NYTimesGeorge Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Creditsit is quite an interesting read,I have quoted some of the stand outs(IMO) below,if you wish to give the 6 page interview a miss
Retiring?“I’m retiring,” Lucas said. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”
He was careful to leave himself an out clause for a fifth “Indiana Jones” film. But otherwise, “Red Tails” will be the last blockbuster Lucas makes. “Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do,” says Rick McCallum, who has been producing Lucas’s films for more than 20 years. “He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.”
Red TailsLucas first heard the story of the Tuskegee Airmen from a friend, the photographer George Hall, in 1988. It appealed on a visceral level — “I’m a fan of fast things” — and also because, despite criticism that “Star Wars” was too white, Lucas has always had an interest in civil rights. Back in the 1970s, Lucas almost cast an African-American as Han Solo (Glynn Turman, who played the first Baltimore mayor in “The Wire”).
“You think ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ you think ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ ” Rick McCallum says. “Then you think, Oh, my God, ‘Red Tails.’
“I can’t make that movie,” Lucas recalled thinking when he read the scripts. “I’m going to have make this kind of . . . entertainment movie.” So Lucas focused on the middle chapter: the dogfights and the Nazi-hunting black pilots who shout, “How you like that, Mr. Hitler!” (When I mention Lucas’s naïve style to Michael Bay, the director of the “Transformers” movies, he says sympathetically, “That’s what I get crap for from my critics.”)
Star Wars“Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”
In the last decade and a half, Lucas has given “Star Wars” several “final” cuts. For the 1997 special edition, he made Greedo, a green-skinned alien, fire his blaster at Han Solo because Han’s murdering Greedo in cold blood — as the 1977 version had it — struck him as a violation of his own naïve style. For the new Blu-ray version of “Return of the Jedi,” Lucas added Darth Vader shouting, “Nooo!” as he seizes the evil emperor in the movie’s climactic scene. Lucas made the Ewoks blink. And so forth.
When fanboys wailed, Lucas did not just hear the scream of young Jedis; he heard something like the voice of the studio. The dumb, uncomprehending voice in his Socratic dialogues — a voice telling him how to make a blockbuster
Indy 4In 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the fourth and least-liked of the Lucas/Spielberg collaborations, Indy steps into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear bomb. Like “jumping the shark,” “nuke the fridge” became shorthand for a creative nosedive and inspired a “South Park” episode in which Lucas and Spielberg rape their archaeologist hero. “Blame me,” Spielberg told Empire magazine last fall. “Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.”
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“What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?” Lucas once asked his biographer, Dale Pollock. Now imagine it being yanked away. If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood. He’d become their dad.
When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.
