George Lucas
Page 36
“Just throw him in the pit,” sighed Lucas.133
As production continued on Jedi throughout 1982, it probably came as little surprise to Marcia that her husband—despite his repeated promises that family was his new priority—had already started work on yet another film, falling this time into the waiting arms of Indiana Jones. With the enormous success of Raiders of the Lost Ark had come talk of the inevitable sequel, and Lucas had taken it on himself to write a treatment called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death, completing the twenty-page draft at the end of May 1982, just as Jedi was wrapping in London.
The relics being pursued this time were holy Sankara stones (Lucas admitted later, “I couldn’t think of another MacGuffin that I thought would work”), which Indy has to retrieve from an Indian temple, saving the enslaved children of a nearby village in the process. The story was darker, the humor as black as Lucas’s own disposition as his marriage crumbled. “I wasn’t in a good mood,” Lucas admitted.134 Spielberg, too, was under a black cloud, the result of a recent accident on the set of the Spielberg-produced Twilight Zone: The Movie that had killed actor Vic Morrow and two children. Spielberg was never charged or investigated in the incident, which had resulted in indictments of several crew members, including director John Landis,135 but the entire experience had rocked and depressed the normally upbeat Spielberg. Their respective moods scared off writer Lawrence Kasdan, whom Lucas approached about turning his notes into a script. “I didn’t want to be associated with Temple of Doom,” said Kasdan later. “I just thought it was horrible. It’s so mean. There’s nothing pleasant about it. I think Temple of Doom represents a chaotic period in both their lives, and the movie is very ugly and mean-spirited.”136
Instead, Lucas would hand his treatment off to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, his collaborators on American Graffiti, instructing them to write quickly so they could get a full script over to an ambivalent and increasingly busy Spielberg. “I’m afraid we might lose him,” Lucas told the Huycks, “so you guys better get this done fast.”137 The Huycks, long used to working from Lucas’s story treatments, had a first draft script in front of Spielberg in August. There were plenty of in-jokes (continuing a habit of naming characters after pets, the character Short Round was named for the Huycks’ own dog), and the Huycks had infused the script with some of their own love of Indian culture and films like Gunga Din, but the somber, and sometimes frightening, tone Lucas had set in his story treatment remained intact. Some Lucasfilm staffers also worried that the film might be too violent—a concern that would plague the film right up until the moment of its release.
Huyck and Katz would continue to tinker with the script on into 1983, completing the shooting script—now called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—on April 10, less than two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Lucas, looking for any distractions before the premiere of Jedi in May, joined Spielberg and the Temple of Doom crew on location in Sri Lanka in late April, finally touching down in a helicopter near the Kandy River, where the film crew had constructed a long rope bridge over a ravine. Six days later, Lucas took a second-unit crew to film the sequence in which Indiana Jones cuts the bridge’s supporting ropes with a machete, sending a number of villains tumbling into the river below. As Lucas rolled camera, the supporting cables were blown with a small explosion, the bridge—now split in half—collapsed against opposite sides of the cliff, and fourteen dummies plummeted into the ravine below, mechanical arms flailing. Lucas loved it. He lingered in Sri Lanka for several more days, engaging in squirt gun fights with Spielberg, and watching romantic sparks fly between Spielberg and the film’s leading lady, Kate Capshaw. Most thought Lucas appeared tired. When Lucas sat down for an extended interview with Rolling Stone later that month, the interviewer noted that he looked “so gloomy, so unhappy, so downright miserable.”138 Ken Ralston at ILM thought Lucas seemed “totally fried.”139
Fried or not, there was still Jedi to attend to—and on May 7, Lucas screened a special preview of the film for Lucasfilm employees at San Francisco’s Coronet Theatre. For the most part, he was pleased with the final film, though he still regretted that he’d been unable to get the Ewoks to blink. (He would fix that decades later through digital technology.) He’d also renamed the film at practically the last minute, rightly deciding that revenge was a trait unbecoming in a Jedi knight, and substituted the word return instead. The change required the recall of movie posters that had already been printed with the old title. Lucas would make them available for sale exclusively to members of the Star Wars Fan Club.
The opening of Return of the Jedi on Wednesday, May 25, 1983, was officially an Event. The cliff-hangers from Empire had audiences lining up for a day in advance, counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until the premiere of the film in which they’d see how everything was resolved. Fans debated the fate of Han Solo and bickered over the identity of the “other” Yoda had mentioned. People skipped out of work—many of those who didn’t would take their school-age children to the midnight showing—threw parties, celebrated birthdays, even held screenings of the first two movies while waiting in line. One fan even tried to steal the film at gunpoint.
As always, Star Wars was all about the experience of seeing it. Return of the Jedi opened in 820 theaters across the United States and Canada—quite a step up from the 126 in which Empire had debuted three years earlier—and shattered records for the largest opening day gross, with ticket sales of $6.1 million. Just as they had when The Empire Strikes Back premiered, most studios didn’t bother to open a movie against Jedi, holding back big releases like Superman II and the latest James Bond film, Octopussy. Jedi was going to have to earn $115 million to break even—but from day one, its success seemed inevitable. “After doing about $46 million in the first week, we knew that we would make our money back shortly,” said Kazanjian. It would do so in less than five weeks—and by the end of 1983, when the film was still playing after thirty-two weeks in release, Return of the Jedi was closing in fast on the $250 million mark.
Critics were split, and even those who gave it positive reviews often found reasons to hedge their bets. Gary Arnold at the Washington Post called it “a triumph,” though he thought Harrison Ford looked tired.140 Time magazine, which had gambled correctly on the success of the film by putting Lucas on the cover, hailed Jedi as “a brilliant, imaginative piece of filmmaking,” but cautioned Lucas and other filmmakers against relying too much on special effects and creatures—a criticism that would be leveled against him and his three Star Wars prequels twenty years later. ILM artist Joe Johnston, discussing Jedi with journalist Gerald Clarke, said perhaps too truthfully, “We were never sure whether the movie was a vehicle for the effects or for the story.”141 A few even figured out that Lucas had finally made his Vietnam movie. “You can look at Jedi and see the Vietnam War there,” said Kazanjian. “You can see the Ewok guerrillas hiding in the jungles, taking on this improper force of mechanized bullies—and winning.”142
Most of the negative criticism leveled at the film tended to train its fire on either the acting or Marquand’s directing. One of the film’s harshest critics, John Simon at National Review, took to the television news show Nightline to lament that Jedi was “dehumanizing” and, cryptically, that it made children “dumber than they needed to be.” An amused Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, appearing on the same show to refute Simon, flatly told the critic he needed to lighten up.143
Lucas heard none of it; as usual, four days before the film’s release, he had left for Hawaii, this time spending two weeks in Honolulu, waiting for the phone calls that would bring him the box office numbers. He was relieved to be done with it—not just Jedi but Star Wars as a whole. “That dumb screenplay I first wrote ten years ago is at least finished,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s all in a movie now. It’s been ten years since I started this.… [T]here hasn’t been a day in my life where I haven’t gotten up in the morning and said, ‘Gee, I’ve got to worry about this movie.’ Li
terally. Not one single day.”144 To Time magazine, he compared the making of the Star Wars trilogy to pushing a train slowly up a hill, then holding on for dear life as it careened down the other side. “I’m burned out,” he admitted wearily. “In fact, I was burned out a couple of years ago, and I’ve been going on momentum ever since. Star Wars has grabbed my life and taken it over against my will. Now I’ve got to get my life back again—before it’s too late.”145
Getting his life back meant moving forward without Marcia. On Monday, June 13, Lucas called an all-hands meeting at Skywalker Ranch. Staff gathered to find George and Marcia holding hands as they tearfully announced they were getting divorced. The staff was stunned; they’d had no idea. “They were a team,” said Sprocket manager Jim Kessler. “If he was black, she was white, and vice versa. It was a well-balanced thing. Independently, they were kind of like balls with unweighted sides, so they spun out in goofy ways.”146 Marcia would relocate immediately to Los Angeles; their daughter Amanda, now two years old, would remain largely in George’s custody—one of the few conditions of the divorce that Lucas truly embraced. “I’ve got a daughter now and she’s growing up around me and she’s not going to wait,” said Lucas. “I don’t want her to grow up to be eighteen and have her say, ‘Hey Dad, where have you been all my life?’”147
The ranch would remain his work in progress, but with the exception of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was still in production in London, he was done with movies, at least for a while; he was taking at least a two-year sabbatical from filmmaking, he told Time. “[Family] became my first priority,” he said later. “I didn’t think it was going to be, because before that, making films [was] my first priority.… But then I realized that this was my life. And then… I was divorced, and it really was my life. So I just simply said, ‘Okay, I’m retiring.’ I put my companies and the making of movies and everything on the side.”148
Steven Spielberg wasn’t so sure Lucas could ever retire; he had heard it all before. “Every time George is making a film, he talks about retiring and never working again,” said Spielberg. “But the minute it is finished, he is already thinking up his next opus. I can see him running Lucasfilm, making three to five pictures a year, and then some day returning to directing, which is where I think he belongs. I believe his destiny is behind the camera.”149
But Lucas insisted he meant it—especially when it came to Star Wars. “I look upon the three Star Wars films as chapters in one book. Now the book is finished, and I have put it on the shelf.”150 As far as he was concerned, he was never taking that particular book down off the shelf again. Not ever.
PART III
RETURN
1983–2016
10
Empty Flash
1983–1994
The skies were dark and gray when Lucas arrived in northern London in late June 1983—weather that perfectly suited his own state of mind as he returned to Elstree Studios, where production was continuing on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Since announcing his divorce a month earlier, Lucas felt both physically and emotionally drained. Partly, he admitted later, he’d collapsed under the weight of his own success, which had made him neglectful of his personal life. “Success… is a very difficult emotional experience to go through,” he said. “It’s a very devastating experience when it happens. Some people can deal with [it], some people can’t. I thought in the beginning it was a piece of cake. I had a little bit of success with [American] Graffiti, and a lot of success with Star Wars, but the full impact didn’t hit me for a few years after that.”1 It was the beginning, he said, of “a several-year tailspin.”2
At Elstree, Lucas would step in from time to time to helm a few second units, mostly overseeing the mass fistfight in the movie’s opening scene at Club Obi Wan—which, while complicated, didn’t involve dealing with any real acting, making it just the kind of sequence Lucas normally would enjoy. But it was no fun for him, and Lucas even looked miserable. His beard, while never unkempt, was as thick as it had ever been, dark with flecks of white at the chin. Between takes, he would often lean against the wall and stare blankly, hands thrust deep into his pockets, stroking his beard absently.
While Lucas would always claim Spielberg took considerable relish in directing some of the film’s gorier or more disturbing scenes—whether it was eating bugs and brains or having Indy strike a child—Spielberg too would look back on Temple of Doom as an unhappy experience. “It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific,” he reflected—strong words, considering he had only just finished serving as the writer and producer of the 1982 haunted house movie Poltergeist. But Spielberg thought it even “out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom.”3
For Lucas, however, there was one moment that perfectly summed up his own feelings: as the evil priest Mola Ram prepares to lower a human sacrifice down into the temple’s fiery pit, he slowly and deliberately reaches out and rips the victim’s still-beating heart out of his chest—as literal a metaphor for Lucas’s own heartbreak as he would ever put on-screen. “I was going through a divorce,” Lucas reminded one journalist later, “and I was in a really bad mood.” Frank Marshall, one of Temple’s producers, thought the film was probably somewhat cathartic for the morose Lucas. “As I think you can see in the movie,” he said later, “there’s a lot of darkness being worked out.”4
Principal photography on Temple of Doom wrapped on August 26, 1983. With that, Lucas shut down his production offices at Elstree—and now, for the first time in more than a decade, Lucasfilm had no movies in production. As he had promised, and whether Spielberg believed it or not, George Lucas was retiring from filmmaking. For someone who loved film as much as Lucas did, it felt odd to have no projects of his own to tinker with. But completing the Star Wars trilogy had sapped his creative energy—“[and] then,” recalled Lucas, still wincing at the memory, “the divorce. Divorce is a very difficult thing financially and emotionally.”5
“Difficult” was putting it mildly, especially when it came to the terms of the divorce settlement. While Marcia was entitled to half of everything under California law, Lucas was not inclined to settle graciously; as far as he was concerned, he was the aggrieved party. “He was very bitter and vindictive,” recalled Marcia.6 At the time of their separation, Lucasfilm, including the still uncompleted ranch, was worth between $50 and $100 million—and Lucas made it clear that he had no intention of giving Marcia a single square inch of Skywalker Ranch; nor did he want to pay spousal support in perpetuity. To be done with it all, he’d pay her off with nearly all the cash he had on hand—about $50 million—and keep the ranch.
