The showpiece, of course, was the Main House, a fifty-thousand-square-foot Victorian mansion, all picturesque gables and square turrets, wrapped in a surprisingly cozy veranda. At the back, under an enormous stained-glass dome, was Skywalker’s research library—Lucas would continually stock the library by purchasing abandoned collections from other studios like Paramount—with a gleaming redwood spiral staircase made of materials salvaged from a collapsed bridge. Lucas was so proud of the library, in fact, that his own private office was accessible only from the upper balcony level of the library. At the moment, Lucas had decorated the walls with old movie posters—he was a stealth collector of memorabilia—as well as paintings and original art from comic book artists like Carl Barks and Alex Raymond. (Eventually the walls would be hung with original works by Norman Rockwell, one of Lucas’s key investments.) Many of the opulent furnishings—the stained glass, the antiques, the Victorian furniture—had been selected by Marcia in her last unhappy years of their marriage, serving as Skywalker’s decorator.
In scattered locations on the grounds surrounding the Main House—and Lucas had been careful to lay out the property so no structure was visible from any other—were the Carriage House (housing theater operations and licensing), the Stable (for production, publicity, and the gaming division), the Gate House (animation, business affairs, and finance), and the Brook House (more of the games division). Still under construction was the Tech Building, built to resemble a brick winery, where Lucas intended to put Sprocket, which he’d rename (what else?) Skywalker Sound. All in all, more than a hundred employees would make the move from rented offices in Marin County to report to work on the ranch. Rumors to the contrary, Lucas would never live at the ranch—he would make his home in the renovated Parkhouse in San Anselmo, now that the company was at Skywalker—which meant that the only thing really missing from the ranch was ILM, which was still working out of warehouses at Kerner, about fifteen miles away, much to Lucas’s continued annoyance.
Always a stickler for details, Lucas had concocted an elaborate backstory for Skywalker Ranch to explain the amalgamation of architectural styles he had fused into the Main House and other buildings at the ranch. According to Lucas, the Main House was built in 1869 by a retired sea captain, whose children then added on to the ranch at various times, embracing the architectural styles of the moment. The Brook House, for example, had been executed in the Craftsman style, which became popular in southern California in the early 1900s, while the Tech Building was being built to reflect the Art Moderne style of the 1930s. “It’s my biggest movie,” Lucas said of Skywalker Ranch. “I’ve always been a frustrated architect.”60
If the ranch was a movie, then Lucas was producing, directing, and editing it with his usual penchant for control. Even nature was controlled to a certain extent: the lake on the property was man-made, ostensibly to provide water for his own private fire department, though birds had taken up residence in the flora on its shores, turning Lucas’s water supply into a perfectly crafted bird sanctuary. And to make it seem as if the ranch really had been sitting in the hills near Nicasio since 1869, Lucas brought down from Oregon more than two thousand full-grown trees. The effect worked: the mature trees gave the brand-new facility a timeless ambience—a special effect worthy of ILM. Like Walt Disney, who had created Disneyland as a manufactured reality in the orange groves of Anaheim, Lucas had his own perfectly controlled environment tucked away in the hills of Nicasio. Lucas, however, did his world-building in private.
“I’ve loved creating the ranch—I find business exciting and challenging,” Lucas told a Gannett news reporter visiting Skywalker Ranch that autumn. “There have been exciting parts to it. But I prefer making movies.”61
For 1985, however, Lucas had put his efforts mostly into rescuing the films of old friends, often without credit, rather than directly involving himself in the production of movies. “On the one hand, I’m [known for] doing these huge productions, and at the same time I’m helping on these little productions for my friends,” said Lucas. “But in most of the interviews with me, they’re passed right over as though they never existed. But those movies may be closer to what I am than Star Wars.”62 That could certainly be said of Latino, a gritty and politically charged film about the conflict between the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the U.S.-backed Contras, written and directed by Lucas’s old friend Haskell Wexler. Given its contentious, though relevant, topic—Nicaragua would turn into a political quagmire for Ronald Reagan’s administration by 1987—Wexler was having difficulties getting the film distributed and called on Lucas for help. “George Lucas helps his friends with whatever they’re doing,” said producer Tom Luddy, a friend to both Lucas and Wexler. “He’s the kind of person who is loyal to his friends. And Haskell Wexler is one of his oldest friends.”63
Lucas had also stepped in to help another old friend who had run into trouble: Walter Murch, who had just been unceremoniously fired from his directorial debut, Disney’s Return to Oz, which was filming in London. When Lucas heard the news, he called the film’s producer in his hotel room in London, waking him up at 3:30 a.m. “You’re making a mistake,” Lucas said matter-of-factly. The producer was unimpressed. “I’m head of the studio,” he snapped, then hung up and went back to sleep. Lucas flew to London anyway and managed to salvage Murch’s reputation with Disney, which permitted him to finish the film without further incident. Lucas even hosted a preview showing for Disney executives in the screening room at his house in San Anselmo. “That was Big Brother’s arm around Walter,” said Murch’s wife, Aggie. “George was saying, ‘You’d better not hurt my little brother.’”64
Disney didn’t, but the critics did. Lucas thought there was only one thing that might have made the reviews even worse. “The critics came crashing down on the picture anyway,” he remarked at the time, “but they didn’t come down nearly as hard as they would have if my name had been on it.”65 It was a complaint he would continue to make throughout his career. As for Murch, he was rattled enough by the experience that he’d never direct another film again.
