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

by Taylor, Chris

  * Even today, Hamill defends his delivery of this line as deliberately whiny—it was so that Luke Skywalker would have an arc that took him from willful teenager to mindful Jedi Knight.

  * Lucas went even further, suggesting that “bringing balance to the Force” would only be achieved at the end of Return of the Jedi: “The prophecy was right,” he said in 2005. “Anakin was the chosen one, and he does bring balance to the Force. He takes the ounce of good left in him and destroys the Emperor out of compassion for his son.”

  26.

  USING THE UNIVERSE

  The Star Wars saga seemed like it was just getting settled into its happy retirement on June 25, 2005, just over a month after the release of Revenge of the Sith. It was another mild and foggy summer day in San Francisco. The Coronet had not been able to show that last episode of the franchise it helped birth; suffering from declining ticket sales, the theater had closed its doors for the last time in March and would be razed two years later to make way for a senior citizen center.

  In the Presidio, walking distance from the Coronet, George Lucas welcomed the press to the official opening ceremony for Lucasfilm’s new $350 million headquarters. Called the Letterman Digital Arts Center, it would bring together most of the company’s disparate divisions: ILM would move down from San Rafael, Lucasfilm’s licensing and marketing arms would relocate from the ranch, and the video game branch, LucasArts, would arrive from the overflow ranch, Lucas’s property next door to Skywalker, known as Big Rock.

  The opening was celebrated with one of Lucasfilm’s now-famous all-day picnics. The picnics were Lucas at his most generous. Attendees—myself included—all collected meticulously crafted wooden picnic boxes inscribed with the date and location; we got serenaded by Bonnie Raitt and Chris Isaak and served by a ridiculously good-looking wait staff. A VIP audience ranging from real politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer) to fake politicians (Richard Schiff, who played Toby on The West Wing) wandered the winding stone paths of the seventeen-acre headquarters, taking in its view of the Palace of Fine Arts and the Golden Gate Bridge. Downtown San Francisco and the delights of the Marina district’s Chestnut Street were a short drive and walk, respectively, to the east.

  Such a dramatic relocation had been necessary, and not just because Skywalker, Big Rock, and the ILM facility in San Rafael were bursting at the seams. Coming to the city just felt healthier. “We spent a lot of years hidden away,” said Micheline Chau, the former health care industry executive and accountant who became Lucasfilm president in 2003. “I’m not sure if it was good for the company as a whole.”

  Lucasfilm had long been proselytizing for digital movies, and what better place to do that than in the world capital of digital ideas? What Chau didn’t say, however, was that without more Star Wars to make, the company would need to drum up business in order to maintain the same level of employees. Lucasfilm couldn’t rely on the good will of a benign billionaire forever.

  Lucas had used his earnings from the first Star Wars movie to build Skywalker Ranch on a 1,700-acre plot of land in a Marin County valley. A World War II hospital had been demolished to make way for the second great house that Star Wars built. Bodies had been found on the grounds, and stories of hauntings by the staff would lead Chau to pay for a company-wide exorcism late one night that involved sprinkling rice around supposedly haunted sections of the building. The site soon acquired a restaurant and cocktail bar called Dixie’s, whose bartender—when I visited, at least—had a light saber tattooed on his middle finger. There was a superfast fiber-optic connection to Skywalker Ranch running through the state-of-the-art servers in the Letterman Center’s basement, annihilating time and distance between the two ends of the Lucas empire. “The Ranch” would always be called just that, whereas Lucas and ILM employees (1,500 of whom were about to start moving to Letterman at the time of the opening picnic) would take to calling the new facility the Death Star. (When, in time, Disney took over Lucasfilm, and hundreds of these same employees were fired in rolling waves of layoffs, some of them would start to employ a darker nickname for the site: Mouseschwitz.)

