George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  On the morning of Lucas’s visit, Iger invited him to breakfast at the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. The restaurant was normally closed at that early hour, so Lucas and Iger had the place to themselves—a deliberate choice by Iger, who wanted to speak to Lucas in confidence. As Lucas picked at an omelet and Iger, fresh from a workout, downed a yogurt parfait, Iger casually posed the question he’d been dying to ask Lucas for a while now: Would you consider selling Lucasfilm to Disney?

  Lucas chewed quietly for a moment as he mulled it over. He was thinking about retiring, he told Iger; he was sixty-seven years old now, and the restructuring of Lucasfilm over the past few years had been part of his effort to make the company less dependent on his leadership and vision. But he still had projects to attend to—The Clone Wars was entering its fourth season, and the live-action Star Wars was on the drawing table—and he had ideas for a number of movies he might put into production.

  The answer, for the moment, was a qualified no. “I’m not ready to pursue that now,” he told Iger. “But when I am, I’d love to talk.”

  Iger, a deal maker who’d recently brought Pixar and Marvel Entertainment into the Disney fold, was prepared to wait Lucas out. “Call me when you’re ready,” he said.54

  Lucas was hoping to make another trilogy.

  It was one he’d had in mind for a long time—since the late 1980s, in fact, when he’d been in conversation with George Hall, a respected photographer of military aircraft. At that time Hall, a Vietnam veteran and student of military history, told Lucas the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American military pilots who overcame racism, segregation, and prejudice to become one of the most highly respected bands of fighters in World War II. It was a story well suited to Lucas’s sensibilities, with a small group of individuals triumphing over enormous odds—exactly the way he still saw himself and Lucasfilm in his never-ending tangle with mainstream Hollywood. “Like Tucker, it’s a story too good to be true,” said Lucas.55 It was just the kind of story he adored. He was determined to bring it to the screen.

  But it was a big story—too big, he thought, to tell in a single film. “The question is, how do you make it small and personal and deal with it in a thematic way?”56 His answer: turn it into a trilogy. In the first one, he would tell the story of the pilots and their training in segregated Alabama; in the second, he’d trace their successes in World War II in their dogfights over Europe; and in the third, he’d follow them back into civilian life, where they would fight to overcome ongoing racism and segregation. “I see the movie less as a race picture than as an aerial action adventure,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I’ve always been drawn to underdogs and intrigued by the relationship between man, machine, and excellence.”57 For Lucas, that made the middle part of the trilogy—with the World War II dogfighting sequences—the obvious place to start.

  Lucas regarded the film as something of a social and moral crusade, one that he would wage for more than twenty years. For those who cynically thought Lucas’s commitment to racial equity had begun with his relationship with Mellody Hobson, Lucas could, if asked, point to the development of what would eventually become Red Tails. From the beginning, it had been critical to him to hire a black writer for the screenplay and a black director to sit at the helm. “I thought, ‘This is the proper way to do this,’” Lucas said later.58

  Initially, Lucas had brought in writer Kevin Sullivan and director Thomas Carter to help develop the project, but after several false starts had backburnered the project in favor of the Star Wars prequels. In 2007 he tried again, this time hiring John Ridley, a novelist and screenwriter who’d written for Martin and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, to write a script that focused more closely on the middle part of the trilogy. For his director, Lucas chose Anthony Hemingway, a veteran of the TV show The Wire, but a rookie film director. Hemingway had been all but certain he wouldn’t be the man hired for the job; after his interview at the ranch, his parting words to Lucas had been May the Force be with you. “Oh my God, I walked out of that meeting after I said that and completely wanted to jump off the fifteenth floor,” said Hemingway, still wincing at the memory.59 On the drive home, he received a call from Lucas on his cell phone telling him he had the job. Hemingway pulled over and cried.

