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Summary
Summary
The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas.
On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored-and successful-movie franchises of all time.
Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a long-awaited, revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones.
If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound.
Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched.
Author Notes
Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography . He worked for nearly two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter, and has a degree in English literature from the University of New Mexico. He lives in Maryland with his wife.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Biographer Jones (Jim Henson) exhaustively chronicles the life and movies of George Lucas, arguably America's most successful filmmaker. The creator of two enduring franchises, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, he sold his company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4 billion in 2012. The author chronicles Lucas's story, from his upbringing as the son of a prosperous stationery store owner in Modesto, Calif., to his career as a filmmaker who took on the Hollywood studio system and won. From the beginning, Lucas's goals were independence and control. Jones cites this obsession in seemingly every major decision Lucas made, to the point of repetitiveness. The greater part of the book tells in granular detail how his films were produced: from initial concept and scriptwriting, to casting and location selections, to the filming and, most importantly for Lucas's process, the editing. This minutiae may lose the casual reader, but Jones is more successful at explaining Lucas's many contradictions: an aspiring avant-garde filmmaker who made blockbusters, a pessimist who loved fairy tale endings, an introvert in the most collaborative of arts, a man with a professed uninterest in money who became a billionaire. Jones also proves Lucas's singular legacy is well deserved. He revolutionized all aspects of filmmaking, particularly visual effects, sound, and merchandising. Photos. Agent: Jonathan Lyons, Curtis Brown. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Maestro biographer Jones (Jim Henson, 2013) tackles another brilliant entertainer. The world knows George Lucas as the filmmaker who brought us Star Wars, one of the most iconic Hollywood franchises in history, but as Jones' in-depth, fascinating, and even gripping exploration reveals, Lucas is much more than a gifted storyteller. In fact, writing has never come easy to the Northern California-raised Lucas, who immersed himself in editing and directing while studying at USC. He started out making such stand-alone films as THX-1138 and American Graffiti before getting caught up in the idea of a grand space epic, an optimistic fairy tale to counter the disappointment and depression bogging down America in the 1970s. But it isn't just Lucas' movies that are visionary; so, too, is his business acumen. By retaining the licensing rights for Star Wars, he paved the way for lucrative toy deals and maintained creative and monetary control over the sequels. With Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and Pixar, Lucas has created hundreds of jobs, and his friendships with fellow auteurs Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg led to dynamic collaborations, including the popular Indiana Jones franchise. Jones digs deep to limn the highs and lows of Lucas' career and life, capturing his drive and innovation in crisp, sparkling prose. Masterful and essential for film and pop culture enthusiasts.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
there are two types of show business star: matte and gloss. Matte stars deaden the light, their recesses best revealed in shadow. Creatures of chiaroscuro, they conquer and retreat, like Garbo, turn chameleonic in company, like Brando, alternating sullen disgruntlement with outright self-sabotage. Beards may be involved. Gloss stars, by contrast, eat up the light like a cat sunbathing on a windowsill. They strut with the room-temperature ease of toddlers showing off to their parents. Think of the peacock thrill of being looked at that John Travolta evinces in "Grease" or Tom Hanks in "Big" or Jennifer Lawrence in anything besides "The Hunger Games." Theirs is an egoless egotism that, by dint of the generosity with which it is offered up, yields audiences the promise of transcended, liberated self. Here, have me. Alan Cumming is the latter. His new book, you gotta GET BIGGER DREAMS: My Life in Stories and Pictures (Rizzoli, $29.95), is a scrapbook of photographs taken by the actor over the years, accompanied by biographical sketches of what he was up to at the time - prose selfies for a kind of Instagram-era memoir. Here is a shot of Glenn Close's "totally smoking ripped back" on the red carpet at the Tonys. Here is Eva Mendes's cleavage at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Here is a blurry shot of Oprah snapped in the star's tail winds at an Elie Wiesel Foundation dinner in her honor. "Very famous people create