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George Lucas: A Biography
The first major biography (since 1983) of the great movie mogul George Lucas, whose marketing techniques have transformed the film business. His fourth Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace, released in 1999, was perhaps the most eagerly awaited cinematic event of all time. George Lucas is one of the most innovative bigtime players on the movie scene. His three Star Wars films and the trio featuring the action hero Indiana Jones (all six of which Lucas conceived, produced and co-wrote) comprise the most popular group of films ever made. To finance them, he masterminded a revolutionary redrawing of the financial agreements under which films were produced in Hollywood, snatching away control of funding, intellectual content and the distribution of profits from studios, and placing them in the hands of the film-makers themselves. Yet Lucas remains (like Stanley Kubrick, the subject of John Baxter’s recent biography) an enigma and a recluse. He has specially built the Skywalker Ranch a long way from Hollywood – a Victorian village community in a redwood forest where he and his friends can work in splendid isolation, free of studio pressure but with the highest technology.
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First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
John Baxter
229 books123 followersJohn Baxter (born 1939 in Randwick, New South Wales) is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker.
Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise.
He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction.
Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing.
In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter.
For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese.
Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris.
Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.
Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise.
He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction.
Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing.
In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter.
For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese.
Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris.
Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 26, 2012
George Lucas wrote and directed “THX-1138” and “American Graffiti” before changing the cinema – and pop culture – landscape with the “Star Wars” saga. There are plenty of books about how all the pieces fell into place and this is a jump-on-the-bandwagon version, written by a man who clearly doesn’t like Lucas and appears never to have either met or spoken with him. I like biographies and always wondered what the term “cut-and-paste” meant in relation to the cheaper end of the market, but now – having read this 1999 effort – I understand completely. Whilst Baxter is credited as the writer, apart from a few linking pieces (where his tendency to over-write lets him down), it appears that all he did was compile a lot of other writers’ hard work. A quick look at the Notes section reveals that he only conducted interviews with half a dozen people (the key ones being John Milius, Gary Kurtz and Lawrence Kasdan and none of them, at the time of publishing, had worked with Lucas for over 15 years) and had no contact with Lucas, Lucasfilm, any of his staff or even Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, who he quotes frequently. Worse, big sections are taken almost verbatim from Dale Pollock’s “Skywalking” which is not only a much better book but was written with the full co-operation of Lucas (though he later disowned it), his friends and colleagues and the Lucasfilm archives. As for the picture section – well, the fact that one page is taken up with a still of Bill Norton, who directed “More American Graffiti” and there are none of Lucas as a child tells you all you need to know. I read this on holiday, which is why I stuck with it plus – I’ll be honest – I love the story of how “Star Wars” came together, but I can’t see myself ever wanting to read another book compiled by Baxter. If you do want to read a well researched and well written biography of George Lucas, then track down “Skywalking”, whilst Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is also worth a look (and quoted extensively here too). Absolutely not recommended (and it gets the 2nd star for subject matter alone).
October 24, 2011
This was a different read for me - I am not one to normally read biographies but this one I took exception to since I grew up with star wars - it was the first movie I saw at the age of 5 and it has stayed with me ever since. The read is a fascinating one in to how close fought some of these films were to never being made and of the type of characters that create, drive and in the end single mindedly see to completion (and released) I will not give anything away about the type of person George Lucas is just to say that I cannot imagine working for such a person and not coming away without a different view on the world
July 16, 2015
A lackluster piece of hack work. The biography relies heavily on the Dale Pollock book on Lucas written in the 80s, almost looked like outright plagiarism at times. It's clear Baxter despises his subject and spares no opportunity to take cheap shots at Lucas, calling his movies "coca-cola froth" or something like that. Avoid, Avoid, Avoid
January 18, 2021
John Baxter does a very entertaining biog - though in each one I have read, I have tripped over a clunking great blunder - in this case, an insistence that Kenny 'R2-D2' Baker played Wicket the Ewok and not Warwick Davis. A strange mistake to make, since a cursory glance at ROTJ publicity material would have yielded the facts - and one that will have Star Wars fans baying.
What's striking is that in spite of George's cliched insistence that he is interested in 'small, personal films' he set in motion processes which would result in the destruction of cinema. One wonders what kind of 'small, personal' filmmaker contrives to remove the human element (actors are human beings, don't forget) from the filmmaking process entirely. Perhaps he was a frustrated animator all along. From this persepctive, George's story mirrors that of Darth Vader, starting out with noble intentions, prodigiously talented, ultimately complicit in the subjugation of life under a vast Death Star. Within it, a compound, surrounded by lush fields, with libraries and filmmaking equipment that no one can use. Better that culture be preserved in vast, freeze dried collections.
Furthermore, George seeks to eradicate from existence the original cut of Star Wars. The man cannot bring himslef to live with humiliating errors like the Star Wars Holiday Special, seeking them out as Vader does the stolen datta tapes.
If he'd been a little less uptight, he could've copped a Warholian defence and said, "yes, I am more interested in machines than people. Or rather, I see the machine as an extension of man, man expresses himslef through the machine. A symbiosis. Also, the machine comes to stand for neglected human processes. This is why I chose to tell the story of Star Wars through the eyes of the Droids. There was a very subtle and, I thought, moving theme displayed in the film through the way human characters reacted to the Droids - a theme which I have subsequently ruined by my obsessive and pointless revisions of my own work."
