On May 14th, George Lucas turned eighty. A remarkable achievement from a human point of view, but even more so from an artistic, cinematographic and, dare we say, cultural point of view. Many more expert and worthy names than us have written everything and more about Lucas’ adventure as a filmmaker, the revolution he brought to cinema and the intuitions that took him to the highest peaks of production.
Faced with the proposal to celebrate the eight decades just completed by the Jedi Master par excellence, we decided to follow a less traveled but perhaps more heartfelt path, underlining how George Lucasover the course of these eighty years, has not only played the role of trailblazer and visionary from the point of view of direction, screenplay and film production, but has managed to grasp, express and embody what has been the deepest feeling and more intense than the era in which he lived, to embody and describe the vices and virtues of American culture and, by osmosis, of the rest of the world.
The fifties: at the roots of the myth
“The child is the father of the man,” goes the saying. The years that saw little Lucas grow up in the quiet town of Modesto in the Californian province, as part of a family that ran the town’s general store and that seemed like the embodiment of the Kents of Smallville, were in a certain sense those that would define the whole his creative path. Lucas grows up with superhero comics and pulp adventures, science fiction stories and serial screenings in cinemas on Saturday mornings. He absorbs, gets excited and dreams in a world of adventures that “the grown-ups” at best look at with a smug smile and at worst brand as childish or harmful. But for little Lucas they are the key to redemption to escape from the monotony of a small and repetitive daily life: he continues to dream and treasures it. And together with him, perhaps quietly just like him, the same happens to his entire generation.
The sixties: the anxieties of youth
Accustomed as we are to imagining Lucas as a shy, taciturn and shy young man, it is difficult for us to imagine him as a restless and reckless teenager in search of the strong emotions that mark the passing of the adolescence years. A Fiat Bianchina crumpled during a reckless race from which the young Lucas is extracted battered but miraculously alive tell us the opposite. These are the years of protest and Woodstock, but also of Kennedy’s “Camelot” which incites America to dream big, and if in childhood the desire for greatness could be kept at bay or find outlet in fantasy stories, now he moves restlessly between the banalities of a daily life that is always the same and the longing for something more. And if a mythology that makes life great cannot be found, the very banality of the province is transformed into mythology: everything is told with the wealth of detail that only those who have experienced those emotions firsthand can afford in American Graffiti.
The seventies: the bet
The dreams of childhood and the rebellion of adolescence come together in a synthesis that changes the history of cinema. To all intents and purposes, the seventies would be rowing in a completely different direction. America is exhausted and disheartened by a war in Vietnam which exposed its failures, Nixon’s scandals have reduced belief in the American dream to a minimum, the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King have taught Americans that it is better keep quiet instead of dreaming or thinking big. Even in the film industry, disaster films are the most popular, from The Crystal Hell to Jaws. Lucas would have a much easier time as a young director if he just went with the flow, but he decides to go against the grain. He knows that the adventure, the humour, the amazing feats and the fantastic scenarios that made him dream as a child and that kept the dream alive in him can rekindle the spark in others too and he literally plays everything to give back to cinema and to the public the innocence of the fairy tale and the joy of the pure and uncontaminated adventure of the past with Star Wars. He emerges worn out, exhausted by the thousand battles waged to bring the film home, but he is the turning point that changes the direction of cinema and perhaps literally restores “a new hope” to America.
The eighties: the other roads
Having completed the stellar trilogy, an undertaking that consecrates his success but which in some respects leaves him even more worn out and exhausted, Lucas decides to turn the page and abandons the ways of the Force to try to apply the lessons learned with Star Wars to other initiatives some triumph, such as Indiana Jones made with his friend Steven Spielberg, but more generally, even if in the following years the gentlemanly time will make his works from this period cults appreciated by more limited sections of the public (Labyrinth, Willow and the discussed Howard the Duck), the magic formula that had consecrated Star Wars is not easy to reproduce with equal success in other fields. Ironically, better luck will be had by other productions by friends and competitors who, having discovered the general public’s hunger for fantasy, will be able to follow Lucas’s path “in their own way”, from Milius’s Conan to the various Robocops and Terminators, from Boorman’s Excalibur to Dante’s Gremlins up to Zemeckis’ Back to the Future.
