How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Reviewers professed to like Jedi somewhat less than Empire, now recognized as a classic of the genre, but moviegoers were voting the other way. Meanwhile, the official Star Wars fan club hit its first peak in 1983 with 184,000 members. The novelization of the movie was the best-selling book in America. With the profits from all of this, Lucas could finally complete Skywalker Ranch, the design of which he had been restlessly tinkering with for years (most recently adding a giant water feature, Lake Ewok). It should have been heaven.

  Instead, it was arguably the worst year of his life.

  The first blow, even before news of Lucas’s divorce became official, was the arrival of the manuscript of Skywalking, the biography written by Dale Pollock. The experience apparently scarred the intensely private Lucas for life. Pollock remembers being summoned to Lucas’s home in San Anselmo shortly after the filmmaker read the manuscript. Inside, spread out on a large workbench, “was just about every page of the manuscript with a red paperclip on it,” Pollock says. “It was clear we were not going to agree on what was inaccurate. He would say things like ‘It says here I’m frugal. I’m not, I’m very generous. I want that changed. It’s inaccurate.’”

  Of course, one can be frugal in business and generous with friends and charities at the same time. Indeed, this is the picture that emerges in the book; we learn of Lucas carefully accounting for every dollar spent at his company, while sharing his Star Wars points when he didn’t need to, and keeping his charitable giving under wraps for fear of being labeled an easy mark, à la Scrooge McDuck.

  Pollock pushed back as best he could. “I told him, ‘I’m happy to put in something that says you disagree with this,”’ he remembers. ‘“But I’m not taking out what I wrote. Matters of opinion are not subjects of accuracy.’ What he said to me at the end of our unfruitful conversation was ‘I’ll never do this again; no one will ever do this to me again; I will control everything that’s written about me.’ He’s stayed pretty true to that.”

  To this day, Lucasfilm contends that some of the eighty hours of interviews Lucas gave to Pollock were off the record; Pollock, now a film school professor, says he would have turned his tape recorder off if he’d heard Lucas utter the words “off the record.” There were rumblings of lawsuits, from both Lucas and Coppola, whom Lucas had attacked in his interviews, alleging that Coppola had stolen Apocalypse Now and never really stood up for American Graffiti.

  But Pollock had actually held back on some of the worst things Lucas had said about Coppola. (They remain unpublished; Pollock has refused entreaties from publishers to print the Lucas tapes in their entirety.) He sent both men copies of tapes that proved his point. The threats of lawsuits vanished. Lucas even signed a copy of Skywalking for the author, an inscription that may well go down in history as the most lukewarm dedication from a subject to his biographer. It reads:

  To Dale. You have captured an imprint of the first thirty nine years of my life. I am now able to close the book on the past (your book) and look forward to the future. It has been an interesting and sometimes unnerving experience. I’m glad we were able to do it together.

  May the force be with you.

  It was only after the book was published, Pollock says, that Lucas’s friends told him of the filmmaker’s true intent in participating: to help him reconcile with Marcia. “He hoped my recreation of their meeting and their early time together would help make the case why they should stay together,” Pollock says. Even unbidden, he did the best he could. When he finally got hold of Marcia, she complained to him that George “never wanted to go anywhere, hang out with anyone—he was very insular and it just drove her crazy.” This is rendered in the book as “he and Marcia avoid parties, restaurants and travel.” He writes that the “resiliency of their relationship is impressive,” and quotes Lucas’s long-time assistant, Jane Bay: “They just keep getting stronger as a couple.” Marcia is quoted talking about the “tender and cuddly” side of her apparently cold husband, the side that liked to imitate commercials in silly voices and blushed at her off-color jokes. We see Marcia encouraging George to play tennis and go skiing. The fact that Marcia had to make her husband endless rounds of tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the way his mother used to make, goes unmentioned.

