Ron writes:
A while back, while searching a digital archive for newspaper articles related to Kenner's Star Wars toy line, I came across an interesting article about George Lucas.
Its source was the Modesto Bee, Lucas' hometown newspaper; and since it was published on October 16, 1977, it understandably dealt with the filmmaker's extraordinary success with Star Wars, released the previous summer.
The hometown aspect of it made it somewhat unique. It had a personal quality that most articles about Lucas don't approach.
I mean, it was even illustrated with a photo of Bonnie Jameyson, Lucas' cousin, whom the image shows inhabiting a venue stacked high with the commercial relics of her famous family member's recent triumph -- a sure sign I'd found an interesting article.
Cousin aside, the most arresting aspect of the piece (authored by Fred Herman) was its focus on Lucas' father, George, Sr.
According to various sources, including Dale Pollock's authoritative Skywalking, George, Sr. was a formative influence on Lucas and his career. It was he who inspired Lucas to make of his filmmaking a business, and thereby fully control the fruits of his labor. But the elder Lucas served as a negative influence, too; for Little Georgie -- that's what they called him in those days -- wanted nothing more than to escape a life chained to the office-goods store founded by his namesake.
Ever the conventional businessman, George, Sr. had a low opinion of Hollywood.
"I didn't want [Lucas] to go into that damn movie business," he was quoted as saying in Skywalking. "I fought him."
"My father thought I was going to turn into a beatnik," opined Lucas. "He was still hoping I'd take over the [family] business. It was one of the few times I can remember really yelling at my father, screaming at him, telling him no matter what he said, I wasn't going into the business."
George, Sr. interpreted his son's desire to go his own way as the upshot of resentment. "The damn kid won't even work for me," he explained to a friend, "after I've built this business up for him."
I don't think Old Man Lucas was trying to be a jerk. He just didn't understand his son. He couldn't get on his wavelength.
As it turned out, George Lucas' efforts at movie making were pretty successful. Indeed, perhaps no one has more skillfully interwoven the art of filmmaking and the business particulars that undergird it.
Yessir, Lucas did it his own way -- with his own money, via his own purpose-built studio, and with technology developed by firms that he controlled.
Really, Lucas' story is one of the great American can-do narratives. Even as a child I recognized the famously bearded filmmaker as the last exemplar of a classic American type: the iconoclastic Yankee tinkerer who builds an empire on his own terms, and gets rich doing it -- a kind of movie-industry version of Henry Ford.
Our article captures Lucas on the cusp of achieving that empire.
But though he was fast becoming an emperor, George Lucas still had a dad, and he had something to say about his son's achievements. Lucas may have succeeded in segregating himself from the annoyances of Hollywood, but not from his father's opinions. Or, I suspect, his influence.
And that's probably why the article tickles me: It reveals the very human ways in which our relatives' expectations overlap with personal realities. It also shows how personalities can diverge in ways uncomfortably (and somewhat touchingly) human, even among people whose genetics are similar.
As stated above, George, Sr. didn't think much of movies -- or of the arts in general. And yet he appreciated his son's success in his own peculiar way, and with an uncommon astuteness.
The above excerpt demonstrates that George, Sr., ever the numbers-minded business owner, cannily predicted that Star Wars would bring in billions of dollars.
He probably wasn't thinking of sequels here, but rather of the combined return of ticket and merchandise sales generated by the first film in the franchise.
Sure enough, elsewhere in the piece, George, Sr. expounded on the finer points of merchandising, proudly explaining how the corporation controlled by his son would benefit from the novel licensing deal negotiated with Fox.
One can visualize the family vignette preceding the elder Lucas' grasping of his son's famous licensing coup: Lucas quietly explaining to his father, perhaps at the dinner table, that, as the owner of Star Wars Corp., he stood to earn untold millions on the back of merchandise related to his weird little space film.
Vivid, too, is the effect this realization must have had on George, Sr. Finally, here was an aspect of his son's involvement in movies to which he could relate -- its business potential.
Perhaps George, Sr. didn't grasp the appeal of THX 1138, American Graffiti, or Star Wars. But residuals, those he understood; and as the implications of the deal became clear to him, his son's business savvy was something he took pride in.
Yet, ever the dad, he couldn't help but criticize.
His son had been smart enough to obtain the right to merchandise his film. Yet somehow, in the mind of father Lucas, Little Georgie didn't quite grasp the implications.
Look, I gotta call BS on this criticism, and the elder Lucas' claim that his son was clueless as to his take related to Star Wars.
I suspect Lucas knew exactly what percentage he was getting.
But it's the way of parents -- fathers in particular -- to find fault. Often, this is nothing more than their means of bridging an interpersonal gap. They criticize so they can give advice, and be involved in our lives.
Criticism aside, the popularity of Star Wars was tangible to George, Sr. It was a thing from which he could extrapolate financial value.
OK, so the above quotes hit a bit differently now that The Mandalorian and Grogu made all of three dollars at the international box office. [1]
Regardless, they constitute another canny prediction from George, Sr.
For nearly 50 years his son's creation was a cultural staple, as familiar in its time as were Disney's animated films in theirs. And George, Sr. recognized it immediately.
As the below excerpt demonstrates, he also recognized the drag on earnings created by the percentages on the gross of Star Wars promised by Lucas to the film's key constituents.
But, for me, the most notable bit of the passage is the characterization of George, Sr. as the voluble antithesis to his notoriously reticent son.
"Father Lucas . . . enjoys talking as much as his son enjoys hiding from the press" is one of those passages whose pithiness belies its eloquence.
It may be the article's most human bit; for we've all known guys whose personalities differ radically from those of their fathers -- and yet they're noticeably their fathers' sons.
George Lucas, the filmmaker-businessman par excellence, inherited (or perhaps just learned) his father's business acumen. But he fought against it, too. And maybe in that conflict lies the source of the sensibilities that brought distinction to his life.
At the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke saves his father (or does his father save him?), the power of the moment lies not in its sturm und drang, but in the recognition of what in each man depended on the other.
It's a recognition worth considering on Father's Day.
If you'd like to read the rest of the article, see below for its concluding page.
Notes:
[1] I'm being generous; reportedly, it lost money.
