George Lucas Wants to Retire and Make Art Films

Last fall, my esteemed and wordy colleague Darren Franich posted an essay entitled “Stop hating George Lucas, and stop loving Star Wars so much: Why it’s time to grow up.” It was in reaction to the uproar surrounding Lucas’ decision to make Darth Vader say “Nooooo!” at the climax of Return of the Jedi, and it touched a nerve, inspiring mostly spirited and totally geeky online debate over whether Lucas’ many changes and alterations to the Star Wars films over the years had, in fact, ruined our childhoods.
Well, Lucas haters, you’ve gotten your wish: In a story appearing in the upcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine and posted online yesterday, the man who helped invent the modern summer movie blockbuster says he’s retiring from making big-budget feature films, including and especially any more Star Wars movies. “Why would I make any more,” he says in the story, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” Yes, anonymous fanboy commentors, George Lucas has read your Han-Solo-shot-first! screeds, and he’s taken it kinda personally: “I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.


Briefly mentioned in the Times piece is that Lucas has wanted to follow the path of fellow Bay Area director Francis Ford Coppola, who has begun to self-finance films. Twixt, which screened at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival and stars Val Kilmer as a third-rate mystery writer who encounters vampires, murderers and intermittent 3-D during a book tour stopover, isn’t a particularly good movie. But it is loose and personal (witness the scenes that flashback to what is essentially a recreation of the speed boating death of Coppola’s son Gian-Carlo) and was filmed on and around Coppola’s Northern California estate.


If Coppola — a man who has gone bankrupt at least twice and now uses the proceeds from his wine business to fund films — can get together some slightly washed up stars and make a film in his backyard, surely the eternally flush Lucas can do the same. He can probably shoot, edit, mix, and do all the sound effects right on his sprawling Skywalker Ranch. The fact that he wants to make “esoteric” films makes it even easier; 30 minutes of digital sunburst patterns, no people, no dialogue, no overhead. Done.


Though, as might be clear, we suspect he won’t do any of this. He’s talked this game for a while and the closest he’s come to “experimental” is the dialogue in the Star Wars prequels. If one of the wealthiest men in show business is unable to achieve his dreams, what hope do the rest of us have?