Lucas’s most ambitious educational project, however, would be The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which he would pour much of himself into for nearly three years, and which would revive his enthusiasm for filmmaking. From the beginning, it was always Lucas’s intention that Young Indiana Jones would end up as another interactive educational tool, with each episode ported over to videodisc, where viewers could access hours of additional information at the click of a mouse. When Indiana Jones meets Teddy Roosevelt on a safari, for example, Lucas envisioned the viewer being able to click on any animal seen on-screen, which would then access articles on the animal’s environment, maps of its habitat, and hours of video footage. “[Young Indiana] started out as a project to teach turn-of-the-century history in the eighth grade for an interactive prototype that I’m developing,” Lucas explained to the Los Angeles Times.130
In 1990 Lucas sat down with Rick McCallum, a German-born producer he’d met several years earlier in London while poking around the sets of the film Dreamchild. Lucas laid out for McCallum not only his lofty ambitions for the television series—he wanted a show that would both educate and entertain—but also his unorthodox approach to writing, shooting, editing, and producing it. Lucas would write all the basic stories—and he had plenty of historical figures in mind for Indiana Jones to meet, from Louis Armstrong to Albert Schweitzer—but rather than set up a shooting schedule for each individual episode, Lucas wanted McCallum using a stable of talented directors, including Nicolas Roeg and Terry Jones, who would shoot film constantly. The footage would then be shipped to Lucas back at Skywalker Ranch, where he would begin assembling the episodes using, for the first time, EditDroid. If there were places where he thought an additional scene was necessary, he would ask McCallum to have his director shoot the desired footage, even in the midst of filming another episode. Lucas was essentially treating the series as one long extended film—and for this reason, Young Indiana Jones was almost constantly in production for nearly two years, moving from one exotic location to another while Lucas edited furiously back at Skywalker. It was a seat-of-the-pants approach to filmmaking, almost a return to the guerrilla style he had used in film school. Lucas loved it.
Young Indiana Jones was more than just an educational initiative; for Lucas it was also something of an experiment in digital filmmaking. While he had, over the past decade, developed and then deployed digital filmmaking technology for others, he had yet to use it at any real length on a project of his own. When the questions inevitably arose about more Star Wars, Lucas would often point out that those films relied heavily on special effects, which made them very expensive; on top of that, to create the worlds Lucas envisioned in his head often far exceeded the capabilities of any soundstage in Hollywood or Elstree. But what if he could create those special effects and those sets digitally? With Young Indiana Jones, he’d start experimenting with the digital technology he had on hand, using the computer to fill out crowd scenes by turning ten actors into an expensive-looking throng of two hundred, or creating digital backgrounds rather than using a more time-consuming matte painting.
The mere idea of having Lucas involved with an Indiana Jones television series was enough to persuade ABC to provide the bulk of the funding for the project; even with Lucas’s computer technology keeping costs down, each episode would run about $1.6 million. But while Lucas had managed to negotiate an aggressive deal, he didn’t have control over everything. For one thing, it would be up to ABC to oversee the promotion of the show—and the network would never seem to know quite what to do with it, promoting it as “a big action thing,” Lucas complained.131
After nearly two years of writing, filming, editing, and post-production, the pilot episode finally premiered in March 1992, to mostly polite reviews. Critics applauded its noble goals, even as they found it all just a bit boring. Writing in the New York Times, the respected critic John J. O’Connor lauded it as a “perfectly admirable idea” but thought the execution was “clunky” and heavy-handed. “Every time a bit of information is plopped into the script,” wrote O’Connor, “the sound of Mr. Lucas picking up a teacher’s blackboard pointer can almost be heard in the background.”132 Still, ABC was happy enough with the pilot to grant Lucas a full season—and then seemed uncertain what to do with the episodes Lucas gave them, cutting the first season short after only six episodes. While disappointed with ABC’s handling of the project, Lucas was having the time of his life, rarely complaining about the fifty hours he was putting in each week between the writing, editing, and supervision of the digital effects. “I’m only doing this because I want to do it,” he insisted. “It gives me a huge advantage, because I could[n’t] care less if [the networks] don’t like it. I’ve given up my paying job as a movie producer to do this. So I’m doing it out of love.”133 It was the happiest, and most engaged, he’d been with a project since college.
