I've Got to Get My life Back Again

By Gerald Clarke

After his labors, the mythmaker plans to rest and perhaps retire

From his office window, George Lucas looks out over a pleasant little valley to a pleasant little mountain, Mount Tamalpais. Small as it is, this friendly peak has an important if unheralded role in his life: it blocks the summer fog that often rolls in from San Francisco, eleven miles to the south, and makes the side on which Lucas lives and works that much sunnier.

Mount Tamalpais is only one reason Lucas has for rejoicing. Here, in no particular order, are some of the others:

He shares with his friend Steven Spielberg (E.T.) the title "Mr. Blockbuster." Besides Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, which rank No. 2 and No. 3 in receipts, he drew up the plot of and produced No. 5, Raiders of the Lost Ark. In addition, an earlier film, American Graffiti (1973), loosely modeled on his own adolescence in Modesto, Calif., ranks as one of the most profitable films in Hollywood history. It cost Universal Pictures only $780,000 to produce, but it has already returned $145 million worldwide.

Besides making money, the Star Wars pictures changed the way moviemakers look at film and created a new vision of ancient mythological themes that has deeply affected a whole generation of children. What Walt Disney was to the children of the '30s, '40s and '50s, Lucas is to those of the late '70s and '80s. "George has been able to hook into some very basic universal images," says Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the Jedi script with him. "Tying into these images isn't always conscious, and part of George's gift is his being able to use everything he has ever experienced or been exposed to. He is able to draw on the feelings he may have had when he was twelve or much younger."

Lucasfilm and its various divisions, like Industrial Light and Magic, are doing well. I.L.M., for example, has created special effects not only for Lucas' films but for others too, including Star Trek II and E.T. The company spends about $3 million a year on research and development of things like better sound systems for movie theaters, and it is pioneering the art of film far more than any of the Hollywood studios. Even after generous profit deals for his stars and associates (Mark Hamill, for instance, will receive 1.5% of the profits of Return of the Jedi), Lucas has kept enough for himself, roughly $20 million, to provide the ordinary domestic comforts.

Beyond all that, he has an apparently blissful marriage, a charming, attractive wife Marcia, 37, and an adopted daughter Amanda, who is two and whom he seems to worship. As he celebrated his 39th birthday last week, just eleven days before the release of his latest and perhaps most successful picture, he had every reason to celebrate. Why, then, as he sits down to talk on this fresh spring day, his office deliciously perfumed by a bowl of giant, sinfully luscious strawberries, is he so gloomy, so unhappy, so downright miserable?

First of all, he is tired, still groggy from jet lag. He has just returned from Sri Lanka, where he was working on Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom, the sequel to Raiders. Second of all, he is worried about the reception of Jedi. "What if we have finally got to the end of the shaggy-dog story," he asks, "and everybody says, 'That's it?' Technically and logistically, this was the hardest of the three films to make, and all I see is the mistakes and the stuff that doesn't work." Only 5 ft. 7 in. and always slight, Lucas has lost 20 lbs. in the past six months of work and worry. The way he talks, the sheriff will be at his door May 26 if there are not long lines outside theaters when Jedi opens May 25.

But there is more to Lucas' bleak expression than weariness or worry. There is a fundamental, existential malaise, and as he describes it, the telling of the Star Wars saga has taken a terrible toll on him. "The sacrifice I've made for Star Wars may have been greater than I wanted," he says. "After Graffiti, Star Wars could have gone in the toilet and it wouldn't have mattered financially. It's an interesting choice I made, and now I'm burned out. In fact, I was burned out a couple of years ago, and I've been going on momentum ever since. Star Wars has grabbed my life and taken it over against my will. Now I've got to get my life back again--before it's too late!

"Ever since I was in film school in the '60s, I've been on a train. Back then I was pushing a 147-car train up a very steep slope--push, push, push. I pushed it all the way up, and when Star Wars came along in 1977,1 reached the top. I jumped on board, and then it started going down the other side of the hill. I've had the brakes on ever since. My life since Star Wars has been spent pulling back on all these levers, trying to stop the train from going down this very steep slope, with the wheels screaming and screeching all the way. It's been work, work, work."

What that has meant in practical terms has been long stretches of getting up at 5 a.m., coming home at 8:30 p.m. or later, and no more than five hours of sleep. "People usually don't understand the implications of what I'm saying," he insists, "but they are awesome! It's one thing to talk about it; it's another to actually live your life that way. After a while it just gets to be grim. I'm not going to turn around 16 years from now and have my 18-year-old daughter say, 'Hi, Dad, where have you been all my life?' So I'm about to jump off the train. I've got this slim chance right now to decide what I want to do."

One decision Lucas has already made: to place Lucasfilm on hold and take a two-year sabbatical. His company will continue--he is not intimately involved in its day-to-day operations anyway--and he will finish his duties as co-executive producer of the Indiana Jones film. But that, he maintains, will be all. He will spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies. He will also read and write, retreating to what Marcia calls his "treehouse environment," a little suite in a former carriage house a few steps away from the rest of their Victorian-style home in San Anselmo. There, near his Mickey Mouse phone, his Wookie pencil holder and his telescope, he has books on mythology, like Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and five three-ring notebooks, in which he has written notes on the history of Star Wars, past, present and future.

The films that record what went on in the beginning--if they are ever made--will be altogether different in look and tone from the existing trilogy, says Lucas. They will be more melodramatic, showing the political intrigue and Machiavellian plotting that led to the downfall of the once noble Republic. They will have only enough outward action to keep the plot moving. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the elderly Jedi who was played by Alec Guinness in the Star Wars series, and Darth Vader will be seen as younger men, while Luke Skywalker may make a brief appearance as a baby in Episode III.

The sequels, the three movies that would follow Jedi, are considerably vaguer. Their main theme will be the necessity for moral choices and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong. There was never any doubt in the films already made; in those the lines were sharply drawn, comic-book-style. Luke, who will then be the age Obi-Wan Kenobi is now, some place in his 60s, will reappear, and so will his friends, assuming that the creator decides to carry the epic further. Hamill and the others will get first crack at the roles--if they look old enough.

The abundant fantasy on the screen is a mere sliver of Lucas' imaginary universe. Behind any creature may be a little volume of fable or cultural anthropology. Chewbacca is a favorite of Lucas', and he can go on and on about the Wookie tribe. They come from a damp jungle planet where they reside in tree houses and live to be 350 years old. The six-breasted females deliver their offspring in litters. After an invasion by Imperial forces, which may be alluded to in the "prequel," the Wookies were rounded up by slave traders and sold throughout the Empire. Chewy was rescued by Han Solo and installed as his copilot. Got that?

If the saga sometimes sounds like a comic book or a children's TV serial, magnified a thousand times over, it is no accident. Lucas grew up on both. His father George Sr., who owned a prosperous stationery store in Modesto, was a rigorous man who tried to teach his son and three daughters the old-fashioned virtues: early to bed, early to rise; be true to yourself; work hard, be frugal. His father was convinced that the son paid no attention. "He never listened to me," says George Sr. "He was his mother's pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it. He was hard to understand. He was always dreaming up things."

"A scrawny little devil," as his father remembers, George was a target for neighborhood bullies, who would throw his shoes into the sprinkler and tease him until his younger sister Wendy chased them away. A terrible student (the loyal Wendy would sometimes get up at 5 a.m. to correct misspellings in his English papers), he found comfort in fantasy. Whenever he or Wendy got a dollar, they would march down to the drugstore and buy ten comic books, which they would then read in a shed behind their stucco house on Ramona Avenue. Several carloads of comics were passed on to his sister Ann's children a few years ago, but they have since been returned to George, a legacy perhaps for his own daughter. When he was ten or so, TV replaced the comics, and he would spend Saturday mornings watching cartoons, his black cat Dinky draped round his neck.

In his teens Lucas did what most other boys did in Modesto: cruised the streets. Nearly killed when he crashed his Fiat into a walnut tree, he missed his high school graduation and took four months to recuperate. When he was able to function again, he attended Modesto Junior College for two years, then went to the film school of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. At U.S.C., Lucas finally came into his own. "He played with the concepts, he was free, he said we can do anything," says Classmate John Milius, director of Conan the Barbarian. "In those days we really felt we were going to change everything, that we were going to make the greatest art. And we did to a degree."

After graduation in 1966, Lucas worked as an assistant to Francis Coppola, who was directing Finian's Rainbow. Coppola, who remains a friend, later helped him find backing for his feature, THX 1138 (1971), a chilling look at a futuristic world in which people live underground and numbers have replaced names. American Graffiti came next. Its success persuaded 20th Century-Fox to invest money in Lucas' strange script about chirping robots, Jedi knights and a form of hocus-pocus called the Force.

What Lucas has done in the Star Wars films is rather like what his father did over dinner in Modesto. While providing entertainment, he has tried to instill in the young the old-fashioned virtues. "A lot of the stuff in there is very personal," he says. "There's more of me in Star Wars than I care to admit. I was trying to say in a very simple way, knowing that the film was made for a young audience, that there is a God and there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you're on the good side. It's just that simple." Luke is his alter ego, and it is no coincidence that he chose Mark Hamill, an actor who is about his own height, to play the last of the Jedi knights, or that he named the character Luke in the first place. Does Lucas really believe in the Force? "George says he doesn't, because he thinks people will consider him a freak if he does," says his wife. "But deep down, part of his unconscious believes in it, I think."

A man with such beliefs should have simple habits, and Lucas does. He dresses casually and inexpensively, in corduroys, jeans or khakis, tennis shoes and sleeveless sweaters. The Lucas house, which was built in 1869, is large and comfortable, with a spacious view, but the pleasant middle-class neighborhood is not the kind of area successful film makers usually choose. Only rarely do the Lucases, who have been married since 1969, even visit Los Angeles, where some people make movies.

Marcia is a talented film editor, with credits on Taxi Driver and New York, New York, as well as Star Wars, for which she shared an Oscar. On Jedi she was chiefly responsible for the emotional scenes, the "dying and crying," as her husband says. "I love film editing," she says. "I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair. I think I'm even an editor in life." She has taken charge of the layout and decoration of Lucasfilm's offices, creating a remarkably pleasant work space, with light, airy offices and numerous, much used kitchens for the employees.

Describing their life, her husband says, "We're basically simple people, with simple wants and needs."

Hamill remembers once being invited out to dinner by Lucas, only to be taken to the local Taco Hut. "I should have known," he says ruefully, "that George wouldn't go to a place with tablecloths and waiters."

Lucas says that his two-year sabbatical could be extended for the rest of his life. He would be happy, he claims, to do nothing more than be with his family, read and watch over the development of his center for creative film makers, a 3,000-acre complex--called Skywalker Ranch, naturally--a few miles north of Lucasfilm. Will he retire? Most of his friends doubt it. "Every time George is making a film, he talks about retiring and never working again," says Spielberg. "But the minute it is finished, he is already thinking up his next opus. I can see him running Lucasfilm, making three to five pictures a year, and then some day returning to directing, which is where I think he belongs. I believe his destiny is behind the camera."

Ironically, says Spielberg, Lucas probably does not fully comprehend why the Star Wars saga has generated so much affection among its huge following. "When you get close to something, you never see the magic," he says. "You only see it through the eyes of the audience." Soon Lucas will have that opportunity once again.

--By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.