George Lucas: A Life

This week’s show isn’t about a film so much as it is about a filmmaker, specifically about a book written about that filmmaker. Not to steal John Augustine’s book review thunder from the very good Lifelines, but this week I want to talk about the excellent biography by Brian Jay Jones called George Lucas: A Life. Everyone knows George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars and co-creator of Indiana Jones, the guy responsible for the joy of the original Star Wars trilogy and the agony of the prequel trilogy. In this zippy but comprehensive telling of the man’s life, Brian Jay Jones lays out the familial, financial, creative, and personal circumstances that led George Lucas to become arguably one of the single-most influential figures in modern film history.

Clocking in at nearly five hundred pages, the book tracks Lucas’s entire life, from his parents establishing their family in pleasant, little Modesto, California before George was ever born all the way to Lucas as a billionaire in his seventies, retired and living the life of a philanthropist.

George Lucas: A Life, is not a hatchet job, by any means. On the contrary, it acknowledges Lucas’s many industry-defining choices that have shaped how movies are shot, distributed, displayed, and marketed. Jones obviously admires Lucas’s work and has respect for the empire (pardon the pun) the man has created. But Jones is also clear-eyed about his subject and isn’t afraid to draw out the themes he sees at work throughout Lucas’s life – specifically, his dissatisfaction with basically everything and his profound need for control.

Jones connects the dots between Lucas adamantly refusing to be part of his dad’s stationary business as a young man, his obsessive work ethic once he found his calling as a filmmaker at USC in the 1960s, his fury and disgust at having his early films altered by bottom-line driven studio executives, and Lucas’s lifelong quest to be completely independent of Hollywood studios or really any kind of restriction from anyone when it came to his films. Lucas was furious when studios removed four minutes apiece from his first two films, THX1138 and American Graffiti. He was just a newbie director and studios had all the power. But later when Star Wars became a worldwide phenomenon, rather than use his newfound fame to bargain for more money up front, George Lucas asked for and got control – most significantly, final editing decisions on his films and control over marketing and merchandising. That early foresight are part of why we have Lucasfilm LTD still producing Star Wars movies forty years later, digital projectors and THX Sound systems in theaters, and Industrial Light and Magic as the foremost special effects company in the world. Lucas’s stubborn insistence that his way, his preferences, his control were superior made him wealthy and remarkably influential.

The book covers many of the events that most Lucas fans already know: his catastrophic car crash as a young man, his student days at USC making “experimental” films, the long series of disasters that accompanied the production of the first Star Wars movie, his partnerships with Coppola and Spielberg, and the financial success but critical failure of the prequel trilogy – and does so in fascinating detail. But the book also covers smaller, lesser known but equally interesting parts of the filmmaker’s life: the acrimony of his divorce from his first wife, the completely unconventional way he chose to produce and sell The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tv show and how its successful use of digital backgrounds led to making the little seen Radioland Murders. That film was the first in which only partially constructed sets were filled in with digital imagery. It was that early success that eventually convinced Lucas the technology was where it needed to be in order for him to return to the world of Star Wars.

The book concludes with details about the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Lucas’s marriage to businesswoman Mellody Hobson, and the birth of their first child together, just as Lucas turned 69 years old.

Jones’s prose is clean and his research is impeccable. His book, George Lucas: A Life, is an excellent read for anyone with even a passing interest in the development of modern Hollywood filmmaking as we know it.