whirlwinds," he notes, and kicks his book off with a Force 7 gale : Hurricane Liz, whom he runs into at Carrie Fisher's birthday party and soon has cackling "like a trucker who'd just heard a good fart joke." The book ends, some 250 pages later, with the actor's being barged out of the way by Diana Ross making a beeline for the dance floor at an Oscar party. "The song she was so desperate to dance to was one of her own!" he notes. "Talk about being in the middle of a chain reaction." There is a tradition of stars turning paparazzi - Jeff Bridges has taken beautiful photographs on and off the movie set. There's a tradition, too, of British performers going to Hollywood and returning with their wits intact to write up the experience in best-selling memoirs: David Niven set the bar with "The Moon's a Balloon." Quentin Crisp turned his bone-dry humor into a cottage industry. Cumming has already proved himself a gifted writer with "Not My Father's Son," wringing humor from the hard facts of his upbringing in Scotland, not least his brute of a father, who used to shear him with clippers, like a sheep. Cumming Sr. makes a brief appearance at the start of this book, too, sneering at the little plastic Kodak camera that his son wins in a church raffle: "Get on with that grass" - an instruction to which the rest of the book might be said to raise a puckish middle finger. "I am a sensualist," he writes. "I understand the need to let go." There is a curious innocence to his pictures of drag queens and go-go boys snapped on trawls through the dive bars and strip joints of Lower Manhattan, which he eats up "like a deprived child." What makes Cumming unusual is that the powers of observation that make him a good writer haven't canceled out the instincts for pleasure that propel him out into the world. He has advanced and found a retreat within himself, as all artists must, throwing his own after-party to which we are all luckily invited. Think of this book as the goody bag you get to take home afterward. "I had never seen my name engraved on a dildo before," Cumming writes of his haul from the Fleshbot Awards. "And I had never received an award that I could potentially penetrate myself with, safely at least." It's that "safely" that sets you thinking. He never does get around to finishing his father's lawn. If celebrity is the biggest party the ego can throw, then the example set by Bill Murray takes the principle a step further, asking: Can the ego crash its own party? In the TAO OF BILL MURRAY: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (Random House, $26), the Rolling Stone contributing editor Gavin Edwards tracks the mysterious yeti-like sightings of the comedian made by the public for years. The Scandinavian exchange students' party he crashed near St. Andrews Links in 2006, where he ended up washing the dishes. The two-day international conference on biodiversity and conservation Murray dropped in on to talk about sturgeon. The music festival in Austin where he popped up behind the bar in 2010, pouring people tequila regardless of their order. The list goes on: a game of kickball on Roosevelt Island, a snowball fight in upstate New York. Typically, festivities end when Murray slips away with the words "No one will ever believe you." Edwards has saved some of us a lot of work. Murray watchers have been keeping unofficial scrapbooks of this activity for years, and like many of us, the author suspects there is more going on here than the off-duty irrepressibility that has long lightened his forays to the golf course - using spectators' sweaters to polish his balls, for instance - although Edwards includes these, for good measure. "Our modern-day trickster god," he writes, "Bill isn't just being a clown. He has a tao, a way of being, a philosophy of life." Murray's deus ex machina drop-ins are an attempt, in Edwards's formulation, "to make real life more like the movies." He takes careful note of the courses in French and philosophy Murray took at the Sorbonne in the years following his "Ghostbusters" success, where he was exposed to the teachings of the Greek-Armenian thinker George Gurdjieff, who argued that most of us sleepwalk through our waking lives; it is the task of the freethinker to wake us up. There's no record of these wake-up calls ever being unwelcome, although one Williamsburg hipster, disgruntled to find Murray at a Halloween party with the band MGMT, does accuse him of making "poor life choices." The bulk of the activity postdates the end of Murray's second marriage in 2008, but as with his screen performances, the dusting of midlife melancholy adds rather than subtracts from the stories. My favorite has Murray driving a golf cart around the streets of Stockholm with two drunken Swedes singing Cat Stevens's "Father and Son" until they are stopped by the police. "Bill's explanation that he was a golfer proved insufficient," Edwards writes, which may be one of my favorite sentences in any film book this year. There have been greater, weightier testaments to the art of cinema published in 2016 - Edwards's book is no more than a magazine article, really, padded out with a bio of the comedian and a slightly redundant filmography - but for sheer dopamine release, it's