and oversee the special effects for Star Wars, and to establish the workshop that would become Industrial Light & Magic. Brilliant and fiercely independent, Dykstra constantly frustrated Lucas, who accused the FX wizard of being more interested in creating the new technology than in producing the actual effects. Dykstra’s groundbreaking special effects would win one of Star Wars’s seven Oscars. (ABC Photo Archives / Getty Images)
Marcia Lucas was a talented and highly respected film editor, who many considered to be Lucas’s secret weapon. Tasked by her overextended husband with editing many of Star Wars’s frenetic battle sequences, Marcia brought to the film her instincts for storytelling and an intuitive sense of what excited audiences. “If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Vader,” she told Lucas, “the picture doesn’t work.” Marcia would win an Academy Award for her editing on Star Wars. Lucas, to this day, has yet to win an Oscar. (Julian Wasser / Getty Images)
Movies—and movie fandom—changed forever on May 25, 1977, when Star Wars opened in fewer than forty theaters nationwide and sold out every show in nearly every theater, including Loews in New York City. Fans waited for hours for a showing, queues stretched for blocks, and standing in line became part of the Star Wars experience. Lucas was stunned by the film’s immediate success. “I had no idea of what was going to happen,” said Lucas. “I mean, I had no idea.” (Paul Slade / Getty Images)
Francis Ford Coppola joins a beardless Lucas at the premiere of Captain EO at Disneyland in 1986. Closer than brothers, Lucas and Coppola would squabble and reconcile constantly for two decades while working together on project after project. “I think Francis always looked at George as sort of his upstart assistant who had an opinion,” said Steven Spielberg. “An assistant with an opinion, nothing more dangerous than that, right?” (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)
Willow (1988) was a labor of love for Lucas, who handpicked both Ron Howard (left) to direct and Warwick Davis (right) to star in the Lucas-penned, Tolkien-tinged fairy tale about an abandoned baby returned to her people by the titular hero. While the film featured one of ILM’s most dazzling effects to date—the “morphing” of one creature into another—critics were generally unimpressed and criticized Lucas for recycling fairy-tale clichés. “The Great Regurgitator,” sniffed one detractor harshly. (MGM Studios / Getty Images)
Lucas with Steven Spielberg on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. After the deliberate darkness of Temple of Doom—“a chaotic period in both their lives,” said writer Lawrence Kasdan—Last Crusade was a return to the more rollicking fun of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Murray Close / Getty Images)
Lucas and Steven Spielberg met at a student film festival in 1968, marking the beginning of one of film’s warmest personal and professional friendships. My “valiant colleague, and great and loyal friend,” Spielberg called Lucas, who in turn referred to Spielberg as “my partner, my pal, my inspiration, my challenger.” (Valerie Macon / Getty Images)
Producer Rick McCallum (left) helped Lucas usher in the era of digital filmmaking during their television work on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in the early 1990s, proving that backgrounds, actors, and sets could be manipulated digitally. After being tasked with overseeing the new digital footage inserted into the original Star Wars trilogy, McCallum served as Lucas’s producer on Episodes I, II, and III, quietly permitting Lucas to indulge his love of digital technology, often to the detriment of storytelling. (Francois Guillot / Getty Images)
The sixty-one-year-old Lucas met the thirty-seven-year-old Mellody Hobson in 2005 and was smitten immediately. “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,” said Lucas. The two were married in 2013 at Skywalker Ranch. (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)
Lucas, who raised his children (left to right) Jett, Katie, and Amanda as a single parent, often cited being a father as his proudest achievement. “There was a point there where I lived only for movies,” Lucas said in 2005, “[but] children are the key to life.” (Gregg DeGuire / Getty Images)
Lucas with Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, who orchestrated Disney’s $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. Lucas believed the deal required Disney to use his treatments for Episodes VII through IX, and was disappointed when Episode VII was made largely without his input. “I will go my way,” Lucas finally conceded, “and I’ll let them go their way.” (Image Group LA / Getty Images)
Longtime friend, collaborator, and Indiana Jones producer Kathleen Kennedy was Lucas’s handpicked successor to serve as president of Lucasfilm after its sale to Disney. The first Star Wars film with Kennedy at the helm, The Force Awakens, would earn more than $2 billion in ticket sales worldwide and successfully relaunch the franchise. (Jeffrey Mayer / Getty Images)
Lucas at peace—mostly—at Skywalker Ranch. “I hope I’ll be remembered as one of the pioneers of digital cinema,” he said. “[Though] they might remember me as the maker of some of those esoteric twentieth-century science fiction movies.” (Jean-Louis Atlan / Getty Images)
Acknowledgments
While writing, almost by definition, is a lonely craft—ultimately, it’s just you and the page and a closed door—biographers, simply by the nature of our work, still rely on the assistance and generosity of others. As I researched, wrote, and worked on this project over the last three years, it was my pleasure to speak with, spend time with, and get to know many wonderful people. This book is all the better for it, as am I.
