FUTURE generations will never need to establish a George Lucas museum, because George Lucas has already built one for himself. On either side of the Golden Gate Bridge he has constructed himself two temples where “Star Wars” is made and worshiped: at his Skywalker Ranch in Marin County and his newer office complex, the Letterman Digital Arts Center at the Presidio, he has gathered all manner of relics honoring his six-film saga, from the imposing (life-size replicas of the villains Darth Vader and Boba Fett) to the self-congratulatory (a Yoda fountain) to the self-deprecating (a carbonite block encasing the much loathed Jar Jar Binks).Like religious shrines, these buildings both consecrate and confine the man for whom they were built.
Using the freedom and the fortune he has amassed largely on the astronomical success of “Star Wars,” Mr. Lucas has accumulated unparalleled creative resources; his next film could be anything from a sweeping epic to one of the intimate personal narratives he has often said he would like to make. Instead his next two ventures will be “Star Wars” projects, no less ambitious than his previous films yet potentially less commercial. And they come at a time when even the “Star Wars” faithful wonder if Mr. Lucas’s continued mining of this fantasy world has anything more to yield.
A few weeks ago Mr. Lucas, who is 64 with a full white beard, was visiting his Presidio offices somewhat reluctantly, on a layover between the European and Japanese premieres of his latest “Indiana Jones” movie. “I love making movies; I’m not the biggest fan of selling them,” he said, seated in the librarylike Lucasfilm boardroom, stocked with books about real-world military history and novels like “Quo Vadis.” “But since I’m in the selling mood, that’s what you’re here for. I’m doing all my selling for two more weeks. Then I’m sold out.”
He was pitching a computer-generated animated movie called “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which Warner Brothers will release on Aug. 15 and which will introduce an animated television series with the same title that will have its debut on the Cartoon Network this fall.
Despite his vows to the contrary Mr. Lucas did not conclude his “Star Wars” epic with his 2005 film “Revenge of the Sith,” the third in a trilogy of prequel movies that grossed more than $1 billion in the United States alone. As far back as 2002 he was contemplating an animated series that would take place between Episodes II and III of his prequels, fleshing out the adventures of the Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (who is doomed to become the evil Darth Vader), and explore heroes, villains and planets glossed over in the prequel films.
For Mr. Lucas this was an opportunity to revisit imaginary turf that gives him great personal satisfaction. “Star Wars,” he said, is “a sandbox I love to play in.”
“It’s not a matter of trying to prove anything to anybody,” he added. “I don’t have to.”
But his enduring interest in “Star Wars” hints at a lesson that his filmmaking peers have already learned: that it is sometimes easier for them to make big movies than small ones. As his longtime friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg wrote in an e-mail message: “All of us would like to make these little personal films that sneak into theaters under the radar. Sadly, for George and myself, and others who have enjoyed and endured great success — ‘under the radar’ has become a no-fly zone.”
Mr. Lucas began pursuing his “Clone Wars” projects about three years ago when he summoned the technological might of his company’s research and development division to start building Lucasfilm Animation, now a pair of studios at Big Rock Ranch — part of Skywalker — and in Singapore. (Lucasfilm declined to discuss budgets, but Mr. Lucas said that building a similar operation in the 1980s — the era when he sold a start-up computer-animation business called Pixar to Steven P. Jobs — would have cost him $60 million to $100 million.)
Next he hired a team of young “Star Wars”-obsessed artists who revere Mr. Lucas as if he were Yoda himself.
“He’s the guy,” said Dave Filoni, director of the “Clone Wars” show and movie. “Chewbacca exists because he named him, thought him up, put him in the cockpit.”
The two men worked closely together (Mr. Filoni is a former director of the Nickelodeon action cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender”) to hone the anime-inspired look of “The Clone Wars” and develop scripts, often drawing upon unused ideas Mr. Lucas had been stockpiling since the original “Star Wars” was released in 1977.
Then Mr. Lucas took the unusual step of waiting until the first 22-episode season of “The Clone Wars” was nearly finished before pitching it to television networks in late 2007. There were no immediate takers. Fox Broadcasting, the sister company of 20th Century Fox, which released the live-action “Star Wars” movies, passed. And the Cartoon Network, which had broadcast a series of traditional 2-D animated shorts called “Star Wars: Clone Wars” from 2003 to 2005, was lukewarm about the project.
That tepidness may have stemmed from some viewers’ dissatisfaction with the “Star Wars” prequels, with their stilted dialogue and baffling politics. Or it may have indicated that “Clone Wars” wasn’t compatible with a prime-time network schedule. “It didn’t fit any of the molds that everybody had,” Mr. Lucas said. “It’s not ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ but at the same time it’s also not ‘Family Guy.’ ”
Mr. Lucas said that Warner Brothers became interested only after he decided to produce a theatrical “Clone Wars” film (having been encouraged by the animation results he saw), and the film studio convinced its corporate siblings at the Cartoon Network to give the television series another look. (Executives at Warner Brothers and the Cartoon Network, both divisions of Time Warner, gave slightly different chronologies but did not dispute this element of Mr. Lucas’s account.)
For Time Warner the “Clone Wars” collaboration is more than a one-time opportunity to share in the money-minting “Star Wars” franchise. “It’s the relationship with Lucasfilm that we’re very excited about,” said Dan Fellman, president for domestic distribution of Warner Brothers Pictures. “Not just on the Cartoon Network but possibly for live-action television down the road.”
