Despite the many criticisms he tends to attract, George Lucas is smarter than any of us. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of things that you couldn't actually find in any encyclopaedia, and was a film scholar back when that meant long days tracking down obscure theatres or film prints in university basements rather than pouring half-heartedly over the internet and wading into forum debates. He is also one of the smartest advocates of popular film as art - hence his commitment to blockbusters and epic scale - and lest we forget, he invented Star Wars. Only a genius could have created Tatooine, or conceived the Death Star, and only a genius could have made millions upon millions of people care about the adventures of a charming smuggler, his hirsute sidekick, a war-weary princess, and a farm boy with a destiny as if generic boundaries didn't even matter. It's just a shame that that self-same genius has to be considered one of the worst decision makers in the history of modern cinema. It is no contradiction to say that George Lucas has proven time and again that he can generate great ideas, it's just that these ideas are culled from thousands of really bad ones; it's very much a case of sifting through tonnes of mud to find the elusive gold nuggets. For every Darth Vader there's a boring Mace Windu, or a green, gilled Han Solo, and there's a reason that Lucas had to do go through four radically different drafts before a studio would accept his script. Luckily, a lot of people stopped most of Lucas' worst ideas from making the leap from page to screen, but then, unfortunately (and rather brilliantly, it has to be said), Lucas engineered a position of power for himself that meant he basically had complete creative control, and was unquestionable, because of his past achievements. And that's when people started saying no to his bad ideas a lot less frequently, and the graph of success took a serious nose-dive. As far as we now know, Lucas will not be making films ever again, and had he not made so many missteps, we might well have seen a lot more of his projects on the big screen. As it is, it was the kind of mistakes listed within this article that ultimately put a black mark against his reputation...
I am a writer and musician born and raised in Montana. I have done everything from fixing fences in Glacier National Park to curating the music library at KBGA Missoula. I am also a lazy jerk.
