George Lucas changed the direction of Hollywood with Star Wars by helping set the bar for blockbusters to come. But Star Wars was more than a phenomenally successful movie. It was a social phenomenon. According to fans interviewed for the thought-provoking, amusing documentary The People vs. George Lucas, the Star Wars trilogy shaped not only the imagination but molded the lives of a generation and established their moral universe. Why then, the documentary asks, have so many fans turned on Star Wars\' creator?
Director Alexandre O. Philippe explores Star Wars and its discontented fans while wondering about artistic integrity in the face of fandom. The intensity of the reaction by many adults who spent many childhood hours in Lucas\' galaxy is more than the usual shrug of “that sucks.” They are angry, many of them—not just disappointed but profoundly let down. It\'s as if Lucas eventually revealed himself as clay-footed prophet, a thief in his own temple.
His sins? To most fans, it wasn\'t the merchandizing empire that absorbed his movies into a consumer product line. They were happy to buy the goods—the light sabers and Darth Vader helmets and Luke Skywalker action figures. The grumbling began when Lucas released revised versions of the first three Star Wars, excising the original special effects in favor of less evocative computer imaging, and then suppressed the originals, even claiming to have destroyed the negatives. It was as if the Dreammaker turned evil and robbed the sleepers of their cherished memories. Suddenly, the movies that shaped a generation weren\'t as they remembered. Mutant changelings had taken their place.
Did Lucas have the right? Well, as the film shows, in the 1980s he took the lead in challenging Ted Turner for colorizing black-and-white movies, charging the mogul with cultural vandalism for changing the pictures. But those were movies by dead directors. Why can\'t Lucas revise his own past work, if he chooses? The arguments by extreme fans fall on the other side of lame; they may love Star Wars but they don\'t own it—they can make their own fan movies and circulate them on YouTube or wherever, but they can\'t tell the artist what to do with his work. And yet, they also have every right to be disappointed. The originals were better in the mind of almost everyone except Lucas.
Things turned ugly with the much-anticipated trilogy of prequels, beginning with Phantom Menace. The years that had passed since the previous Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, gave fans plenty of time to imagine their own prequels—all of them better than the ones Lucas finally produced. While Jar-Jar Binks was an instant turn-off, it took time for the pervasive, technocratic dullness of Phantom Menace (and its trivialization of the Star Wars saga) to sink in. I was no better, praising the movie from the obligation of expectation and realizing belatedly that it was a stilted bore, as were the two remaining prequels.
Examining his biography, Philippe finds that Lucas, the onetime rebel filmmaker, had transformed himself out of necessity into a mogul to protect his vision. The irony was that in doing so, his vision began to deteriorate, isolated within his profitable merchandizing empire and an obsession with technology for its own sake. He should have left Star Wars to the fans and moved on, but as put by Francis Ford Coppola, one of the documentary\'s most perceptive commentators, Lucas became a prisoner of his own success, sacrificing his creativity in order to feed fans determined to hang on to their vision of the story he had told decades earlier.
The People vs. George Lucas is out on DVD.