Unfortunately, the labor of love never turned into a ratings bonanza for ABC. Trying to jump-start viewership late in the second season, Lucas brought in Harrison Ford to take up the hat and fedora again to play a fifty-year-old Indy telling a story of solving a murder alongside Sidney Bechet and Ernest Hemingway as a young man in 1920s Chicago. Ford, looking somewhat the worse for wear under the beard he had grown for shooting The Fugitive, filmed his part in less than a day at his own ranch—and Lucas was intrigued by seeing Ford as a middle-aged Indy living in the 1950s. It was an interesting premise, Lucas thought, for another Indiana Jones movie.
This time, however, even Harrison Ford couldn’t rescue Indiana Jones. After two seasons and twenty-four episodes, Young Indiana Jones quietly faded from TV screens.134 Still, it had been worth the effort. The show had superb production values—it had multiple Emmy Awards in editing, art direction, and visual effects to prove it—and most critics agreed it was a well-intentioned, good-looking dud. But if Young Indiana Jones was a failed experiment as far as creating a television series with a higher calling went, it had been an unqualified success when it came to exploring the possibilities of digital filmmaking. The digital tricks he had learned on Young Indiana Jones might, Lucas hinted, even make it possible to do another Star Wars.
It had been more than a decade since the Great Credits Fiasco of 1980, when Lucas had quit the Motion Picture Academy in disgust during the squabble over the placement of Irvin Kershner’s director’s credit. But in 1992 the Academy, perhaps acknowledging that the prodigal son was responsible for some of the biggest movies in film history, was ready to make amends. The board of directors voted to award him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, reserved for “creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” It was a distinguished and well-intentioned olive branch from the Academy, and one that Lucas would accept, even if he still refused to become a member of the Academy.
On March 30, Spielberg took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to present the award personally, introducing Lucas as his “valiant colleague, and great and loyal friend.”135 Lucas strolled out on stage in a black tuxedo, and in heartfelt prepared remarks reminded Hollywood that filmmaking was about more than business deals and executives:
I’d like to thank the Academy members and the Board of Governors for this tremendous honor, not only for myself, but for the thousands of talented men and women, robots and aliens and others with whom I’ve been lucky enough to share the creative experience in the last few years. Movies are not made in isolation; it’s a group activity. And it’s only because of the work, the very hard work, of many actors, writers, directors, producers, creative technicians, thousands of assistants of all kinds, and projectionists, that I’m able to stand here and accept this award. I’m very, very grateful to them all.136
The award—a heavy bust of Thalberg mounted on a wooden block—was the only Academy Award George Lucas had ever won. (“I’m too popular for that,” Lucas would grumble in 2015. “They don’t give Academy Awards for popular films.”)137 Still, the Thalberg Award was
an appropriate honor for Lucas to receive; while introducing Lucas that evening, Spielberg—who had received the Thalberg Award in 1987, and would finally win an Oscar for Best Director in 1994 for Schindler’s List—pointed out that Lucas had “changed the look and the sound of not only his movies, but everybody else’s movies.”138
By 1992 that was certainly the case. Knowing that Lucasfilm could no longer rely on Star Wars merchandising, Lucasfilm president Doug Norby had rolled all the bread-and-butter divisions of the company—THX, ILM, Lucasfilms Games, and a few others—into a new division called LucasArts Entertainment Company. And it was LucasArts that was truly changing the look and sound of everyone else’s movies. Lucas’s THX sound system was rapidly becoming the gold standard in movie sound—and not just in theaters. Electronics companies like Technics were now producing home versions of the system too, giving every home theater owner the opportunity to watch videocassettes with window-rattling sound. “It’s just a desire to present a film as the filmmakers intended it to be seen, heard and experienced,” Lucas explained.139
