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

by Taylor, Chris

  There were certain underlying ideas when I started: one was to tell a fairy tale, which is what it is—a fairy tale in space guise. The reason it’s in a space guise is that I like the space program, and I’m very keen on having people accept the space program. We’ve grown up in what is the flowering, and maybe the apex, of the space program, and Star Wars was made during that time when everyone was saying, “what a waste of time and money.” I was hoping, and still am hoping, that if 10 years from now it comes up for a vote that people will be a little more prone to saying “yes, this is important and we should do it”. . . . If suddenly the space program gets a lot of money 15 years from now then I’ll say “Gee, maybe I had something to do with that. . . .” But it’s hard to tell at this point whether Star Wars will have any effect or not.

  By the mid-2010s, the United States was leaning toward “not.” We haven’t exactly been tripping over ourselves to send humans to Mars, whether in search of Wookiees or otherwise. As a share of the federal total, NASA’s budget has declined to less than 0.5 percent. The agency’s emphasis for the past two decades has been on unmanned spaceflight. Barack Obama, lightsaber-wielding, Death Star petition–responding, Threepio-welcoming Jedi Knight, cut funding for a future manned Mars mission. Before that happened, NASA’s administrator suggested the agency plans to send humans to Mars in 2037—which, coincidentally, is the year Lucas will turn ninety-three.

  We may have to wait even longer than that to find out what inspired the first person on the Red Planet—but if any fictional universe is inspiring the folks at NASA at the moment, it is that of Star Trek, not Star Wars. “My whole love of space is from Star Trek,” says Bobak Ferdowsi, also known as Mohawk Guy, flight director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The engineer who helps control the Martian rover Curiosity, Ferdowsi told me he prefers Trek over Wars. “There’s the hope that we’re progressing toward that Star Trek future,” he said in an earlier interview, “that maybe it will be less about individual countries and more about a global organization.” He’s not alone; you’ll find many Trek-quoting fans at the laboratory, which has on occasion described itself as the nearest thing Earth has to the Starfleet of the Trek universe.

  Call it the final revenge of Star Trek fans, who for decades have been struggling with their feelings about the rival “star” franchise. (The latest perceived slight: director J. J. Abrams, who rebooted the Trek franchise in 2010, upped and left it for Star Wars at the first opportunity.) Trek’s focus on rational exploration over galactic mysticism is a natural fit for NASA. Ferdowsi’s fellow social media star, astronaut Chris Hadfield, is also a Trekker, as is astrophysicist and host of the Cosmos TV show Neil deGrasse Tyson. “I never got into Star Wars,” Tyson said. “Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.” Tyson’s predecessor on Cosmos, the late, great Carl Sagan, also took issue with Star Wars. His son Nick Sagan told me he remembers watching the original movie on VHS with his dad, who loved Flash Gordon–style serial adventures, but let out a giant sigh after Han Solo made his boast about doing the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Both knew what was wrong with that statement: a parsec is distance, not time. “Dad,” protested Nick, “it’s just a movie.”

  “Yes,” said Sagan, “but they can afford to get the science right.”

  So much for the space fantasy approach to inspiring the Einsteins of the future.

  Still, America’s space industry is not without its Star Wars homages, which mostly can be seen in the names of its space-bound systems. Take for example NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program, dubbed C3PO. Chris Lewicki, the former flight director for NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, is about to blast an even geekier, more obscure Star Wars reference into space. Lewicki’s private space company Planetary Resources, which plans to mine space rocks for precious metals, is launching an asteroid-hunting telescope called the Arkyd in 2015. That’s a name you’ll only know if you’re schooled in the Expanded Universe; Arkyd Industries was a major manufacturer of droids and spacecraft in the Old Republic; when conquered by the Empire, it made the probe droids that we see landing on Hoth at the very beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. “We’ve got lots of Star Wars lore built into the company,” Lewicki told me. Unlike Tyson, Lewicki was at least kind of inspired the way Lucas intended: “Star Wars was my gateway drug to hard science fiction,” he said.

