Interestingly, Lucas’s most successful film for the year was one that didn’t play in traditional movie theaters at all—and came out of a job offer that Lucas never even accepted. In 1984 the Walt Disney Company, on the hunt for fresh blood to reenergize its brand, had approached Lucas about taking over as head of production. Lucas, a lifelong Disney fan, was flattered but refused; he had his own company to manage, after all, and wasn’t looking for the kinds of headaches and drama currently rocking Disney’s board of directors, which had barely managed to survive a hostile takeover by financier Saul Steinberg. Still, Lucas had advised Disney’s new majority stockholder, the billionaire Bass family of Texas, on their purchase of 25 percent of the company, and strongly endorsed the selection of Michael Eisner, his go-getter ally at Paramount, as an ideal CEO. Once Eisner was in place, he immediately reached out to Lucas and Spielberg about developing attractions, based on either Star Wars or Indiana Jones, for the Disney theme parks. Spielberg declined, preferring to concentrate on more adult film content—he currently had The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun in the pipeline—but Lucas was thrilled at the idea of having the opportunity to play in the Disney kingdom, which had so inspired him as a boy. While always skeptical of studios, for Disney he would make an exception.
In February 1985, at a Disney shareholder meeting in Anaheim with six thousand excited shareholders in attendance, Disney and Lucasfilm formally announced an agreement under which Lucasfilm would develop several attractions for the Disney parks, including a new ride based on Star Wars.83 The ride, called Star Tours, would use military-grade flight simulators to give riders the sensation of flying through the Star Wars universe, even putting them in the middle of an ILM-produced dogfight with TIE fighters and an assault on the Death Star. At four and a half minutes long, it was ILM’s longest visual effects sequence to date. When the ride opened in January 1987, Lucas was at Disneyland with Eisner to cut the ribbon, both of them waving enthusiastically at record crowds that would keep the ride running at capacity for the next sixty hours straight. “I’ve always felt that there’s only one first-class amusement park operation, and this is it,” said Lucas appreciatively. “When I did something, I’ve always wanted to make sure it was done right.… [T]his is the only place in the world like that.”84
While the ride was the high-profile attraction, Lucas and Eisner were trying to keep under wraps their other ambitious project for the parks: a 3-D movie called Captain EO, which would feature another A-lister Disney had recently signed, pop megastar Michael Jackson, still enjoying his post- Thriller glow of invincibility. Disney, looking to add some zip to its lineup of in-park films, pitched Lucas and Jackson several ideas during a Valentine’s Day meeting with Disney Imagineers in 1985. “We were asked to come up with some concepts to go with three elements,” said Imagineer Rick Rothschild. “The elements were George Lucas, Michael Jackson, and 3-D.”85 Both Lucas and Jackson preferred a story treatment called The Intergalactic Music Man, in which Jackson’s character would arrive on a cold and passionless planet, where he would convince an evil queen—through song and dance—that things are better with warmth and color. But while Lucas had agreed to serve as executive producer for the film, he had no intention of taking on the day-to-day chores of directing it. Jackson was hoping Lucas could persuade Steven Spielberg to take the job, but with Spielberg booked, Lucas brought in an old acquaintance he promised Jackson and Eisner they’d be happy with: Francis Ford Coppola.