hard to beat. Tippi Hedren puts gossips out of their misery early on in her memoir, TIPPI (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99): Barely 37 pages in and here is Alfred Hitchcock, "shorter and even rounder than I was expecting," casting the 32-year-old model in "The Birds" after seeing her in a Sego commercial. What follows has long been the subject of Hollywood rumor and inspired a 2012 TV film, "The Girl," so Hedren's decision to break her silence on her director's "obsessive, often embarrassingly ardent, often cruel behavior" is a significant addition to our current Trump-era conversation on sexual assault. Fixing Hedren with an "unwavering stare" wherever she went on set, Hitchcock instructed her co-stars, "Do not touch The Girl," had her followed and - creepiest of all - had a "life mask" of her face made for his own personal use. "I'm so sorry you have to go through this," Hitchcock's wife, Alma, confides in her at one point. Jay Presson Allen, the writer of her subsequent film with the director, "Marnie," pleads, "Can't you love him just a little?" Finally, after a series of "excruciating" encounters in her dressing room and a fumble in the back of his limo, he summons her to his office and assaults her. "It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly," she writes. "I'll ruin your career," Hitchcock threatens upon being rebuffed, and then proceeds to do just that, denying her opportunities to appear opposite David Niven and Marlon Brando in "Bedtime Story" and in François Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451." But the rest of the book (written with Lindsay Harrison) is not without incident. Hedren marries her manager; the pair grow obsessed with lions, start a small animal sanctuary in their backyard and plow every penny into a film epic starring the beasts . A decade in the making. "Roar" has the scent of genuine insanity, involving multiple trips to the E.R. after the cats attack Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith; the cinematographer Jan de Bont (later to direct "Speed"); and Hedren herself, who is mauled by a leopard named Pepper. "I sat on the floor with my eyes tightly closed and held perfectly still while I felt his claws on my right thigh, followed by his sandpaper tongue licking honey off my cheek," she recalls, in slightly more detail than her mauling by Hitchcock. At least Pepper didn't block her from working with Truffaut. Bryan Cranston's memoir, a life in parts (Scribner, $27), suffers from the lopsidedness that afflicts any account of late-breaking fame - Cranston was 51 when he took the role of Walter White in AMC's "Breaking Bad," which made him a global star. But Cranston is a good-enough storyteller, practiced enough in his skills of self-examination, to make those five decades pull their weight. Determined not to repeat the path of his father, an actor who appeared on TV shows and in a movie about killer grasshoppers before succumbing to terminal resentment, young Cranston works as a farmhand, learning the correct way to kill a chicken; he sees a cadaver split open while a trainee for the Los Angeles Police Department; learns how to spot shoppers from thieves while working as a security guard ("Shoppers move quickly. Thieves have a slower pace"); and is motorcycling down the Eastern Seaboard when, seeking refuge from a storm, he reads "Hedda Gabler" in one sitting. As he drifts off to sleep that night, he knows what he wants to do with his life. "I knew how he carried himself. Burdened," he writes of Walter White, upon being sent the script for "Breaking Bad" by the showrunner Vince Gilligan, who remembered Cranston from a small role he'd given him on "The X-Files." He'd also, by that point, appeared in six episodes of "Seinfeld" and seven seasons of "Malcolm in the Middle," and was up against Steve Zahn for the role. As intriguing as the Zahn idea is. it was Cranston's less glitzy résumé - the years spent doing commercials for Excedrin and Preparation H - that was required for the tighty-whitey-wearing chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White: a pinpoint study in frustrated ambition and simmering megalomania, i n White's demented liberation a lusty Gloria in Excelsis Deo for jobbing actors everywhere. Jason Diamond's SEARCHING FOR JOHN HUGHES: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching '80s Movies (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99) is one of those pop culture bildungsromans in the vein of Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch," wherein a writer enacts an obsessive battle with a pop culture phenomenon that fills his or her sky, before finally realizing the fixation is perilous and parachuting to safety. Growing up Jewish in the Chicago suburbs, beaten by his father, abandoned by his mother, Diamond is by 15 a blue-haired punk with a Jewfro, carving a Dead Kennedys logo into his desk, seeking plaintive escape in films like "Pretty in Pink," "Home Alone" and "The Breakfast Club." "I wanted to live in a John Hughes film. I wanted everything to turn out just right," he says, but wonders, "How many more times could I tell myself there'd be a happy ending?" The reader suffers from a similar