  When it came to editing Star Wars, writes Pollock, “Marcia is indispensable to Lucas because she compensates for his deficiencies. Where George is not unduly concerned with character and lacks faith in the audience’s patience, Marcia figures out how a movie can be made warmer, how the characters can be given depth and resonance.” Lucas’s less laudatory way of putting this was to say that Marcia was great at the “dying and crying” scenes; she edited the Yoda death scene in Return of the Jedi, one of the slowest and most tender moments of the series. According to Marcia, the conclusion of Return of the Jedi marked the only time George paid her a compliment on her work—telling her she was a “pretty good editor.” How that rankled.

  Skywalking came too late to have any effect on the Lucases’ marriage. George and Marcia Lucas officially separated on June 30, 1983. (It would be almost thirty years to the day before Lucas married again.) At the beginning of that month, they had held a tearful meeting to tell the staff at Lucasfilm; the press announcement was made about two weeks after that, on June 13. The Lucas marriage was officially dissolved on December 10, 1984.

  The divorce papers in the public record are minimal, both parties having signed a settlement that remains sealed to this day. All we know is that they would share custody of Amanda and that Marcia had agreed to the deal George offered, waiving her rights to receive further spousal benefits under California law. A Marin County judge agreed to keep the settlement under wraps because of the harm that media attention could inflict on the Lucases’ daughter.

  We might agree with the judge and draw a veil over the whole sad scene. But as much as the company would prefer to forget it, the fact remains that Marcia’s departure was one of the most costly financial disasters in Lucasfilm history. The company had, in effect, just lost its cofounder. “I think people sometimes forget that Marcia Lucas owns half of this company,” Lucasfilm’s second CEO, Bob Greber, pointedly told Pollock before the divorce. He added that her unofficial title was “Lucasfilm’s cheerleader.” Her departure cast a pall over everything. Greber himself would leave in 1985, after trying and failing to persuade Lucas to make more Star Wars films.

  Losing his wife cost George Lucas more than the budget of another Star Wars film, with no return on investment. He was determined to be done with Marcia, and he was determined not to part with Skywalker Ranch. That made for an expensive settlement. Press reports at the time of the divorce pegged Marcia’s payout at between $35 million and $50 million. Her prenuptial agreement with Rodrigues, signed five years later, states that she still has a forthcoming note from Lucasfilm worth around $25 million, which is to remain solely her property. By the time Marcia and Rodrigues separated in the summer of 1993, her ex estimated Marcia’s net worth at $60 million. Her income—from real estate and from points in Star Wars—was $7 million a year.

  None of that, of course, guaranteed Marcia happiness or made up for her lack of a career later on. Nor did the fact that she and Rodrigues had a child, Amy, in 1985, or their wedding on Maui in 1988. According to court documents, they had five cars, including three Mercedes and a Jaguar. On top of their $1.6 million home in Marin, they owned a million-dollar ski home in Utah and a million-dollar beach condo in Maui. They would fly first class with Amy and her nanny on the Concorde to Paris, and stay at a $2,500-a-night suite in the Ritz. But Marcia found herself shunned by many former friends of the Lucases and was unable or unwilling to return to a film-editing career.

  Marcia and Tom were divorced in 1995 after two years of separation. She gave Rodrigues most of the cost of a substantial house in San Anselmo, and a generous amount to make sure Amy had equal access to anything she could get at Marcia’s home. But Rodrigues complained that he’d had to put his career on hol
d while Marcia wanted him available to “play and travel.” Thus began a long and contentious legal wrangle over the size of their settlement. Ultimately, the judge concurred with Marcia that Tom’s cut was more than generous, and he retreated to a winery he’d bought north of Marin.

  George and Marcia would stay in touch only as much as necessary for Amanda. Their subsequent activities would often make it seem as if they were in competition. Marcia funded a postproduction center at USC that bore her name; Lucas donated his $175 million building to their alma mater. Marcia bought a house in Pacific Heights; Lucas moved his company to the nearby Presidio. Marcia never quite understood what George was doing with his company. In 1999, she told author Peter Biskind that the Lucasfilm empire was “an inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn’t going to make more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with a huge facility and enormous overhead. Why did he want to do that if he wasn’t going to make movies? I still don’t get it.”