  Rising to address the crowd in one of Letterman’s large, light atriums on the day of the opening ceremony, Lucas mumbled through some remarks. He noted how fitting it was that Letterman had been completed at the same time as Revenge of the Sith, because both had begun at the same time: three years earlier. Sith had been released five weeks earlier and was of course another unqualified success. In a year in which movie attendance was declining precipitously and there were no real blockbusters, Episode III ruled the roost. In six weeks in the United States alone it made $361,471,114, or more than three times’ Lucas’s budget. Fans had still camped out for tickets even though online ordering was widely available; the line had become a ritual in itself. In Seattle, one obsessive fan began camping out for Episode III tickets a record 139 days in advance.

  In media interviews after his remarks, Lucas announced that he had sworn off making $100 million movies for good, with the air of a man who was taking his winnings and getting out of town. Oh, he’d always be connected to the realm of special effects thanks to ILM, which at the time was working on new movies from franchises like Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as a certain flick about a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe. Indiana Jones 4, which Lucas was then writing for Spielberg, didn’t count; he meant he’d sworn off $100 million Star Wars movies, not $100 million movies in general. “A lot of Star Wars is over,” he said, “in terms of the features.”

  What was Lucas going to do next? Why, he said, he was going to “go off and write my own little experimental films.” He concluded his press interviews, and off he walked into the corridors of the Death Star, adorned with a half dozen Darth Vader statues and a Jar Jar Binks in carbonite that had been presented to him by the 501st legion.

  Experimental films? Right. In fact, as Lucas had announced back in April at Celebration III, Lucasfilm was already working on not one but two Star Wars TV series—one live action, one animated. In fact, the very building itself was intended to serve as a production facility for Star Wars TV shows (and, if one line of discussion panned out, a whole TV channel dedicated to the franchise). These new initiatives—and the ultimate fight for survival that developed between them—would represent a kind of battle for the soul of Star Wars.

  Over the preceding years, especially after the delights of Young Indiana Jones and the agonies of the prequels, it had become apparent to Lucas that he was most comfortable as a TV kind of executive producer—a showrunner, basically, the kind that comes up with the overarching themes and directions of a fictional world and then allows a bunch of smart writers to flesh it out. This was how Empire and Jedi had been written; the prequels had lacked any such writers’ room conviviality, and fans had given Lucas hell for it. No wonder he yearned to get back to a collaborative mode of filmmaking.

  It had also been evident for years that animation was Lucas’s first love and that he found actors hard to manage. “If there were a way to make movies without actors,” Mark Hamill had suggested in the 1980s, “George Lucas would do it.” By the 2000s, computer animation was indeed offering Lucas a way to make movies without the inconvenience of actors, at least in their corporeal form. So it is perhaps not surprising that the Star Wars live-action TV series would ultimately flounder, while the animated series—The Clone Wars—would go from strength to strength.

  The success of The Clone Wars was by no means a sure thing. The live action series, developed under the working title of Star Wars Underworld, had a great deal of potential. Lucasfilm was in talks with ABC, mostly, but also at one point HBO, for the rights to screen it. Centered on the Galactic capital of Coruscant in the two decades between Episode III and Episode IV, it would focus on the seedy underbelly of the Empire: the gangsters, smugglers, and bounty hunters who had been so missed by mature audiences in the prequels. It would also tie into a computer game of the same name (a game that was later renamed Star Wars 131
3 and even later was shelved by Disney). Unconfirmed rumors suggest the series was to use Boba Fett as a recurring character. One ship we know was going to be featured in the show, according to design sketches: the Millennium Falcon.

  Underworld went through many years of intensive concept design. Lucas kept a small team of artists on the third floor of Skywalker Ranch, directly above his office, with private back stairs so he could reach them at any time (polite to a fault, Lucas would always knock). Technically, they worked for another Lucasfilm subsidiary, JAK Enterprises, named for the first letters of Lucas’ three kids. As one artist put it, George treated the third floor like his sketchpad.

  Rick McCallum executive produced Underworld alongside Lucas. Both men described the show as dark, Western-like, “Deadwood in space.” But it soon appeared to the artists that they had distinctly different ideas about what this meant. McCallum saw a largely indoor drama that could be made very cheaply. “But then George would come in and say, ‘Let’s add another speeder bike chase,’” said a member of the production team. Lucas apparently wanted the show to focus on what the citizens of the galaxy did for fun. There would be more drag-race-style pod races. The boy racer had never grown out of his need for speed.