  The agency’s (and an astronaut’s) greatest homage to the franchise came on November 3, 2007. That’s the day when the Star Wars theme was played in space for the first time, thirty years after it first thrilled audiences back on planet Earth. It was a wake-up call broadcast by NASA to the crew of shuttle mission STS-120, then in its twelfth day aboard the International Space Station. In particular, it was directed at Mission Specialist Scott Parazynski, a rare Star Wars fan among the few humans who’ve made it into orbit and beyond. (His son, whom he had named Luke, was ten years old at the time; he had been born around the time of the release of the Special Edition.) “That was a great, great way to wake up,” Parazynski told Mission Control. Then, for his son, he performed the first known Darth Vader impression outside of planet Earth: “Luke, I am your father,” he said. “Use the Force, Luke.”

  As if the scene couldn’t get any geekier, the shuttle that had transported the crew to the International Space Station had been carrying a special Star Wars payload: the very lightsaber Mark Hamill had used in Return of the Jedi. Space Center Houston officials had come up with the idea to fly it, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the original movie, and Lucas had readily agreed. The lightsaber had been delivered to NASA officials in a ceremony at Oakland Airport, with Peter Mayhew (the actor who played Chewbacca) handing it over. Flown from Oakland to Houston, the lightsaber was received by R2-D2 and Stormtroopers from the Texas 501st. Lucas was onsite, watching the shuttle launch that blasted his prop into space.

  That was NASA’s greatest staged homage to Star Wars—but another, less intentional one occurred some four years later, in 2011, when the agency’s astronomers used the Kepler telescope to discover, for the first time, a planet orbiting two suns. Officially, the planet was designated Kepler 16(AB)-b. Unofficially, astronomers at NASA and around the world gave it another name: Tatooine. This was something of a victory for Lucas: when Star Wars first came out, astronomers had declared it highly unlikely that a planet like Luke Skywalker’s could exist so close to two suns. In the two years after Tatooine was discovered, another nineteen double-star-system planets showed up. NASA was moved to offer an official apology to Lucasfilm. ILM’s John Knoll, speaking on behalf of Lucas, accepted the apology: “The very existence of these discoveries cause us to dream bigger, to question our assumptions,” he said. Or as Einstein put it, imagination is more important than knowledge. Sometimes, when you’re just trying to make space fantasy, it turns out you can be accidentally ahead of the curve of science.

  George Lucas may have spent much of his career with his eyes fixed on the heavens, but in his post–Star Wars life he would be preoccupied with more terrestrial, prosaic battles.

  On the domestic front, everything seemed blissful for Lucas in 2013—the closest a person can get, perhaps, to happily ever after. Retired at last, he wasted no time proposing in January to Mellody Hobson. They were married in June at Lucas’s own never-never land, Skywalker Ranch. Lucas’s friend Bill Moyers was the officiant. Friends remarked, as they had remarked for a number of years, how much slimmer and happier Lucas seemed since he’d been with Mellody, how much better dressed. The media were far from the gates of Skywalker, faked out by rumors that the wedding was going to take place in Chicago. Minimal press attention, an elite crowd, and a utopian setting: just the way Lucas likes it. And there was even happier news on the horizon. Melody and George were pregnant with a first biological child, Everest, via a surrogate. The world would not find this out until Everest was born in August. The following year, in May 2014, Lucas threw yet another Skywalker Ranch celebration, inviting far-flung friends s
uch as Laddie and Fred Roos to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

  But Lucas’s first few years of retirement didn’t go so well. This was especially true when it came to preserving and controlling his legacy. Sure, he built a nice park for his neighbors in San Anselmo, where he unveiled statues of Yoda and Indiana Jones, marking the icons that were created nearby. But his eyes were on the glittering prize of the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum. This was his legacy project: a vast and vastly expensive edifice in the Beaux Arts style, near the gold-domed Palace of the Legion of Honor, in the Presidio of San Francisco, it would make the San Francisco skyline look a little more like Naboo. It would be steps from the Disney Museum, where the life of the other creator to birth a globally admired mass entertainment was celebrated. The LCAM, as it was known, would contain all the storytelling art Lucas had been collecting, funding, and dreaming about since he was a child—Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish jostling for space alongside Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks and exhibits on CGI.

