George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  Lucas’s hand had been steady as he signed the papers, but it had been an emotional moment. “He was saying goodbye,” said Iger. Lucas promptly flew back to San Francisco to say his farewells to the staff—now Kennedy’s staff—at Lucasfilm, then issued a carefully worded statement to the media. “It is now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” Lucas said. “I’m confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come.”78

  That was a certainty. At the same time it had announced its acquisition of Lucasfilm, Disney had also promised the world another Star Wars movie by Christmas of 2015. They could thank George Lucas for that. With all the pieces Lucas had put in place, Kennedy immediately put Episode VII into pre-production, bringing in J. J. Abrams to direct, and assigning script duties entirely to Lawrence Kasdan. And in a way, things almost seemed the same, as Lucas would still sit in on the story sessions with Kasdan and his writing team at Disney, trying to explain the rules of the universe he’d created.

  For the most part, though, Lucasfilm and Star Wars were moving on without Lucas. With his business affairs in order, Lucasfilm in Kathleen Kennedy’s capable hands, and no more movies to make, Lucas was prepared to move on to the next major milestone, this one in his personal life. After dating her for seven years, Lucas had proposed to Hobson in January 2013. They were ready to spend the rest of their lives together, and were making plans to have a family; already, a surrogate was carrying a child for them, due in August. The wedding was arranged to take place a couple of months before that.

  On Saturday, June 22, Lucas—looking very much like a man without a worry in the world—wed Mellody Hobson at Skywalker Ranch, under one of those impossibly blue and warm California skies. Hobson was walked down the aisle by one of her mentors, former senator Bill Bradley, while Lucas waited, beaming, with his twenty-year-old son, Jett, at his side, serving as his best man. Amanda and Katie stood off to the other side, serving as bridesmaids. Journalist Bill Moyers, a former Baptist minister, officiated the ceremony. “It takes only one person to have met the love of your life,” Moyers said touchingly.79 Eyes were dabbed all around.

  It was a power wedding in every sense of the word. Among the two hundred guests in attendance were Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Howard, and Quincy Jones—with music provided by Van Morrison and Janelle Monáe. There were affectionate jokes that Hobson was one of the lower-profile people at her own wedding. A week later, however, at a second reception in Hobson’s hometown of Chicago, it was Lucas who could be said to have had one of the lower profiles, as the event—at Chicago’s Promontory Point, jutting out into Lake Michigan—bustled with the political elite: a former congressman, a mayor and a former mayor, a university president, even a U.S. secretary of commerce. And only Hobson could have arranged for a twenty-two-piece wedding band with rock star Prince as the front man.

  Yet, despite the heavy hitters in their widening circle of friends, Lucas remained as unaffected as usual. He would wear a tuxedo for Hobson, who regularly brought him to receptions and conferences and other formal social events, but left on his own, he would return to the comfortable jeans, button-up shirt, and well-worn white tennis shoes. There would be expensive restaurants, certainly, but Lucas still liked picking up drive-thru from Taco Bell, or sitting down at Sizzler. “George says to me, ‘We are normal,’” said Hobson. “And we are. We go to movies every weekend. He likes to have the same experience that others do, so we don’t watch in a screening room closed off to the world. We go to the local theater in whatever city we are in.”80

  And he was about to experience parenting a young one again, too. On August 9, 2013—almost seven weeks after their wedding—Lucas and Hobson’s surrogate delivered a baby girl they named Everest Hobson Lucas, after the son of a close friend. It was Lucas’s first biological child. At age sixty-nine, he was a father again.