  Red Tails—named for the distinctive tails on the Tuskegee pilots’ aircraft—finally began principal photography in April 2009. The film was being shot digitally, and with more than an hour of aerial dogfighting to be inserted digitally by ILM in post-production, much of the movie was shot with actors in cockpits in front of greenscreen. As was his working style now, Lucas assembled a full edit of the film, eyeballed places where additional footage was needed, then had Hemingway go back to shoot again. When Hemingway was pulled away in early 2010 to begin work on the HBO series Treme, Lucas stepped behind the camera himself to supervise a series of re-shoots. Lucas also called in cartoonist Aaron McGruder, the creator of the Boondocks comic strip, to help write new dialogue for some of the new footage. McGruder, who had taken shots at both Jar Jar Binks and Lucas in his comic strip over the years, was both thrilled and nervous to be asked, and “was really happy” to find he and Lucas got along fine.60 Jar Jar Binks never even came up. “Not at all,” said McGruder. “Not even close.”61

  After two years of post-production Lucas did something he was loath to do: he made the rounds in Hollywood, looking for a studio to distribute the film. He found few takers; one studio’s executives didn’t even show up for the screening, a snub Lucas found particularly galling. “Isn’t this their job?” he exploded. “Isn’t their job at least to see movies?”62 It was typical Hollywood, thought Lucas: afraid to take a chance on any movie that didn’t look like most others. “It’s because it’s an all-black movie,” he told Jon Stewart somewhat ruefully. “I showed it to all of them and they said, Nooo, we don’t know how to market a movie like this.”63 Lucas finally persuaded Fox to distribute the film, though the studio balked at paying any of the associated costs. Lucas would end up paying for everything out of his own pocket, investing $35 million in distribution—which even covered the costs of making prints—in addition to the $58 million he’d already spent making the film. No one could say Lucas didn’t put his money where his mouth was.

  The first previews in Atlanta seemed encouraging, with young people sounding especially enthusiastic. Lucas was pleased. “I’m making it for black teenagers,” he told the New York Times. “They have a right to their history just like anybody else does. And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywoodized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does.”64 Ultimately, Lucas’s corny approach would be seen as part of the problem. Reviews were brutal. “The movie is devoid of visceral thrills, drained of emotional energy, and head-scratchingly awful throughout,” wrote a critic for Mother Jones. “[Red Tails is] one of the most appallingly bad war movies of recent memory.” If Lucas cried racism, Mother Jones countered that the only bias Lucas was challenging was “the one against vapid filmmaking.”65 That one hurt.

  Many critics applauded Lucas for having the temerity to openly address important themes and subject matter, but lamented that he had addressed them so badly. “Filled with clichés [and] one-dimensional characters,” sniffed one English reviewer,66 while the New York Times compared the film to a well-intentioned classroom lesson, the kind of pseudo-documentary Lucas had made for Young Indiana Jones. Even ILM was called out by several reviewers for producing overly digitized, unconvincing special effects that had elicited audible laughter from audiences during the dogfighting scenes.

  Lucas was hurt and frustrated. He was also worried that the failure of his film might scare studios away from backing major motion pictures by black filmmakers—or featuring black characters—perpetually consigning them instead to low-budget productions. “I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are quite a while,” Lucas said, referring to African American filmmakers. �
�It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that [low-budget] mold.”67 While slightly condescending, it was an earnest and not entirely baseless concern. Lucas had intuitively tapped into a growing movement demanding greater diversity in film and pop culture. To his likely delight, two years after the premiere of Red Tails, a film written, produced, and directed by African Americans—and featuring a nearly all-black cast—would win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That film, 12 Years a Slave, would also win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for John Ridley, who had written Red Tails for Lucas.