And then there was Coppola. This time Coppola had gotten involved with a film by another mutual friend, Paul Schrader, who’d written both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese, and had also recently directed American Gigolo and Cat People. Schrader was writing and directing a project close to his own heart called Mishima, an arty biopic based on the life of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author, poet, and playwright who had committed ritual suicide in 1970 at age forty-five. Coppola had offered to finance the film himself, but when his latest Zoetrope endeavor collapsed, Coppola had to appeal to Lucas for money. Lucas said yes almost immediately; Schrader was making the kind of deliberately artistic film Lucas admired, shooting each of the film’s three narratives in a different style—the approach Lucas had experimented with in More American Graffiti. Lucas eventually talked Warner Bros. into financing half the film, and even flew to Japan to check on Schrader’s progress as he completed the movie. Mishima would be released as a co-production of Lucasfilm and American Zoetrope and, on its release in October 1985, would be little seen but highly regarded.
Lucas spent the end of 1985 in court. And it was all President Ronald Reagan’s fault.
In March 1983, President Reagan had proposed a missile defense system that would rely in part on space-based launching systems to knock any incoming enemy nuclear missiles out of the sky. While Reagan called his system the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), its opponents—starting with Senator Ted Kennedy—had derisively dubbed it “Star Wars.” The term had picked up traction in the media to the point where the terms “Star Wars” and “SDI” were used interchangeably, much to Lucas’s increasing annoyance. When dueling activist organizations began using the term “Star Wars” in competing television commercials in the weeks leading up to a summit between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Lucas finally went to court, arguing that affiliating the term “Star Wars” with SDI was an inf
ringement on his trademark, and that he didn’t want his film associated with “a noxious subject, particularly nuclear holocaust.”66
Lucasfilm lawyers finally had their day in court on November 25. Things didn’t go well. Judge Gerhard A. Gesell (the same judge who had presided at the 1974 trials of the Watergate defendants) quickly ruled against Lucas, citing “non-trade use” of the term “Star Wars.” “When politicians, newspapers, and the public generally use the phrase Star Wars for their convenience,” wrote Gesell in his opinion, “[the] plaintiff has no rights as owner of the trade-mark to prevent this use of Star Wars.”67 It wasn’t the last time Lucas would go to court to protect Star Wars; in 1990 he would sue rapper Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew for calling himself Luke Skyywalker, slapping the performer with a $300 million lawsuit. This time Lucas would have better luck; Campbell would eventually settle, paying Lucas $300,000, and agreeing to stop using the name.68 But Campbell would never forget it. Spotting posters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in New York twenty-five years later, Campbell would get angry all over again. “Every time I see a trailer, or an ad, for that movie,” seethed Campbell, “all I can think is I want that motherfucker George Lucas to give me my money back.”69
And still the question dogged him: Would he be doing any more Star Wars? “I don’t know,” Lucas told a reporter in late 1985. “I probably won’t do any more personally.” He had rough plots in his head, he promised, but “they’re not written down like stories.”70 For now, he said, “I want to produce other directors’ films, to be just the executive producer and to shoot some films of my own that will be experimental instead of commercial,” adding, “I want to try to do some films that no one has ever done, [regardless of] whether they’re watched, whether they’re successful.”71
It’s unlikely, however, that he intended for that to be the fate of Howard the Duck.
After nearly two years of keeping a low profile, Lucas was ready to enter the public spotlight again in 1986. As Lucasfilm CEO Doug Norby continued paring away at employees and reorganizing divisions inside the company—and with overhead rumored to be approaching $20 million per year—the media and business analysts wondered aloud whether Lucas was getting back into films because he needed the money. “The appeal of Mr. Lucas’s principal stock in trade, the ‘Star Wars’ saga, appears to be waning,” wrote Michael Cieply in the Wall Street Journal.72 Star Wars fans, it was argued, had moved on. Toy sales continued to plunge, and even Marvel Comics was preparing to wrap up its monthly Star Wars comic after nine years.
