Last month I added another best-of-year book to my list, that being Brian Jay Jones’ biography of George Lucas. This makes me want to read his bio of Washington Irving even more, because his writing is eminently consumable and I kept wanting to go back to the book. That’s a rarer and rarer quality these days.
He also wrote one on Jim Henson, which I need to get to. But I digress.
Star Wars as a franchise started out with moderate success under Disney, and then quickly went off the rails. Jon Favreau was righting the ship for a second there before Kathleen Kennedy jumped into the fray, screaming “No you DON’T!” and destroyed everything he spent two years building. Now we’re nose-deep in the “everything is gay” phase of Disney’s ownership and with the benefit of hindsight, most people can see that this whole operation was doomed from the start.
This is the book that explains how we got to where we are, but even more intriguing is the fact that we’re kind of lucky it even happened in the first place. Everything about Lucas’ life, from his childhood and his career trajectory, to the people he met and the time in which he came up in the world, worked for and against him at the same time. He had world-altering success and life-shattering failures in equal measure. Now, a month before he turns 80, I look at his life (which is only half as long) and I say to myself “Man…sometimes my existence is pretty middle-of-the-road, but I’m not sure I’d want his extremes either.”
Let’s take a look at the grand ups and the crushing downs, and all the miraculous crossroads along the way.
Lucas’ father wanted him to take over the family business.
Growing up in Modesto, California, George had a good childhood in a successful family. His father owned a store so they weren’t hurting for money. His father’s vision was for George to eventually run the business for him, as any loving father might—after all, who doesn’t want their kids to be taken care of?—but George understandably wanted to forge his own path. He was primarily interested in racing cars and making films. These two things would intersect and lead to his first major movie success, American Graffiti, which I still haven’t seen, but really want to.
Because of the tension with his dad, George kind of had to lie to him about his college plans at USC, studying “cinematography” which sounded more serious than “film school.” In the end it worked out okay.
Lucas had an uncanny knack for bumping into industry legends at the right time.
He had an early partnership with Francis Ford Coppola, and over the course of their lives they would collaborate on numerous projects, and their friendship waxed and waned. The most notable connection he’s maintained over the years has been with Spielberg, but an underrated creative partner of his was Jim Henson, who shared similar aesthetic tastes with Lucas.
Personally I think an under-the-radar connection of his is with Joe Johnston, who doesn’t get enough love as a director (October Sky, The Rocketeer, Captain America: The First Avenger, Jumanji). Johnston was a storyboard artist with Lucas initially, and went on to other things.
And none of this accounts for the acting legends he put on screen early on, like Ron Howard, Harrison Ford, and more.
Like many writers I know, he produced several iterations of the same idea.
He kept trying to make a film of a sci-fi character that he named THX 1138, producing shorts in college and later a feature with one of the major studios. Obviously the initials THX would be used later for something else, and cell block 1138 was where Princess Leia was held on the Death Star. Lucas had that knack for recycling bits and pieces of things until they worked.
This tendency worked against him though, at least in the eyes of the fans, as he kept messing with Star Wars over the years, most notably with the 1997 special editions, and later the Blu-Ray versions. Jones even addressed the “Han Shot First” controversy in the book, and offered insights from multiple people involved who refute Lucas’ excuses for the changes.
In a sense I can relate to this behavior, as I’ve written numerous versions of stories and characters I liked over the years, but one of my hard-and-fast rules is once it’s published, I don’t change it again. But when you’re at Lucas’ level, well, who’s gonna stop you? More important, who should?
His writing process is haphazard at best.
I found this facet of his work to be the most surprising. Lucas only writes enough to put something in front of the camera, because he really likes to shoot things, and he really loves to edit (more on that in a second). I think this is a big contributor to the failures of many other Lucasfilm projects, because the writing isn’t all that solid, he just happened to do the right stuff with Star Wars and that put him on top of the world.
He studied Joseph Campbell later on, as well as other classic themes and sci-fi tales, like John Carter, which had an outsized influence on a lot of Star Wars. That helped him figure out the plots for Empire and Return, but that same process backfired on him for the prequel trilogy. Once you realize that at his core he isn’t a writer, he just didn’t want to let anyone else write his ideas, his work makes a lot more sense.
