George Lucas - A Life

Brian Jay Jones

Headline, £20

Review by Allan Hunter

WHEN George Walton Lucas, Jr, graduated in August 1966 he knew exactly what the future held. He had decided to become a documentary cameraman and, if he was really lucky, he might be able to make his own movies on the side. It didn’t seem an unrealistic ambition. Given his fascination with the avant-garde, passion for editing, admiration for the French nouvelle vague and determination to make political statements, Lucas could well have wound up as the American Jean-Luc Godard or the next Slavko Vorkapich, a Serbian director whom Lucas greatly admired.There was little to suggest that his true destiny lay in becoming, along with his close friend Steven Spielberg, one of the masters of the modern Hollywood blockbuster.

Brian Jay Jones’ hefty life of the Star Wars creator is especially good on his early years, painting a fair-minded, often unflattering portrait of the young Lucas as someone who looked like a “diminutive Buddy Holly”, sounded like Kermit The Frog and was stuck “halfway between hipster and dude.” Every aspect of the adult Lucas’s personality and creative vision can be traced back to a childhood that was as comfortable as it was suffocating. Lucas grew up in small-town America during the blazing optimism of the Eisenhower presidency of the 1950s. His father ran a respected stationery business and was considered one of the pillars of the community. We are presented with a vision of white picket fences, rose trees in bloom and children playing safely on the front porch. It is hardly surprising that Lucas later collected original Norman Rockwell paintings. Lucas Sr believed that his son would follow in the family business. He would appear to have been a formidable figure. One childhood friend recalls: “Every time Mr Lucas came around, you just kind of hid.”

Tensions between father and son are a key element of the Indiana Jones films and are central to the whole sprawling saga of Star Wars. The pressure to conform to his father’s vision of the future sent Lucas in the opposite direction, determined not to join the family business, vowing to become a millionaire by the age of 30 and constantly seeking an independence that would put him beyond the control of any parent or boss. In terms of Lucas’s extraordinary career, Jones convincingly argues that his motivation has always been the pursuit of independence rather than the hunger for material wealth.

The vehicle that granted Lucas his independence was Star Wars and Jones rightly devotes a good deal of his book to the making of the film, capturing a potent sense of the graft and craft that ultimately convinced an exhausted Lucas that he never wanted to direct a film again. There are enough details on alternative casting possibilities to satisfy the most dedicated fan. How would director David Lynch have tackled The Return Of The Jedi? What kind of Han Solo would Al Pacino have made? Can we picture Jodie Foster as Princess Leia rather than the late Carrie Fisher? Jones weaves together all the influences great and small that combined to create the world of Star Wars from cliffhanging Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to beloved childhood comic books, the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the films of Akira Kurosawa. He also makes an astute point that in many ways Star Wars has to be seen in the context of the 1970s, providing a joyous burst of swashbuckling escapism to a nation bruised by Vietnam and Watergate. In 1976, American audiences flocked to Taxi Driver and All The President’s Men but when Star Wars was released in 1977 it was an antidote to a nation’s gloomy introspection.

Lucas likened the phenomenal success of the first Star Wars trilogy to “pushing a train slowly up a hill, then holding on for dear life as it careened down the other side.” The Star Wars success allowed Lucas to build an empire, funding pioneering work in digital editing technology, sound design, special effects and so much more. He occupies the same status as an Edison or a Disney.

Jones’ writing is sometimes only as interesting as the films themselves. The later stages of the book become a dutiful plod through lesser Lucas ventures from Howard The Duck to Radioland Murders. Lengthy sections on some of the technological advances that Lucas helped pioneer are decidedly dry.

Jones also tends to treat Lucas’s private life with kid gloves. We have a sketchy sense of a shy, private man more committed to his work than his personal relationships. There is a fleeting sense of the pressures put on his first marriage to editor Marcia Griffin. The fact that his five-year relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt went virtually under the radar speaks volumes about his need for privacy.

Over the past 20 years or so, Lucas has talked wistfully about a return to directing the kind of independent, avant garde films that he made as a student. His constant declarations make him sound like a Gatsby in search of his lost Daisy Buchanan. It also makes you wonder whether the success of Star Wars has been as much of a curse as a blessing. That question remains unanswered by Brian Jay Jones but his book provides plenty of insights into the working life and motivations of the man who made Star Wars and changed Hollywood moviemaking forever.