John Baxter - George Lucas - A Biography

On the other side of the valley, ‘unwanted relatives’ of the captain occupied conveniently remote guesthouses – named, in a lapse of historical authenticity, for Lucas’s cultural heroes: Orson Welles, John Huston, George Gershwin. After incidents like the encroachment of the drunken effects men, visitors only entered the main house by invitation. To get into the private compound around the Main House, you needed a coded key-card.

The illusion of old money was as meticulous as anything created in Hollywood at the height of its reconstructive powers in the 1940s. The Victorian-style double-hung windows and other fixtures were made in a workshop on the estate, which also maintained a studio for creating stained glass. The library’s well-rubbed redwood came from a demolished bridge in California’s Newport Beach, the books in its glassed cabinets from Paramount Pictures; they’d once been the studio’s reference library. The two thousand mature oaks, bays, and alders spotted around the 235 redeveloped acres of the ranch were trucked in from Oregon.

One visitor who opened a door marked ‘Staff Only’ found herself staring into a bunker filled with video surveillance equipment. Hidden cameras watched every corner of the estate; conduits snaking under the tranquil meadows carried enough electrical, telephone, and computer cables to feed a small town. The extent of the ranch’s electronics could faze even Lucas. In 1997, looking for a socket into which to plug a journalist’s tape recorder, he pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal a tangle of wires. ‘So that’s what’s under there,’ he murmured.

In 1987, Lucas retained the San Francisco firm of Rudolph and Sletten to build a ‘winery.’ A red-brick two-story building with two large wings and an imposing central entrance leading to a three-story atrium with wooden galleries and a glass roof resembled other wine-making facilities in the area. In fact the building housed Skywalker Sound, 150,000 square feet of state-of-the-art post-production studios in the form of eight mixing stages. San Francisco’s avant-garde Kronos Quartet recorded here. So did the Grateful Dead, and singer Linda Ronstadt. The largest facility, Studio A, also known as the Stag Theater, replicated a high-style pastel art deco cinema of the thirties. Its ninety-six-track mixing console was twenty-four feet long, and on a film like Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer demanded eighty-five technicians.

Elsewhere on the ranch, what looked like a two-story barn held the negatives of Lucas’s films and the Lucas Archive. From 1983, Lucasfilm’s first archivist, David Craig, began photographing, documenting, and collecting the models, art-work – ten thousand items alone – costumes, story-boards and accumulated relics of the Lucas legend: ‘objects of artistic, cultural, and historical significance,’ according to the authorized catalog. Donald Bies became archivist in 1988, and helped plan the building, which opened in November 1991.

Lucas’s own office in the Main House held no hint of how he earned the money to build and maintain this empire. Friends like Steven Spielberg filled their offices with framed posters, awards, and signed photographs from presidents and box-office legends. Lucas displayed no souvenirs at all of his film career – no references to film at all, except for a pair of Disney bookends. Opposite his desk was a large painting of the enmeshed gears of a sixteenth-century clock. The artist, Walter Murch, a minor modernist of the thirties, was the father of Lucas’s close friend, also Walter Murch, who edited American Graffiti and with whom, rare for Lucas, he had remained close since they met at college. Elsewhere in the house hung originals by illustrator Maxfield Parrish and Saturday Evening Post cover artist Norman Rockwell, artist by appointment to those who, like Lucas and Spielberg, another Rockwell collector, yearned for the imagined certainties of American small-town life between the wars.

Downstairs, inside the front door, a few items, battered relics of Captain Lucas’s film-faring days, were displayed behind glass. They included Indiana Jones’s stained felt hat and whip; an ewok , one of the cuddly forest animals from Return of the Jedi , whom Lucas modeled on his then-two-year-old daughter Amanda; a heavily nicked light saber from Star Wars ; and a creature from Willow . The case next to it was empty – for trophies of future triumphs? Or because reality has not kept pace with the growth of the illusion? Because, disguised by all this celebration of past triumphs was the puzzling fact that Lucas had not until 1999 actually directed a film in almost twenty years.

The one aspect of Lucas’s activities not relocated to Skywalker by the late nineties was Industrial Light and Magic, which still operated out of San Rafael, outside San Francisco. In 1988, Lucasfilm had opened negotiations with Marin County to develop more of the ranch as a production facility, and to move in ILM. When the supervisors bridled, Lucas offered to set aside most of the remaining thousand acres for ‘conservation,’ while continuing to own and patrol it. Meanwhile, he kept buying surrounding properties, though not without a fight from local farmers and the zoning authorities. By 1996, he owned 2500 acres and was negotiating for more.

The battle with his neighbors was typical of Lucas’s tentative hold on his retreat. In a quarter-century, more than the ranch had changed. Lucas was the second-largest employer in the county. Power calls to power; money draws money. Skywalker had become a focus for the hopes, ambitions, and needs of millions. There was magic in this place, but also greed, resentment, and fear.

Around dawn on any fourth of July during the mid-1990s, hundreds of people would have been on the road heading for Skywalker Ranch, and Lucas’s annual cook-out.

The first of them had flown up from Los Angeles on the early shuttle and collected rented cars at San Francisco airport – or been collected, if they had that kind of clout, as many did; there are some invitations that even the highest executives disregard at their peril.

Leaning back in their limos, the agents, producers, and stars skimmed Variety and Hollywood Reporter . It would be a long trip, and the headlines reminded them why they were making it. ‘ Star Wars ’ All-Time Boxoffice Force,’ shrilled Variety . ‘Lucas’ Series Paid off in Spades.’ The story spelled out the news, happy for their host, that the three Indiana Jones films he’d produced and helped write, the Star Wars trilogy he’d conceived and the first of which he’d written and directed, the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , and the animated films in the series The Land Before Time were all making money.

So were his other enterprises. LucasArts Licensing was earning millions from franchising toys, clothes, drinks, candy, comic books, and games inspired by his films . One manufacturer alone, Galoob, would sell $120 million-worth of Star Wars toys that year, and the original licensee, Kenner, which still owned some rights, could also have survived comfortably on nothing but Star Wars light sabers, Imperial stormtrooper helmets, and models of Han Solo’s ship the Millennium Falcon and the series’ characters . ‘Since the first film came out,’ noted one report, ‘ Star Wars merchandise sales have totaled more than $2.5 billion. It’s safe to say, in fact, that Star Wars single-handedly created the film-merchandising business.’ So expert was LucasArts Licensing that outside enterprises like the TV series Saturday Night Live and the environmental Sierra Club had become clients.