TOUR DE FORCE
IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY... MARION MCMULLEN LOOKS AT THE EMPIRE OF STAR WARS CREATOR GEORGE LUCAS AS HE TURNS 80
HOLLYWOOD legend George
Lucas has taken film lovers to a galaxy far, far away and also led them on a search for the Holy Grail, but once declared: “Making a film is like putting out a fire with a sieve. There are so many elements and it gets so complicated.”
No film studio was interested when he started writing the film script for an intergalactic saga which became Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
He had just enjoyed his first success with American Graffiti, an ode to American youth, which featured a young actor called Harrison Ford.
However, Star Wars was rejected by several film studios until 20th Century Fox decided to take a chance on the movie.
They did not expect it to do much at the box office and George agreed to a lower salary for a percentage of the film’s box office and all the merchandising rights instead.
Said George: “Nobody in their right mind thought American Graffiti or Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope would work.”
Of course, Star Wars became a world-wide blockbuster when it was released in 1977. It won seven
Oscars and made stars of its three lead actors – Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.
It was the first movie to make more than $500 million on its initial release and merchandise sales have brought in millions more over the years. George said: “I took over control of the merchandising not because I thought it was going to make me rich, but because I wanted to control it.
“I wanted to make a stand for social, safety and quality reasons. I didn’t want someone using the name Star Wars on a piece of junk.”
He worked on the original Star
Wars movies with his first wife Marcia, a film editor, but they divorced after the release of the trilogy.
George Walton Lucas was born 80 years ago on May 14, 1944. He originally wanted to race cars but his career path changed when he was hurt in a bad accident and spent a summer in hospital.
His debut in the film industry was marked by his close collaboration with The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, who helped him produce THX 1138 in 1971. It was adapted from one of George’s experimental short films made at the University of Southern California and was a science fiction story about a society under surveillance.
George said: “I was never interested in being powerful or famous, but once I got to film school and I learned about movies, I just fell in love with it.”
The success of the first Star Wars movie saw him build up a film empire through nine episodes of the saga – four of which he directed himself – in the space of 40 decades.
He also wrote the story for the first four Indiana Jones films,
again starring Harrison Ford, beginning with Raiders Of The Lost Ark in 1981. Harrison has called George “a fountain from which my career sprang, more or less”.
George’s unflagging passion for technology has made him one of the pioneers of the visual effects industry.
He founded Industrial Light & Magic and helped develop many new visual technologies, including the computer-assisted camera.
The “Abba-tars” of Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anni-frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog, specially created for the Abba show Voyage in London, were the work of an 850-strong team from Industrial Light and Magic.
He also contributed to the evolution of stereo through his company THX and formed Lucasfilms Ltd. He sold the latter to Disney in 2012 for more than $4 billion (£2.7 billion).
George’s nickname at school was Luke and he used it for the name of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars
films, while Indiana was the name of his own family dog. It inspired the name of adventurer Indiana Jones as well as the furry look of Star Wars Wookie Chewbacca.
Fans celebrate Star Wars Day
every May 4 (after the Star Wars
line, ‘May the force be with you’) and the fearsome Darth Vader has been called one of the top villains of the movie world.
The late Dave Prowse, the Bristol weightlifter-turned-actor inside the costume, was initially offered the choice of playing Han Solo’s furry sidekick Chewbacca or the villainous Sith lord and chose Darth
Vader, reportedly saying “Everyone remembers the villain, George.”
George and fellow director Steven Spielberg brought out eight of the 10 highest-grossing films fo the 1980s and were responsible for six of the ten highest-grossing films of the 1980s.
Ever modest, George himself once said: “I’m not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.”