I’m so glad to see Marcia Lucas — wife of George, and the Oscar-winning, ace editor who put together the original Star Wars trilogy–finally going on the record about her life and experiences for Vice’s Icons Unearthed docuseries. (I tried like heck for three years to get her to talk with me, and never cracked it.)
There’s a reason everyone refers to her as the heart of Star Wars, as well as George Lucas’s secret weapon. Apart from being a terrific editor, Marcia had an uncanny ability to see any film they were working on from the point of view of an audience. That sounds like it should be obvious, but it’s actually an often overlooked superpower of seeing the forest for the trees.
It was Marcia, for example, who, during the trench run sequence in Star Wars, used recycled footage to insert the ‘ticking clock’ of the Death Star moving into position to destroy the rebel base. It was a plot point that was NOT in the original script, but Marcia understood it made the stakes much higher–and therefore that much more exciting for the audience. She also told George Lucas, just before the film’s first showing to a real audience (SPOILER, I GUESS): “If the crowd doesn’t cheer when the Millennium Falcon comes back at the end, the film doesn’t work.” And boy, was she right (and yes, the audience cheered).
It was also Marcia who, after watching the first cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark, pointed out that the audience needed to see Indy with Marion again after their experience with the Ark–and Steven Spielberg, realizing she was right, brought Harrison Ford and Karen Allen back to film the two of them together on the steps of the local courthouse, giving the audience a sigh of relief and a bit of closure.
Anyway, we’re long overdue to hear her story in her words (I did the best I could to get her voice into George Lucas: A Life, but there’s nothing like the real thing). You can find this five-part docuseries on the VICE channel. I watched it using Sling, but as they say, YMMV.
Oh yeah — while I’m not in this particular episode, you’ll see plenty of footage of me running my mouth as the series progresses. Hang in to the end, and you may even see me doing my impression of the infamous Darth Vader “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” Maybe.
This is kinda fun: on a bookshelf in my office — it’s actually a wooden crate at the base of my desk — I like to keep every edition of the three books I’ve had published over the last decade. For Washington Irving, that meant I had it in hardcover and softcover. For Jim Henson, apart from the U.S. hardcover and paperback, there was a UK edition, a Polish edition, and an audiobook — the first time I have ever had an audiobook of my work, and I gotta admit, I still get a bit weepy listening to Kirby Hayborne read the heck out of it.
George Lucas: A Life arrives in paperback in a galaxy near you on November 21. If you’re so inclined, you can preorder it 
German friends and fans: the latest issue of the German pop culture magazine Geek! features not only a terrific photo of Mark Hamill on the cover and lots of cool articles on All Things The Last Jedi, but you’ll also get a three-page interview with me talking about George Lucas and the cultural significance of Star Wars.
Lucas and Spielberg have one of those wonderful fraternal relationships where, as brothers do, they both admire and compete with each other. Would Spielberg ever make such a joke to Lucas? I don’t think so – that one might be a little raw; you can see it in Lucas’s face when Charlie Rose mistakenly says that Lucas has won an Oscar, and Lucas says with a slight grimace, “No, I’m too popular for that…”
Do people forget that Lucas was involved with those movies? Maybe for Willow, though I think people now remember it more as a George Lucas film than Ron Howard one! I think the point, anyway, is that Lucas had a great knack for story concept – or, at least, how that story should look at 20,000 feet. In the best instances – Star Wars, Raiders – it then took some really great writers (Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, Lawrence Kasdan) to pull the final story and script together. The main ideas – the characters, the concepts – behind Willow and at least some of the Indiana Jones movies are really good ones, but the execution can be tricky. With Raiders, I think, it’s done about as well as it has ever been – that’s one where Lucas is content to light fuse and stand back and let Spielberg put Kasdan’s script to work.
Finally, it’s ultimately a great story about being absolutely true to yourself and committed one thousand percent to your own vision. Lucas constantly invested his own money in his company and in his films, even as his accountants fretted. Lucas was and is absolutely committed to getting the vision of the artist up on the screen in its purest form, and has worked his entire career to give them the tools to do that, whether it’s developing the gold-standard in special effects with ILM, creating groundbreaking digital technology (part of which became Pixar), or encouraging theaters to install earth-rumbling sound systems – like THX – to ensure a movie sounded in the theater the way it did in the editing room. The word ‘no’ isn’t in his vocabulary. If you’re a creative person – or a businessperson! — looking for a bit of inspiration, I think you’ll find that in George Lucas’s story as well.
Back in the 1980s, it was definitely too much for him. He stopped directing right after Star Wars, for example, because it actually took a physical toll on his health. He had little patience with actors, and the daily grind of being on-set really kind of annoyed him. He was much better suited to producing, where he could still oversee and control everything without having to actually run the set – though with Empire and Jedi, he still practically parked himself on the shoulders of his hand-picked directors anyway. Lucas can really never not be involved.
Absolutely. Lucas is fascinated by man’s relationship with machines – it informs his work all the way back to college in films like THX-1138 4EB or 1:42:08, which features race car driver Allen Grant putting a racecar through its paces. His own experiences as a gear head and a cruiser in high school are up there on the screen in full force in American Graffiti. And in Star Wars, his ships tend to move and dive and scream by like cars at a race track. Heck, the podracing scene in Episode I is practically the drag race in American Graffiti! Even a ship like the Millennium Falcon is really just a spaceship hotrod, souped up for speed and with a lot of special modifications that the driver made himself. Even Darth Vader himself is a man struggling with machine – “he’s more machine than man now” Obi-Wan tells Luke.
Forty years ago this week — Sunday, May 1, 1977, to be specific — George Lucas screened the premiere of Star Wars at the Northpoint Theater in San Francisco , the very same theater where he’d triumphantly (though not perfectly) debuted American Graffiti in 1973. Lucas was bracing for the worst; previous showings of the film, even as a work-in-progress, had been met with indifference, confusion, and sometimes anger, even from some of his closest friends (“What’s all this Force shit?” Brian DePalma had thundered at Lucas after a private showing in February).
Brian Jay Jones 