My thoughts on George Lucas

This is part 2 of 4 loosely related posts.

Part 1: RIP Star Wars

Because Star Wars was such a big part of my childhood, I felt it necessary to put my analysis (or a post-mortem, if you will) of how the franchise has turned out, and how its creator influenced it. Before Disney bought Lucasfilm, this is basically what I thought of him: George Lucas is a terrific story teller and a great producer. But he’s not a particularly good director or writer of dialogue. He needs to be reined in a little bit to make greatness happen. Let’s go though things somewhat chronologically.

The first thing he did of major note was American Graffiti. He was in the middle of production of Star Wars when it was released, and its success earned him back the rights to the property (including merchandising) from 20th Century Fox. Given that the subject of the film is something that most of

the actors had experienced for themselves (namely, the last night of summer before officially becoming an adult), it probably wasn’t hard for them to recreate it sufficiently up to George’s vision, and he probably had to do less direction/communication than he did on other projects.

On Star Wars, he had a vision that nobody else had. As one producer put it, he was changing the world and nobody else knew it yet. Because of this he had to plough through and hope he finished it to his liking. If you notice, there is a lot of clunky dialogue in Episode IV. Granted, some of it is expository to explain the rules of lightspeed travel to the audience, for example. But because the special effects, world building, and concept were so revolutionary, it’s easy to forgive its shortcomings. But it should be noted that he wrote and directed it himself, and did a lot of oversight on the special effects team and editors. Harrison Ford famously said that the saying on set was that you can write this stuff, but you can’t say it (speaking of the dialogue), and that Lucas’ most common direction was, “Great. Let’s do another one but faster and more intense.” He also said that George wasn’t great at communicating exactly what he wanted to the actors. He had written down what he imagined/envisioned, and it was right there on the page, so the actors should just do . . . that. It annoyed him to no end that they had their own vision/version of how the character would act or say things. 

(In retrospect, this is probably why he invested so much money into CG and founded Pixar – so he could eliminate the actor side of the business)
Even on the Episode I documentary, there were things that his team did that he didn’t like because (I assume) he couldn’t really communicate it well. To get the idea to the editors and special effects team what he wanted exactly on the first Star Wars film, he had to edit together old movies together because he couldn't verbally communicate it to his underlings. Anyhow, John Williams did the music for the movie and it helped the film immeasurably. 

Now comes Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. George came up with the story, but hired Irvin Kershner to direct the film with Lawrence Kasdan to be the script supervisor. There are a couple of things that Kasdan changed to tighten things up, and a few changes that Kershner made that cut out some of the cheese and camp. For example, he changed the interactions between Han and Leia when she said she didn’t trust Lando, and also let Harrison Ford ad lib his own response to Leia’s profession of love before being frozen. While I’m sure there were a few things that bugged George about the final result (because they changed a couple of lines of dialogue from what he originally wanted), the movie was a masterpiece. It improved upon almost everything from the first movie.

The next major film he did was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like Empire, Lucas did the story, Spielberg did the directing, Kasdan did the script supervising, Ford did the acting, and Williams did the music. Again, greatness came about.

Then Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi was made. Everything was kept the same except Irvin Kershner was replaced by Richard Marquand. There was some drama in the directors guild that forced Lucas to hire a non-DGA director who could handle this size and type of film, and it severely limited his choices. Originally it was going to be Spielberg, but the aforementioned drama prevented it. What this meant was that Marquand wasn’t as qualified and probably wasn’t as confident to overrule Lucas on certain things. Lucas said that he ended up having to do a lot of things himself because Marquand wasn’t quite up to the challenge, and Lucas essentially ended up ghost-directing it. But the movie was still great, but it did have a few things reminiscent of Episode IV dialogue-wise.

The next two Indiana Jones films had more or less the same setup – Lucas doing the story, Spielberg directing, someone else established doing the screenplay, Williams on music, and Harrison Ford starring, and both films were excellent. Between 3 Star Wars and 3 Indiana Jones films, it seemed like Lucas could do no wrong. And that was the magic formula – Lucas with story/concept, an experienced director to communicate to the actors, someone experienced supervising the screenplay/script, and John Williams doing the music. Willow also followed this formula, with John Williams’ absence being the only exception.

One thing to note here is that Lucas disliked the old studio system of making movies for a lot of reasons. But using the money he made, he essentially set up his own studio that had its own FX department (ILM), sound department (Skywalker Sound), music department (Bantha Music), computer animation department (Pixar), and other sub companies like THX, and he invented non-linear editing and sound machines called EdiTroid and SounDroid. These inventions and subsidiaries revolutionized a lot of the movie industry. The irony is that he had become the thing he hated.

Ever since then, he's been tinkering with the Star Wars movies. He's a big believer in the concept of not ever finishing a project, just abandoning one. He made the special editions that re-integrated some previously cut scenes and re-doing some of the special effects shots with modern tech. Maybe I'll do a video about those someday. But in any case, there are some clear examples where the special editions make it better and some where the changes make it worse. 

Fast forward to the late 90’s, when Lucas begins work on Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Understandably, there was a lot of excitement and hype over this movie. I was personally very worried that he would have gone to the well one too many times and would ruin the legacy of Star Wars being such a good trilogy. Apparently he tried to find someone to direct, but got turned down, so he did it all himself – just like Episode IV. He wrote and directed with no script supervisor, and had a nearly unlimited budget. Since he essentially had his own studio, he was surrounded by yes-men who didn’t want to get in the way of the master. 

And that’s what went wrong with the Prequels. I think had he had the oversight and collaboration of some others, they would have turned out much better. I think there was a good origin story of Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi somewhere in there, but the execution wasn’t quite up to par, and there was a lot of clunky dialogue. He relied too much on special effects, blue screen, and sword choreography to mask the shortcomings. There was a misfire on a particular character in particular (Jar-Jar Binks), and I kinda felt that Lucas had painted himself into a corner a bit because he had to have 3 movies to accomplish certain things mentioned in the OT, like Anakin being a pilot (hence the Podracing) and how the old government worked. To be fair, his original story was far too long for a single movie, so he cut it up and originally made the most exciting piece because he didn’t think the others would be made. So by definition, these parts should be less interesting. But I will say that they got better – 2 was better than 1, and 3 was better than 2.

Whatever problems the prequels may have had, they still felt like Star Wars, though. The characters and ideas fit into and were consistent in the universe that Lucas had made.

Admittedly, I never got into the Expanded Universe (EU), which is all of the books and comics that were made in the wake of such a popular franchise. From what I heard, Lucas approved stuff before it was made, and he had certain topics that he wouldn’t let authors broach (like Han and Chewie’s past), but I’m not sure how true that is/was.

For some reason, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had the same magic formula but turned out to be a heaping pile of dung. Between the 3 Star Wars Prequels and now this Indiana Jones film not being as good, perhaps it could be said that Lucas had exceeded his expiration date.

Part 3: Disney-era Star Wars and SJWs

Part 4: Fandoms