curiosity. Diamond, now the sports editor at Rollingstone.com, never gets far enough into his John Hughes obsession to explain it, or why his alienation doesn't express itself in angrier popcultural form - the music of Nine Inch Nails, say, rather than the quirky but well-adjusted world of Hughes. But the sweetness is telling, a sign of the strain to his nature that will eventually win out. He moves to New York, takes a job as a barista, starts an unauthorized biography of Hughes, stalls on Chapter 1 ("He's an artist just screaming to break out," his notes read), before finally returning to old haunts in Chicago, where he succeeds in laying some of his ghosts to rest and opening a crack of daylight between himself and his idol. I'm not sure Diamond gets enough about Hughes into the book - for long swaths, the title rings literally true - but he has successfully negotiated the writer's most important rite of passage: He makes himself matter, first to himself and then to us. A sequel to his previous book, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor," Thomas C. Foster's reading the silver SCREEN: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves (Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99) aims to make you "a better reader of movies. More informed. More aware. More analytical." Despite this lofty aim, the book is written in the pop-professor style of someone anxious to reassure his readers that they will not be left behind at any point: "Films not only have to have chemistry; they're like chemistry. Now, relax, there won't be any lab reports." Foster goes in for so many of these icebreakers, each an implicit expression of the author's confident air of superiority, that you grow a little impatient for the fruits of the wisdom whose brilliance he is so thoughtfully shielding from us. What you get is this: "Movies are motion"; "If you put enough" shots "together in the right order you get a movie"; "Every character has a story"; and "A filmmaker can jump from place to place," but "jumping from time to time is problematic." This last observation is so off the mark you wonder if the author has ever seen a movie: "Citizen Kane"? Flashbacks? Flash-forwards? Elliptical editing? Every now and again, one stumbles through the fog of generalities across a piece of analysis born of simple observation: the way John Ford uses Monument Valley to frame the landscape of the West, for example, or the Escher-like cocoon of alcoves, rooms, elevators and stairwells in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." "This is a world very much like the actual world between the wars," Foster writes, citing Ionesco. "Personal freedom is a scarce and fragile commodity." It is telling that Foster is at his best when he forgets his readers entirely. Brian Jay Jones's biography george lucas: a Life (Little, Brown, $32) tells an oft-told tale: how a scrawny, easily bored nerd from Modesto, Calif., resisted the lure of his cooler, more flamboyant filmmaking contemporaries to stun the world with gee-whiz cinema aimed at his inner 6-year-old that reshaped Hollywood overnight. The collective double take over "Star Wars" never gets old, although if it's a definitive reconstruction of the creative spaghetti that fed into the saga you want, then Chris Taylor's masterly "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" is your book. Jones, who comes to Lucas from a celebrated life of Jim Henson, tells a more straightforward story in definitive detail, although you have to wonder whether Lucas is a good fit for the biographical format: a cautious, withdrawn man, bland in his tastes, his resentment toward his father driving his career-long fight for autonomy from the studios. So much in Lucasland seems born of peeve and pedantry, it's a miracle the films are as ebullient as they are, but then that is the Faustian sacrifice behind "Star Wars": All the fun, humor and adventure in its maker's life are instead up there on the screen. Crisper pleasures await in bresson on BRESSON: Interviews 1943-1983 (New York Review Books, $24.95), edited by Robert Bresson's widow, Mylène, and translated by Anna Moschovakis. This collection of interviews reveals the great French filmmaker's own interview technique to bear more than a passing resemblance to Roger Federer's drop shot. In shuffles a nervous interviewer to take his or her seat, stealing the odd personal observation: The auteur's eyes are blue-green, and he speaks softly. "What was it that drew you to this subject?" he is often asked. It seems innocent enough, but this is Bresson. He thinks, then gently deconstructs the implicit assumptions about cinema contained therein, and rolls the ball back to the interviewer's feet with a smile. "I don't choose my subjects. They choose me," he says. "Films should not have subjects at all. . . . What I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express with silence what other films express with words - the almost imperceptible things that happen on a face, or in a look in someone's eyes." He interviewed much as he made films: by saying very little, with great eloquence. TOM SHONE is the film and TV critic for Newsweek. His book "Tarantino: A Retrospective" will be published in 2017.
