George Lucas
The man I admire most in my life is my dad, because of his integrity and example, but also of the
deep personal connection we obviously share. But if I turn the focus to the public sphere, George Lucas is the man who I try to pattern myself after, both professionally, and - in the limited way I can detect - personally.
From his humble beginnings in filmmaking in the early 1970s, to his tour de force in the form of Revenge of the Sith in 2005, Lucas has always been a man who set out to carry out his vision and maintain his independence.
I feel independence is perhaps my strongest character trait, so it's something I can deeply respect in Lucas. He felt that way even before the age of 30, when he made his first two films, THX-1138 and American Graffiti. The studios in charge of those projects edited his films without his consent after he was finished with them. This angered Lucas to the point where he went about his filmmaking philosophy in an entirely new way, starting with Star Wars in 1977.
Even though he was just 32 years old, making a movie in a foreign country (England, Tunisia) with an unknown cast, he had a very particular vision of how he wanted his project to turn out.
He literally put himself in the hospital with stress over the compromises he had to make and the battles he had to fight in order to drag some very traditionalist people into a way of making movies that heretofore, had never been done before. But he drove himself to that extent in order to fulfill this vision he had, which I can only define as a God-given ability to see things ahead of where other people could see at the time.
He was 5 minutes ahead of everyone else, and that's just one of the things I so greatly admire about him.
When Star Wars was released, it became a cultural phenomenon unlike any previously seen. In the 1970s, people were looking for a reason to stop being cynical. From the JFK Assassination of 1963 to the mess of Vietnam and the Nixon resignation, people were beaten down with reality. Star Wars gave them a reason to feel uplifted again. It was the result of one man's vision and interminable drive to see it through.
He could have been content with a film that broke all box office records and literally redefined the state of a culture. He was wealthy and successful enough that he could have retired then. But he didn't. Instead, he decided to become even more ambitious, and make The Empire Strikes Back.
If Star Wars was the game-changer, Empire was the movie that gave the franchise legs and set the bar at an entirely new level. It's the movie I always felt like it least-looked like it was made on Planet Earth out of any of the Star Wars films.
The kicker for me, is that the last five Star Wars films he made, he paid for with HIS. OWN. MONEY. I mean, no one does this in Hollywood. People can't make a movie walking around their neighborhood without having some outside cash helping out. In order to maintain his independence and to keep up the quality he envisioned, Lucas personally paid for every piece of lumber, every square foot of a sound stage, every actor's airplane ticket, every computer pixel used to make those movies. He had the guts to lay it on the line himself and take on all the responsibility for the films himself. Sadly, he has paid a heavy price for this, with the misguided and uninformed criticism he's received in the latter half of his career. But he put his money where his mouth was, every time.
After Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, he had finished his vision of the trilogy, a project that took him 10 years of his life. He suffered personal anguish while doing so, his wife divorcing him just as production on the last film was wrapping.
One of my favorite Lucas stories occurred in this time, but I only became aware of last year. A man named Joe Johnston was a very important art director for the first three films, and who deserves an awful lot of credit for the great look those films achieved. Lucas thought he had a future in film school, though Johnston was reluctant. Lucas kept Johnston on at half salary, paid his tuition to film school in full and offered to help him pursue his own opportunities in the business. Selfless and loyal gestures like that, inspire me to do that for the workers I have in my employment today.
In 1992, Lucas was the recipient of the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award, the highest honor the film industry can bestow upon an individual. He was at the very top of his profession, never to reach any higher. Could he have stayed retired then? Content to raise his two (soon to be three) adopted children? I mean, who in the world could have blamed him?
But no, he set out to push the standards of film even further just two years later. A billionaire sat down at his office desk, made of three old doors (I want that setup!) and started writing on a yellow legal pad. On November 1, 1994, he began the process that made the word "prequel" a well-known word and heavily copied concept throughout popular film and television thereafter.
Again, a man who was ahead of the curve. He invented ways to use the camera to capture motion and action in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, he created the digital frontier that enabled him to place no limits on himself as a storyteller and filmmaker. He wasn't content with doing groundbreaking work in just two decades, he decided to do it in four different decades.
But it's not only Lucas's success and imagination that I admire, but his generosity. The Joe Johnston story is just one example of this. After each of his films were released, he arranged to have revenue percentage points distributed among all of his employees. In the early years, he would buy a turkey for each family associated with Lucasfilm for Thanksgiving. He didn't have to do any of this, but without prompting, he did it.
The ultimate act of his generosity was probably his hardest. I was shocked when, on October 30, 2012, it was announced that Lucas had sold his company to Disney for $2 billion in cash and $2 billion in stocks, options, etc. He gave all that money away to education.
George Lucas is a man, who in so many ways, is leaving a world in better shape than which he entered. As five circus clowns debated the future of the world on a debate stage in Houston tonight, I was reminded of George Lucas, an understated man with a sly sense of humor, a deep imagination, an unsatiable drive, and a generous heart who has certainly made my life better, more enriched than any current candidate for President ever could.
I know he'll never see this, but, as this blog is for me, I'd like to type these words: Thank you George Lucas, for making my life more fun and complete with your creation. Star Wars films, stories, music and characters have allowed me to escape the pressures of my own life countless times. That may not be what you intended to do when you started writing those words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," but that's the effect you've had on me, and millions of others worldwide.
Thank you, sir.