Lucas refused to be magnanimous about it. While they would see each other only as long as it took to make decisions about raising Amanda together, Lucas would chip away at their mutual friends to make certain Marcia was never again invited to parties and holiday celebrations. “That really hurt,” said Marcia later. “It’s not enough that I’m erased from his life, he wants to blackball me too, with people who were my friends.”7 But the anger went beyond the personal; while Lucasfilm would have to acknowledge Marcia’s editing Oscar as one of the seven Academy Awards won by Star Wars, her contributions to Lucas’s films and to the company would be all but erased from most Lucasfilm-sanctioned histories.8 One noteworthy relationship improved in the shadow of the divorce, however. “George came to me and wanted to be my friend,” said Francis Ford Coppola, still suffering from the humiliation of bankruptcy after losing his most recent version of Zoetrope.9 “Francis had lost everything financially,” observed one friend. “George had lost everything emotionally.”10 The two were reconciled. Again.
With no movies in production, it wasn’t a great time for Lucasfilm to be paying out a large cash settlement. Fortunately, money continued to pour in to the licensing division. Return of the Jedi had turned into a merchandising juggernaut, with more than fifty licensees for everything from cream rinse to vases to th
e reliable Kenner toy line. For the moment, then, Lucas could continue to build Skywalker Ranch on action figures and soda. “I’ll still spend a minimal amount of time at the company, but it won’t be very much time,” Lucas explained. “I’ve sort of got the company to the point where it can operate by itself.”11 He assured reporters that he wasn’t really doing much more than “pok[ing] my head into some doors.”12
But of course he was doing more than that. To get Lucasfilm and Skywalker Ranch to the point where they really could operate by themselves, Lucas envisioned his organization as a one-stop, full-service company for other filmmakers. For screenwriters, the ranch offered an idyllic retreat where they could work on screenplays in comfort and quiet; for film editors, there would be access to the finest editing equipment available. And for special effects, ILM still offered its services as the gold standard against which all others were judged. At the moment, ILM was juggling several outside projects—including Star Trek III and Starman—but its main priority was completing the effects for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “Because it was George and Steven’s project, there wasn’t an option to say no, or How about next year?” said model shop supervisor Lorne Peterson.13
Apart from ILM, Lucas was still fiddling with a couple of other divisions he was planning to house permanently on the property. A year earlier he had directed Ed Catmull at the computer division to find the right person to head up a new computer gaming group. Lucas would never be the video game junkie that Spielberg or Howard Kazanjian was, but he was fascinated with the idea of interactive storytelling, in which the decisions a player makes directly affect the outcome of the story, making every trip through a game unique. (There was also a matter of financial practicality: reinvesting in his own company allowed Lucas to reduce his tax burden.) Catmull wooed Peter Langston, a Unix Jedi master if ever there was one, and Lucas finally lured him in with an offer he couldn’t refuse: Lucasfilm’s COO Roger Faxon had cut a deal with the video game king Atari, which had offered Lucasfilm $1 million to do nothing more, as Langston put it, than “see what you can make.”14 With that, the Lucasfilm Games Group was up and running.