  It could have been worse. Lucas would tweak McCallum by suggesting that Jar Jar Binks join the cast. McCallum let loose with a string of expletives, according to witnesses. Lucas was joking, but then again, Jar Jar did appear in The Clone Wars animated show. With George, McCallum knew, you really had to push back hard on Jar Jar.

  Lucas and McCallum conducted a global talent search. They reached out to writers such as Russell T. Davies, the Welsh showrunner who revived Doctor Who in 2005 (Davies was thrilled to be asked but too busy building his own little empire of science fiction TV shows). Rather than just set one writer to work on his own, the coproducers convened lavish multiday international writers’ conferences at Skywalker Ranch; the assembled talent would laugh and chat and eat and drink, and returned home to write around a hundred scripts between them.

  One of the leading writers in the Skywalker Ranch conference was Ronald D. Moore, the man who rebooted Battlestar Galactica. The original Galactica, in 1978, had angered Lucas because, he said at the time, it spoiled the potential market for a Star Wars TV show. Then along came the series again in 2004, darker and far better and enrapturing all of geekdom for the next five years—just as Lucas was attempting to fulfill the promise of Star Wars on TV. But Moore’s presence made it clear that Lucas held no grudge. In fact, he and McCallum sought to emulate it as much as possible; the “sketchpad” on the third floor of Skywalker Ranch was assigned to watch Battlestar Galactica episodes to figure out how the show could look so good on less than $3 million an episode.

  The trouble was, Lucas wasn’t envisioning the sort of show that could be made on a shoestring. All those speeder bike chases and pod races added up. Underworld episodes were being priced out at roughly $11 million apiece—an original Star Wars every week. By 2009, Underworld was on the shelf, awaiting some form of future technology that could render galactic drag races more cheaply. “It would have been a great show,” says Ronald D. Moore. “I’m disappointed I never got to see it happen.” Then he casually revealed one of the characters involved: “I had the satisfaction of writing a few lines for Darth Vader.”

  The chances of Underworld ever being made faded away. Lucas would start plundering the show’s art for use in The Clone Wars, from Season 2 onwards. Recycling ideas was a very Lucas-like trait, but some of the third-floor artists were upset. “We were building this show up, and it felt like bricks were being taken away,” said one. But the artists had to be sanguine about it, he added: “George viewed our art as one big toy box. Anything he wanted to pull out in a particular situation was fine by him.”

  The Clone Wars had begun as a series of short cartoons in 2002. This version of the series had been made by Genndy Tartakovsky, an award-winning, Russian-born animator, for Cartoon Network. Intended as promotional material to gin up interest in Episode III, Tartakovsky’s show had aired for three seasons, gaining four Emmys. Some viewers described it as the best Star Wars they’d ever seen. It offered stylized art and a relative lack of dialogue—never a bad idea as far as Star Wars is concerned. Mace Windu silently destroying an entire robot army with a lightsaber and a lot of Force: this alone was worth the cable subscription. Tartakovsky took General Grievous—a lightsaber-twirling cyborg he was required by Lucas to introduce because Grievous shows up in Episode III—and made him far more scary in Stormtrooper white, a cyborg ghost.

  Lucas had big plans for the series. He wanted to fill in the gaps between Episode II and II. What better way to burnish the reputation of the prequels than with more context, more answers, more adventure, more Star Wars? Lucas had been dreaming about the details of The Clone Wars for years, and then, in Episode III, most of the conflict happened offscreen. He never got his seven battles on seven planets. So once that movie was done, Lucas decided to reboot the Clone Wars cartoon into a CGI animated series. “We can do better,” he said.

  Lucas saw The Clone Wars differently from Tartakovsky. He envisioned the show as more of a CGI version of Thunderbirds, a British-made, puppet-filled science fiction show from the 1960s, than as the kind of stylized serial that Tartakovsky had turned it into. He also wanted 3-D—which had turned a technological corner since the days of paper glasses. Lucas told Celebration III that Clone Wars would be made in this increasingly sophisticated format. Like Underworld, it was not to be.