His obsession for his craft often harmed his personal relations.
His first wife, Marcia, was also a brilliant editor and she saved Star Wars from a lot of Lucas’ poorer decisions. Her absence from the prequel trilogy explains a large amount of the differences between that and its predecessors. She kept wanting to have children and he kept taking on new projects, even when on vacation. Eventually the friction took root, and by the time they were working on Return of the Jedi their marriage was more of a professional arrangement. They waited until the movie was out before telling their staff they were divorcing. He adopted a few children but hadn’t had any biological children with Marcia.
We as fans tend to love those movies, but the woman closest to him was pushed away by his over-dedication to working. There’s a lesson there.
His personal life, in turn, affected his craft.
Want to know why Temple of Doom was so dark and dour? He was working on it through that divorce. Spielberg was going through a similar personal speed bump at the time, which affected everything from the tone of the script to the look of the film and the deep horror elements within. The PG-13 rating didn’t exist before that movie, it was made especially to categorize the gray zone in between PG and hard R that the movie seemed to occupy. There are other examples, but that’s the most glaring one.
Fans tend to take his work far more seriously than he does.
He cares way less about Han shooting first than you do, and the idea that 400,000 Brits listed “Jedi” as their religion on a national census in the 80s made him wince a little, as it should. First and foremost he makes his films for himself, and the audience that wants to tag along can do so, just understand that he’s in the captain’s chair.
It may be unpopular to say, but I can respect that sentiment. I always want to be in control of my own work. I appreciate my readers and viewers, but they don’t dictate what I write or make. If they don’t like it, well, that’s for me to decide what to do about it. Call it the artist’s prerogative.
He’s much more of an editor than he is a writer or traditional filmmaker.
As stated above, he actually hates the writing process and he had to force himself through it. He’d rather be editing but he understood that in order to have something to edit, he needed something to shoot, and for that, he needed something on the page.
This facet of his artistic side explains why he bit so hard on digital technology in the late 90s/early 2000s for the prequels, because it made editing 100x easier. It made it harder for the actors, who constantly had to sit on green things, or walk on green floors, act against green backgrounds, and talk to people in green suits, but he didn’t mind so much. It suited his methods.
He invented, refined, or proliferated multiple new technologies for the industry in his career.
It’s the actual making of things, real physical things, that he loved from a young age. Lucas built model train sets (one of us, one of us…) and sculpted landscapes with rocks and dirt from outside, or made little buildings by mixing small amounts of concrete and pouring it into molds. He had an especial interest in sounds, very unique sounds, and was always putting together a library of sounds that didn’t exist in other properties. The blasters, the engines, the lightsabers, everything in Star Wars was unique and most of it remains so to this day.
He urged the studios to upgrade from film to digital, to install the THX sound system when it came out, and also had a hand in getting Pixar off the ground early on. The tech fascinated him and the stories he put on screen were in many ways just an excuse to use this new stuff in a cool way.
He shouldn’t have sold Lucasfilm…to Disney.
This one pretty much goes without saying, and yet it needs to be screamed from the rooftops. The problem with Disney in 2012 is that they were buying everything, and everyone else was selling. Personally I’d have liked to see Lucasfilm under Paramount, but they had just parted with their stake in Marvel by selling it…to Disney. And even if he’d sold it to Fox, they also got bought…by Disney.
He left them script treatments, which they wholly disregarded so that megalomaniac man-hater Kathleen Kennedy could, as the Devil himself does, immediately seek to rebuild something wholesome and popular in her own perverse, postmenopausal image, full of evil hwyte men, possibly gay diverse sidekicks, and a stronk woman who doneeno man and would be awesome and unstoppable if all those men would just stop stopping her.
Nothing that Lucas did in his alterations is anywhere near as bad as the prison shower where Disney currently holds Star Wars as the bribed guards keeping the door locked. But he did sell it, so he holds some of the blame there.
Conclusion
This is a fantastic look at a modern titan of the creative industrial complex, and the extent of the role that he played in building and changing it over a five-decade career. Go read it.