  For now, however, the entire Red Tails experience had left Lucas bitter and angry. He’d dealt with Hollywood’s insensitivity to artists before, watching helplessly as his own movies were hacked up by studio suits—but this was something seamier, a streak of racism in the system that left a bad taste in his mouth. “My girlfriend is black,” he told USA Today, “and I’ve learned a lot about racism, including the fact that it hasn’t gone away, especially in American business.”68 He’d made up his mind. “I’m retiring,” he told the New York Times wearily. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”69

  Several weeks after the disastrous opening of Red Tails, Lucas picked up the phone and called Kathleen Kennedy, the old friend who’d produced all four Indiana Jones films among a thirty-year run of blockbusters. Apart from the Indiana Jones movies and the other films she’d produced for Spielberg—E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, War of the Worlds—there were also the features she and her husband, Frank Marshall, had produced with Spielberg as part of their Amblin Entertainment production company, including Gremlins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Back to the Future. Kennedy had great instincts for film, and an even keener business sense, but Lucas counted her among his inner circle of friends as well. He knew she was in New York putting the final touches on Lincoln for Spielberg, he told her, and he wanted to meet her in the city for lunch.

  Kennedy assumed that Lucas merely wanted to catch up. But over lunch, Lucas wanted to talk business—namely his. “I suppose you’ve heard that I’m moving forward fairly aggressively to retire,” he told her matter-of-factly.

  Kennedy was stunned. “Actually, no,” she said.

  “I was surprised by that,” Kennedy said later. “And part of me didn’t really quite believe him.” She listened patiently as Lucas explained that while he intended to maintain the title of chief executive and serve as co-chairman for at least one more year, he wanted someone to co-chair the company with him, with the ultimate goal of making that person the head of Lucasfilm. Kennedy started rolling though her Rolodex in her head, ticking off for Lucas the names of potential candidates to take over the company.

  “No, no, no,” Lucas said sharply. “I’m thinking about you doing this.”

  Kennedy never even blinked. “You know, George, I actually might really be interested in that.”70

  On June 1, Kennedy formally stepped in as the co-chair of Lucasfilm. It had been an easy decision to make. “I wanted to do this for him as well as myself,” Kennedy said later, “because I knew how important it was to him.”71 Lucas would admit as much, announcing, “I’ve spent my life building Lucasfilm—and as I shift my focus into other directions, I wanted to make sure it was in the hands of someone equipped to carry my vision into the future.”72 One of their first mutual objectives, he told Kennedy, would be to “build this company up so it functions without me”—and to do that, he continued, “we need to do something to make it attractive.” There was no more obvious way to make Lucasfilm attractive—and keep it functioning beyond Lucas’s involvement—than to take advantage of the company’s most visible and valuable commodity: Star Wars. While Lucas had insisted the story he had set out to tell was finished with Return of the Jedi, he admitted now he might have a few ideas for Episodes VII, VIII, and IX in a drawer in his office. “So I said [to Kennedy], ‘Well, let’s just do these movies.’”73

  Lucas and Kennedy brought in Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning writer of Little Miss Sunshine, to take a crack at writing Episode VII, based on Lucas’s story ideas—really just a “brief synopsis,” as Kennedy remembered, but enough to start. To provide Arndt with support and guidance on the Star Wars universe, they also brought in Lawrence Kasdan, who understood Lucas’s rhythms and sensibilities perhaps better than any other screenwriter, to consult with Arndt as needed.

  In August, Lucas made a trip to Orlando on the pretext of making a surprise appearance at a panel at Star Wars Celebration VI, but with another even more secret agenda in mind. Lucas took the stage at his panel to earsplitting applause, without giving the slightest indication that the gears of Star Wars were slowly turning again. Then, while in Orlando, Lucas took to lunch two other Celebration attendees—Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher—to try to persuade them to reprise their roles in future Star Wars movies. Hamill was shocked. “The idea that he would say, ‘We want to do VII, VIII, IX’ was the farthest thing from my mind,” said Hamill.74 But he and Fisher both agreed to reprise their roles—and, after considerable discussion, so did Harrison Ford, largely on promises of a meaningful story arc that would close the book on Han Solo once and for all.