Kirkus Review
A sweeping, perceptive biography of the influential director. Jones (Jim Henson: The Biography, 2013, etc.) sets the stage for this impressive biography with a short prologue set in 1976. Lucas was in the Tunisian desert starting his 84-day shoot ofnbsp;Star Wars. The weather was terrible, and sand got into everything. The machines, including R2-D2, wouldnt work, and the studio was stingy with funds (at that point, Lucas pledged to always control the money). About a year before the release date, Lucas was certain the movie was going to be terrible. Jones extensively researched, unauthorized biographyhe wasnt able to interview key people, including Lucaslays out in luscious detail the path Lucas took to become one of films most successful directors. Born in Modesto, California, in 1944, he grew up in the 1950s and loved comic books, TV serials, and building things. A mediocre, bored student in high school, he managed to get into the University of Southern California. When he discovered their film school, he fell madly in love with [film], ate it and slept with it 24 hours a day. He also met Francis Ford Coppola, who helped him get his student film,nbsp;THX 1138, made into a movie. He also helped him make the popularnbsp;American Graffiti, which provided Lucas with much-needed money. He could now focus on his Flash Gordon thing, Star Wars. Jones wisely eschews unnecessary plot summaries to focus on where the ideas for Lucas films came from and how he wrote them and how he dealt with studios and contract negotiations, funding, casting, filming, and marketing. This in-depth portrait of the modest and audacious Lucas, a brilliant and enigmatic technological wizard, and those who were crucial to his successhis editor wife, Marcia, Stephen Spielberg, Haskell Wexler, Garry Kurtz, John Milius, John Dykstra, Harrison Fordis never less than fascinating. Masterful and engaging: just what Lucas fans and buffs, who love the nitty-gritty of filmmaking, have been waiting for. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The life and work of the visionary -filmmaker and mogul is explored in this unauthorized biography by Jones (Jim Henson), who not only follows George Lucas's successes and missteps as a director, writer, and producer, but also investigates his acumen as a businessman who rebelled against the Hollywood system and forever changed the way films are produced, distributed, and experienced. Jones finds in Lucas's early life themes that would shape his future, including a need for creative independence and a teenage enthusiasm for design and drag racing that would inspire works as diverse as American Graffiti and Star Wars. The tone is admiring but evenhanded: Lucas's innovation, philanthropic interests, and loyalty to friends are emphasized, but so is his need to assert total control over projects, which sometimes affected his personal and professional relationships. Well researched and comprehensive--Lucas's 2012 sale of Lucasfilm to Disney and the release of The Force Awakens are both covered-the biography gives fans a chance to understand the man behind so many magical movie moments. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of modern biographies, film enthusiasts, and Star Wars aficionados. [See Prepub Alert, 6/6/16.]-Sara Shreve, Newton, KS © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Out of Control March 1976 | p. 3 |
| Part I Hope 1944-1973 | |
| 1 Scrawny Little Devil 1944-1962 | p. 9 |
| 2 Geeks and Nerds 1962-1966 | p. 38 |
| 3 The Right Horse 1967 | p. 68 |
| 4 Radicals and Hippies 1967-1971 | p. 86 |
| 5 American Graffiti 1971-1973 | p. 127 |
| Part II Empire 1973-1983 | |
| 6 Bleeding on the Page 1973-1976 | p. 167 |
| 7 "I Have a Bad Feeling About This" 1976-1977 | p. 215 |
| 8 Striking Back 1977-1979 | p. 246 |
| 9 Darkening Skies 1979-1983 | p. 278 |
| Part III Return 1983-2016 | |
| 10 Empty Flash 1983-1994 | p. 325 |
| 11 A Digital Universe 1994-1999 | p. 382 |
| 12 Cynical Optimism 1999-2005 | p. 408 |
| 13 Letting Go 2005-2016 | p. 436 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 475 |
| Notes | p. 479 |
| Select Bibliography | p. 527 |
| Index | p. 531 |