Coppola’s first directive: change the title to Captain EO, an allusion to Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn or light—a decision that met with no objection from Lucas, Jackson, or Disney’s handpicked line producer and screenwriter for the project, Rusty Lemorande. Coppola began filming at Laird Studios in Culver City in June 1985 and completed work in August—a quick shoot, certainly, but not as hassle-free as Lucas had promised. Coppola, while fascinated with the much-improved 3-D process—which involved two cameras filming simultaneously at slightly different angles—had often struggled to figure out just the right lighting. Jackson held his song-and-dance routines close to the vest, refusing to show Coppola what he’d be doing until practically the day the sequence was shot. And Lucas didn’t make things any easier, dropping in unannounced and insisting on changes that were either technically difficult or expensive to shoot, even scrapping all the footage that had already been shot using the model spaceships. Harrison Ellenshaw, Disney’s special effects supervisor, thought Lucas was somewhat distracted by other projects—namely, completion of Skywalker Ranch—“so he could never give Captain EO or any of the other things full attention,” said Ellenshaw. “So it’s kind of like having Michelangelo come by every other day for half an hour and telling you, ‘If I had the time, I’d do the Sistine Chapel, but since I don’t, let me tell you what you need to do.’ And then he’d wait two days, and then he comes by and says, ‘You didn’t do it right, do this, do that.’ Everything was constantly in flux.”86
Captain EO premiered at Disneyland and Walt Disney World in September 1986. Lucas attended the Disneyland premiere, cutting the ribbon in front of nearly two thousand invited guests. Both parks had rebuilt or refitted existing theaters to accommodate the film and all its incorporated special effects; the theater itself, as Lucas would always argue, was a critical part of the experience. At Disneyland, the film played in the seven-hundred-seat Magic Eye Theater, which had been equipped with flashing lights, fog machines, and concussive audio that pulsed and huffed and throbbed in perfect sync with the action on-screen, making the movie immersive entertainment. (Lemorande would remark that the film wasn’t a movie, it was a “feelie.”)87 Clocking in at a fast-paced seventeen minutes, the film boasted a price tag of more than $20 million—nearly twice what Lucas had spent on Star Wars—making it one of the most expensive films, on a per-minute basis, ever produced.
Disney was delighted with the film. It would play for more than a decade (and then, after Jackson’s death in 2009, return for another five-year run) to tens of millions of park-goers, making it one of Lucas’s most widely seen films. Movie critics may have tried to argue that Captain EO wasn’t a great film—“[It’s] only the fourth best film at EPCOT,” insisted Richard Corliss—but Disney patrons didn’t care;88 most would pay it at least one obligatory visit during a trip to the park, while hard-core fans would sit through it repeatedly. Still, critic Charles Solomon, writing in the Los Angeles Times, lamented that, given the caliber of the talent involved, audiences were entitled to something more than “the most elaborate rock video in history.” Of course, “no one expects an amusement-park diversion to be Gone With the Wind,” wrote Solomon wearily, “but given that list of credits and the film’s lavish budget… audiences have a right to expect more than empty flash.”89
Speaking of films, would there be more installments of Star Wars? It was a question that would continue to be lobbed at Lucas wherever he went, shouted at him across hotel lobbies or tacked on to the end of even the briefest of interviews. This was particularly true in 1987, as fans and media alike marked the tenth anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars. Lucas was surprised by the fuss. While all three Star Wars films had taken in $1.4 billion at the box office, and another $2.6 billion in merchandising, the blush was clearly off the rose. Sales of Star Wars–related merchandise had virtually petered out. The Droids and Ewoks cartoons had already faded from Saturday morning television. Although all three films had fared well on videocassette, the premiere of Star Wars on network TV in 1984 didn’t even win its time slot, losing out to the trashy miniseries Lace on ABC.
Lucas was surprised, then, when the science fiction magazine Starlog asked to work with Lucasfilm to host the first-ever Star Wars convention at the Stouffer Concourse Hotel in Los Angeles in May 1987. More than nine thousand fans, many dressed in character, thronged the hotel, paying $18 for three days of events and the opportunity to buy merchandise and memorabilia, greeting one another with “May the Force be with you.” Lucas stunned the crowd by m
aking an appearance on the stage in the Grand Ballroom on the last evening of the convention, strolling out to John Williams’s music and thunderous applause. “Oh, I thought there were only seven of you here,” he joked, as he prepared to take questions from the audience.90
And to the inevitable question, Lucas would only deflect cryptically, giving different answers to different interviewers. “I’m kicking it around in my head,” he told the New York Times. “I keep milling the story around to make it more interesting to myself.”91 In the Los Angeles Times, he struck a less optimistic tone, saying, “I haven’t really thought about Star Wars. I mean, I think about it from time to time, but it will take a lot of ruminating before I can come up with the energy to do three more.”92 But in the Wall Street Journal, Lucas was more encouraging. “Right now, there are too many other things I’m more interested in,” he said. “But there will be more; it’s just a matter of when.”93
Among those “other things” was his continuing relationship with Linda Ronstadt. While he and Ronstadt still managed to keep from being photographed together in public, she continued to visit Lucas regularly at his home in San Anselmo or at the ranch. Friends were surprised the relationship had lasted this long; “Linda does have a roving eye,” said music producer Peter Asher, “and she does not want to settle down.”94 And yet Ronstadt was genuinely smitten; she had recently rented property in northern California so she could be closer to Lucas, and playfully carried around an Empire Strikes Back lunchbox.95 Lucas, too, seemed willing to become more adventurous for her; in addition to the dance and guitar lessons, he had even tried—for a couple of months, anyway—to develop a hipper look by ditching his glasses for contacts and shaving off his trademark beard.