  While Lucas had long been one of the world’s most successful filmmakers, with the sale of Lucasfilm he had also become very, very rich. By 2015, Forbes would list him at number ninety-four on its list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans, with an estimated worth of $5 billion.81 Lucas found it all just a bit embarrassing. “I’ve never been that much of a money guy,” Lucas told Businessweek. “I’m more of a film guy, and most of the money I’ve made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.”82

  Lucas vowed to donate the bulk of his wealth to charity; in 2010 he had signed the Giving Pledge, an effort by billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to encourage wealthy Americans “to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to the philanthropic causes and charitable organizations of their choice.” For Lucas, his cause of choice would always be education. “I am donating the majority of my wealth to improving education,” he promised. “It is the key to the survival of the human race.”83

  Already Lucas had made significant donations to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, donating $175 million in 2006 for a complete overhaul of the campus buildings he’d built or improved with an earlier contribution in the 1980s. In 2014 he would endow three chairs in the department, and in 2015 he and Hobson would donate another $10 million to the school to create the George Lucas Foundation Endowed Student Support Fund for Diversity, providing financial support for black and Hispanic students attending film school. Another $25 million would go to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to develop and build a new arts hall, which Lucas required be named for the influential black photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks. And in 2014 Lucas would donate $500,000 to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to help the museum develop interactive online tools.

  They could probably have started by digitizing Lucas’s own collection; Lucas owned more than fifty Rockwell paintings, hanging them on the walls at Skywalker and lending them to museums. In 2010, in fact, he and Spielberg had lent the Smithsonian American Art Museum nearly sixty of their own Rockwell paintings for what became an enormously popular exhibit. It was his Rockwell paintings, in part, that had inspired what Lucas hoped would be one of his legacy projects: a museum in which he could show and share all the art, animation cels, comic pages, movie posters, props, memorabilia—including most of his Star Wars collection—and countless other works of art and artifacts he’d collected over the past five decades. “I don’t have enough walls,” he explained, “which is why I want to build a museum.”84

  He thought he knew exactly where to put it. On the grounds of the Presidio near Crissy Field, stood an abandoned 93,000-square-foot former commissary that had briefly been occupied by a sporting goods store but now stood vacant. The Presidio Trust, the same board that had granted Lucas permission to develop his Letterman Digital Center onsite, was now accepting proposals for use of the commissary. Lucas submitted a proposal to spend $700 million to develop eight acres at Crissy Field, including turning the abandoned commissary into the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Lucas and Hobson had assembled a powerful slate of backers that included U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, California governor Jerry Brown, and the cofounders of Twitter and YouTube. Its approval seemed inevitable.

  It wasn’t. In February 2014, Lucas was stunned to learn that the Presidio Trust had rejected his proposal outright. Some thought the Presidio Trust had it in for Lucas, with whispered accusations that he was either too rich or too liberal or too successful to prevail with the politically charged trust—a campaign that continued to escalate until the National Park Service stepped in to explain coolly that “the museum does not merit one of the most important sites in the entire Presidio.”85 The trust offered to work with Lucas to find a more suitable site. Lucas agreed, and the conversation dragged on for another eight weeks or so—just long enough for Hobson to grow tired of the “doodling around.” If the trust wasn
’t able to locate the museum in Lucas’s hometown, then why not hers? Hobson, a longtime friend of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, offered to make a phone call. “Don’t worry,” she told her husband. “I’ll talk to the mayor. I’m sure he’ll love it.”86

  Emanuel was definitely interested. After putting together a task force to look for suitable locations, Emanuel thought he’d found Lucas the ideal site: a seventeen-acre parking lot on the lakefront between Soldier Field and McCormick Place, and practically within the shadow of the planetarium. Furthermore, if Lucas would stick with his pledge to pay for all costs associated with the museum, Emanuel offered to rent the site to Lucas for one dollar a year. Lucas agreed that the site was ideal and hired the Chinese architect Ma Yansong to begin working on concept drawings for the museum, including paintings showing what it would look like sitting on the lakefront site. Yansong came up with a futuristic design that looked to some like a giant amoeba oozing out onto the lakeshore; others thought it looked like Jabba the Hutt. Whatever it was, it wasn’t helping Lucas make his case with the Chicago community. Politics, too, were starting to creep into the discussion—this was Chicago, after all—with some alleging that the land was Emanuel’s payback to Hobson for donating money to his mayoral campaign, an accusation both parties ignored.87

