From small town geek to Star Wars legend

George Lucas: A Biography by John Baxter (Harper, Collins: #17.99) Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab John Baxter's new book about George Lucas risks inducing in readers the same sense of puzzlement that Dorothy felt when she saw the Wizard Of Oz prized out into the open. Exposed to the biographer's gaze, Lucas, the all-powerful magician who has force-fed us robots and spaceships, Darth Vader and Chewbacca, The Emperor Of The West, the proprietor of Skywalker Ranch, seems a curiously shrunken and commonplace figure.

Lucas's beginnings were humble enough. He was born on Mother's Day 1944 in Modesto, California. His father, methodist businessman George Lucas Snr, owned the stationery store. His mother, "dark but frail Dorothy Bomberger", was daughter of a prominent local businessman. George's childhood sounds like something out of The Wonder Years. He wasn't an especially bright student (he limped along at a D+ average, notes Baxter, "his one aptitude was art").

As a teenager, he spent his spare time reading comics, listening to rock 'n' roll and tinkering with cars. He wasn't at ease with women. George Snr, incensed that George Jnr didn't want to follow him into the family business, dismissed him as a "scrawny little devil". Baxter, for his part, likens Lucas to Terry The Toad, the ber-nerd in American Graffiti.

Little George's transformation from small-town geek into billionaire producer/director defies Baxter's powers of analysis. This biography was unauthorized. Its tone is sceptical and knocking throughout, even if Baxter throws in the occasional, outlandish compliment. (On page 2, he compares Lucas to Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Alexander The Great, "yet he, a man less favoured in his birth, less wealthy, less powerful, less educated, had achieved more than any of these men".) Baxter seems baffled by how Lucas shimmied up the ladder quite so quickly. According to sociologist Leo Lowenthal, "the mythology of success contains two elements, hardship and breaks". Lucas, though, seems to have risen without trace. After surviving a near fatal car crash in 1962 (a key formative experience, Baxter insists without explaining quite why), he managed to get on to the film major course at the University of Southern California.

What distinguished him from other students wasn't so much his imagination or storytelling skills as his pragmatism. "For God's sake, keep an eye on the kid," cameraman Haskell Wexler told one of his teachers, "he's got the calling." Lucas, despite being "this weird, skinny kid," was able to talk a small army of "tough navy guys" 10 years older than him into working as his crew on his graduate film, the 15-minute sci-fi epic THX1138 (which he later re- made as a feature.) His skill with machinery in general and cars in particular also landed him one of his first professional assignments, working with Saul Bass on the credits sequence of John Frankenheimer's 1965 film, Grand Prix.

He'd already directed one student film, Herbie, "made up entirely of reflections on the hubcaps and polished surface of a car, set to jazz by Herbie Hancock" and another with the revealing title, A Man And His Car.

With his interest in television, cars and comic books, the tyro director often seems like an arrested adolescent. The Star Wars fantasies and the work later carried out by Industrial Light And Magic, the (non-Union) effects outfit he set up in the mid-1970s, reinforce the sense that Lucas was more interested in machines than people.

As he admitted after stressful experiences on both American Graffiti and Star Wars, he didn't much like directing. For him, actors were a necessary evil and the creative part of the movie- making process was in the editing suite. Then again, Lucas helped champion Kurosawa in the US, railed against the wastefulness inherent in the Hollywood system and - at least in the 1970s, when hobnobbing with Coppola and John Milius - was an iconoclast of sorts.

Baxter has interviewed various key members of Lucas's inner circle and has assiduously trawled through the cuttings. His book is well- researched and contains many intriguing asides on such subjects as the 1950s US car industry, how Star Wars revolutionised the movies and how comics and TV shows were merchandized. There's a strange absence at its centre, though. What we never get is any real sense of Lucas as an individual.

"Star Wars," Baxter argues, "is Diet Coke cinema. Fizzy, sweet, refreshing, colourful, but without calories, vitamins or food value; less a drink than the idea of one." Lucas is the purveyor of this ersatz fare - the cinematic equivalent of the burgerstore manager telling us to have a nice day.

In one passage, Baxter describes how Brian De Palma chortled with contempt at a preview screening of the first Star Wars film. ('"What are those?' he demanded of the coiled plaits clamped over Carrie Fisher's ears. 'Danish pastries?'") More recently, critics tore The Phantom Menace to shreds. Some (notably Tom Paulin on The Late Show) saw it - and its predecessors - as racist and imperialist. If the films really are as offensive, mawkish and simple-minded as such responses suggest, why do they inspire almost religious fervour in so many audiences?

This is not a question Baxter is able to answer. The Lucas who emerges in these pages is a sort of cross between Sinclair Lewis's Babbit and Howard Hughes, but he remains as inscrutable at the end of the book as at its beginning.

Copyright 1999
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