One of Willow’s most memorable moments, however, wasn’t made on a soundstage but rather came out of the workrooms of ILM. One sequence in the film called for Willow, an aspiring wizard, to attempt to turn an enchanted goat back into a woman—but the spell goes slightly awry, and the goat changes into an ostrich, then into a tortoise and a tiger, before finally reverting to human form. Supervisor Dennis Muren pondered ways of doing the effect with props and models, then thought better of it and turned the effects over to the computer department. Starting with establishing shots of each creature, the computer was used to transition seamlessly from one animal to the next in a single shot. It was the first use of computer morphing (or “morfing,” as Lucas would always spell it), and that wondrous effect alone would be enough to earn ILM yet another Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. It would lose to itself, again, for its work on the groundbreaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
In the months leading up to the release of Willow, there was speculation that Lucas might have another big franchise on his hands—that Willow Ufgood might become the next Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. And for a moment, it seemed that Lucas might have done it; on its release on May 20, 1988, Willow opened at number one at the box office. But reviews were unkind—and in some cases brutal—and audiences never really connected with Willow as Lucas had hoped. Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, applauded Lucas for trying to stage another “high, ambitious fantasy,” remarking that the effort “has a certain nobility, even when the film itself does not.”110 But many reviewers felt that Lucas was not only recycling fairy-tale clichés but also blatantly ripping off himself, using old tricks and tropes, but not nearly as well as before. “A ‘Star Wars’ without star quality,” declared Time, while Newsweek’s David Ansen called Lucas “The Great Regurgitator.”111 That one stung, and Lucas accused reviewers of trying too hard to be clever. “They tell you a little about what a movie is about, and come up with some spiffy little remark. I really don’t give them much concern.”112 That, however, would never be entirely true; Lucas had rather cathartically made a point of naming one of Willow’s villains General Kael, after one of his most thoughtful but often harshest critics, Pauline Kael.
On March 3, 1988, Lucas and Spielberg sat side by side at a table in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, looking vaguely uncomfortable in their suits, like schoolboys who had been forced to dress up for company. The issue at hand was a seemingly mundane one—the Senate, as part of its constitutionally mandated “advise and consent” role for treaties, was in the midst of considering the Berne Convention, part of an international agreement regarding copyright. But for Lucas, this was no small matter; the treaty formally guaranteed artists the right to claim authorship of their work and—key to Lucas—the ability to object formally to defacement of their work. “The practical issue is colorization,” Lucas stated in his testimony, referring to the recent move by cable magnate Ted Turner to add color to the old black-and-white movies shown on his cable networks. But Lucas, who stood at the cutting edge of digital technology, thought the problem went beyond mere colorizing. “Current and future technology,” he warned, “will alter, mutilate and destroy” films and other works of art for future generations. “Tomorrow more advanced technologies will be able to replace actors,” Lucas continued, “or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actors’ lips to match.”113
Ironically, in less than a decade Lucas would be doing much the same to his own work, as he began tinkering with the first three Star Wars films, amping up special effects, adding dialogue, and slightly modifying a number of key scenes. But Lucas would argue that, as the creator of the movies, he and he alone was entitled to make any changes he deemed fit to his own work. “Who better, than the person whose hard labor and unique talent created the art, to determine what is an appropriate alteration?” he argued. The Senate would approve the treaty a year later, providing Lucas and other artists with the protections he sought—but embedded in Lucas’s testimony was a charge that could likely be leveled against Lucas by irritated Star Wars fans: “People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit, or as an exercise of power, are barbarians.”114
