on The Empire Strikes Back, ‘that Marcia wanted a particular painting for her birthday. She dropped hints and dropped hints and dropped hints, until she was sure even George had got the message. On her birthday, he said, “I’ve got a nice surprise for you.” As Marcia looked around for her painting, George said, “I’m going to have the roof fixed.”’
John Milius was on the road, and wondering why he bothered. He and George went back longer than almost anyone. Before Star Wars, before American Graffiti and THX1138, back to 1963, when Lucas was a weedy, close-mouthed kid from upstate California, sitting through the same courses at the film school of the University of Southern California. In the famous malapropism of producer Samuel Goldwyn, they had all passed a lot of water since then – and, in Milius’s case, put on a lot of weight. Except that his beard was gray, George still looked the same. But then, he would probably look the same when another twenty years had passed.
Milius assumed that their oldest mutual friend Francis Coppola wouldn’t be at the cook-out. The excuse would be the standard one – he was on location on some film. But everyone knew that the two men were no longer close, and that, even though Coppola’s vineyards were only a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, George and he seldom saw one another. With Lucas, some rivalries never went away: ‘I bear grudges,’ he has said.
Coppola had led the move away from Los Angeles. His company American Zoetrope in San Francisco was meant to create a new Hollywood in Marin County. For a while after its collapse, Milius and the rest of the group half-believed that Lucas might pick up where Coppola left off. The mansion he and Marcia bought on Parkway in San Anselmo as headquarters for Lucasfilm might have been the beginning of an atelier, a collaborative film enterprise like Laterna, the Swedish studio-in-a-mansion which inspired Francis to found Zoetrope. But once Star Wars started earning, George bought the 1700-acre Bulltail Ranch. In 1979, he received planning permission to begin creating Skywalker.
The ranch, Lucas explained, would give him the freedom to make ‘my little films,’ abstract, experimental films that would ‘show emotions.’ Star Wars, he insisted, was only a means to an end. It would buy his way out of big-time cinema. He envisaged a ‘retreat [with] a rich Victorian character, [containing] film-research and special-effects facilities, art/writing rooms, screening rooms, film-editing areas, film libraries, a small guesthouse, and a recreation area complete with handball courts, tennis courts, and a swimming pool.’ His scheme would use only 5 percent of the land area, he said; the rest would remain agricultural.
But old friends like Gary Kurtz, Lucas’s one-time producer, watched with growing alarm as this vision metamorphosed into something closer to the private empire of Howard Hughes. ‘As the bureaucracy got bigger and bigger,’ says Kurtz, ‘George seemed to vacillate back and forth between wanting to control everything absolutely, make all the decisions himself, and being too busy to be bothered. He was busy working on his writing and other creative things, and he left his managers to deal with all that. Then he would come back in and want to be in control again, and that kept going back and forth a lot. Frustrating for a lot of people.’
That Lucas regarded the ranch as his monument became clear when, at the 1982 cook-out, a time capsule was ritually interred under the Main House, containing relics of what he hoped would become known as the Lucas Era. They included a microfilmed list of every member of the Star Wars Fan Club. He also called in Eric Westin, the designer of Disneyland, to manage the estate.
He hired helpers like Jane Bay. Once secretary to Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia pictures, and later assistant to Californian governor Jerry Brown, Bay was just the sort of management professional Lucas might have been expected to avoid. Shortly after, investment banker Charles Weber became president and chief operating officer of Lucasfilm. He imported studio veterans like Sidney Ganis as his deputies, driving out some of those who had been with Lucas through the long and painful gestation of Star Wars. Since then, Lucas had taken back control of the company, dispensing with Weber and appointing himself chairman of the board. ‘Critical observers feel, however,’ commented the Los Angeles Times tartly, ‘that if Lucas goes too far out of the Hollywood mainstream, he may end up chairman of the bored.’
These days, Lucas spent his days in a small house on the estate with his three adopted children, only visiting the Main House on semi-ceremonial occasions. Security at the ranch had increased. ‘The last thing we want,’ said Lucas in justification of the fencing and electronic surveillance, ‘is people driving up and down the road saying, “They made Star Wars here.”’ He hated being interviewed or photographed. ‘I am an ardent subscriber to the belief that people should own their own image,’ he said, ‘that you shouldn’t be allowed to take anybody’s picture without their permission. It’s not a matter of freedom of the press, because you can still write about people. You can still tell stories. It just means you can’t use their image, and if they want you to use their image, then they’ll give you permission.’
His public pronouncements had come to have overtones of the messianic. In 1981, breaking ground on the new USC Film School, to which he contributed $4.7 million, he lectured the audience on their moral shortcomings: ‘The influence of the Church, which used to be all-powerful, has been usurped by film. Films and television tell us the way we conduct our lives, what is right and wrong. There used to be a Ten Commandments that film had to follow, but now there are only a few remnants, like a hero doesn’t shoot anybody in the back. That makes it even more important that film-makers get exposed to the ethics of film.’
By 1 p.m., most of the guests had arrived and were assembled on the lawn in front of the Main House. At his first cook-out, in 1980, Lucas took the opportunity to hand bonuses to everyone who’d worked with him that year, down to the janitors. Actors and collaborators were given percentage points in his films, and he exchanged points with old friends like Steve Spielberg and John Milius. Overnight, actors like Sir Alec Guinness became millionaires.
There was nothing of that informality and generosity in the cook-out today. Replacing it was something closer to a royal garden party, or the rare personal appearance of a guru. Softly-spoken staff chivvied the guests into roped-off areas, leaving wide paths between.
‘George will be coming along these lanes,’ they explained. ‘You’ll have a good chance to see him. If you just move behind the ropes, and please stay in your designated area …’
Old friends exchanged significant glances; evidently George shunned physical contact as much as ever. Hollywood mythology also enshrines the moment when Marvin Davis, the ursine oilman who bought Twentieth Century-Fox in the eighties, met Lucas and, overcome with appreciation, picked him off his feet and hugged him. Lucas, it’s said, ‘turned red, white and blue.’
A moment after his acolytes had passed through the crowd, the host emerged onto the verandah of the Main House. Flanked by his trusted inner group, he moved to the top of the steps and stood expressionless just out of the early-afternoon sun.
It looked like the old George. Grayer, of course, and plumper, but still in the unvarying uniform of plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers, draped over the same short body.
John Milius was a connoisseur of excess. He had penned Colonel Kilgore’s speech ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like … victory,’ in Apocalypse Now; Robert Shaw’s reminiscence in Jaws of the USS Philadelphia going down off Guadalcanal, and the slaughter of its survivors by sharks; the bombast of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian.
‘I remember one time I was with Steven and Harrison Ford,’ Milius recalled. ‘These people were coming around and saying, “You can be in this line, and you’ll be able to see George if you’re over here,” and moving us around.’
On that occasion, Milius’s mind had flashed to other examples of the cult of personality. Preacher Jim Jones in Guyana, for instance, and those shuddering TV images of bloated bodies fanning out from the galvanized washtubs from which they’d dipped up their last drink of sugar water and strychnine. ‘If George gets up there and starts offering Kool Aid,’ Milius muttered to Ford and Spielberg, ‘I’m bailing out.’
They all laughed,