George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  At the moment, Lucas was concentrating mainly on building what he referred to as the “farm group,” a small cluster of buildings that would eventually house the ranch manager and caretaker, with the main ranch house further up a curving road beyond a man-made lake. Lucas wanted everything to be interesting and well designed; the Victorian-influenced buildings would be octagonal, with casement windows and stained glass, tongue-and-groove paneling, cupolas, and fireplaces—modern, with state-of-the-art equipment, yet looking as if they’d been sitting in the hills for generations. “[George] set out to bring the vision we shared [for Zoetrope] into reality—the way he saw it,” said Coppola, who, flush with the success of Apocalypse Now, was trying to get back in the empire-building business himself. Looking for a new headquarters for Zoetrope, he was angling to purchase a property he couldn’t afford at Hollywood General Studios. “Lucas has a bank called Star Wars,” said Spielberg coyly. “Coppola doesn’t have a bank—only courage and fortitude.”67

  The courageous Coppola approached Lucas and Spielberg for funding and was turned down by both. Coppola was irked, but Lucas was even madder at what he saw as Coppola’s colossal gall at trying to one-up him. “Francis helped me and gave me a chance, but at the same time he made a lot of money off me,” Lucas said later. “Francis has a tendency to see the parade marching down the street and to run in front of it with a flag and become the leader.” What annoyed Lucas more than anything else was the very idea that Coppola would abandon northern California in favor of the pestilence of Hollywood. “I thought Francis was betraying all of us in San Francisco who had been struggling to make this community a viable film alternative.”68 Coppola would raise the money and head south anyway—and true to form, he would lose the studio three years later, hard on the heels of his musical flop One from the Heart.

  That was typical Coppola—and typical Lucas. Sitting together for an interview years later, both were asked what they would do if suddenly given $2 billion to do anything they wished. Where Coppola replied with his usual bombast—“I’d borrow another $2 billion and build a city!”—Lucas’s response was straight out of Modesto: “I’d invest a billion of it,” he said, “and use the other billion to build a town.”69 With Skywalker Ranch, that’s exactly what he was doing. No detail was too small for Lucas to obsess over. Visitors to Parkhouse would find one room filled with fabric swatches, blueprints, and furniture samples, as if Lucas wanted everyone to understand just how seriously he was taking this ranch endeavor. Within a year he would proudly be walking the property with a reporter from the New York Times, showing off the nearly completed main house, swimming pool, and tennis courts. The three-acre lake—which Lucas would later dub Lake Ewok—would be stocked with trout, while an electronic deer fence lined the perimeter, much to the annoyance of the neighbors. Beneath their feet, a series of tunnels connected the buildings, and closed circuit television cameras swept the complex, looking for invaders or the merely nosy. “It’s a totally controlled environment,” Lucas said proudly.70 Totally controlled. Just the way he liked it.

  With the company’s shift north, the other major task was to ensure that ILM—still working out of the Kerner Building—stayed in business permanently. Up until now, as one ILM model maker described it, “a kind of lifestyle had been established where everybody worked on one film and, when it was done, everything came to an end.”71 Lucas wanted that to change. While Weber had boasted that ILM could become a “first-class entity” by continuing to create effects for Lucas-produced films, Lucas wasn’t actually involved with enough films at any given moment to keep ILM open full-time.72 Instead, he let it be known that ILM could be hired to produce effects for anyone. “We were trying to bring in outside projects so that we can keep everyone here working,” said Lucas.73

  The first non-Lucas project to come through the door would be the Paramount-Disney film Dragonslayer, though even it had a touch of family about it, as it was written, produced, and directed by two members of the USC Mafia, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. Over the next three years, ILM would take on a dozen more projects on its way to becoming the preeminent special effects shop; over a fifteen-year period, from 1980 to 1995, ILM would win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects thirteen times, often competing with itself in the same category.

  There was one particular special effect that would turn out to have far-reaching impact, though the film in which it appeared, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, wouldn’t even be in contention for the Academy Award. The remarkable sequence—a computer-generated flyover of the creation of a planet, with volcanoes bursting and clouds forming—was actually the result of frustration on the part of Ed Catmull, who had spent the previous two years trying to convince Lucas that his computer division could do more than just build digital editing and mixing equipment. Determined to prove the point, Catmull and his team put together the computer-animated footage that would become Star Trek II’s “Genesis Effect” sequence. Catmull called it “a sixty second commercial to George Lucas” to prove they could create realistic animation with the computer, and hoped for the best. It was groundbreaking work—the first fully computer-animated sequence to appear in any film—and wowed everyone but Lucas, who watched from a doorway, congratulated the team on one of the camera shots, then disappeared.74

  Still, Lucas was pragmatic enough to appreciate it as the kind of work ILM needed. When Mark Hamill—understandably protective of the Star Wars franchise—heard that the computer division was doing a computer animation for the rival Star Trek franchise, he whirled on Lucas in mock protest. “You traitors!” Hamill roared. “George, how could you do that?”

  “It’s business, kid,” said Lucas.75

  Lucas had no idea what was going to happen in Revenge of the Jedi. Beyond the title, he had little more than some notes scribbled on yellow pads. Harrison Ford, tiring of Han Solo, had urged Lucas to kill his character off—but Lucas had hedged his bets in Empire, merely deep-freezing Solo in carbonite. His fate, it seemed, hinged on whether Ford would sign on for the third movie—but now that Lucas had slid a third Star Wars clause into Ford’s contract for multiple Indiana Jones films, Solo seemed safe.

  Gary Kurtz still wasn’t so sure. At one point, Kurtz and Lucas had sat down to discuss the plot of the final film, which Kurtz—who had loved Empire’s more serious, grown-up feel—wanted to end on a more poignant, almost downbeat note. “The original idea was that they would recover Han Solo in the early part of the story,” recalled Kurtz, “and that he would die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base.”76 That would have left Leia alone to assume her new duties as queen of the upstart Alliance, “with Luke riding off into the sunset, metaphorically, on his own. And that would have been a bittersweet ending,” said Kurtz, “but I think it would have been dramatically stronger.”77

  Lucas wouldn’t even consider it—and Kurtz thought he knew why. During production on Empire, Kurtz had spent a fair amount of time ferrying representatives from the Kenner toy company around the set. Lucas was clearly keeping an eye on the “toyetic” qualities of his franchise—and “George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed,” said Kurtz.78 Or, as Ford put it more sardonically, “George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”79 “It’s a shame,” said Kurtz later. “They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”80

  The Lucas-Kurtz partnership—which had produced three of the most successful films in history in less than a decade—was on increasingly thin ice. Lucas was still smarting over Kurtz’s budget busting on Empire, while Kurtz was wary of the growing influence of merchandising. But as Lucas worked his way through his first story treatment for Jedi—disregarding Kurtz’s ideas for a bittersweet ending—one plot element finally cracked the ice for good: Lucas had made an assault on the Death Star a pivotal part of his story. “It sounds redundant,” he confessed
, “but we’ll do it again.”81

  Kurtz wasn’t going to do it again. “We had a kind of mutual parting of the ways, because I just didn’t want to do another attack on the Death Star,” he told an interviewer.82 “So we agreed that I should probably leave.”83 Lucas tapped Howard Kazanjian, who had already stepped in at the tail end of Empire and had served as his producer on Raiders, to fill the same role on Jedi. Kurtz, meanwhile, left to work with Jim Henson on his ambitious film The Dark Crystal. “It wasn’t acrimonious,” Kurtz said of his departure. “It was just that [Lucas] felt he would probably be more comfortable with someone else handling the production on Jedi, and I felt that I would prefer a different kind of challenge, that wasn’t kind of repeating something I had already done.”84 While Kurtz would always refer to his relationship with Lucas as “professional,” the two of them would not work together again.

  With a new producer in place, Lucas turned next to the important matter of his director. Briefly, he considered Kershner; although he could be slow, Lucas liked him, but Kershner dismissed the idea immediately. “I didn’t want to become simply another Lucas employee,” said Kershner. “I love George, but I wanted to go my own way.”85 In the meantime, Lucas had Kazanjian scouting for potential directors, though with Lucas’s present persona non grata status with the Directors Guild, Kazanjian had to be picky—for the sake of both Lucas and his director. A DGA director could be blacklisted for working with Lucas, or the guild could force the director to walk off the film mid-project—and fine him if he refused.

  Lucas was looking seriously at experienced directors like Richard Donner, up-and-comers like Joe Dante, and several quirky artistes like David Cronenberg and David Lynch. It was Lynch, in fact, who intrigued Lucas the most; at the suggestion of Stanley Kubrick, Lucas had screened a copy of Lynch’s darkly disturbing Eraserhead and found it “bizarre… but interesting.”86 It was the kind of highly personal filmmaking Lucas admired. Unfortunately, said Lynch, “I had next to zero interest, but I always admired George. He’s a guy who does what he loves. And I do what I love.” Lynch went to visit with Lucas at the ranch, where Lucas took him for a ride in his Ferrari and then to lunch at a salad bar. Lynch came down with a mean migraine headache and by his own recollection “crawled into a phone booth” to call his agent. “No way I can do this,” he moaned into the phone. “No way!” The reason was simple. “Lynch decided he didn’t want to do a George Lucas movie,” said Mark Hamill. “He felt he couldn’t be constantly answering to another producer. George didn’t want to restrict someone that original.” Lucas could only agree with Hamill’s assessment. “I think I may have gone a bridge too far on that one.”87

  Rather than a visionary, Lucas decided he was better off with a workhorse—preferably one who had worked in television, where it was generally accepted that the director was subservient to the executive producer. In early 1981 Lucas screened the thriller Eye of the Needle by the Welsh director Richard Marquand, who had spent much of his career directing television movies, including the 1979 biopic Birth of the Beatles. Like Lynch, Marquand, too, was invited to the ranch, and spent the entire day with Lucas and Marcia, eating dinner, then talking late into the evening. “[Lucas] thought Richard was a director he would feel comfortable with,” said one insider, “one who could understand that essentially it’d be George’s movie.”88 That was fine with Marquand. “I was bowled over by Star Wars,” he said. “What made me hesitate about directing Jedi was the fact that anybody would consider me for such a picture.”89 Furthermore, Lucas liked that Marquand respected the need to bring in a project on time and on budget—but mostly he liked that the soft-spoken Marquand was willing to adhere as closely as possible to Lucas’s vision for the movie. Said Marquand later, “I always had the feeling that possibly I’d find myself in a situation where I was a horse dragging this thing along, with George holding the reins.”90 He had no idea.

  The last missing piece to be found was the screenwriter. For Jedi, Lucas wanted to write an entire script himself first, rather than just handing off a story treatment to a screenwriter, as he had done with Empire. But the writing was a chore, as usual, and Lucas found himself leaving blank the final pages of a revised draft, knowing full well they could be fixed when he handed the script off to his screenwriter of choice, Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas hadn’t been entirely sure whether Kasdan would take the job, now that Body Heat had put him on the map as a successful writer-director, but it turned out that all Lucas had to do was ask. “I was surprised to find myself writing Jedi, because I was already a director and I had no intention of writing for anyone ever again,” said Kasdan. “But George asked me as a favor, and he’d already been so helpful to me.”91

  In early summer 1981, Lucas called Kasdan, Kazanjian, and Marquand out to Parkhouse for a story meeting to work out details of the plot. There were several elements Lucas knew he needed. He wanted to feature Jabba the Hutt, now that he finally had the resources to build the character he had envisioned, then scrapped, in Star Wars. He wanted Luke to have a twin sister, though he still wasn’t certain it was Leia. And he wanted a primitive society aiding the rebels, another idea he’d lifted from the early drafts of Star Wars in which he’d brought a planet of Wookiees to the aid of the heroes. At the same time, he also had McQuarrie and Joe Johnston at ILM sketching ships and creatures, with little idea where or how any of them fit into the movie—“a free-for-all,” as one ILM artist described it. “The process was the same for Jedi as [for] Empire,” recalled Kasdan. “There were designs and pictures of things before I even started writing.”92

  The toughest part of the script was ensuring they gave every character something memorable to do—and Kasdan, looking for dramatic impact, suggested killing someone off, arguing that it would give the movie “more emotional weight if someone you love is lost along the way.” But Lucas dismissed such suggestions outright. “You don’t have to kill people,” he told Kasdan with just a hint of annoyance. “You’re a product of the 1980s. You don’t go around killing people. It’s not nice.”93 Still, Lucas wasn’t above teasing Kasdan about his desire to inject a little angst into the script. As he described Luke dragging the mortally wounded Vader to safety near the conclusion of the film, Lucas, with a straight face, suggested “the ultimate twist”: “Luke takes [Vader’s] mask off… and then Luke puts it on and says, ‘Now I am Vader.’ Surprise!… ‘Now I will go and kill the fleet and I will rule the universe.’”

  Kasdan could barely contain his enthusiasm. “That’s what I think should happen,” he told Lucas.

  “No, no, no,” Lucas shot back, slightly exasperated. “Come on, this is for kids.”94

  Star Wars had been born of Lucas’s own love of comic books, fairy tales, and Saturday morning serials—his way, as he had said at the time, of giving a new generation its own mythology. There would be no bittersweet endings, no killing off of central characters, no heroes turning evil. “The whole point of the film… is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life,” Lucas explained to Kasdan. “That is the greatest thing that we could possibly ever do.”95

  Not everyone shared Lucas’s optimism. “George has a predisposition for happy endings,” sighed Harrison Ford.96 Even Hamill, the comic book fan who was nearly always inclined to give the story the benefit of the doubt, admitted to being somewhat disappointed in Jedi’s lack of heft, complaining to Lucas that it “all seemed so pat.”

  Lucas smiled. “So are fairy tales.”97

  As Kasdan went on his way to write the next draft of the script, Lucas had his legal team working to wrap up the legal and financial negotiations with Fox, which had been dragging on for nearly two years. With Ladd now out of the picture, Lucas wasn’t inclined to negotiate nicely, and discussions hadn’t gone well, with Fox griping that the percentage of the profits Lucas was offering was so low that the studio wouldn’t have much incentive to promote the film. Lucas had little sympathy for their complaints, and little patience; on
ce again, he was going to be putting all of his own money on the line. But after tying up nearly all of his Empire profits in the ranch, Lucas didn’t have enough on hand to cover the $30 million he thought it would take to make Jedi. That gave Fox some much-desired leverage—financing in exchange for profits—but Lucas wasn’t going to make it easy on them. And when negotiations between Lucasfilm and Fox began to falter—with Greber playing with relish the role of the bad cop—Lucas finally gave Fox an ultimatum: reach an agreement within thirty days, or he would take his movie to another studio.

  Fox, now under the leadership of CEO Marvin Davis—a former oilman and an amiable enough blowhard—did its best to stand firm. The studio was still willing to take a lopsided deal on the gross receipts, though it was pushing for its piece of the pie to actually increase as the film earned more and more money, rather than bottoming out, as it had with Empire. Lucas eventually agreed that in exchange for a loan of $20 million, Fox’s share in the profits would increase incrementally as the film made money, topping out at 40 percent once the film cleared $105 million. There were other sticky details to work out involving television, cable, and video rights—“Fox was greedy,” complained Greber—but the deal still tilted heavily in Lucasfilm’s favor. After inking the 224-page final contract, the six-foot-four Davis draped an enormous arm over Lucas’s shoulder. “Georgie boy,” drawled Davis, “you’re going to make me rich with movies.”98