But would there be more Star Wars? During a lengthy interview with film critic Charles Champlin in the spring of 1988, Lucas mentioned that he had ideas and notes enough not for just three trilogies but for four. “I’m not sure how I could get to all of them in my lifetime,” he added, before moving on to other topics. Lucas, who had just turned forty-four, was reflective and generally upbeat that spring. At the moment, the fates of Willow and Tucker were still unknown. He was thrilled with everything that was happening with the ranch—a small vineyard had recently been planted near the Tech Building, lending further veracity to its fictitious backstory as an old winery—but he remained frustrated with the continued local opposition to his proposal to move ILM there. Lucas had recently tried to make nice to a group of about forty neighbors by inviting them over for sandwiches and a tour of the property, but there was still much hand-wringing in the community about the thought of a 300,000-square-foot building going up in the hills, larger than any existing building in the county. “I don’t have anything against George Lucas,” said one Lucas Valley neighbor. “He’s a nice man.… Hey, I liked Walt Disney, too, but that doesn’t mean I want to live next to Disneyland.”115
In some press accounts Skywalker Ranch was compared unfavorably with Xanadu, the castle-like retreat in Citizen Kane, and Lucas to the hermit-like Charles Foster Kane. Lucas argued that he wasn’t a recluse—he still enjoyed getting out and doing things—but he did value privacy. In 1988, in fact, he and Linda Ronstadt would amicably end their relationship, doing it so quietly that the news didn’t even make it into the gossip magazines. Post-breakup, Lucas adopted another daughter, Katie, and in 1993 would adopt a son, Jett.116 “My main focus was really raising my kids,” Lucas said later. “I knew I couldn’t direct and raise these kids at the same time. A director… isn’t free to go to parent-teacher conferences. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll be a producer. I can take days off when I need them, and basically focus on raising my kids.”117 Coppola felt that being a father and a family man had changed Lucas for the better. “He raised those kids as a mother, really,” said Coppola. “He wanted to have a family.… He saw what my kids meant to me. He realized that that was really, in the end, all you have.”118
The privacy and secrecy surrounding Skywalker continued to intrigue, and slightly baffle, the media, critics, and even some friends. John Milius thought that Lucas was wasting his energy by focusing on the ranch instead of on filmmaking. “Francis really tried to do things with his power,” said Milius. “He made movies with [German filmmaker] Wim Wenders, produced The Black Stallion, produced George Lucas. George built Lucasland up there, his own private little duchy—which was producing what? A bunch of pap.”119 Strong words coming from the writer-director of Conan the Barbarian, and not entirely fair; while Lucas had produced several mainstream duds, he’d also helped out—often without credit—arty, underappreciated films like Mishima and, in 1988, Powaqqatsi, an experimental documentary by filmmaker Godfrey Reggio that throbbed to a score by composer Philip Glass. It was the kind of film that some part of Lucas still aspired to make; like his student films Herbie and the first THX 1138, Powaqqatsi was something of a “tone poem,” with images and sound evoking emotional responses from the viewer. Lucas and Coppola served as executive producers, and Lucas helped negotiate a distribution deal with Cannon films.
On the flip side of Powaqqatsi was Don Bluth’s animated dinosaur film The Land Before Time, executive produced by both Lucas and Spielberg. It had been Spielberg’s idea, explained Lucas, for a Bambi-type adventure “about baby dinosaurs, and he wanted me to executive produce it with him.”120 Lucas had initially wanted to do the film without dialogue, similar to the Rite of Spring segment in the Disney film Fantasia, but had lost that argument: this was a kids’ movie, not a tone poem. Lucas also
involved himself in the editing process, where he and Spielberg suggested that Bluth tone down some of the film’s scarier sequences—this from the two who had delighted in human sacrifice and brain eating in Temple of Doom, an irony that was not lost on Bluth. The Land Before Time would be a smash with audiences and critics, spawning several sequels and a cable television cartoon.
The most successful film Lucas had in production in the spring of 1988, however, was a third Indiana Jones film, which both he and Spielberg were hoping would be a return to form after the misfire of the grisly, gloomy Temple of Doom. Lucas had actually finished a treatment for the third film as early as September 1984, while Temple of Doom was still in the theaters, writing an eight-page story outline called Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. This time, Lucas put Indy on the trail of the Fountain of Youth, which brought him in contact with a magical spider monkey who possesses eternal life. It was an odd quest, but Lucas’s preferred MacGuffin, the Holy Grail, had been vetoed by Spielberg early on. “Steven didn’t like it,” remembered Lucas. “He said, ‘I just don’t get it.’”121 But Lucas hadn’t been terribly happy with the Monkey King treatment either, and brought in up-and-comer Chris Columbus, who’d written Young Sherlock Holmes and Gremlins—and who would later go on to direct Home Alone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets—to adapt his story treatment into a screenplay. That script, too, Lucas would shelve.