Even as Lucas groused to the press that he had to “work hard at having a private life,” rumors continued to fly about their relationship status; there was even speculation in the gossip magazines that the two of them had gotten married.96 They hadn’t. But they had quietly gotten engaged—“ring on the finger and all,” as Ronstadt put it.97 More and more, Ronstadt could be found spending time at Skywalker Ranch, riding horses across the pristine countryside—and when the time came to record her 1987 album of traditional Mexican folk songs, Canciones de Mi Padre, she chose to use Skywalker Sound’s facilities. Lucas had even dreamily suggested building them a honeymoon cottage on the Grady Ranch property adjacent to the Skywalker compound,98 a proposal that eventually bogged down in the continuing zoning disputes with Marin County neighbors.
More publicly, Lucas had two films in production, both of which were much closer to his heart and to his own interests than any of the movies he’d produced over the past two years. During production on Captain EO, Coppola had mentioned to Lucas that he was still hoping to make a film he’d had on the back burner for years, a biopic about automobile designer and businessman Preston Tucker. Coppola—whose own father had invested in Tucker’s car company in the 1940s—had purchased the rights to Tucker’s story in 1976, and envisioned filming it as “a sort of Brechtian musical in which Tucker would be the main story,” but would also incorporate the lives of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison as part of a larger American fable. Coppola had even managed to get Leonard Bernstein to agree to write the music, when—the source of Coppola’s continued heartache—the bottom had dropped out of Zoetrope.
Coppola, looking for a backer, said he was “embarrassed and shy” about approaching Lucas for support. “It was a role reversal, like going to a very successful and busy younger brother,” said Coppola. “I didn’t want George to feel I was intruding, trying to capitalize on his success.”99 But Lucas reassured his old mentor that the request “wasn’t a big drama,” reminding him that he had relied on Coppola’s financial support for American Graffiti. Plus, Lucas loved the story, calling it “the best project Francis had ever been involved with.”100 Indeed, in addition to its being about cars—always a subject Lucas loved—Lucas could relate to Tucker’s story, in which a maverick designer bucks the system to create a new kind of car in line with his own unique vision. “[It’s] about how you take a dream and carry it through to reality, and what you’re up against,” explained Lucas. “The people in it come up with interesting, creative ideas that are important and relevant to the world we live in—but they’re not listened to and the ideas are stifled from the top. That sounds likes the business both Francis and I are in.”101 But Tucker’s downfall, in which he lost nearly everything, more closely paralleled Coppola’s own adventures in moviemaking. It was no wonder both Lucas and Coppola were taking the project so personally.
