The Life and Films of George Lucas Are the Focus of Dale Pollock’s Skywalking
In the late afternoon of June 12, 1962, a 17-year-old high school senior named George Walton Lucas, Jr. with a love for fast cars and a D-plus grade average, was driving home from the Modesto (Calif.) public library after a few hours of pre-final exam cramming. Like his future creations Anakin and Luke Skywalker, young George was a daydreamer; on this fateful day his mind was on racing cars and a planned trip to Europe with his best friend, John Plummer. But he had to get his grades up with the finals, or else his parents wouldn’t pay for the trip.
Deciding to go home, George drove east on Sylvan Road through Modesto’s scraggly pastureland. He pushed the tiny Fiat’s two-cylinder engine as far as it would go, more than sixty miles an hour. The sun streamed in through what used to be the roof. George had flipped the car going around a curve and had installed a roll bar in place of the bashed-in roof.
Lucas loved to drive. He savored the thrill of taking a corner on two wheels. He would race the Fiat back and forth on acres of walnut trees. He had seen friends of his killed in car crashes – seven schoolmates died behind his house when their car, going one hundred miles an hour, ran into a tree. But it didn’t slow him down.
As he neared the Lucas ranch, George began to make the turn into the short dirt road that led up to the house. It was around 5:00 P.M., and the sun was slowly sinking behind him. He took a look at his rearview mirror, saw nothing, and turned.
At that moment, he heard the roar of an engine and a wildly honking horn. Frank Ferreira, seventeen, was barreling down the road in his Chevy Impala. The Fiat was directly in his path. Ferreira tried to go around it but instead hit the small car broadside, directly where George was sitting.
– Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.
Considering the impact of Lucas’ career as a writer, director, producer, and chief executive of a multi-media empire that not only encompasses the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films but includes books, computer and video games, sound design and engineering, digital effects hardware and software, and the brave new world of digital cinematography, it’s hard to believe that it could all have ended on that dirt road near the small town of Modesto.
Indeed, in the photo section of Dale Pollock’s unauthorized biography, Skywalking, there is a photograph of Lucas’ Fiat, smashed against a tree, a strong image of the event that changed Lucas’ life drastically. Before the crash, George had been a “perennial goof-off who never bothered to plan ahead.” After the crash, Lucas became goal-oriented and focused.
“You can’t have that kind of experience and not feel that there is a reason why you’re here,” Lucas explains. “I realized I should be spending my time figuring out what that reason is and fulfill it….”
First published in 1983 at around the same time as the premiere of Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and updated in 1999 to coincide with the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Dale Pollock’s unofficial biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema is a very readable and informative work. With the cooperation of Lucas himself, Pollock traces the writer-director’s career from his roots in small town California, his days as a bright film student at the University of Southern California, his partnership with Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola (who co-produced Lucas’ first box-office smash American Graffiti), and, of course, the making of his two most famous movie projects, the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series.
Although Pollock’s book rightly focuses on Lucas’ amazing Horatio Alger-like story and his successes, he also delves into the less-than-successful film and TV projects Lucas has lent his name to (Howard the Duck, More American Graffiti, The YoungIndiana Jones Chronicles) and the less-than-happy ending of his marriage to acclaimed film editor Marcia Lucas, who filed for divorce just as Return of the Jedi was becoming the big hit for 1983 and left Lucas to raise their adopted daughter Amanda by himself. (Lucas has since adopted several other children; they have made cameo appearances as minor characters in the Star Wars prequels.)
For fans of Lucas’ films, the chapters on the making of American Graffiti, Star Wars, and the Indy trilogy will be the big draw of Skywalking. I found Chapter Six (“The Vision of Star Wars”) particularly fascinating; the making of what is now known as Episode IV: A New Hope was no cakewalk; props failed to work, rain made the Tunisian desert (where the scenes set on Tatooine were shot) into a mudhole, and the studio execs at 20th Century Fox were making George Lucas’ life miserable by threatening to cut off the cash flow if the director didn’t finish “that science film.” After reading this part of the book and learning that Lucas had to be hospitalized for exhaustion and stress, I was impressed.
Pollock’s style is informative yet never didactic; he delves into the workings of Lucas’ creative process and filmmaking in general without bogging down the reader with jargon or pretentious phrasings. And although this is not an “official” biography, the author benefitted from the full cooperation of George Lucas, which not only enabled Pollock to interview the man but also his family, friends, and colleagues.
(A fact I learned from this book: George Lucas very much wanted to direct Apocalypse Now, a project he and Francis Ford Coppola – with others – had been working on for several years. He asked Coppola to wait until Star Wars was done, but his friend and former American Zoetrope partner refused. The friendship chilled for a while when Coppola went off to the Philippines to shoot the Vietnam War epic, but in a roundabout way he acknowledged Lucas’ contribution to the movie; if you look closely at the name tag on Harrison Ford’s character’s Army blouse, you’ll see the name “G. Lucas” stenciled neatly.)
Another useful section of Skywalking is the filmography that follows the final chapter of the main narrative. Starting with Lucas’ first student film, 1965’s Look at Life, it includes all the films (up to 1999’s The Phantom Menace) written, directed, and/or produced by the man who took audiences on a journey to “a galaxy far, far away….”
Recommended:
Yes
