This is a story about George Lucas, but despite what you’re probably thinking, it's not about Star Wars. Well, it is and it isn't. This is a different saga, about an artist's ego—a man whose stubborn need for total creative control, and whose career-long rage against the "establishment," became self-defeating. It's about a man whose work celebrates democracy but who himself disdains it. And it's about a popular uprising against the man and his art. This may remind you of the Star Wars prequels, but, in fact, this is the story of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
That George Lucas has been in a creative drought for this entire millennium is without a doubt. In addition to the abysmal Star Wars prequel films from the turn of the century, Lucas has been involved—either directly or indirectly—with the embarrassing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 and Red Tails, after a bloody battle over the film's distribution, in 2012. "Disillusioned with Hollywood," Lucas announced later that year that he was retiring from making popular films.[1]
He then moved on to his next creative endeavor—a museum for his collection of pop culture art. At first, he envisaged a grand structure in Beaux-Arts style located in the Presidio, alongside San Francisco bay. "This," to quote one of many flatly-delivered lines of dialogue from Revenge of the Sith, "is where the fun begins." The Presidio is public land, managed by the Presidio Trust. Although Lucas enlisted the support of politicians Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, public opinion nonetheless turned decisively against what was widely-seen as George Lucas's vanity project. The museum's design was described as "a Beaux-Arts complex festooned with eclectic ornamentation, including copper domes and arches that rested on columns adorned with robed figures," and San Francisco Chronicle critic John King wrote that it "looked like a generic Spanish-themed shopping center."[2]
But Lucas refused to allow any changes to the design, even as the Presidio Trust heard complaints about it from the public and opposition groups began to form. "Presidio Trust board members seemed more willing to have Lucas at the site, but grew frustrated over his unwillingness to compromise on the design of the building," according to a contemporaneous article.[3] What happened at this point isn’t entirely clear; either the Presidio Trust rejected Lucas's proposal, or he simply took his toys and went home to Marin. "They hate us," he said bitterly of the experience.
Next, he turned his attention to Chicago, where once again he recruited the support of the city's corrupt mayor, Rahm Emanuel, the Obama administration alumnus, who set aside a parcel of land beside Lake Michigan. But this, too, was public land. A lawsuit soon emerged from the advocacy group Friends of the Parks, alleging that the proposed 99-year lease “effectively surrenders control” of the lakefront property to Lucas, and that his museum was “not for the benefit of the public” but would “promote private and/or commercial interests.”[4] Ouch! To make matters worse, the design of the museum—no longer Beaux-Arts, but a more modern style—had become even more outlandish. As Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune wrote, it was a “cartoonish mountain of a building... Overly abstract and under-detailed, it looks, from some angles, like a giant lump.”
"This is the Temple of George," Kamin wrote, "a monument to its patron rather than a modest addition to a democratic public space." Even mayor Emanuel "telegraphed his own dislike."[5] But again, Lucas refused to compromise on the design. In 2016, after three years of legal battles, he withdrew his offer and looked for someplace else to build his temple.
Lucas, the young, upstart filmmaker of the 70s and early-80s, funded most of the original Star Wars films himself, in order to rid himself of studio influence and exert complete creative control over the trilogy. By the time of The Phantom Menace in 1999, Star Wars had become an institution, and Lucas was a movie mogul used to getting his way. By then, he had infamously surrounded himself with people too afraid to challenge his fatigued creative instincts, and the result was three painfully bad Star Wars prequel films that were poorly-conceived, -written, and -directed, all by Lucas himself. The backlash from critics and Star Wars fans was widespread and well-deserved, and foreshadowed the ire of the public, years later, at his museum—another project over which he demanded complete creative control.
This story, to borrow a phrase from Lucas, "rhymes" with the Greek myths of man's hubris. One can easily imagine a Greek chorus following Lucas and narrating his tragedy.
The story also illustrates the long-running debate between individual freedom and democracy in art. I take Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author" view that art is separable from the artist. Once completed, it is no longer the property of its creator, but rather of the people. Here, Lucas's hypocrisy is on full display, as he once argued eloquently against the digital colorization of classic films, testifying to Congress in 1988 that, "American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history."[6] Yet for decades he has digitally edited the Star Wars trilogy, re-writing cultural history, much to the consternation of fans. We see this hypocrisy, too, in his art, as Revenge of the Sith is a film which celebrates democracy in principle, while Lucas disdains it in practice. Just ask the people of San Francisco and Chicago, where democracy won and Lucas lost.
The museum—now known as the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art—did finally find a home, in Los Angeles. A deal was made to construct it on land owned by the University of California, thus avoiding any public comment on the project. Lucas had previously funded the renovation of UCLA's film school, where he once studied. Characteristically, Lucas leveraged his money and power to exert his personal artistic influence over that project. “He picked out every piece of stone, every carpet," said UCLA dean Elizabeth Daley, "We’d bring samples up to [Skywalker Ranch], and he’d say, ‘Is this stone maybe a little too red?’"[2]
But perhaps this article has been unfair to Lucas. During the five-year battle for his museum, Lucas aged well into his seventies, and he seems more conscious now of his legacy, over which he won’t have control. What may have begun as a vanity project has, perhaps, matured into something of democratic value, as Lucas, according to a Vanity Fair profile in 2018, "was increasingly coming to think of the museum as an educational institution that would make art more accessible to children who grew up with little exposure to it," particularly "young black and brown children."[2] But Lucas has self-servingly invoked black youth before in his highly-problematic promotion of the film Red Tails, so it's hard to know what exactly to believe.
Maybe I've been too hard on the man, maybe not. I’ll always admire George Lucas’s filmmaking achievements, especially the technical achievements of the original trilogy. But I find the saga of his museum to be a fascinating character study with even more drama than the Star Wars saga itself.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/may/31/george-lucas-retiring
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/george-lucas-museum-los-angeles
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/sftrimetro/treasure-island/presidio-proposal-for-lucas-museum
[4] https://web.archive.org/politics/rahm-plan-demolish-mccormick-place-east-put-lucas-museum-there/
[5] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-lucas-museum-edit-1109-20141107-story.html
[6] http://www.forcematerial.com/home/2016/10/5/george-lucas-passionate-argument-against-altering-films