  With two TV shows in development, and scripts pouring in for both, Lucas had precious little time for the sort of personal filmmaking he had mentioned at the Letterman Center and all those times before. Yet the Creator still planned to go there—once the next thing was out of the way. “After the TV series, I’m going to do my own little movies,” he told Time critic Richard Corliss in 2006. For the first time he specified what those little movies were: a way to go back to his future, back to plotless dystopian documentary fantasy. “Basically,” he said, “you have to accept the fact that it’s going to be the land of THX and worse.”

  By now, Lucas could hardly ignore the fact that he’d been procrastinating on making those personal movies since 1977. “I’m not saying I’m going to make these features fast,” he added. That was just his style: “I ruminate a lot and sit around. I’m one of these guys that come back and paint a little and then go back and paint a little bit more and come back a month later and paint a little bit more. I don’t do things particularly quickly. I do when there’s money involved, because I just can’t afford to spend the money.”

  There was money involved in The Clone Wars, which was the last remaining basket for Lucas to put his visual Star Wars eggs into. Having inked a deal with the Cartoon Network, he was committed to getting the show into syndication, which meant one hundred episodes or more. He needed someone he could trust to steer the ship. Someone he could mentor. A fan, perhaps?

  Star Wars fans didn’t come much more hard-core than Dave Filoni. For the premiere of Revenge of the Sith, Filoni had dressed up as Jedi Master Plo Koon, an obscure Star Wars character if ever there was one. (He was the guy with the weird perforated goggles and the breathing mask on the Jedi Council.) Filoni had reason to celebrate by the time he put on that costume: a writer for the animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a former animator on King of the Hill, he got a call from Lucasfilm about the possibility of working on another animated show. “I talked a lot about Star Wars at work—a lot of people in animation talk about Star Wars at work,” Filoni remembered three years later. “I wasn’t even aware that this job was out there, but friends of mine in the animation industry who know I’m into Star Wars put me up for it.” He thought the call a practical joke by his friends on Spongebob Square-pants. Luckily, he hung on long enough to hear that George really wanted to meet him.

  Later at Skywalker Ranch, Filoni nervously sat down with the Creator and showed him a sketch of five characters: A
sla, Sendak, Lunker (a Gungan who looked like a large Jar Jar), Cad, and Lupe. Filoni’s idea was that these characters were a team of Jedi and smugglers inserted into the galactic underworld during the Clone Wars to investigate the black market. All they would need was a cool ship, something like the Millennium Falcon. The Clone Wars would be like original trilogy Star Wars, in which the fun came from the nobles rubbing shoulders with the scruffy nerf herders. Major characters from the prequel trilogy could cross paths with these new characters every so often. It would be a treat for fans to see Anakin and Obi-Wan and others, but they wouldn’t be the focus of the show.

  Lucas considered Filoni’s idea, and shook his head. “No,” he said, according to Filoni. “I like my own characters. I want to get Anakin and Obi-Wan in.” But there was one thing Filoni’s sketch had given George an idea for: “I want to give Anakin a padawan,” he said, pointing at the sketch of Asla. “Let’s take that girl there.”

  George Lucas had two daughters, and he harbored a strong belief that science fiction and fantasy could—and should—appeal to preteenage girls. And thus Asla was brought up in age and reborn as Ahsoka Tano, aka Snips, padawan learner to Jedi master Anakin Skywalker.

  The first outing for Ahsoka, Anakin, and Obi-Wan turned out not to be on the TV screen at all. After a few years of production work, with the scripts for the first season of The Clone Wars completed, Lucas viewed some of the early footage. Though he had his notes—Filoni says his team was told it was taking Star Wars too reverentially—Lucas made an apparently spontaneous decision that the first four episodes should be released as a movie. His executives were concerned but not surprised. “Sometimes George works in strange ways,” shrugged licensing chief Howard Roffman, who set off to find as many last-minute licensing partners as he could, so the movie would launch with at least some merchandising tie-ins.