In January 1986 Lucas tried again, this time bringing in writer Menno Meyjes, who had written the screenplay for The Color Purple for Spielberg. There would be no monkey king in this attempt; Spielberg had figured out the hook needed to make a Grail quest work. “The search for the father is the search for the Holy Grail,” he told Lucas.122 If Lucas and Meyjes could figure out a story in which a Grail quest worked as a metaphor for Indy’s own relationship with his father, Spielberg would be happy. But Meyjes’s final script wasn’t quite right either; it would take one more writer, Lethal Weapon’s Jeffrey Boam, to put the script into its final shape—and even Boam’s screenplay would be punched up by playwright Tom Stoppard, under the credit “Barry Watson.”
While writing the story, Lucas had envisioned Indy’s father as “more of a professor… [a] Laurence Olivier type, an Obi-Wan Kenobi type.” But Spielberg had something different in mind. Indiana Jones had been spawned partly by Spielberg’s thwarted desire to direct a James Bond film—so in a way, that made James Bond the father of Indiana Jones. It only made sense to Spielberg, then, that Sean Connery—the first, and to his mind best, James Bond—should play Indy’s father, Henry. Lucas wasn’t so sure—he worried Connery might “want to take over a little bit”—but left it to Spielberg to corral and manage Connery. He needn’t have worried; as it turned out, Lucas found working with Connery to be a “fun experience.”123
That could be said for most of the shoot as well. In contrast to their experience on Temple of Doom, both Lucas and Spielberg generally enjoyed the time they spent on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Much of the film was shot at Elstree, which to Lucas now felt practically like home. “We couldn’t imagine not shooting at Elstree,” said Frank Marshall, who was producing Last Crusade along with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy. In the late 1980s, however, Elstree, along with most of the English economy, was in a fragile state, and was in danger of being sold for scrap by its owners, Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment. Spielberg made an appearance before Parliament to make the case for the studio’s worth, and Lucas tried to purchase the studio himself, but was stiff-armed by Thorn. Their efforts saved half of it—about three stages—while the rest was torn down to make way for a Tesco grocery store. Even the Star Wars stage Lucas and Kurtz had built for The Empire Strikes Back was dismantled and carted off to rival studio Shepperton.
The final weeks of shooting were spent back in the United States, primarily in Colorado, where Spielberg would shoot the opening sequence of the film, a 1912 adventure of a Boy Scout–aged Indiana Jones, played by eighteen-year-old River Phoenix. Like the selection of Connery, casting Phoenix—who’d played Ford’s son in The Mosquito Coast three years earlier—was a pitch-perfect choice, with the young actor perfectly aping Ford’s mannerisms and vocal inflections as he was chased over and through a circus train. The sequence was something akin to a comic book “secret origins” story for the wily archaeologist, explaining his whip, his hat, his fear of snakes, even his chin scar. It also better defined the character to Spielberg’s and Ford’s liking; while Lucas continued to argue that Indy should be a morally ambiguous soldier of fortune who sold artifacts to finance an exotic lifestyle, Last Crusade’s opening sequence at last showed Indy to be a historical activist at heart, committed to preserving relics in a museum, where they belonged. Lucas could only shake his head in quiet objection. The argument was lost for good.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opened on May 24, 1989, and would sprint to the $100 million mark in a record nineteen days, on its way to $450 million worldwide by March of 1990. Critics were mostly impressed, as well as largely relieved that Lucas and Spielberg had abandoned the dimness of Temple of Doom for the effervescence of Last Crusade. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone thought the movie worked nearly perfectly, calling it “the wildest and wittiest Indy of them all.”124 Roger Ebert gave it what he felt was an almost obligatory thumbs-up, while the Associated Press thought it was “certain to restore the luster of [Lucas’s] golden touch.”125
While Spielberg had tried to end the film on a conclusive note, showing Indy and his father riding off on horseback into the sunset (yes, yes, Sallah and Brody were there, too)—a shot that looked an awful lot like the final moments of THX 1138—critics and fans were already asking if this was really the last they’d see of Indiana Jones. “Probably,” Lucas said, “unless I come up with some completely inspired idea. Three, I think, is a pretty nice number.” The next question, of course, was whether there would be more Star Wars. “It’s still sitting on the shelf,” Lucas told a reporter for the Associated Press. “It’ll be a few years before I get back to it. That’s the way those things work. I’ve got to get motivated by ideas and themes and that sort of thing before I can go back and do it.”126