  But Lucas hadn’t counted on a couple of roadblocks on the way to the LCAM. The first one was called the Presidio Trust. This body of local grandees were appointed by the president of the United States to manage the national park, and as part of the deal they had forged with Lucas back when he had moved Lucasfilm into the Presidio in 2005, the trust asked Lucas for a quid pro quo: that he would someday build a “world-class cultural institution” in the Presidio. When a retail chain called Sports Basement vacated a building down by the waterfront, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it seemed a given that Lucas would take it over. This was prime real estate for a memorial to any global icon, let alone one who had taken San Francisco values—the US military is an evil technological empire; corporations and bankers will destroy the republic—and turned them into two trilogies of the most fantastic world-conquering legend in history.

  But Star Wars itself was also a road block to the LCAM, in a way—and perhaps also to Lucas’s dreams for his own legacy. Lucas once confessed to Disney’s Bob Iger that he knew the first line of his obituary would read “George Lucas, creator of Star Wars,” no matter what he did, even if he sold the company, and that he had come to terms with that. Try as he might, Lucas couldn’t shake the impression among certain concerned citizens of San Francisco that what he was building was essentially a Star Wars museum—one they feared would instantly become the most popular destination in the city and bring half the population of the world driving and tramping through their parkland waterfront.

  Despite the fact that Lucas had an agreement with the Presidio Trust to build the museum (not to mention a hand-picked board and millions in escrow waiting to pay for construction), the trust decided at the last moment to open the museum space up to a competition and extensive public debate. Nancy Bechtle, chair of the Trust, was a well-to-do, fourth-generation San Franciscan, the former chief financial officer of an international consulting giant, the president of the San Francisco Symphony, and a George W. Bush appointee. It’s also fair to say that she was not a huge fan of Star Wars. Before he knew it, Lucas the billionaire—who was offering to fully fund the museum—found himself competing against a museum proposal from the National Park Service, which didn’t have funding but helps manage the Presidio and has strong ties to Bechtle and the Trust.

  Lucas pulled political levers as adeptly as Chancellor Palpatine. He got the support of San Francisco mayors, past and present; both California senators; a letter of support was signed by a hundred Star Wars–loving luminaries of Silicon Valley, from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Jobs’s widow. After conveying his displeasure to her on a number of occasions, Lucas even got Democratic leader and San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to work the phones for the LCAM.

  Bechtle wasn’t moved by any of this, so Lucas next tried a carrot and stick approach. The stick came first, in the form of a New York Times interview in which Lucas declared that the Trust members “hate us” and that his opponents’ proposals were “a jar of jargon”; he also threatened to move the LCAM project to Chicago, Mellody’s hometown, where “Rahm”—Mayor Rahm Emanuel—was waiting to offer Lucas a space.

  The carrot came a few days later, at the only Presidio Trust meeting Lucas attended. Clearly nervous—he was still, as his sister said, a “behind-the-scenes guy”—he spoke haltingly about how the Presidio was the birthplace of digital arts (along with Marin County, he added quickly), and thus would be well suited as the site of the museum. He apologized for using the word “hate,” a word he said he told his children not to use. But he couldn’t help himself needling the Trust over the broken deal. “Plus the idea [of LCAM] was to help fund the Presidio, to, you know, pay the bills here,” he said in conclusion. “You never know, they might need the extra money.” He sincerely wanted to inspire kids, to promote the digital arts, to celebrate the “shared myth” of storytelling, and to give his traveling Star Wars exhibits (of which there have been a good half dozen since 1993) a home near his home. But that was Lucas’s closing argument for the museum: cold, hard cash.