Sure enough, Mr. Lucas is already developing a live-action “Star Wars” television series, and Time Warner would love to demonstrate that one of its cable channels (like TBS, TNT or HBO) could give it a good home.
But the question remains: Just because new “Star Wars” can be made, should new “Star Wars” be made?
Some “Star Wars” aficionados — even those who have worked with Mr. Lucas on “Star Wars” projects — are ambivalent about his continued plundering of a science-fiction property that has already spawned numerous comic books, video games and novels, not to mention six movies.
“I think it’s the easiest thing to do, because he doesn’t need to come up with a whole new thing; everything’s established,” said Genndy Tartakovsky, the animator who directed Mr. Lucas’s previous “Clone Wars” shorts for the Cartoon Network. Speaking as a fan, Mr. Tartakovsky said, “I appreciate that, but there’s so much more that he could explore.”
Mr. Lucas said he had no urgent or compelling reasons for returning to his most popular characters and mythologies, except that he can and enjoys doing so. As an illustration he pointed to his work with Mr. Spielberg on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
“I mean, why do we have to make another ‘Indiana Jones’?” Mr. Lucas said. “There was no point to it, other than, gee, this might be fun.”
But to the extent that “Star Wars” had kept him from fulfilling his promise to return to making more personal, smaller-scale films, Mr. Lucas lamented this distraction. “You get sidetracked easily,” he said with a chuckle. “I do, anyway.”
And he was deeply pessimistic about the marketplace he will face when he someday releases a movie that is not set in a galaxy far, far away. “Maybe it ends up in a festival somewhere,” he said. “Maybe it ends up in half a dozen theaters around the country for a couple weeks.”
As he so often does, Mr. Lucas took a lesson from the experience of his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola, whose most recent film, “Youth Without Youth,” received a small independent release that was hardly on the scale of his “Godfather” movies. (In the United States the film played in just 18 theaters and grossed less than $250,000.)
“Did you see it?” Mr. Lucas asked rhetorically. “Uh, no. Did you even know it came out?”
Responding to questions sent via e-mail Mr. Coppola agreed that the films he now makes, and that Mr. Lucas says he intends to make, had little chance at achieving blockbuster status. “We make films for ourselves,” he wrote. “If no one wants to see them, what can we do?” (With a parenthetical shrug, Mr. Coppola added: “Emotion does much better at the box office than philosophy.”)
Other former colleagues of Mr. Lucas argued that new “Star Wars” projects have provided technological boons for the entire film business, yielding Industrial Light and Magic, Mr. Lucas’s pioneering special-effects company, and EditDroid, the digital film-editing hardware that was a forerunner to the Avid editing system.
“He does it in a way that might begin as self-serving and then of course is a bonanza for the whole industry,” said Sid Ganis, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who was a Lucasfilm executive during the 1980s.
Mr. Ganis added that Mr. Lucas possessed “an intuition that he stubbornly sticks by.”
“There’s something in him, when you’re told, ‘No, it’ll never work,’ it’s motivation to keep it going,” he added.
And as Mr. Lucas would be the first to remind you, he has proved his detractors wrong many times in his career, from the film executives who thought “American Graffiti” would work better as a television movie to the industry colleagues who warned him not to finance “The Empire Strikes Back” with his profits from “Star Wars.”
When he works on the “Star Wars” properties he owns outright, Mr. Lucas has the freedom to ignore the input of others. In the case of “The Clone Wars” he is financing the series himself and charging Time Warner licensing fees to distribute the film and broadcast the show. (A person with knowledge of the company’s animation operations, speaking anonymously to avoid offending Mr. Lucas, said that the earliest episodes of “The Clone Wars” probably cost $750,000 to $1.5 million each.)
“It’s much easier for me to just do the show I want, say, ‘Here it is, do you wish to license it or not?’ ” Mr. Lucas said. “That’s it. There’s no notes, no comments. I don’t care what your opinion is. You either put it on the air or you don’t.”
But Mr. Lucas’s creative independence cannot shield him from the larger realities of the film business. He is not planning, at least right away, to go head to head with more established animation studios like DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar. The mid-August release of the “Clone Wars” movie — an unusually late date for a new “Star Wars” film — was scheduled in part to avoid competition with recent offerings from these studios.
It is also exceedingly likely that “The Clone Wars” will be the lowest-grossing “Star Wars” movie ever; Mr. Lucas said he would be satisfied if the film made $100 million domestically. (“Revenge of the Sith,” by comparison, grossed $380 million.)
When he is not, say, testifying before a House subcommittee about classroom technology or appearing at Cannes with his frequent companion, Mellody Hobson, the president of the investment firm Ariel Capital Management, on his arm, Mr. Lucas has plenty of new projects to keep him busy.
He is already working on the second and third seasons of “The Clone Wars” and forging ahead on his live-action “Star Wars” television show. Then, he said, he would seek other films and television series for his animation studio and continue to develop “Red Tails,” a long-in-the-works feature film about the Tuskegee Airmen that he is producing.
And after that, who knows?
Mr. Lucas pointed back to his very first feature film, “THX 1138,” a dystopian work of science fiction released in 1971, one that at the time he believed would be his one and only shot at directing a movie exactly as he envisioned it. (The movie’s critical and commercial reception very nearly proved him right.)
All that his wealth has bought him, Mr. Lucas said, is the opportunity to make more films the way he wants to. “I’ve got more shots,” he said. “I can go and make half a dozen ‘THXes.’ I’ll lose everything I put into them, guaranteed. But I can have a lot of fun doing it.”
Source : The New York Times June 29 2008
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