  Lucas could have recouped his losses from the divorce with one more Star Wars movie. But he was adamant: the trilogy was over. He was tired, worn out by the divorce and the unbearable stress of trying to bring his fantastical visions to life with limited budgets and inadequate technology. He would not make more big-budget explorations of his universe until the technology was ready to make it look exactly the way he saw it in his head, no rubber monsters required.

  This didn’t mean that Star Wars was a shriveled-up pea, as Marcia put it. Not quite. There were a handful of deals in the works after Return of the Jedi. There were to be two ABC TV movies starring the Ewoks. The first, Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure, arrived in 1984. It was aimed at children, far more so than anything in the Star Wars universe thus far. But this was George Lucas: anything made for children had to be high quality, or as close as possible on a $2 million budget.

  After the disaster of the Star Wars Holiday Special, Lucas had learned his lesson. He kept a close eye on the production of Caravan of Courage and came up with the story behind it: a family crash-lands on the moon of Endor, the parents and children are separated, and the Ewoks help reunite them. It was directed by the independent filmmaker who had lured Lucas to Marin in the first place, John Korty. Still, Caravan of Courage suffered from one major problem of the Holiday Special—a large portion was furry creatures burbling in a language all their own—so actor Burl Ives was recruited to do a folksy voice-over.

  The sequel came in 1985, and it was a much darker affair, called Battle for Endor. The parents, who have been reunited with their children at the end of the previous movie, are murdered—along with a whole forest full of Ewoks—by off-world marauders and an evil sorceress. As with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a darker movie than Raiders and one that Lucas says he intended as a direct metaphor for how he was feeling at the time, Battle for Endor reflects the darkness of Lucas’s postdivorce world—a darkness that seemed to be annihilating the innocence of the Star Wars universe.

  “The divorce kind of destroyed me,” Lucas admitted years later. He began a rebound relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt, another feisty brunette; they broke up when Ronstadt declared she had no interest in getting married or having children. He experimented with new looks, switched from glasses to contacts, and even tried shaving his beard off. It was, as he said, a classic divorce situation. He called up and reconciled with his old friend and mentor, Coppola. Perhaps most importantly, he was to meet his third and final mentor in the flesh—and not a moment too soon.

  Lucas had put Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to good use between the third and fourth drafts of Star Wars. But it seemed at that point a rather utilitarian work and failed to light a spark in the young Lucas. It was not until some indeterminate point after the first movie, he said, that a friend gave him a series of Campbell lectures on tape. Lucas felt Campbell was much more powerful as a speaker than a writer; he described the experience of listening to the lecture as “immediately electric” and resolved to meet Campbell next time he was in town.

  Lucas had to wait until May 1983 before finally meeting the famed mythologist, who was almost forty years his senior. Barbara McClintock, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who was then in her eighties, was holding a symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco: The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. Dune author Frank Herbert was in attendance, as was Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart. But when Lucas called McClintock to ask for an introduction, it was not to any of these famed personalities. Rather, it was to Campbell, whose talk was the centerpiece of the symposium. Lucas the space fantasist and mythology nerd must have sat in the audience enraptured as Campbell described his concept of galactic space in soaring rhetoric: “a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence: billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other, many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces.” The stars are at war.

  McClintock’s introduction didn’t go so well. Campbell and Lucas were seated next to each other, not speaking. Campbell had enjoyed silent movies back in the 1920s; he didn’t really go for talkies and certainly didn’t care for modern fare. He had a tendency to hold court, and Lucas was not the greatest at breaking the ice. So McClintock called over magician David Abrams, who did a trick that involved putting George’s hand on Joe’s. “That was it,” McClintock recalled. Lucas and Campbell started talking about the impact of a Hero with a Thousand Faces on Lucas’s movies, none of which Campbell had yet seen. They met next for dinner in Hawaii, where Campbell lived. A friendship began to bloom, Lucas later told Campbell’s official biographers.

