The Clone Wars movie was announced in February 2008 and debuted that August. It held a number of firsts in the Star Wars universe. It was the first animated Star Wars movie and the first to be released without the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare. (The film was distributed by Warner Bros, which was part of the same parent corporation as the Cartoon Network; Lucas, who had once wanted an internship at Warner’s animation department, was finally doing one better by releasing an animated movie with the studio.) At a running time of ninety-eight minutes, Clone Wars was also the first Star Wars movie to last less than two hours. It was the first in which John Williams didn’t have direct involvement, although a world music version of his theme is used in the film (as it is in the Clone Wars series itself). It was the first Star Wars movie that actually cost $8.5 million, the official budget for the original film. It had the fewest number of products attached—a few Hasbro figures, a McDonald’s Happy Meal. (Pepsi had a ten-year licensing deal with Lucasfilm. A Pepsi spokesperson said they weren’t aware that Clone Wars was coming out.)
Clone Wars also holds the dubious distinction of most poorly reviewed Star Wars film ever. Lucas had ignored that old advice of Gene Roddenberry’s, that TV shows invariably take a few episodes to warm up; now here was Ahsoka’s tentative early attempts at witty banter with her new master, Anakin, thrust into the spotlight of the movie theater. Action sequences dominated the film, looking like plotless experiments in CGI—which is in fact what they were. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman bemoaned the fact that the Star Wars universe was so “obsessively-compulsively cluttered yet trivial that it’s no longer escapism. . . . It’s something you want to escape from.” He branded Lucas “the enemy of fun.” This was the same year Pixar released its used-universe masterpiece, Wall-E; critics looking for a glimmer of hope in Clone Wars couldn’t even fall back on the notion that its CGI animation was state of the art. Wall-E seemed more Star Wars–like than this latest Star Wars. Even Roger Ebert, who had reliably supported Lucas throughout the prequel years, slammed “a deadening film that cuts corners on its animation and slumbers through a plot that a) makes us feel like we’ve seen it all before, and b) makes us wish we hadn’t.” The movie bears a hideous 18 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and made many annual “worst of the year” lists. A few critics threw the ultimate slur: it was even worse than the Holiday Special.
Looking back on it now, some cast members think Lucas probably didn’t make the best decision of his life. “We weren’t ready for prime time,” says James Arnold Taylor, the voice of Obi-Wan throughout the series. “We were still working out the storytelling, the look and feel of the characters. . . . I’m not knocking it—I just feel we could have had a better start.”
Did any of that matter for Lucasfilm’s bottom line? Was The Clone Wars also the first dud movie in Star Wars history? Not in the slightest. The Clone Wars made $68.2 million at the box office, roughly eight times its budget. In terms of return on investment, that made it more successful than Revenge of the Sith and Attack of the Clones, and on a par with Phantom Menace. Once again, Lucas’s strange ways had been vindicated at the box office. Star Wars movie-going: it’s an addiction, and millions of us are hooked.
All that remained was for Lucas to prove that Clone Wars could make it as a TV show. He had set the bar at syndication, which meant Clone Wars would have to last for roughly five seasons, or from 2008 until 2013—which was how long Cartoon Network had the option to screen it for. But the network could also pull the plug at any time.
The series started out strong. Its premiere was the highest rated in Cartoon Network history. Week to week, the first season averaged three million viewers. The reviews were uneven; critics hated that the early episodes featured some of the prequels’ weakest players, such as the battle droids (the ones that keep saying “roger, roger,” constantly misfire, and are easily sliced by lightsabers), which dominated the first few episodes, and loathed even more the return of Jar Jar Binks. But The Clone Wars’ greatest strength was that it had a long list of characters to follow. Episodes tended to bunch together in story arcs: You might have a Binks arc for a few weeks, then an Ahsoka or Anakin arc, then a Yoda arc after that. The same quality that made it uneven also gave it longevity. The universe was roomy. Miss the Han Solo–style, smuggler Star Wars universe? Try the arcs featuring the feisty new pirate character, Hondo Ohnaka. Want more high fantasy with your Star Wars? Meet the mysterious magic-wielding Night Sisters. “We have stories for every type of fun,” said Filoni.