Lucas agreed to put up the $24 million budget, and even managed to squeeze additional funding and a distribution agreement out of Paramount, leveraging the studio’s desire to lock down Coppola for a third Godfather film. But to Coppola’s quiet disappointment, Lucas, invoking his rights as producer, took over much of the project. “George’s fortunes were rising just as mine were falling,” said Coppola. “So it created a dramatic situation in that the person that had always been the sponsor of things was no longer able to do so.”102 To write the screenplay, Lucas brought in Arnold Schulman, a respected film writer who had recently delivered the screenplay for the film adaptation of A Chorus Line. Schulman nearly resisted the offer, telling Lucas he didn’t want to write a movie about cars. “This film is not about cars,” Lucas told him. “It’s about Francis.”103 Lucas directed Schulman to write a script that was upbeat and entertaining, not intellectual and messagey. “I wanted to make it an uplifting experience that showed some of the problems in corporate America, and Francis didn’t resist,” said Lucas. “Francis can get so esoteric it can be hard for an audience to relate to him.”104
Tucker: The Man and His Dream opened in August 1988 to generally positive reviews (“the best thing Mr. Coppola has done in years,” wrote Janet Maslin)105 but a tepid audience response, earning a little less than its $24 million budget, which made it officially a flop. Holding court with reporters in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, Coppola carelessly went into pre-release damage control mode, telling a New York Times reporter that he had forfeited control of the movie to Lucas. “I think it’s a good movie,” Coppola conceded. “It’s eccentric, a little wacky, like the Tucker car, but it’s not the movie I would have made at the height of my power.”106 Lucas couldn’t believe Coppola’s colossal gall, and immediately went on the record with a San Francisco reporter to set things straight, at least as he saw it. “The truth of it is: Francis and I worked on the movie together, and he made the movie he wanted to make.… Who knows what it’d have been if he made the movie on his own?” said Lucas—then, in his parting shot, took a scathing swipe at Coppola: “And who knows what it would have been if he’d made it at the height of his powers—which was five or six years ago.”107 It was yet one more bump in their always tumultuous, complicated fraternal relationship.
Although his friendship with Coppola was unlike any between Lucas and his other fellow filmmakers, he would have a genuinely warm—and decidedly non-fractious—relationship with Ron Howard, for instance, his handpicked director for the other film he had in production in 1987: the Tolkien-tinged fairy tale Willow, a project Lucas had been mulling over since the earliest drafts of Star Wars. Howard, on a hot streak following the hits Splash and Cocoon, had sealed his deal for Willow on a handshake with Lucas in 1985, when the film was still scarcely more than a few pages in Lucas’s notebooks. “Let’s just both commit to this,” Lucas said earnestly. At Howard’s suggestion, Lucas hired Bob Dolman, who had written an unsuccessful TV pilot for Howard but had also penned episodes of SCTV and WKRP in Cincinnati, which Lucas admired. Dolman was dispatched to Skywalker Ranch to spend several days with Lucas and Howard in story conferences, always one of Lucas’s favorite parts of the process, as he could talk through plots and characters, then hand them off to a screenwriter without ever having to bleed on the page himself.
With his story for Willow, Lucas had distilled all the elements he loved be
st from fairy tales, movies, and folklore—there’s a bit of Moses, a dash of Lord of the Rings, a nod to The Wizard of Oz—to tell the story of Willow Ufgood, a farmer from a race of small people who finds a full-sized baby and must return her to her own people, whom she is destined to rule as their princess. Along the way, Willow picks up a warrior sidekick, encounters fairies and trolls, and battles an evil queen and dragons. Lucas dug deep into his own work for inspiration as well—he was determined, for example, finally to make a movie with little people as heroes, an idea he had flirted with but then abandoned in Star Wars—and at its heart was a theme Lucas loved: “Mr. Average Man rises to the occasion.”108 Dolman worked his way through seven drafts before he, Howard, and Lucas were finally happy with it.
Securing the funding was just as tough; even with Lucas and Howard attached to the project, fantasy films hadn’t fared well over the last few years. Lucas could attest to that, as Labyrinth had been one of those failures. Furthermore, the film had no real stars; it was going to rely on some expensive special effects; and its main character would be a little person, played by Warwick Davis, who had charmed Lucas as Wicket the Ewok. Suffice it to say, wallets weren’t exactly flying open at the studios. Lucas’s savior—once again—was Alan Ladd, now the CEO of MGM, who agreed to provide half the film’s $35 million budget in exchange for theatrical and TV rights. Lucas would provide the other half, and retain cable and home video rights.
Principal photography on Willow began in New Zealand in April 1987, then circled back through Wales to Elstree, where Lucas had a number of enormous sets sprawled across several soundstages. While Lucas tried to linger unobtrusively on the set, Howard knew that he was being watched closely. Willow was the first original story Lucas had written since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard understood that he was expected to take good care of the project. “I know he was disappointed in the outcome of Labyrinth and Howard the Duck,” recalled Howard. “But those movies weren’t his ideas, and the thing he really enjoys most is kind of cooking up his own ideas and really following it through.”109 Howard was trying hard not to blow it.
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