  Campbell and his wife, Jean, came to stay with Lucas in his ever-widening San Anselmo estate for a week, and Lucas gently suggested showing him the Star Wars trilogy at Skywalker Ranch: “Would you be interested at all in seeing it? I can show you one, or all three of them.” Campbell opted for all three. Lucas suggested stretching them out over three days; Campbell insisted on doing the trilogy in a day. It marked the first time Lucasfilm had screened all three as a movie marathon. They took breaks for meals between each screening. When the credits rolled a third time, the eighty-year-old Campbell sat in the dark and declared: “You know, I thought real art stopped with Picasso, Joyce and Mann. Now I know it hasn’t.” That, McClintock noted, made Lucas’s day.

  “I was really thrilled,” Campbell said of the Star Wars series in a later interview. “The man understands the metaphor. I saw things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern problem, which is man and machine. Is the machine going to be the servant of human life? Or is it going to be master and dictate? That’s what I think George Lucas brought forward. I admire what he’s done immensely. That young man opened a vista and knew how to follow it and it was totally fresh.”

  Lucas returned Campbell’s compliment in February 1985 at the National Arts Club, where Campbell was being presented with the Medal of Literature. In a potted revisionist history of his writing of Star Wars, Lucas gave a speech in which he said that prior to reading Campbell, he had been reading “Freudians and Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, and all the other mythical heroes of our time.” When he finally came across The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he said, it helped him carve a five-hundred-page script down to two hundred pages. “If I had not run across him,” Lucas said, “I might still be writing Star Wars today.” Of course, as we know, the script emerged more organically, with a far greater range of mythic influences, such as The Golden Bough. Campbell’s book arrived very late in the day, and the majority of the first movie’s script was in place by the time Lucas read Hero. But Lucas was not about to let that fact get in the way of his burgeoning relationship with Campbell, one that reflected well on the saga in retrospect. “He is a really wonderful man and he has become my Yoda,” Lucas concluded.

  The following year, PBS broadcaster Bill Moyers, another mutual friend of Lucas and Campbell, told Lucas he was interested in filmi
ng multiple interviews with Campbell. “Bring him out to the Ranch,” Lucas insisted. He would cover out-of-pocket expenses for the show. “Just point the camera at him and turn it on. Let’s not make a big deal of this, let’s just get him talking.” The result, some forty hours of interviews edited into a five-episode special called The Power of Myth, hit screens shortly after Campbell passed away at the age of eighty-three; it became one of the most-watched and best-loved shows in PBS history. The franchise that Campbell had inadvertently helped to shape, meanwhile, was not faring nearly as well.

  By 1985, the year George Lucas lionized Joseph Campbell at the National Arts Club, Star Wars was far from its mythical heights. The franchise seemed to be petering out as a brand for anyone but the youngest children, and even they were losing interest. There was a Droids cartoon, starring Artoo and Threepio, which lasted for one season, and an Ewoks cartoon, which lasted for two. Initially these cartoons were shown as a Star Wars adventure hour on ABC Saturday mornings, and a new line of Kenner figures and a Star Wars comic book were created to go with them. Viewership figures were great—in a few European and Latin American countries, that is.

  Not for the last time, Lucas turned to Disney to help revive the brand. The first Lucas-Disney collaboration was the Michael Jackson vehicle, Captain EO, executive produced by Lucas and directed by Coppola. That blossomed into a Star Tours theme park ride, which opened in Disneyland in January 1987. Disney CEO Michael Eisner helped Lucas open the proceedings with a light saber, a couple of droids, an Ewok or two, and a pair of large mice. Star Tours was situated at the same Tomorrowland that entranced a young Lucas back in 1955, and it had the singular honor of being the first Disney ride based on a non-Disney movie.