Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Though he draws on our century's pop culture for his raw material, his vision arises from the Middle Ages.
May 18, 1999 | In August 1976, George Lucas was exhausted and desperate. He had been in London, directing the actors in "Star Wars," a film he had every reason to believe would fail. The usual turmoil and sheer labor of the set had been made worse by the lordly British studio unions, who quit promptly at 5:30 for tea, and by the money people back in Burbank, Calif., who in the end pulled the fiscal plug on the filming. At the end of 16 weeks of shooting, Fox gave Lucas three days to finish two weeks of work, a cost-saving move that appears at least ironic now that "Star Wars" and its succeeding films have gone on to gross billions. At the time Lucas had to hire triple crews and divide the stage into three sets, on each of which he directed the action for the final three days. "I cared about every single detail," he recalled (including the duct-taping of Princess Leia's breasts -- "No jiggling in the Empire," noted Carrie Fisher). By the end of shooting Lucas was pale, ill, ready to drop.
At that point he flew from London to Los Angeles, where Lucasfilm was headquartered in those days, and found that his special effects unit, having spent more than $1 million of its $2 million budget, had completed only three shots. Lucas was outraged. He made arrangements to assume control of the unit, then flew home to San Francisco, where he began having chest pains. He was taken to Marin General Hospital, diagnosed with exhaustion and held overnight. The next morning he took a vow. "That's when I really confirmed to myself that I was going to change," he told biographer Dale Pollock. "I wasn't going to make more films, I wasn't going to direct anymore. I was going to get my life a bit more under control."
George Lucas has more or less stuck to his vow. He has made more films, but at a distance, as a producer. The release of "The Phantom Menace" will show us George Lucas the director for the first time since the original "Star Wars." Indeed, Lucas also seems to have gotten his life "a bit more under control." In interviews of late he has described the last 20 years as being taken up with parenting his children and recovering from his divorce. But this puts a homey gloss on an astoundingly successful and labor-intensive enterprise.
Much that eluded him in the beginning is now within Lucas' grasp. He has amassed and consolidated his fortune (in the last 10 years his net worth has gone from about $25 million to somewhere near $2 billion) and made solid investments, so that now he can finance his films entirely. Never again will someone give George Lucas three days to do what should take two weeks.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
George Lucas' gifts are difficult to categorize in conventional film-industry terms; he has defied Hollywood's expectations all along. In his early days as a rebel filmmaker, he made a student film called "1:42:08: A Man and His Car," which mostly consisted of a yellow race car doing laps at speed. Escape from and defiance of authority have always been a central theme for Lucas, both in his films and in his career as a whole. In his first feature, "THX-1138," the hero flees an oppressive, sexless, bureaucratic society, where robotic police give up the chase only when they exceed their budget for the operation. In perhaps his farthest-out moment, in 1969, Lucas was hired by David Maysles to shoot the Rolling Stones in concert at Altamont. (Pollock reports that Lucas "can't remember" whether he filmed a young black man, Meredith Hunter, being stabbed to death by Hell's Angels, as Mick Jagger sang "Under my Thumb.") In any case, Lucas continued to challenge the industry through the 1970s and '80s, when it represented the Evil Empire, and does so even more profoundly now, as lord of the manor on Skywalker Ranch in Northern California's Marin County.
Though he has said of directing "The Phantom Menace" that it was "much more fun than it used to be," his dislike of directing live actors has been evident since his first days as a filmmaker. Lucas is said to be standoffish and quiet, a man who prefers working with special effects to working with human beings. In the past he has chosen to work with unknown actors, whom he can then fill with his own ideas. Said Anthony Daniels, the actor who portrayed C-3PO, "I think George would like to freeze a lot of people and bring them out only occasionally."
Nor is writing Lucas' favorite activity. He wrote the original script for "Star Wars" by hand, in his tiny printing, with sharp No. 2 pencils. The work gave him stomach pains and headaches; in his frustration he took to clipping off bits of his hair with a pair of scissors. Lucy Wilson, his assistant and pencil supplier, told Pollock that Lucas' wastebasket "had tons of hair in it." The result of this effort was dialogue like "I recognized your foul stench when I was brought aboard, Governor Tarkin," lines the actors often had trouble wrapping their mouths around. Playing Obi-Wan Kenobi to the rubber model of Yoda, Sir Alec Guinness complained about one speech to Irvin Kershner, the director of "The Empire Strikes Back." Guinness' suggestion: "Why doesn't the little green thing do this one?"
While Hollywood's other creative geniuses stake their success on writing and directing talents, Lucas' brilliance is due at least in part to his wizardry as a film editor. "He knows the secret of what an editor can do to a movie, how he can enhance a film," Steven Spielberg told Pollock. "I would trust George with any movie I ever direct to reedit in any way he sees fit."
One reason Lucas is a great editor is that he makes each film mentally before any shooting starts, then harnesses the stubborn will to see his vision through. His is not the extemporaneous approach to filmmaking; the moments in filmmaking when this process of realizing the vision is most apparent -- in the drawing of the original storyboards, in the overall art design and in the editing suite -- are Lucas' best. On the set of "The Empire Strikes Back," Kershner would often redo the scenes from the storyboards, attempting to find something better on the spot. "George would never do that," said producer Gary Kurtz. "He'd stick to the storyboards and fix it in the editing room."
This gift -- "obsession" might not be too strong a word -- for realizing a vision has driven all of George Lucas' activities. "I used to do it with cars, then I did it with film, now I do it with the ranch," he told Pollock in the late '70s, when Skywalker Ranch was still in the planning stages. The ranch itself is a piece of artwork, a simulacrum of the past composed of postmodern elements; Lucas planted thousands of mature trees around the ranch's buildings, each of which has been made to look old and assigned its own fictional history.
Get Salon in your mailbox!