  Back in San Francisco, mayor Ed Lee was scouring his waterfront for an alternative site to offer Lucas, hoping to woo him back to his hometown. But Lucas had vowed to stick with Emanuel and Chicago for the long haul. The Chicago City Council’s zoning committee okayed the project, and Lucas was ready to move forward, when the nonprofit Friends of the Parks—arguing that a museum was an inappropriate use of lakefront property—filed a complaint in federal court formally objecting to the project. The proposal ground to a halt, and Emanuel went scouting for other more expensive sites, which also bogged down in mudslinging. Lucas, while refusing to back down, threw up his hands in frustration. It was mind-boggling. He couldn’t give away a museum. “Doing this museum, I’ve realized that most cities don’t want museums, they don’t really care about them,” Lucas said during an interview with the Washington Post. “You know, it’s too esoteric for most people, and they don’t see them as educational institutions.”88 In May 2016, Hobson, once again tired of the foot-dragging, issued a blistering press release in which she accused Friends of the Parks of hijacking the process “in order to preserve a parking lot,” and warned that she and Lucas were “now seriously pursuing locations outside of Chicago.”89

  By late June, Lucas decided he was done fighting. “No one benefits from [Friends of the Parks’] seemingly unending litigation to preserve a parking lot,” he echoed wearily.90

  He will take his museum elsewhere, preferably back to San Francisco, where Mayor Lee has offered a prime piece of waterfront property—an island, actually—directly between San Francisco and Oakland. If it’s not located there, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has also enthusiastically offered the museum a home in southern California. Whether that is just a bit too close to Hollywood for Lucas’s tastes remains to be seen. As of July 2016, he has yet to make a decision.

  In January 2015, Lucas surprised everyone by releasing, through the Disney distribution machine, the computer-animated musical fantasy Strange Magic. The movie, Lucas’s take on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, was for his daughters, he said, and one he’d been trying to make for years. With a classic rock and roll sound track behind it—the title was lifted from an ELO song—it was essentially American Graffiti with fairies and bog creatures and a fairy-tale lesson about not judging others by how they look. Released with little fanfare—though with a poster reminding audiences that it was “FROM THE MIND OF GEORGE LUCAS”—Strange Magic opened to mixed reviews and tanked within two weeks.

  Lucas scarcely seemed to care. He was much more interested in being a doting father than in promoting films at this point, wheeling Everest around dutifully in a stroller or taking her to Disneyland. “By the time she’s five, she’ll have her own career going and being in school and talking about her friends and her homework,” Lucas said. “The fun, goofy time will fall into place in reality, as opposed to right now, [when] she doesn’t have much else to do but hang out with her father.”91

  Meanwhile, anticipation was running high for Episode VII. So far, Iger, Kennedy, and Abrams had shown that they too knew a thing or two about promoting Star Wars. When the title of the film was announced in November 2014 as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, fans parsed it with the same obsessive care with which they’d analyzed the titles The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Jedi. Abrams and Kennedy carefully doled out only the smallest, most tantalizing nuggets of information, sparking fan interest into a frenzy as the film’s December 2015 release date approached. As usual, it seemed everyone was excited about Star Wars.

  Lucas wasn’t one of them. Publicly he put up a good front, telling USA Today that he was looking forward to seeing a Star Wars film in a movie theater with an audience, without knowing what was going to happen first. Lucas wouldn’t ever quite get the full crowd experience; he would end up seeing the film at a private viewing with Kennedy and others in early December. He didn’t immediately make his views on the movie known; it was left to Kennedy to inform reporters afterward that Lucas had seen the movie and “he really liked it”—a tepid response to be sure.92 When he was asked to clarify, Lucas’s reply was deliberately narrow. “I think the fans are going to love it,” he said. “It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.”93 But it clearly wasn’t the kind of movie George Lucas had been looking for.