At the moment, however, Lucas wasn’t motivated by Star Wars at all. In the two years since its release, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Indy and his estranged father had come to an understanding and reconciliation, seemed to be taking on a special resonance. Since the early 1980s, George Lucas Sr. had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, needing near-constant care and attention. Lucas had seen to it that his father was placed in one of the best nursing homes in northern California—and when Lucas’s mother, Dorothy, passed away in March 1989 at age seventy-five, only two months before the premiere of Last Crusade, Lucas and his sisters tended more and more to their father’s needs. While George Jr. and George Sr. had never been entirely at odds, they had long put any differences aside—and with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lucas had seemed to almost subconsciously offer his father both farewells and forgiveness (as filmgoers discovered in Last Crusade’s final moments, Indiana Jones, like Lucas, had been named after his own father). When George Sr. passed away in December 1991, Lucas must surely have at last known that he had made his father proud. His sister Kate was sure of it. “When my brother made it so big, that was a real thrill for him, of course,” she recalled. “It was nice he lived to see that.”127
Such personal associations aside, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had gotten him interested in Indiana Jones again, though not, as fans might have hoped, in doing another movie. After watching Jones as a teenager in the opening sequence of Last Crusade, Lucas had been struck by the endless storytelling possibilities provided by a young Indy having adventures in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Pancho Villa. Recalling how little interest he’d had in his own schooling, Lucas wondered if he might use Indy to make learning fun and engaging. What if he could expand on the prologue from Last Crusade, showing Indy’s adventures from childhood on into h
is early twenties, and have him encounter famous figures from history? It would be a real opportunity, he thought, to educate and inspire—to correct some of the problems of the educational system he believed had failed him as a student.
Already Lucas was exploring methods of interactive learning, teaming up with Apple and National Geographic to create an interactive videodisc called GTV: A Geographic Perspective on American History, which contained forty videos about historic events. The association with MTV was deliberate; GTV’s videos were part music video, part Schoolhouse Rock, part sketch comedy. Also included in the package was a program called Showmaker—“like a junior video editing system,” declared Lucas happily—with which students could make their own short films using the images and video from the disc.128 Working with educators, Lucas had been careful to ensure that the content actually reflected approved curriculum—and by March 1990, eighteen of San Francisco’s middle schools were using GTV in their classrooms.
Lucas found the work inspiring. In 1991 he would establish the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) in an effort to reignite what he saw as a docile and uninspiring education system—“a morass,” he called it derisively—by providing it with new and exciting technological tools for teaching. Suddenly, the young man who had been bored with school was trying hard to improve them—a paternal instinct that George Lucas Sr. would have approved of. “Occasionally, in school, you stumble across a teacher that lights your fire and gets you going and it becomes one of those great moments. It happens once or twice in your life,” said Lucas. “And I keep thinking, why can’t education be as exciting all the time?”129 He would oversee the creation of two more interactive multimedia programs for use in high schools and junior colleges—Life Story: The Race for the Double Helix, created in association with Apple and the Smithsonian, and the environmentally themed Mystery of the Disappearing Ducks, made with the cooperation of Apple and the National Audubon Society. By 1992, nearly 2,300 schools would be using the programs—but Lucas acknowledged that both the hardware and the videodiscs were expensive enough to make the program cost-prohibitive for many schools. As he had with EditDroid and Pixar, Lucas quickly abandoned the idea of being a manufacturer of the technology; instead, GLEF would eventually spin off two companies: Edutopia, an online clearinghouse for education knowledge and best practices, and, in 2013, Lucas Education Research.
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