{"id":897,"date":"2012-01-18T08:39:23","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T14:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=897"},"modified":"2012-01-18T23:56:29","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T05:56:29","slug":"the-retiring-george-lucas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=897","title":{"rendered":"The Retiring George Lucas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019m retiring. I\u2019m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.\u201d So says George Lucas in a New York Times Magazine profile timed to the Friday release of his new film Red Tails. Apparently, George Lucas doesn\u2019t want to make blockbusters anymore (though calling Red Tails \u2014 a film about the Tuskegee Airmen produced and financed by the mogul \u2014 a blockbuster is quite a stretch). Apparently, George Lucas doesn\u2019t want to deal with Star Wars or any of its demanding fanboys anymore. Apparently, George Lucas wants to make \u201cexperimental films.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure he does. But he won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For years now, Lucas has been parroting the same line \u2014 that what he really desires is to make art films like they ones that made him fall in love with cinema in the first place. Tone poems and visual collages and non-narrative short films. That he has yet to deliver anything of the sort despite being one of the richest and most independent men in Hollywood is surely some sign that he prefers to externalize his dreams rather than actualize them.<\/p>\n

Some very quick, non-rigorous research turned up the following:<\/p>\n

A Sept. 1991 piece by Joseph Gelmis in Newsday: \u201cIt\u2019s been 18 years since the then-boy genius told me, on the eve of the release of American Graffiti that he yearned to make abstract experimental films that would evoke emotional reactions as powerful as any narrative adventure.\u201d
\n In a June 1999 piece by Nick Hasted in The Independent, Walter Murch, who brilliantly edited Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s The Conversation and did sound design work on The Godfather II and Apocalypse Now, said of Lucas, \u201cIf you look at what happened to George, his oft-stated \u2018What I\u2019m doing to do next is small, experimental films\u2019 \u2026 well, he\u2019s never done that.\u201d
\n In a 2005 Wired profile, Steve Silberman wrote, \u201cNow Lucas says he is determined to leverage that security to make the kinds of movies that no one expects from him. He claims to have a stack of ideas piling up on his desk for \u201chighly abstract, esoteric\u201d films even more daring than his 1971 debut, THX 1138 \u2026 As a director of \u201cvery out-there\u201d films, he admits that he faced this crossroads at least once before and chose to go down the more familiar route of embellishing Darth Vader\u2019s backstory.\u201d
\n Lucas\u2019s ex-wife Marcia says, in Peter Biskind\u2019s 2005 book about the New Hollywood of the 1970s, \u201cGeorge would have remained an experimental filmmaker if it had not been for [American] Graffiti leading to Star Wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in this week\u2019s New York Times piece, Bryan Curtis writes:<\/p>\n

Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They\u2019ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They\u2019ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then Star Wars happened.<\/p>\n

Briefly mentioned in the Times piece is that Lucas has wanted to follow the path of fellow Bay Area director Francis Ford Coppola, who has begun to self-finance films. Twixt, which screened at last fall\u2019s Toronto Film Festival and stars Val Kilmer as a third-rate mystery writer who encounters vampires, murderers and intermittent 3-D during a book tour stopover, isn\u2019t a particularly good movie. But it is loose and personal (witness the scenes that flashback to what is essentially a recreation of the speed boating death of Coppola\u2019s son Gian-Carlo) and was filmed on and around Coppola\u2019s Northern California estate.<\/p>\n

If Coppola \u2014 a man who has gone bankrupt at least twice and now uses the proceeds from his wine business to fund films \u2014 can get together some slightly washed up stars and make a film in his backyard, surely the eternally flush Lucas can do the same. He can probably shoot, edit, mix, and do all the sound effects right on his sprawling Skywalker Ranch. The fact that he wants to make \u201cesoteric\u201d films makes it even easier; 30 minutes of digital sunburst patterns, no people, no dialogue, no overhead. Done.<\/p>\n

Though, as might be clear, we suspect he won\u2019t do any of this. He\u2019s talked this game for a while and the closest he\u2019s come to \u201cexperimental\u201d is the dialogue in the Star Wars prequels. If one of the wealthiest men in show business is unable to achieve his dreams, what hope do the rest of us have?<\/p>\n

Read more: http:\/\/entertainment.time.com\/2012\/01\/18\/george-lucas-wants-to-retire-and-make-art-films-sure-he-does\/#ixzz1jowpTvxu
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