The nineties: the return of the Force
The “life beyond Star Wars” that Lucas aspired to as a director and producer never seems to arrive and the creator, weakened by the irrelevance that other experimental projects to which he had dedicated himself have achieved, begins to understand that his creative destiny is inextricably linked to the saga that launched him towards success: every other production will always carry with it the original sin of having “delayed” the continuation of the stellar saga. This awareness, together with (or at least, this is the official statement) the customs clearance of the newborn CGI with Jurassic Park, which will allow the director to “realize his vision as he had originally conceived it, push him to start the trilogy of prequel and the story of Anakin Skywalker. As had already happened at the time of the classic trilogy with the advent of “practical” special effects, the prequel trilogy confirms itself as the ‘breakthrough’ work that will sanction the arrival of computer graphics in all action and adventure venture. But if once again Lucas proves to be pioneering in imagining the technological future of cinema, the narration of the prequels does not unanimously dazzle the public and the creator finds himself having to take note of a discrepancy between his narration and expectations (perhaps impossible to fully satisfy after sixteen long years of waiting) of its audience.
The 2000s: the twilight
For better or for worse, with the conclusion of the prequel trilogy, Lucas’ creative adventure begins to come to an end. A final foray into his “other” successful saga, Indiana Jones, ends up confirming instead what was the meandering evil that had eroded the prequels, namely the discrepancy between the feelings of the public and that of the director. The new millennium is a very different scenario from that of the seventies which saw the advent of Star Wars. Ironically, primarily due to Lucas himself, the audience of the 2000s is an audience that chews up, devours, swallows up and dissects increasingly extreme, cutting-edge and complex television and cinematographic adventures: these are the years of the proto-birth of the Marvel Universe with Bryan Singer’s And above all, these are the years of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings which, thanks to the solidity of Tolkien’s original narration, seems to accomplish the miracle of rediscovering that harmony with the public and collecting the Starwarsian baton in the most significant collective imagination.
The ten years: abandonment
For some it is an epochal turning point, for others it is a nightmare, for everyone it is undeniably a historic moment. The public Lucas definitively gives way to the private Lucas, and with the historic sale for four billion dollars, Star Wars and Lucasfilm are sold to the Walt Disney Company. Choice that undeniably saves Star Wars from oblivion (from 2005, the release date of Revenge of the Sith to 2012, the year of sale, with the exception of the animated experiment of The Clone Wars, the saga had slipped into oblivion and the The announcement of a potential Star Wars television series by Lucasfilm bounced around from year to year without ever coming to fruition), but which was understandably experienced with pain by those who had always seen Lucas as the tutelary deity of the universe of his creation.
Having separated his path from that of his creation, Lucas seems to really want to dedicate himself to his private life. But if you can take Lucas out of cinema, you can’t take cinema out of Lucas. Soon the director and producer returns to deal with the seventh art “from the other side of the fence”, no longer as a creator, but as a scholar and historian. These are the years of cultural initiatives dedicated to the preservation of films and contributions to cinema museums.
The Twenties: Yoda
Having reached his eightieth birthday, Lucas can sit down and look back at the journey of a life full of great goals: from the revolution in the special effects sector to the revival of adventure films, pulp fiction and everything that today we would define as ‘ pop culture’, to a multi-billion dollar empire. It is, of course, no surprise that those who have inevitably picked up his baton, the directors and creative heads of the next generation, occasionally feel the need to jump on an X-Wing and fly to the Dagobah system to learn from the most great of masters. The most “direct” heirs such as JJ Abrams and Ryan Johnson did it, but also one of his closest “disciples”, Ron Howard. Names like Kevin Feige and Jon Favreau followed him and it is rumored that even the directors and showrunners of Game of Thrones sought Jedi Master George’s advice on various occasions. Because everyone knows they owe something to Lucas’ vision, just as everyone feels that there is still a lot that the master of the old guard can teach the Padawans of the new generations.
“It is the soil on which we grow.”
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