Clone Wars paid homage to Star Wars’ hokey, earnest TV-screened origins. It was the closest thing the TV world had seen to Flash Gordon serials in a long time. The episodes, about twenty-one minutes each without commercials, lasted roughly the same time as a Flash Gordon. Each Clone Wars show opened with a different homily in the blue-on-black “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” font. Instead of a roll-up, voice actor Tom Kane performed his best imitation of a 1940s newsreel announcer. Lucas had once said that the original trilogy was World War II and the prequels were more like the Great War, but the newsreel introduction made us feel like this was World War II—a good and worthy war, with the voice of the Republic pulling us all together in the great struggle against evil Dooku and his Separatists. The fact that the whole war was actually a Sith plot added a layer of irony that was, unfortunately, rarely examined in the show.
There were times when Lucas seemed to be mentoring Filoni, grooming him as a sort of successor, schooling him in World War II and Kurosawa. For one episode, “Landing at Point Rain,” Lucas threw the script out and made Filoni cut together actual film footage from movies such as The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Battle of the Bulge. Lucas pulled out his reels from back when he was cutting together dogfights for the original Star Wars. Filoni absorbed Lucas influences and shared them with the crew; he made sure that every one of his animators watched Seven Samurai. (The plot of the second season episode “Bounty Hunters,” in which Anakin and Obi-Wan protect a planet of farmers, paid direct homage to the Kurosawa film.)
Lucas would barely talk to the Clone Wars artists but was having a whale of a time during meetings in the writers’ room with Filoni and six other writers. Once a week, Lucas would come in with a few ideas—he tended to be the creative impetus behind the episodes of the show that focus entirely on the Clones. The series took a bunch of soldiers who were supposed to look and talk the same way (all modeled on the Maori actor Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett) and developed different personalities for them, such as Rex, Cody, Fives, and an older, wiser Clone named Gramps. After being presented with such an idea, the writers at the meeting were then free to debate whether it would actually work, but Lucas would want to hear the result. “He always wanted to be there to push us,” said Filoni.
The show initially aired on Friday nights at 9 P.M., which won it a large adult audience. But as Filoni catered more and more to that audience, with darker scripts and better animation, viewership declined—from 3 million for series 1 to about 1.6 million for series 4. For series 5, Cartoon Network tried something that was either radical or suicidal—it moved Clone Wars to Saturday mornings at 9:30 A.M. Ratings barely moved. Still, the fifth season was number 1 in its time slot among boys age between nine and fourteen, which was and remains Star Wars’ core demographic—despite attempts to bring in the girls with characters like Ahsoka (and her fellow padawan, Bariss Offee).
The scripts got darker still. Darth Maul returned from his bisection in Phantom Menace, his lower half a skittering mechanical spider. The show was approaching what some fans called a M*A*S*H problem—it had been running for longer than the three years the Clone Wars themselves were supposed to last, just as M*A*S*H was on TV for longer than the Korean War. But Clone Wars had the inherent advantage of being set in the Star Wars universe; remember, the original movie covers the course of three or four days at most. Three years might be enough to keep the show in business for a lifetime.
Season 5 ended on
March 2, 2013, with the show’s most shocking cliff-hanger: Ahsoka, wrongly accused but exonerated of bombing the Jedi Temple, walks away from the Jedi order. Filoni talked confidently about tying up some more loose ends in the sixth season. One of the Clones would discover the terrifying truth about the forthcoming Order 66 that was to wipe out the Jedi. Yoda would go on a galactic voyage that would allow him to commune with the dead and learn the secret of how to become a Force ghost. The show had vaulted over the hundred-episode hurdle, but “we need 100 more just to finish what we’re trying to do,” Filoni told “Star Wars” Insider.
By that point, however, Filoni had a new boss who didn’t like what she saw in the Clone Wars’ bottom line. On March 11, the plug was unceremoniously pulled.
27.