Norby’s pruning and rearranging, while unpopular, had actually done much to steady Lucasfilm. With merchandising receipts down, however, ILM would have to step up as the most reliable source of revenue. Over the past year, the effects shop had indeed taken on more and more outside work, producing effects for The Goonies, Explorers, Back to the Future, and even the opening credits sequence for Out of Africa. At the Academy Awards in March, ILM would win yet another Oscar, this time for the special effects for American Graffiti actor, now director, Ron Howard’s Cocoon. And yet, even as ILM expanded its work, Lucas would gripe about the company’s becoming complacent. “A lot of wild, rebellious enthusiasm seems to be paling a bit, for better and for worse,” Lucas told Time. “While it’s reassuring to see the company becoming more stable and professional, it’s a challenge to keep things fresh.”73
Inside Lucasfilm, everyone seemed certain Lucas had another big project in development, another game-changing franchise like Star Wars or the Indiana Jones films. “I think George will search his instincts for something new,” said one employee,74 while another noted proudly that Lucas “has this terrific instinct for popular taste. I’m sure he’s got something completely different up his sleeve.”75
He didn’t. But what he did have was plenty of old friends whose work he respected, whose company he enjoyed, and for whom he was more than happy to act as a producer—and for Lucas, that was usually more than enough. The resulting films would meet with only varying degrees of critical and popular enthusiasm—one would even be considered among the worst films of all time—but Lucas never regretted making any of them, or putting them out under the Lucasfilm imprint. “The company is designed so I don’t have to make commercially profitable movies,” Lucas explained patiently. “Your bottom-line assumption has to be that every movie loses money. They don’t, of course, but you go on that assumption. It’s like baseball. You don’t always get into the World Series, but you go on playing.”76
One collaborator Lucas liked a great deal was Jim Henson, with whom he had remained friendly since working together with him to develop Yoda for The Empire Strikes Back. Following the lukewarm reception of his groundbreaking 1982 film The Dark Crystal, Henson was looking for a big-name producer for his next film, the fantasy–fairy tale Labyrinth. “Jim and I both wanted to work with each other, and that was a movie nobody wanted,” Lucas said later.77 While the vision for the film was entirely Henson’s, the script remained problematic, with several writers—including Dennis Lee, Laura Phillips, Terry Jones, Elaine May, and Henson himself—unable to crack the structure of the story. Lucas offered to tinker with it too. “I’m strong with script and editing,” Lucas remarked. “One contribution I could make to Labyrinth was to keep the script focused. It’s a real trick to keep a script focused.”78
After Lucas sat through two days of story meetings at Parkhouse with Henson and his creative consultant Larry Mirkin, one had to wonder how much help he really was. Mirkin recalled Lucas taking out a clipboard and drawing three or four concentric circles and tracing a line through them as he explained the main character’s journey through the labyrinth. Lucas was “a really lovely, unassuming guy,” said Mirkin, “but I don’t remember it leading to anything very helpful to the writer.”79 More memorable—at least to Mirkin’s mind—was their lunch at a local restaurant, where Lucas was joined by Linda Ronstadt, who turned every head as she entered the dining area.
Lucas enjoyed working with Henson, and took great pleasure in arranging for Darth Vader to show up on the first day of filming at Elstree to present Jim with a good luck card. Both he and Lucas would need it; Labyrinth bombed with audiences almost immediately upon its release in June 1986, earning only $12 million off its budget of $25 million. Henson took it hard; Lucas didn’t. “It’s disappointing when something doesn’t work, but it’s part of the game,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You win some, you lose some.”80
Lucas’s next production, which opened a mere six weeks later, would fare just as badly.
At first blush, Howard the Duck seemed like an ideal project for Lucas. It was based on a comic book he loved, and Howard’s co-creator, writer Steve Gerber, was just the kind of defiantly independent artist Lucas admired. Shortly after completing American Graffiti, in fact, Lucas had pressed issues of the Howard the Duck comic into the hands of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, telling them they were “very funny” and might be worth turning into a movie.81 Huyck and Katz had eventually produced a script that they then shopped around Hollywood for nearly a decade, with no takers except Universal, which promised to back it on the condition they bring in Lucas as executive producer. Once again, Lucas would permit his name to be used as a favor to friends. And once again, it would cost him.
Production of Howard the Duck was a disaster from the beginning—and the biggest problem was Howard himself. After Huyck and Katz had unsuccessfully pushed for an animated version of the film, Lucas suggested instead that they handle Howard as a special effect, and put him in the hands of ILM. Unfortunately, ILM treated Howard as little more than a complicated duck costume, cramming one of seven actors inside the suit—usually the three-foot-four Ed Gale, who could barely see, fell over constantly, and had to be carried from set to set.
The experience was a bad one, too, for Huyck and Katz, both of whom felt they’d been marginalized on their own film. Borrowing a page from Lucas’s playbook, they left for Hawaii the week their film opened in August 1986—which
meant they weren’t around to see the disastrous reviews. The headlines practically wrote themselves: “‘Howard the Duck’ Lays an Egg,” snickered the Washington Post, while the New York Times called the film “A Fowl Brew.” And those were the kind reviews. Lucas thought the film had never been given a chance; the movie’s promotional materials had prominently played up his involvement—his name was above the title on the first movie posters—which Lucas believed had caused critics to judge it unfairly. Still, Lucas tried to remain upbeat. “If I had to do it over, I’d do it again,” he said a year later. “Look—making movies is like a sporting event. Playing the game is the best part. You put all your effort into it, and sometimes you’ll be successful, sometimes the public won’t connect.”82 Executives at Universal weren’t nearly as understanding; two production heads nearly came to blows in a heated argument over who was to blame for green-lighting the film.
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