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When approached by Lippincott, neither Mattel nor Ideal had expressed sufficient interest in making Star Wars toys. Film-based toys, so the common thinking went, had a limited shelf life, with sales sputtering out shortly after the film faded from theater screens.
“Star Wars could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon,” Lucas suggested, referring to the 1950s television show that had started a marketing fad. “I don’t know whether I’ve done it. I don’t know.”62 But he had, and where the Crockett craze had had its coonskin hats, Star Wars had… well, everything.
Not that Lucas would license just anything. That summer he had set up within Lucasfilm yet another company—this one called Black Falcon, a name borrowed from the Blackhawk serials—to oversee all merchandising. It was the only way, he explained, “to control things. I didn’t want the market flooded with junk.…
But Milius also understood that innocence had consequences,
“We’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said one theater manager.
“Intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity,” Lucas jotted in his notes, “but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity.”
while he always boasted of his ability to run with the best idea in the room, no matter whose it was, Lucas was generally all but certain the best ideas in the room were his.
“If I do a sequel, I’ll be a sort of executive producer,” Lucas had told People magazine. “I’ll approve the rough cut and I’ll say, ‘you’re doing great,’ and all that kind of stuff.”85 But as Kersh and others would learn, it was a vow Lucas wasn’t equipped to keep.
“You must agree with George, and if you don’t agree with George, then George doesn’t like you,” said one ILMer.101 Even Jeff Berg, the agent who had so diligently shopped the messy fledgling Star Wars script, was dismissed; Lucas, through his team of shrewd attorneys, would take over his duties from this point forward. “I just didn’t need him anymore,” said Lucas without a shred of regret.102
Lucas’s laser-like focus on The Empire Strikes Back,
As always with Lucas, it was a question of control: “I wanted my independence so badly.”
Lucas did have some doubts about giving such a pivotal role to a rubber puppet, no matter how talented the puppeteer. “That was a real leap,” said Lucas, “because if that puppet had not worked, the whole film would have been down the tubes.”28
With the shoot now more than fifty days over schedule, the budget still creeping upward, and the bank nervous, Lucas decided he’d had enough of Kurtz and his indulgence of Kershner and put Howard Kazanjian, his producer from More American Graffiti, in charge instead.
“I had to get the film made,” Lucas said without a whiff of sentimentality, “and that was all I really cared about at that point.”29
Catmull, who admired Walt Disney nearly as much as he admired Albert Einstein, was hoping to persuade Lucas to let him devote some time to computer animation as well; Lucas, however, considered that scope creep. He wanted Catmull developing tools to make digital movies, not wasting his time on what Lucas regarded as high-tech cartoons. Catmull did his best to follow orders, though he continued to hire the kind of staff he wanted, even when that sometimes meant doing it on the sly; when Catmull hired a young former Disney animator named John Lasseter, he finagled the approval of Lucasfilm
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Alvy Ray Smith suggested they come up with something just a bit cooler—perhaps referencing the laser the computer used for most of its scanning—and proposed the name Pixer. After a bit more discussion, they decided to tweak the word slightly, giving it a name they all liked just a bit better. Pixar.
Kurtz could only shake his head. “That’s not true,” he said later. “There were a lot of little bits and pieces that were reasonably good ideas and that ended up being in the final draft [of Star Wars],” but “there wasn’t enough material to do other movies.”38 Lucas, however, would maintain he’d had a galaxy-spanning epic mythology in mind all along, though he would sometimes waffle on whether he had intended it to be six parts or nine. Regardless, at least one critic bristled at Lucas’s nerve in teasing fans with the promise of even more Star Wars.
always comes down to saying [to her], ‘Next week. Just let me get past this thing.’ By the time you get past this thing, there’s always something else. And you can’t leave.”41
Why bore an audience with credits when you could jump right into the action? He refused to recut, paid Kershner’s penalty himself (“I consider it extortion,” Lucas seethed), then resigned from both guilds.52 The credits would stay at the end—where most films have put them ever since—and Lucas would remain as disdainful of guilds and unions as ever.
“Well, I guess that works,” he admitted to Spielberg.56
Less successfully, Lucas had also helped find funding for a project by another old friend. John Korty—who,
“Hollywood is like a grandiose high school as far as I’m concerned,” he said derisively—and to his disappointment, employees at The Egg Company hadn’t behaved much better.63 “It was a bunch of spoiled people,”
No detail was too small for Lucas to obsess over.
When Mark Hamill—understandably protective of the Star Wars franchise—heard that the computer division was doing a computer animation for the rival Star Trek franchise, he whirled on Lucas in mock protest. “You traitors!” Hamill roared. “George, how could you do that?” “It’s business, kid,” said Lucas.75
The Lucas-Kurtz partnership—which had produced three of the most successful films in history in less than a decade—was on increasingly thin ice.
Lucas seems to be hard to get along with. Is that accurate?
wasn’t acrimonious,” Kurtz said
Said Marquand later, “I always had the feeling that possibly I’d find myself in a situation where I was a horse dragging this thing along, with George holding the reins.”90 He had no idea.
As he described Luke dragging the mortally wounded Vader to safety near the conclusion of the film, Lucas, with a straight face, suggested “the ultimate twist”: “Luke takes [Vader’s] mask off… and then Luke puts it on and says, ‘Now I am Vader.’ Surprise!… ‘Now I will go and kill the fleet and I will rule the universe.’” Kasdan could barely contain his enthusiasm. “That’s what I think should happen,” he told Lucas. “No, no, no,” Lucas shot back, slightly exasperated. “Come on, this is for kids.”
“The whole point of the film… is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life,” Lucas explained to Kasdan. “That is the greatest thing that we could possibly ever do.”95
Lucas smiled. “So are fairy tales.”97
Fox, now under the leadership of CEO Marvin Davis—a former oilman and an amiable enough blowhard—did
lamented Kael. “If Lucas… weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result.… [E]ssentially, George Lucas is in the toy business.”102 It was a punch that Kael couldn’t land; Lucas liked being in the toy business.
When you have kids, you have a priority in your life.”106 Lucas
Lucas admitted.112 “I hadn’t realized that ultimately it’s probably easier for me to do these things than to farm them out.”113
What wasn’t right was that George and Marcia’s thirteen-year marriage was quickly imploding, largely because of Lucas’s own neglect.
I wanted joy in my life. And George just didn’t. He was very emotionally blocked, incapable of sharing feelings.
He wanted to stay on that workaholic track. The empire builder. The dynamo. And I couldn’t see myself living that way for the rest of my life.”122
Their respective moods scared off writer Lawrence Kasdan, whom Lucas approached about turning his notes into a script. “I didn’t want to be associated with Temple of Doom,” said Kasdan later. “I just thought it was horrible. It’s so mean. There’s nothing pleasant about it. I think Temple of Doom represents a chaotic period in both their lives, and the movie is very ugly and mean-spirited.”136
When Lucas sat down for an extended interview with Rolling Stone later that month, the interviewer noted that he looked “so gloomy, so unhappy, so downright miserable.”138 Ken Ralston at ILM thought Lucas seemed “totally fried.”139
ILM artist Joe Johnston, discussing Jedi with journalist Gerald Clarke, said perhaps too truthfully, “We were never sure whether the movie was a vehicle for the effects or for the story.”141 A few even figured out that Lucas had finally made his Vietnam movie.
“Success… is a very difficult emotional experience to go through,” he said. “It’s a very devastating experience when it happens. Some people can deal with [it], some people can’t. I thought in the beginning it was a piece of cake. I had a little bit of success with [American] Graffiti, and a lot of success with Star Wars, but the full impact didn’t hit me for a few years after that.”1 It was the beginning, he said, of “a several-year tailspin.”2
Divorce is a very difficult thing financially and emotionally.”
Lucas refused to be magnanimous about it. While they would see each other only as long as it took to make decisions about raising Amanda together, Lucas would chip away at their mutual friends to make certain Marcia was never again invited to parties and holiday celebrations. “That really hurt,” said Marcia later. “It’s not enough that I’m erased from his life, he wants to blackball me too, with people who were my friends.”7 But the anger went beyond the personal; while Lucasfilm would have to acknowledge Marcia’s editing Oscar as one of the seven Academy Awards won by Star Wars, her
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My man is either incredibly emotionally immature or a petty. Maybe both.
Once again, he can’t keep relationships.
But of course he was doing more than that.
Langston and his team figured out how to create fractal technology—in which images become clearer and more detailed as the player moves closer to an object—for less powerful home computers like the eight-bit Atari 800, a task many programmers had considered impossible.
The first trilogy, he explained, would be melodramatic, showing the politics that put the Empire in place. The final three, he continued, would be all about “moral choices, and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong.”25 More than that, however, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.
But Lucas played the politics of the situation poorly,
“He took it literally for what it was, and assumed that’s all we could do.”37 Lucas
“It’s a George thing,” said Doris. “He’s successful at creating a myth for himself.
As discussions dragged on into late 1984, Alvy Ray Smith asked a friend of his, Alan Kay, if he knew of any potential investors—ideally someone with a bit of computer expertise who could appreciate what he’d be getting with the Pixar, and might also understand that getting Catmull and his team in the deal was worth the entire cost of the transaction. Kay thought he knew exactly the right person, and called on an old friend of his who happened to be both computer savvy and a multimillionaire: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