HELLO DISNEY
In January 2012, George Lucas chose a maroon sofa in his animation studios at Skywalker Ranch, beneath two paintings of Padmé, as the place where he would tell the world he was retiring from Star Wars. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff,” he explained to New York Times freelance reporter Bryan Curtis. Once again, he declared his intention to get back to making personal films. Reporters who’d been around the block a few times raised their eyebrows.
The ostensible subject of the interview was Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen biopic Lucas had been struggling to get released with a major studio for years. Naturally, Curtis wanted to know about the prospect for future Star Wars films. If Lucas could make a fifth Indiana Jones, which was supposedly in the works, why not a seventh Star Wars? Lucas’s response was one of the most revealing emotional answers he’d ever given. Years of fan pushback on the prequels, it seems, years of Plinkett and his ilk had gotten to him—and his answer suggested he had been reading more online commentary than he would care to admit. “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” he blurted to Curtis. (Such online focus, from a man who often claimed to be content with Victorian technology, was also to be found in a later BusinessWeek interview: “With the Internet, it’s gotten very vicious and personal. . . . You just say to yourself, why do I need to do this?”)
Note what Lucas’s answer wasn’t. It wasn’t that he hadn’t even written the barest treatment for Episode VII, as he’d said back at Celebration III. As early as 1999, he’d told Vanity Fair that “I never had a story for the sequels.” By 2008, he was not only ruling out a sequel trilogy from himself, but from his successors at Lucasfilm: “I’ve left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features,” he told Total Film magazine. “There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything!” But by 2012, around the time he was announcing his retirement, Lucas was secretly at work on a new treatment—for Star Wars Episode VII.
Lucas hadn’t ever needed to make more Star Wars, or indeed any at all. He could have made Apocalypse Now back in his salad days and won the approval of his friends. He could have handed the franchise over to Fox in 1977 as planned. He could have left it to the Expanded Universe after the first trilogy was completed. He could have stopped at the prequels. That advice he offered to Simon Pegg—don’t get stuck making the same movie for thirty years—could have been applied to himself even as he gave it. He could have gone off and made personal movies, burning through his Star Wars money the way he said he would.
But Lucas had taken none of these off-ramps. He had kept on making more Star Wars. He started to describe Star Wars as something that was happening to him. “Star Wars obviously snuck up and grabbed me and threw me across the room and beat me against the wall,” he told Jon Stewart in 2010. “It was a very slow process accepting the reality of what happened.” He was hooked, as hooked as any R2 builder or 501st member or lightsaber choreographer. His creation had taken over his life, whether he liked it or not.
Of course, Lucas had a financial incentive to keep Star Wars going. Given how well every Star Wars movie in history had done, it would be hard for even the selfless Creator to not see them as personal piggy banks. Indeed, he briefly discussed the idea of a new Star Wars film with McCallum in the late 2000s, viewing a sequel as a way to fund the production of Underworld. There were plans to rerelease 3-D versions of all six movies which got as far as a 3-D rerelease for Episode I in 2012. It earned a relatively disappointing $22 million during its opening weekend; the least a Star Wars release had made, ever. Episode II was converted into 3-D but never shown outside Celebration Europe. The Clone Wars wasn’t enough. The video games weren’t enough. The Star Wars machine was winding down. Lucas would have to either set about making Episode VII or accept that layoffs were inevitable.
Lucas loved the company; this is why he bore the burden of the Star Wars machine so willingly. This is why he still showed up for work at 7 AM, the way his father had. In more than one interview, he compared his situation to that of Darth Vader, trapped unwillingly by the inner workings of a technological Empire. The Empire was increasingly far-flung—most of the Clone Wars production took place in Singapore—and increasingly difficult to manage.
In particular the games division, LucasArts, was “quite a mess,” in the words of Jim Ward, a marketing manager who took over LucasArts in 2004 and was asked to perform a top-to-bottom audit. The division’s 150 game developers were spending too much time building software engines and not enough on the games themselves. The best titles were outsourced; the Knights of the Old Republic may be widely considered one of the top 100 video games of all time, but that was largely thanks to the Canadian company that designed and built it, BioWare. LucasArts was reduced to distribution and marketing.