But the real advances were being made over at ILM, which seemed to be producing one game-changing effect after another, year after year. In 1989 ILM had created the morphing water pseudopod—a writhing tube of water that could make human faces—for James Cameron’s film The Abyss, an effect so spectacular that it practically won the Oscar on its own. Still, competition was ramping up; there were more and more effects companies setting up shop, including some led by former ILMers, like Richard Edlund’s Boss Films. That sort of competition had convinced ILM manager Steve Ross that he had to turn ILM into a brand name all its own, and he thought he might have done it with the effects for Terminator 2, with its computer-generated morphing liquid metal Terminator. “I believe people will become interested in seeing an ILM movie as much as they would an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,” said Ross.140 And sure enough, at the 1992 Oscars—the same ceremony where Lucas received the Thalberg Award—ILM films received all three nominations in the Best Visual Effects category, with Terminator 2 beating out Hook and Backdraft.
And then came Jurassic Park.
After acquiring Michael Crichton’s bestseller about a dinosaur-themed amusement park gone wrong, Spielberg had pondered the best way to create convincing on-screen dinosaurs. Initially, he pushed ILM to consider using a combination of stop motion, animation, and animatronics, skeptical that computer-generated imagery (CGI) had advanced to the point where it would be convincing. But Dennis Muren, ILM’s special effects supervisor, thought they could make it work. “Prove it,” said Spielberg.141
Lucas would never forget the day they did. “We did a test for Steven, and when we put [the dinosaurs] up on the screen, everyone had tears in their eyes,” recalled Lucas. “It was like one of those moments in history, like the invention of the lightbulb or the first telephone call. A major gap had been crossed and things were never going to be the same.”142 With their completely convincing dinosaurs, Muren and his team had fundamentally changed the role of the computer in special effects. It had gone from simply being a tool in filmmaking to being the tool. Spielberg, eyes wide with amazement, could only agree. “There we were, watching our future unfold,” he said.143 Muren, while impressed, was more contemplative. “I don’t know where the end of this stuff is,” said Muren. “I mean, how real is real?”144
When Lucas strolled across the stage to collect his Thalberg Award, the in-house orchestra at the Chandler Pavilion had struck up the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, not the march from Star Wars—an indication of the trilogy’s faded reputation by the early 1990s. It had been nearly a decade since Return of the Jedi, and while Lucas would always be asked if more was coming, the original films were starting to be regarded—if they were regarded at all—through a warm haze of nostalgia reserved for movies like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, or even American Graffiti: all terrific movies with their own loyal followers, but none with a pervasive pop culture saturation. Star Wars had gone from a sensation to a pleasant, though distant, memory.
Or so it seemed.
In 1988 Lou Aronica, the head of mass-market publishing for Bantam Books, had written Lucas a letter that was part business proposal, part fan letter. Aronica had heard Lucas hem and haw about future Star Wars films and thought it would be a shame if no one ever learned what happened to Luke, Han, and Leia after Return of the Jedi—and he suggested that Bantam could produce a series of books continuing the story where Lucas had left off. “This body of work is too important to popular culture to end with these three movies,” wrote Aronica. It had taken a year for Lucas to get back to him—and his response, while encouraging, was unenthusiastic: “No one is going to buy this,” Lucas said.145 But he gave Aronica the licensing and his blessing anyway, as well as a few conditions: namely, the books had to be post- Jedi—there could be no talk of prequels, since Lucas planned to carve that space out for himself—and there would be no killing off of the existing characters, nor could they bring back any who were already dead. Aronica quickly hired Hugo Award–winning author Timothy Zahn—who was already a huge Star Wars fan—and in 1991 Zahn’s first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, slowly but steadily climbed its way to the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
Zahn followed Heir to the Empire with two equally successful Star Wars novels in 1992 and 1993. Meanwhile, Dark Horse Comics, flexing its muscles with a Lucasfilm license of its own, produced the six-issue bimonthly series Dark Empire, which was so successful it would spawn two sequels. Clearly, Star Wars still had a pulse. LucasArts had felt it too, finally releasing several Star Wars–based video games in 1993, the first time Lucas had agreed to let his programmers play in the Star Wars universe. There were Star Wars games for Nintendo and Super Nintendo, new trading cards, and bendable figures. Even the Lucasfilm Fan Club magazine, which had been launched quietly in 1987, was renamed Star Wars Insider.