  Much to Lucas’s irritation, Disney had disregarded the story treatments he had given them in 2012—the ones that Iger had claimed “had a lot of potential”—and had gone instead in their own direction, using a script with story elements by Kasdan, Arndt, and Abrams, but none by Lucas. “They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were gonna go do their own thing,” Lucas complained to journalist Charlie Rose in an interview that ran on Christmas Day 2015.94 Furthermore, apart from those few early story sessions in 2012, Lucas hadn’t been involved in The Force Awakens at all. Kennedy, caught between her old boss and her new masters at Disney, did her best to be understanding. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about [George] it’s that he’s never ever held back,” she said. “Having him 100 percent on board is up to him and he can’t do that unless he’s running everything.”95

  It’s telling that Lucas would compare tearing himself away from Star Wars with divorce; his 1983 divorce from Marcia, and its aftermath, had been one of the most miserable experiences of his life, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Watching The Force Awakens, he said, was “an awkward reality,” like attending the wedding of your grown child after you’ve been divorced. “I gotta go to the wedding,” Lucas said. “My ex will be there, my new wife will be there, but I’m going to have to take a very deep breath and be a good person and sit through it and just enjoy the moment, because it is what it is and it’s a conscious decision that I made.”96

  Lucas would always resent that Disney had permitted Abrams to make a movie “for the fans.” “They wanted to do a retro movie,” said Lucas. “I don’t like that.” To him, that was just as bad as knuckling under to bullying from studio executives who didn’t know a thing about film but still demanded arbitrary cuts to reduce a movie’s running time. Regardless of what people thought of the prequels, they could never say Lucas hadn’t been faithful to his own vision for Star Wars. It was no wonder, said Lucas, that the people at Disney “weren’t that keen to have me involved.… If I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble, because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.’”97

  And so George Lucas had given up control. But that didn’t mean he was ever going to be happy about it.

  At age seventy-two
, George Lucas is retired, enjoying life, and especially enjoying being a husband and a father. He still makes his home at the house on Park Way, and despite the rumors, he still owns Skywalker Ranch—all 6,100 acres of it now—as well as Skywalker Sound, which he’s happy to make available to Disney, or any other studio, to use for a fee. He still dresses in the familiar jeans and flannel shirts, with white running shoes; the suits come out only for special events. He’s a devoted husband, remains a proud father to his three grown children, and is happy spending most of his day trailing along after Everest. While he stays off social media—the venomous online comments and trolling in the wake of the release of The Phantom Menace convinced him to abandon the Internet for good—he’s hardly a recluse: he travels widely, attends charity events, and has no problem obliging autograph requests.

  Still, he’s looking for things to do. He still hopes to build his museum in San Francisco or Oakland or Los Angeles, or wherever anyone who values such things will have it. If and when the museum is ever built, you can bet Lucas will be intimately involved in its layout, design, color scheme, and lighting. As with his movies, Lucas will never be entirely happy with a building project unless he can put his hands on as much of it as possible.

  Like any good parent, Lucas finally saw Star Wars leave the house without him; The Force Awakens shattered nearly every box office record on its release in December 2015, steadily climbing its way past $2 billion in worldwide revenues. Episode VIII—still unnamed in mid-2016—was scheduled for 2017, with Episode IX to follow in 2019. In the meantime, Disney also announced a number of spin-offs, including Rogue One, set just before Episode IV, and movies featuring Han Solo and Boba Fett. The Star Wars universe, born of Lucas’s sweat and frustration and scrawled onto his remarkably low-tech notepads in pencil, seemed poised to exist in perpetuity, passed down from generation to generation into the hands of new writers and filmmakers for them to embrace and then make their own. Star Wars remained as timeless as the imagination, a mythology permanently woven into the culture.