In 1997, John Seabrook visited George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and reflected on the lasting power—both mythical and commercial—of Star Wars. NewYorkerArchive
The biannual Star Wars Summit Meeting is an opportunity for the licensees who make Darth Vader masks and thirty-six-inch sculpted Yoda collectibles to trade strategy and say “May the Force be with you” to the retailers from F.A.O. Schwarz and Target who sell the stuff, and for everyone in the far-flung Star Wars universe to get a better sense of “how deeply the brand has penetrated into the culture,” in the words of one licensee.
Roffman warned the licensees not to flood the market with Star Wars merchandise this winter—maybe because he was concerned about damaging the prequel’s allure. He admitted that no one knew how well the “Special Edition” would do, because nobody has ever given a trilogy of movies already seen on television and video such a wide theatrical rerelease. Still, he believed that a lot of people would go to see “Star Wars” again, because seeing it for the first time had been such an important event.
Earlier, during a break, marketing reps from Hasbro had given all the members of the audience their own Luke Skywalker lightsabres, and at Lucas’s appearance people turned them on and waved them around. After they’d finished, Lucas said a few words about his reasons for wanting to rerelease the trilogy, which were chiefly that it would allow a new generation of fans to see the movies in theatres.
Some of Lucas’s friends told me that they thought the Ranch was George’s attempt to recapture not only America’s legendary Western past but his own past, especially his golden days at U.S.C. film school, in the sixties, when he was a protege of Coppola’s . He soon became friendly with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma. They were all young artists, who just wanted to make artistically worthy films and weren’t yet worried about topping one another’s blockbusters.
“I’ve always had a basic dislike of authority figures, a fear and resentment of grown-ups,” Lucas says in “Skywalking,” the 1983 biography by Dale Pollock . When the success of the first Star Wars film allowed Lucas to “control the means of production,” as he likes to say, he financed the second and third films himself, and he built the Ranch. In the beginning, the films edited at the Ranch were Lucas’s own: he was busy working on the Star Wars movies and overseeing the Indiana Jones series .
Lucas’s business success as the owner of Star Wars, however, has had the ironic result of taking him away from the thing that touched his audience in the first place. He told me he’d stopped directing movies because “when you’re directing, you can’t see the whole picture.” He explained, “You want to take a step back, be the over-all force behind it—like a television executive producer. Once I started doing that, I drifted further and further away.
I asked Sorensen to explain the extraordinary appeal of Star Wars, and he said, “I’m as perplexed by this as anyone, and I’m right in the midst of it. I travel all the time for this job, and I meet people abroad, in Italy, or in France, who are totally obsessed with ‘Star Wars.’ I met this Frenchman recently who told me he watches it every week. I don’t really think this is caused by some evil master plan of merchandisers and marketers.
The problems arise when Lucas has to slow down. In “Radioland Murders,” the characters have to carry the narrative, but Lucas couldn’t make this work, so he had to speed up the pace and turn the movie into farce. Also, because Lucas has little rapport with actors, his films tend to have only passable acting in them, which forces him to rely unduly on pace and editing. Mark Hamill once said, “I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George would do it.
The scripts for the prequel, which Lucas is finishing now, make it clear that Star Wars, taken as a whole story and viewed in chronological order, is not really the story of Luke at all but the story of Luke’s father, Anakin Skywalker, and how he, a Jedi Knight, was corrupted by the dark side of the Force and became Darth Vader. When I asked Lucas what Star Wars was ultimately about, he said, “Redemption.
He said that his intention in writing “Star Wars” was explicitly didactic: he wanted it to be a good lesson as well as a good movie. “I wanted it to be a traditional moral study, to have some sort of palpable precepts in it that children could understand. There is always a lesson to be learned. Where do these lessons come from? Traditionally, we get them from church, the family, art, and in the modern world we get them from media—from movies.” He added, “Everyone teaches in every work of art.
But Lucas added many small personal details to the story as well, which is part of what gives his creation its sensuous feeling of warmth. According to Pollock, the little robot is called R2-D2 because that was how Walter Murch, the sound editor on “American Graffiti,” asked for the Reel 2, Dialogue 2 tape when they were in the editing room one day, and for some reason “R2-D2” stuck in George’s mind.
“Marty had an anxiety attack is what happened,” Gloria Katz, Huyck’s wife and writing partner, put in. Huyck and Katz are old friends of Lucas’s, who cowrote “Graffiti” with him, and are the beneficiaries of George’s generous gift of two points of “Star Wars” for their help on the script. Katz: “We sat down to eat, and Brian started making fun of the movie. He was very acerbic and funny.”,” Huyck said. “You know, ‘Hey George, what were those Danish rolls doing in the princess’s ears?’ We all sat there very nervously while Brian let George have it, and George just sort of sank deeper into his chair. Brian was pretty rough. I don’t know if Marcia ever forgave Brian for that.”
Huyck suggested that one of the legacies of the trilogy’s success is that a movie as fresh and unknowing as “Star Wars” wouldn’t get made today. “Truffaut had the idea that filmmaking entered a period of decadence with the James Bond movies, and I’m not sure you couldn’t say the same thing about ‘Star Wars,’ though you can’t blame George for it,” he told me.
Take, for example, the I.L.M. model shop—a high-ceilinged space, full of creatures, ghosts, and crazy vehicles that were used in movies like “Ghostbusters” and “Back to the Future.” It’s like a museum of non-virtual reality. There are books on the torque capacity of different kinds of wrenches, cylinders of compressed gas, tools of all descriptions, and a feathery layer of construction dust covering everything.