So would there be more Star Wars, then? For Lucas it now seemed to be a matter of having the digital technology available to make the movie look on-screen the way he envisioned it in his head—but that could be costly, and Lucas, even after the success of Jurassic Park, still wasn’t sure that CGI technology was where he wanted it. “If I were to do them [the prequels] the way I’d done the other Star Wars films, they would be astronomically expensive, over $100 million,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “So we have to sort of reinvent the wheel… and be able to accomplish them with a reasonable amount of money. It’s all sort of dependent on how fast the new technology falls into place, but it’s coming along pretty fast now.”146
As to just how fast, Lucas intended to put the technology to the test in a film he’d been trying to make since the early 1970s called Radioland Murders. Conceived at roughly the same time as American Graffiti—it was one of the films he’d dangled before Universal during his initial deal—Radioland would, Lucas hoped, tap in to the same kind of nostalgia for old radio shows that Graffiti had for cruising. But Lucas wanted it played in much broader gestures than Graffiti, citing his own fondness for the Abbott and Costello film Who Done It?, in which the comic duo investigated a murder at a radio station. Lucas had passed his story treatment on to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and their script had enough traction at Universal for the studio to feel comfortable announcing that the film was in production, with Lucas directing and Kurtz producing. But things fell apart after that, and the project sat in a development dead zone for the next decade.
When Lucas finally dusted it off again, he promised Universal that he could shoot the movie inexpensively—he thought for about $10 million—because he intended to use CGI to finish the tops of partially completed sets and to create digital background mattes that would negate the need for elaborate, and expensive, 1940s-era sets constructed on a soundstage. Universal, while skeptical, agreed, on the condition that Lucas rewrite the script to give it a faster, more modern feel. Ron Howard recommended the team of Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn, who had written and
produced the quirky TV series Moonlighting—but even with Reno and Osborn’s chatty script in hand, Lucas would pick apart what he considered the best bits from all the varying treatments and push and pull them together into the final script. It was not a good start.
Looking for a director with an intentionally comedic touch, Lucas hired English comedian Mel Smith, a veteran of the English TV comedy sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News, and whose only directing experience had been the 1989 dud The Tall Guy. But Lucas had liked that film’s slapstick style (“We’re more in Benny Hill territory here,” complained one critic) and liked Smith personally.147 Smith would have his work cut out for him from the moment he arrived at Carolco Studios in North Carolina; most of the sets were only partially finished, with the rest to be filled in later via digital compositing. Smith would squint through the eyepiece of the camera, then ask drily, “Now, tell me what I’m seeing?”148
Radioland Murders bombed on its release in October 1994, with attendance falling off by a staggering 78 percent in the second week, and earning back only $1.3 million of its $15 million budget. Reviews were scathing—most criticized its too-fast pacing, and overreliance on slapstick and sight gags, both of which had been intentional on Lucas’s part. But Lucas brushed off the criticism. “It came out almost exactly or even better than I hoped it would come out,” he told reporters defiantly.149 “I like my movies, and I’m always surprised if they do very well or do terribly. But Radioland Murders was inexpensive and we learned quite a bit.”150
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