Wired Online has a fascinating profile on George Lucas that starts off as a puff piece:
"I like Star Wars, but I certainly never expected it would take over my life," Lucas says in a conversation at Skywalker Ranch. He estimates that he gave two decades of solid work to Star Wars, not including a hiatus to raise three adopted kids as a single father. Now 60, the once-lanky wunderkind in aviator glasses has grown bearish, with a snowy, close-clipped beard and a sardonic wit that doesn't come through in the making-of documentaries. He says he's relieved that the longest chapter of his career is over.And manages to make me respect him again by examining his roots:
"Normally at this time, I'd be under a lot of pressure to get the script done for the next movie. There wouldn't be any break from the stress and creative demands. So it's great to be able to kick back."
The film that made the most profound impression on Lucas, however, was a short called 21-87 by a director named Arthur Lipsett, who made visual poetry out of film that others threw away. Working as an editor at the National Film Board, he scavenged scraps of other people's documentaries from trash bins, intercutting shots of trapeze artists and runway models with his own footage of careworn faces passing on the streets of New York and Montreal. What intrigued Lucas most was Lipsett's subversive manipulation of images and sound, as when a shot of teenagers dancing was scored with labored breathing that might be someone dying or having an orgasm. The sounds neither tracked the images nor ignored them - they rubbed up against them. Even with no plot or character development, 21-87 evoked richly nuanced emotions, from grief to a tenacious kind of hope - all in less than 10 minutes.Interesting stuff that manages to get quotes from a broad variety of people including Roger Ebert, Peter Jackson and Walter Murch, who Lucas worked with early in his career. I may be greeting the last part of the series with a mixture of dread and anticipation, but I have to say that getting reminded of his impact in the industry was a good thing. I mean, this is the guy that promoted his film at San Diego Comicon back in 1976 and picked Howard Chaykin as artist on the comics. He may have made The Phantom Menace, but he also gave us THX-1138 and Raiders of The Lost Ark. Let's hope that Revenge Of The Sith stuffs his coffers to the point where he can do what it appears he's interested in: small movies that are there because he wants them there, not because of audience demand.
Lucas threaded the film through the projector over and over, watching it more than two dozen times. In 2003, he told directors Amelia Does and Dennis Mohr, who are making a documentary on Lipsett, "21-87 had a very powerful effect on me. It was very much the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I was extremely influenced by that particular movie." Deciding that his destiny was to become an editor of documentaries who, like Lipsett, would make avant-garde films on the side, Lucas worked in the USC editing room for 12 hours at a stretch, living on Coca-Cola and candy bars, deep in the zone.
"When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off," says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. "One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience's mind to try to figure out the connection."