Hal Barwood, after an epiphany on the set of Dragonslayer in 1981, had walked away from moviemaking and followed his passion for game design. He came to LucasArts in 1990, just in time to design Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, only the second time Lucas had allowed the company to develop a game based on his property (computer game graphics had reached a point where he was no longer embarrassed by them; besides, Atari still held the Star Wars license). The future had seemed bright.
But over the next decade, Barwood watched his division slide downhill, hampered in particular by an increasing reliance on Star Wars games. “The marketing department, if it didn’t have Star Wars on it, they didn’t know what to do,” he says. The company had found critical, if not commercial success with smart, witty adventure games such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. But the lure of Star Wars lucre had been impossible to resist, and haphazard development had torn LucasArts apart. Barwood, who quit in 2003, had ten different bosses in thirteen years: “George would get rid of them, or they’d leave,” he says. “Nobody ever took control.”
Not until Jim Ward and his ruthless 2004 audit. An overhaul of LucasArts was promised; in the end it boiled down to firing more than half the staff when the team moved into the Presidio. In 2010, after Ward himself had been ousted, another third of LucasArts was laid off.
The remainder worked like crazy on Star Wars 1313, the companion game to the canceled TV show Underworld. While Underworld scripts sat on a shelf, Star Wars 1313 soldiered on as a role-playing game set in the same dark, gritty part of Coruscant. You played a bounty hunter, and the content of the game felt more mature, more like Empire Strikes Back. Perhaps this would be even better than Knights of the Old Republic; perhaps it would be the title that would win video game critics over to the notion that Star Wars games could be just as good as all that other content. But in 2012, just as LucasArts was preparing to show two years’ worth of work on 1313, Lucas declared that he wanted to change it all around—he wanted the game to be about Boba Fett instead. This was a prime example, said one employee, of the fact that Lucas was “used to being able to change his mind” and “didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with” such casual mind-changing would become.
As he paddled around trying to keep Lucas
film afloat on a shrinking pool of revenue, Lucas would have looked longingly at the success of Pixar, an ocean liner by comparison. Lucas still called Pixar “my company.” Originally called the Lucas Computer Division, Pixar had essentially started off as a skunkworks operation, and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had bought it in 1986, in a postdivorce fire sale. Lucas had been desperate to unload assets in order to hang onto Skywalker Ranch and sacrificed the computer division on the altar of that utopian dream. Jobs gave him $5 million—way less than Lucas had been asking, but at just the right time—and promised to invest another $5 million in the new company, soon to be dubbed Pixar after one of the computers it had been developing. It took a while, but Jobs was eventually convinced to turn the company around, from selling $125,000 computers and specialized software to creating animated movies with that software instead.
The man who persuaded him was John Lasseter, an animator who had been fired from Disney Studios in 1981—interestingly enough, after declaring it his ambition to bring “Star Wars-level quality to the art of animation.” When one of Lasseter’s animated shorts won an Oscar in 1988, Disney CEO Michael Eisner belatedly tried to hire Lasseter back. Lasseter turned him down and went on to direct Toy Story in 1995. Bob Iger, Eisner’s successor, snapped up Lasseter and the results of Lasseter’s work in 2006 for $7.6 billion as one of his first acts; the board let Eisner speak out against the sale, but ultimately overruled his stern objections. For Disney, ignoring Lasseter’s Star Wars–based desire turned out to be one of its more costly mistakes. For Jobs, it led to a 1,520 percent return on the millions he’d given Lucas.
For Lucas, that had to sting—especially given his lifelong love of animation. But he also noticed that after Jobs sold Pixar, Disney treated it like the crown jewels. Everything about the company, from its culture to its intense collaborative storytelling meetings, was to be run just as it was under Jobs. Lasseter was to become Disney’s chief creative officer, and Ed Catmull, whom Lucas had hired to start his computer division way back in 1979, would be the head of Disney animation. It had all the hallmarks of a reverse takeover. Meanwhile, Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, the former bakery whose architectural reconstruction Jobs had poured as much of himself into as Lucas had into Skywalker Ranch, remained effectively independent from the rest of the Mouse House. By 2011, Pixar had produced two of its three top-grossing movies of all time—Toy Story 3 and Up—as part of the Disney family.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 54