The unauthorized nature of this project made it very difficult to get family, friends, coworkers, and collaborators to sit for an interview, so I’m especially grateful to those who took the time to speak with me. My thanks, then, to Randal Kleiser, John Korty, Gary Kurtz, Paul Golding, and Larry Mirkin, who were willing to go on the record, and to Justin Bozung and Mani Perezcarro, who helped me coordinate several of those interviews. The fearless Ken Plume was very helpful as well, and I valued his guidance and conversation highly.
Anyone who writes history or biography understands how invaluable archivists and librarians are to our work—and this project was no exception. My thanks to the countless librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress, the Montgomery County Public Library, the Stanislaus County Library, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Warner and Universal Studios, and the University of Southern California. Special thanks go to Barbara Alexander and Claude Zachary for their help with researching Modesto and the USC film department, respectively, and to blogger-journalist Leo Adam Biga for his research on American Graffiti.
At Little, Brown, I couldn’t have asked for a better or more patient editor than John Parsley, whose excitement for this project was infectious and, frankly, uplifting as the piles of research materials to slog through got deeper and deeper on my desk. His keen ear for clunkers and sharp red pencil always made this book better—and usually made me slap my forehead and exclaim, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of saying it that way?” His quiet manner of speaking also masked a loud enthusiasm for All Things George Lucas—and I’m so pleased that he was always happy to indulge me in long debates about what Imperial engineers could possibly have been thinking when they came up with AT-ATs.
I’m also grateful to the equally patient Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown, who helped keep everything on track and on time, even when I made things exciting for her. I also appreciate the support and enthusiasm of Malin von Euler-Hogan, Karen Landry, and Amanda Heller, the world’s most impressive copyeditor, who not only had to deal with my pet phrases and keep all my endnotes in order but also had to deal with terms such as Kashyyyk and sarlacc. If you spot any further errors, they’re mine, not hers.
My agent, Jonathan Lyons, has been at my side—and had my back—for the better part of a decade now, and was this project’s biggest supporter, and loudest cheerleader, when it was still little more than a long email between the two of us. There were times I made him work harder than I meant to, but his response was always the same: “Don’t worry about it.” He’s smart, kind, and promptly responds to my weird emails and even weirder phone calls—and I thank his wife, Cameron, and his boys, Roan, Ilan, and Finn, for sharing him with me.
As always, I am grateful for the many family members, friends, and colleagues who always took the time to ask how the project was going, offered their support and excitement, and were understanding when dinners were missed or invitations were refused. My thanks, in particular, to James McGrath Morris, Kitty Kelley, Scott Phillips, Marron and Mike Nelson, Mike and Cassie Knapp, Marc and Kathy Nelligan, Jack and Mindy Shaw, Raice and Liselle McLeod, and Bill and Terrie Crawley. This project would also not have been possible without the support and patience of Sidney Katz, Lisa Mandel-Trupp, Lindsay Hoffman, and Jackie Hawksford. I could also always count on the love and support of my parents, Larry Jones and Elaine and Wayne Miller, and of my brother, Cris, who always let me be Han when we played with our Kenner Star Wars figures, even though he’s still cooler than me to this day.
Finally, none of what you’ve got in your hands today would have happened without the support, love, and enthusiasm of my wife, Barb, and our daughter, Madi, who spent the last three years rooting for me and urging me on. If there’s anyone who’s worked as hard or harder on this project, it’s Barb—the real Dr. Jones—who let me spread out my mess across our dining room table for more than two years; went to dinners and walked our dog, Grayson, by herself; and always came to check on me at two in the morning. She’s the real hero of this project. And she did it all without a lightsaber.
—Damascus, Maryland, July 2016
Notes
Prologue: Out of Control
1. “‘Star Wars’ Star Is on Cloud Nine,” Independent (Long Beach, Calif.), June 10, 1977.
2. J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film (New York: Del Rey, 2007), 160 (hereafter MOSW).
3. MOSW, 146.
4. MOSW, 143.
5. Kerry O’Quinn, “The George Lucas Saga,” Starlog, reprinted in Sally Kline, ed., George Lucas: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 104 (hereafter Kline, GL Interviews).
6. GL Interviews, xiv.
7. Robert Watts, quoted in MOSW, 151.
8. MOSW, 160.
Chapte
r 1: Scrawny Little Devil
1. Joanne Williams, “Inside George Lucas: Success Allows ‘Little Movie’ Freedom,” Modesto Bee, June 1, 1980.
2. Jean Vallely, “‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and So Does George Lucas,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 1980.
3. Williams, “Inside George Lucas.”
4. Biography: George Lucas: Creating an Empire, A&E Television, 2002 (hereafter Creating an Empire).
5. “The Modesto Arch,” Historic Modesto website, http://www.historicmodesto.com/thearch.html.
6. See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, for Modesto City, Calif., sheet 7B.
7. “George Lucas Sr. Story Rivals Son’s Film Saga,” Modesto Bee, January 30, 1976.
8. “Play Presented by High School Class to Capacity House,” Modesto Bee and News-Herald, December 8, 1930.
9. “Dorothy Bomberger and George Lucas Marry at Methodist Church,” Modesto Bee and News-Herald, August 4, 1933.
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