  Kennedy was still settling into her new position when Lucas surprised her as well—by casually bringing up the idea of selling the company to Disney. “He started to lay out what he was thinking,” said Kennedy, but he was intentionally vague: “It was a kind of, ‘Down the road, this is something I’ve been thinking of.’”75

  Only it wasn’t down the road; a little more than a year since their breakfast conversation at the Brown Derby restaurant, Lucas was back in discussion with Iger about what a sale to Disney might look like. Lucas pointed out that he and Star Wars would always be indelibly linked, regardless of whether or not he still owned the company; his obituary, he told Iger irreverently, would inevitably begin with “Star Wars creator George Lucas…” Lucas, then, was determined to have it both ways, proposing to hand the entire company over to Iger and Disney while still maintaining complete control over Star Wars. He and his team had been taking care of the franchise for a long time, Lucas argued, and therefore knew better than anyone else how to market, license, and produce Star Wars films. “I think it would be wise to keep some of this [structure] intact,” he told Iger firmly. “We need a few people to oversee the property, you know, who are just dedicated to doing that, so we’re sure we get this right.”76

  But Iger wasn’t biting. He was happy to offer Lucasfilm the same kind of limited autonomy he’d given to Marvel and Pixar, in which the company would remain essentially intact. But he wanted Lucas to understand in no uncertain terms that if Disney owned the company, it would be Disney—and not Lucasfilm—that would have final say over all things Star Wars. For the deal to succeed, it was Lucas, not Disney, who would have to pay the highest price: he was going to have to relinquish control. For Lucas—the rebel who had bucked the Hollywood system and fought for the right to control his own destiny—it was an almost unbearable price to pay.

  After further discussion with Iger, Lucas eventually agreed to sell the company, but not before securing a small compromise: as part of the deal, Disney had to agree to take his story treatments and use them as the basis for any future films. It wasn’t the full control he wanted, but at least it gave him some residual influence over the franchise he had created. But even that concession at times seemed more than Lucas could stomach; every time Iger asked Lucas for his story treatments, Lucas snappishly refused to hand them over until the deal was done. “Ultimately, you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I’m doing. Buying my stories is part of what the deal is,’” said Lucas. “I mean, I could’ve said, ‘Fine, well, I’ll just sell the company to somebody else.’” Iger was just going to have to trust him.

  As talks continued, Kennedy could see the conflict openly in Lucas’s face. Before she headed out the door each Friday to fly back home to Los Angeles, Kennedy would stick her head into Lucas’s office to see how he wa
s doing. Some days, he seemed content and ready to move on; other days, he seemed uncertain. “I’m sure he paused periodically to question whether he was really ready to walk away,” said Kennedy. Still, Lucas thought the partnership with Disney made sense and, in a way, brought his own life full circle; he had, after all, been at Disneyland on its opening day in 1955, and in the 1980s had proudly brought Star Wars into the Disney parks with the opening of the Star Tours attraction. At that time he had praised Disney for its commitment to quality, saying, “When I did something, I’ve always wanted to make sure it was done right and it was maintained right, operated correctly… and this is the only place in the world like that.”77 Only Disney truly appreciated, as Lucas did, the benefits of being in complete control of a universe.

  By fall, Iger finally provided Lucas with a broad description of the terms of the deal—which included the use of Lucas’s story outlines. Lucas, protective to the very end, would hand them over only after Iger signed an agreement limiting the number of people at Disney who could read them. Iger was delighted with what Lucas gave him—or so he said publicly. “From a storytelling perspective, they had a lot of potential,” Iger said enigmatically. It wouldn’t be the last time Lucas would squabble with Disney over his Star Wars story treatments.

  On October 30, 2012, with cameras rolling to capture the occasion, George Lucas and Walt Disney Company president Bob Iger signed the agreement selling Lucasfilm to Disney for a staggering $4.05 billion—half in cash, the other half in nearly 40 million shares of Disney stock. That massive amount of money would go to Lucasfilm’s sole stockholder: George Lucas. With the stroke of a pen, Lucas became one of Disney’s biggest shareholders, owning 2 percent of Disney’s current shares; only the Steven P. Jobs Trust, which had sold the company Pixar—“my company,” Lucas still calls it—owns more.