  After several meetings in which Presidio residents made their distaste for Lucas’s proposal known, Bechtle announced that the Trust had reached a “unanimous” decision: the prized real estate would go to none of the competitors and would be turned into parkland instead. But the Trust still hoped Lucas would build a museum “somewhere in the park.” Lucas was furious. He was subsequently offered a much smaller plot of land close to the Letterman Digital Arts Center, and at time of this writing he was investigating a spot for the museum on the lakefront in Chicago.

  Lucas had overcome every obstacle in his life; he had survived a crash that should have killed him, and he’d completed every creative project he ever set his mind to. He’d broken free of Hollywood. He’d made himself a millionaire and then a billionaire. He’d invested himself and his money and his passion and his research into his Flash Gordon fan project, pursuing perfectionism relentlessly until it exploded in a light show that burned itself into billions of imaginations. He’d built an Empire out of the dreams that resulted, spun a century’s worth of stories, tapped almost by accident into deep spiritual notions and mythologies, shattered our visual expectations, transformed the meaning of merchandise, and changed our perception of the universe forever.

  He’d accomplished so much. But when it came to building a suitable temple to house his vast legacy, George Lucas’s plans were interrupted by not-quite-so-rich-folks who didn’t like new money—or at least, not the kind of new money that came from a popular space fantasy epic.

  Whatever one thought of Lucas’s epic, by 2014 it seemed to be never ending. The seventh episode in the trilogy was approaching, and Lucasfilm was maintaining an even greater, tighter, more maniacal level of secrecy than ever before. Not a detail about the film’s contents, its cast, or even its shooting locations was to be leaked by anyone working on the production or even slightly affiliated with it. A Hasbro toy merchandising executive tweeted the fact of his visit to the set in Pinewood Studios 20 miles west of London in February 2014; he didn’t give away a single detail, but weeks later his Twitter account was inexplicably deleted.

  Star Wars movie productions had been secretive before, but this was something else. It took Lucasfilm until March 2014 to “reveal” that the movie would be set thirty years after Return of the Jedi and would star “a trio of new leads alongside some very familiar faces,” and until May 2014 to confirm what Lucas had let slip in an interview more than a year earlier: that the familiar faces belonged to Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, not to mention Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew.

  When the company couldn’t entirely suppress negative details, they were expertly buried in a slew of positive news. For instance, screenwriter Michael Arndt left the project under mysterious circumstances, to be replaced by director Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan; rumor had it that Arndt didn’t like spending a lot of screen time on three “very familiar faces” and wanted to get straight to the trio of
new leads; Abrams and his boss, Kathleen Kennedy, felt that more homage was due to the old crew. Lucasfilm managed to deflect stories about Arndt’s departure by announcing a significant number of the movie’s behind-the-scenes big names: it wasn’t just Kasdan helping to create Episode VII now, but also sound gurus Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood and composer John Williams, then eighty-one.

  Social media rushed to fill the vacuum purposefully created by Lucasfilm. A thousand amateur artists posted their ideal Episode VII posters to Twitter and Facebook. So many popular tweets were posted speculating about the movie and its rumored stars that to cover them properly would require an entire other book.

  But for the most part, what fans and commenters contributed were Star Wars jokes, reflecting once again the franchise’s propensity for loving spoofs. Comedian, actor, and Star Wars nerd Seth Rogen tweeted that Episode VII should open with a line that suggested nothing at all had happened in the thirty years since Jedi: “Damn, those Ewoks can party. Now what?” Fellow comedian Patton Oswalt went Rogen one better. Appearing in an episode of Parks and Recreation on NBC, Oswalt was asked to ad-lib a filibuster for the show’s town council meeting. What he came up with was over-the-top brilliance: an eight-minute rant filled with his nerdiest heart’s desire about what should happen in Episode VII. It featured Wolverine and the other superheroes of the Marvel Universe, based on the principle that Marvel and Star Wars were both now owned by Disney. The Oswalt ad-lib barely featured in the episode, but it found new life online, with three million YouTube views to date. The Nerdist channel added another million views simply for producing an animation of Oswalt’s storyline. Fans would likely burn down Disney HQ in Burbank if the company ever merged its franchises the way Oswalt was proposing, but they couldn’t get enough of his idea of Star Wars.