How ironic that the ultimate control freak grumbingly sells out to mega-behemoth in the 2Oth century fire sale.
Most crushing myth shattered - Zoetrope was not the film idyll I imagined it to be. Coppola blustered a deal with Warners. I keenly felt a sense of betrayal when I read of his dismissive attitude to THX1138. My wishful thinking had George and Francis engaged in long discussionsabout film, culture, mythology. I fancied that THX and The Conversation arose, as differently evolved beasts, out of a similar swamp of inspiration. George apparently felt slighted by Francis' commandeering the Apocalypse Now project. Here's a thing - there's a General Willard in Star Wars. Harrison Ford's sons are called Benjamin and Willard (I think).
There's nothing about studying a course on Ethology (maybe there is, briefly, I read this three weeks ago and memory fades). There's a fair bit about Campbell, in passing, just incidental.
If this (so-called) review has a bitter tang, it's because I have a beef with Mr. Lucas. I do not care for the tentative alterations he made to Star Wars. I am still aghast at the dreadful scenes involving Greedo and Jabba The Hutt. For this reason, I refuse to watch any version of Star Wars other than the original release or the 1981 rerelease (that said 'A New Hope', big deal). When I was a kid, we found a reference to 'Star Wars: A New Hope' in an issue of Starlog and we got really excited, saying 'there's a new Star Wars film!'
What's striking is that in spite of George's cliched insistence that he is interested in 'small, personal films' he set in motion processes which would result in the destruction of cinema. One wonders what kind of 'small, personal' filmmaker contrives to remove the human element (actors are human beings, don't forget) from the filmmaking process entirely. Perhaps he was a frustrated animator all along. From this persepctive, George's story mirrors that of Darth Vader, starting out with noble intentions, prodigiously talented, ultimately complicit in the subjugation of life under a vast Death Star. Within it, a compound, surrounded by lush fields, with libraries and filmmaking equipment that no one can use. Better that culture be preserved in vast, freeze dried collections.
Furthermore, George seeks to eradicate from existence the original cut of Star Wars. The man cannot bring himslef to live with humiliating errors like the Star Wars Holiday Special, seeking them out as Vader does the stolen datta tapes.
If he'd been a little less uptight, he could've copped a Warholian defence and said, "yes, I am more interested in machines than people. Or rather, I see the machine as an extension of man, man expresses himslef through the machine. A symbiosis. Also, the machine comes to stand for neglected human processes. This is why I chose to tell the story of Star Wars through the eyes of the Droids. There was a very subtle and, I thought, moving theme displayed in the film through the way human characters reacted to the Droids - a theme which I have subsequently ruined by my obsessive and pointless revisions of my own work."
How ironic that the ultimate control freak grumbingly sells out to mega-behemoth in the 2Oth century fire sale.
Most crushing myth shattered - Zoetrope was not the film idyll I imagined it to be. Coppola blustered a deal with Warners. I keenly felt a sense of betrayal when I read of his dismissive attitude to THX1138. My wishful thinking had George and Francis engaged in long discussionsabout film, culture, mythology. I fancied that THX and The Conversation arose, as differently evolved beasts, out of a similar swamp of inspiration. George apparently felt slighted by Francis' commandeering the Apocalypse Now project. Here's a thing - there's a General Willard in Star Wars. Harrison Ford's sons are called Benjamin and Willard (I think).
There's nothing about studying a course on Ethology (maybe there is, briefly, I read this three weeks ago and memory fades). There's a fair bit about Campbell, in passing, just incidental.
If this (so-called) review has a bitter tang, it's because I have a beef with Mr. Lucas. I do not care for the tentative alterations he made to Star Wars. I am still aghast at the dreadful scenes involving Greedo and Jabba The Hutt. For this reason, I refuse to watch any version of Star Wars other than the original release or the 1981 rerelease (that said 'A New Hope', big deal). When I was a kid, we found a reference to 'Star Wars: A New Hope' in an issue of Starlog and we got really excited, saying 'there's a new Star Wars film!'
October 16, 2019
Una biografia molto curata del deus ex machina dell'universo Star Wars, dove emerge prepotente il carattere spesso insicuro e maniacale di Lucas. Una lettura importante per tutti i fan della prima ora - come me - della saga spaziale più famosa del pianeta.
December 1, 2019
Great insight into how GL got into the industry and the volumes of work he had put into his films.
January 16, 2022
George Lucas the brain behind a cult classic Star Wars. How did it all start? The biography gives an insight to the director. An interesting read.
January 20, 2012
Yup, the director we all love to hate, as recorded by a biographer who likes to play fast and loose with his subjects and who always has a thesis. This time, the thesis is that Lucas began life as Luke Skywalker (naive country boy who wanted to promote freedom and liberty (in moviemaking) and became Darth Vader (oppressive, controlling and an acolyte of the System). Kinda works on that theme. Best thing about this book is the indepth stuff about the creation and making of classic films. Behind the scenes stuff that I didn't know, and a couple of things to look out for next time I see them. Worst thing about this book is that it was published right after the release of Episode 1 (referred to at one time as The Phantom Empire) and so misses the mistakes and outrages of the near past. Entertaining. 3/5
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews