One of my favorite novels is William Makepeace Thackery’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. I first got interested in it after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s amazing film adaptation, Barry Lyndon, which I didn’t really understand but which blew me away anyway. Like the movie, the book is a tragedy, the story of an honorable young man who slowly transforms into a selfish adventurer and scoundrel.
It’s a beautiful and rollicking novel, but the main reason I like it has to do with Thackery’s unusual take on the tragic hero. We were all taught in school that the reason a hero falls in a classic tragedy is because of some fatal flaw—some negative quality. But in Thackery’s vision, it is not Barry’s flaws that bring about his downfall, but rather his strengths. That is, the very qualities that bring him riches and fame in the short run—his intelligence, courage, and ambition—are the very qualities which lead to his eventual destruction.
It might seem melodramatic, but I was reminded of this idea as I read Brian J. Jones’s excellent biography, George Lucas: A Life. Although Jones never actually uses the term tragic hero in the book—to do so would be ludicrous in the case of an actual, living man, especially one as laid-back and funny as George Lucas—he nonetheless gives a sense of a person whose determination and genius have sometimes led him dangerously close to self-destruction.
The “tragic” aspect of Lucas’s life might not be obvious to most people, but the “hero” part certainly is. He created a new style of filmmaking, and in the process a new mythology, one based on hope, optimism, and faith. He is an artistic visionary whose intelligence and single-mindedness have placed him at the center of a pantheon of other artistic giants: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and many others.
And yet, as Jones’s book reveals, Lucas is a supremely complicated man who has had his share of grief, self-doubt, and even failure. In fact, with the exception of that one miraculous ten-year period—1973 to 1983—when Lucas created his greatest films, the bulk of his career was characterized by an almost unbroken stream of personal and professional disappointments. There was his box office bomb (Howard the Duck), his divorce, his gradual falling-out with many friends and mentors (Francis Ford Coppola included), and the stunning loss of one of the most profitable innovations in film (Pixar, which he created and then sold for a pittance).
And the strangest thing of all is that, as I suggested above, the same positive qualities that helped him create the definitive film of the 20th Century also led to many of these set-backs.
Chief among these qualities is his amazing creative talent, the ability to compose a stunning image in a movie frame. Second is his overarching single-mindedness, his need to engineer his creations down to the last detail. Who else could create a world as vivid and densely populated as that of Star Wars, where the droids are grungy and the spaceships look like they’ve been drag-racing all night?
Indeed, as Jones points out repeatedly throughout his book, Lucas’s primary concern during his career was not wealth, but control. This single-minded goal became evident to his friends early in his career, when he accepted a surprisingly low fee for directing the first Star Wars movie. Jones writes:
On August 1, 1973—as Lucas was still in the middle of negotiating his deal memo with Fox—came the release and near-overnight success of American Graffiti. Suddenly, Lucas was the hottest director in the industry. Fox executives might have worried that Lucas would attempt to leverage his newfound reputation into a higher director’s fee for The Star Wars—agent Jeff Berg was convinced that they could easily negotiate a fee of half a million dollars—but typically, Lucas didn’t want money; he wanted control. [Emphasis in the original.]
And so Lucas took a low-ball payment for helming his own picture, in lieu of greater control over the merchandizing rights and, most importantly, the creation of any sequels. The fact that Lucas had the vision to see a day when toys and other spin-offs would make almost as much money as the movie itself is a testament to his genius; like Henry Ford, he was always three-steps in front of everyone else.
One of those few people who could see where Lucas was heading was his friend, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg and Lucas had been friendly rivals since their college days (contrary to popular belief, they did not attend the same film school; Spielberg went to Cal. State.) Spielberg had done some earth-shaking of his own in 1975 with the release of Jaws, and he was so excited by Lucas’s idea for The Star Wars (the film’s original title) that he begged to be given a chance to direct one of the second units, a request which Lucas cordially refused. (Yes, you read that right—Lucas wouldn’t let Steven Spielberg help-out on his movie. Talk about the need for control!)
Spielberg, however, was just one of many divine helpers on the great journey that became Star Wars. Another was Francis Ford Coppola, an early mentor of Lucas who encouraged him to write his own scripts (a process which Lucas hated but did anyway). And, of course, Lucas was aided by his cast of unknown but first-rate actors—Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford—all of whom brought their own intelligence and soul to Lucas’s notoriously clunky scripts. (Fisher, in particular, was able to smooth-out his dialogue in the moment of delivery.)
Speaking of clunky scripts, Jones reveals one of the essential mysteries about George Lucas: namely, how could one of the greatest adventure stories of the 20th Century be created by a man who doesn’t like plots. “I find plots boring,” Lucas said, in a moment of candor that is borne out by his filmography. His earliest films—from his student work to the Warner Brothers-funded THX 1139—were essentially non-narrative works, or “tone poems” as Lucas himself described them. Even his first great success, American Graffiti, is primarily a character study, a snapshot in time of four kids in the early 1960s.
So how did Star Wars happen? For that matter, how did that other great mythology that Lucas created—Indiana Jones—happen? How did a man who hates plots create the great hero tale (the eternal monomyth, as Lucas’s idol, Joseph Campbell, would have called it) of his generation?
I have a theory. After reading Jones’s book, I believe that that the decade of Lucas’s greatest productivity was also the period where he had a lot of good friends in his life. Before he transformed into Charles Foster Kane holed up in his own private high-tech Xanadu (i.e., Skywalker Ranch), Lucas had real people he could relate to, friends who were almost as smart as him and could balance out his obsessions.
I’ve already mentioned Spielberg and Coppola, but even more important was Lucas’s wife, Marcia. Marcia Lucas is a world-class film editor who cut many of Martin Scorsese’s early movies, and it was her influence, I believe, that reigned in Lucas’s lurking monomania. It was she who told him that THX 1139 was “cold”; and it was she who re-edited the original cut of Star Wars, saving the picture by many accounts (she won an Oscar for it). I believe that it was Marcia’s humanizing influence on Lucas—and probably some of Spielberg’s, too—that brought out the best in him and his work.
When Marcia finally divorced him in 1983, Lucas began his long decline into self-indulgent techno-fetishism, the culmination of which was 1998’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace—a beautiful film, but with all the drama of a Verizon ad.
Fortunately, like Star Wars itself, Lucas’s life appears to be headed toward a happy ending. In his last Star Wars movie, The Revenge of the Sith, he was able to recapture some of his old dramatic instincts, sufficient to make a very good film, if not a great one. He got married again, to another smart and formidable woman, Mellody Hobson, and with her had another child (his first biological child). And, of course, he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for 4 billion dollars, making him the greatest living shareholder of Disney (Steve Jobs was first). Also, he is well on his way to becoming one of the greatest philanthropists of his generation.
Still, as Jones’s book makes clear, Lucas will always be that odd, nerdy genius who created both the coolest and the clunkiest movies ever to break the 100-million-dollar boxoffice mark. He’ll always be that guy teetering between the Light and the Dark Sides of the Force, somewhere between Flash Gordon and 2001: A Space Oddyssey. (Or, for that matter, between Spielberg and Jean-Luc Godard.)
In short, he’s a lot like many of his own fans. Only much, much smarter.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 