http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/ma...pagewanted=all
“I’m retiring,” Lucas said. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”
He was careful to leave himself an out clause for a fifth “Indiana Jones” film. But otherwise, “Red Tails” will be the last blockbuster Lucas makes. “Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do,” says Rick McCallum, who has been producing Lucas’s films for more than 20 years. “He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.”
Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They’ll 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 — and though Lucas often mused about it, he never committed himself to the uncommercial world until now.
Sitting in a sun-drenched office, his voice boyish, Lucas talked about himself as if he were a character in one of his movies. He’s at the end of an epic saga; he’s embracing a new destiny (“Make the art films, George”); he’s battling former acolytes who have become his sworn enemies; and George Lucas is — no kidding — in love. Before he takes his digital camera with him into obscurity, though, Lucas has one last mission. He wants to prove that with “Red Tails,” he can still make the kind of movie everyone in the world will want to see.
THE LAST BLOCKBUSTER
A little more than a week before our meeting at the ranch, Lucas stood in front of the screen in a packed theater in Times Square. An army of African-American power brokers looked down upon him from stadium seating. Richard Parsons was there. Spike Lee. David Dinkins. Al Sharpton. Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary.
Lee Daniels, the director of “Precious.”
Lucas was sporting his traditional uniform of jeans and a button-down — but this time with a black cashmere sport coat, a flourish one Lucasite credited to Mellody Hobson, Lucas’s girlfriend of about five years, who is president of one of the largest African-American-owned assets-management firms in the country. She stood at his side as Lucas told the crowd about his plan to avenge the studios’ snub. (20th Century Fox finally agreed to distribute the movie domestically but will not be paying any of the costs.) Lucas, in a playful mood, said a huge opening weekend would persuade the studios to finance a second “Red Tails” movie — a prequel — “that Spike Lee’s gonna make!” From the crowd, Lee yelled, “When do we start?” Lucas continued, “And we can get somebody else — Lee Daniels — to do the sequel!”
All preview screenings are wildly optimistic celebrations of the possible. But this was different. This was a rally. “On Jan. 20,” an 89-year-old Tuskegee ace named Roscoe C. Brown Jr., told the crowd, “every African-American in this country ought to go see ‘Red Tails.’ ” Desirée Rogers, who is now C.E.O. of Johnson Publishing Company, said she was splashing “Red Tails” on the cover of Ebony. And Al Sharpton, sounding like a “Star Wars” fanboy in 1977, later insisted that “it’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!”
Lucas first heard the story of the Tuskegee Airmen from a friend, the photographer George Hall, in 1988. It appealed on a visceral level — “I’m a fan of fast things” — and also because, despite criticism that “Star Wars” was too white, Lucas has always had an interest in civil rights. Back in the 1970s, Lucas almost cast an African-American as Han Solo (Glynn Turman, who played the first Baltimore mayor in “The Wire”).
Most important, though, the airmen, World War II pilots who won nearly 100 Distinguished Flying Crosses, fit perfectly in Lucas’s mythic-heroic view finder. If there’s a through line in the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies, it’s a childlike view of heroism. “Star Wars,” with its CliffsNotes Joseph Campbell formula, was a rejection of 1970s gloom; two decades later, the prequel movies were more innocent than “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Lucas’s films are relentlessly — and to some, maddeningly — old-fashioned and naïve. “If it’s a popcorn movie,” Lucas told me, “it needs a lot of corn.”
The first “Red Tails” scripts, which Lucas began commissioning in the early 1990s, suggested a three-part epic. Imagine the opening scenes in segregated Alabama, where one of the original Tuskegee instructors takes Eleanor Roosevelt for a spin; then picture the airborne dogfights over Europe, with slick visual effects from Industrial Light and Magic; and finally, in an irony worthy of Ralph Ellison, envision the war heroes returning home to find that the country they fought for is still in the clammy hands of Jim Crow. “You think ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ you think ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ ” Rick McCallum says. “Then you think, Oh, my God, ‘Red Tails.’ ”
“I can’t make that movie,” Lucas recalled thinking when he read the scripts. “I’m going to have make this kind of . . .
entertainment movie.” So Lucas focused on the middle chapter: the dogfights and the Nazi-hunting black pilots who shout, “How you like
that, Mr. Hitler!” (When I mention Lucas’s naïve style to Michael Bay, the director of the “Transformers” movies, he says sympathetically, “That’s what I get crap for from
my critics.”)
For a model, Lucas studied flag-waving World War II films like Nicholas Ray’s “Flying Leathernecks,” which starred John Wayne. “We made movies like this during the war, and everybody just loved them,” he said. “I said, ‘There’s no reason why that idealism, that kind of naïveté, can’t still exist.’ ” But Lucas wanted naïveté on his own terms. He slipped into a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary studio head.
“They say,
Now, who are you making this for?”
“I’m making it for black teenagers.”
“
And you’re doing it as a throwback movie? You’re not going to do it as a hip, happening-now, music-video kind of movie?”
“No, that’s not a smart thing to do. There’s not really going to be a lot of swearing in it. There’s probably not going to be a huge amount of blood in it. Nobody’s head’s going to get blown off.”
“
And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”
“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.”
The key then to understanding Lucas’s last blockbuster, like his first, is not how futuristic he’s making it but how retrograde.
REVENGE OF THE FANBOYS
Since 1997, the year Lucas released his special editions of the original “Star Wars” movies in theaters, he has been attacked by the very fans who once embraced his heroic style. They didn’t like how Lucas changed the old movies; they didn’t like the prequels, which seemed wooden and juvenile; and the Star Wars merchandising blitz they once gorged on had begun to drive them nuts. (All six “Star Wars” films will return to theaters in 3-D, beginning in February.)
“I think there are a lot more important things in the world” than feuds with fanboys, Lucas says with a kind of weary diffidence. But then he gets serious, even a little wounded. Lucas explains that his first major features — “
THX 1138” and “
American Graffiti” — were forcibly re-edited by the studios.
Those were wrenching experiences he has compared to someone keying your car (he loves cars) or chopping a finger off one of your children (he has three and loves them too). Afterward, Lucas set out to gain financial independence so the final cut would forever be his. “If the movie doesn’t work,” he vowed, “it’s going to be my fault.”
In the last decade and a half, Lucas has given “Star Wars” several “final” cuts.
For the 1997 special edition, he made Greedo, a green-skinned alien, fire his blaster at Han Solo because Han’s murdering Greedo in cold blood — as the 1977 version had it — struck him as a violation of his own naïve style. For the new Blu-ray version of “
Return of the Jedi,” Lucas added Darth Vader shouting, “Nooo!” as he seizes the evil emperor in the movie’s climactic scene. Lucas made the Ewoks blink. And so forth.
When fanboys wailed, Lucas did not just hear the scream of young Jedis; he heard something like the voice of the studio. The dumb, uncomprehending voice in his Socratic dialogues — a voice telling
him how to make a blockbuster. “On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are
completely changing the movie,” Lucas says, referring to fans who, like the dreaded studios, have done their own forcible re-edits. “I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ ”
Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”
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