See ya, George. Don't let the screen door hit you on the backside.
The farther away from Star Wars he is the better.
Sorry, folks, but I just can't accept that GL is any kind of "genius".
If he was a "genius" the prequels wouldn't be the garbage fire they are.
He doesn't even understand Star Wars.
What kind of "genius" is too dense to grasp the message of his own story?
Good riddance.
Lucas is a genius of a particular stripe. I've said this here and elsewhere in the past, but I see it like this.
Lucas is, at the core, a "big ideas" guy. He also isn't that great at executing those big ideas on his own. Instead, he's someone who does his best work when he's surrounded by collaborators and faced with limitations, be they budgetary, environmental, or just the naysaying of those collaborators.
As an idea guy, out of 10 total ideas:
- 5 will be utter crap.
- 3 will be pretty good, but need some tweaks.
- 2 will be total genius that will absolutely floor you.
With the OT, surrounded by collaborators like Gary Kurtz, Lawrence Kasdan, Irvin Kershner, and Marcia Lucas, and faced with all manner of limitations, George did amazing work. You see less of this after Kurtz's and Marcia's departure and tapping Richard Marquand to be the director of ROTJ, but there's still some of the old DNA about. What you saw were George's 2 genius ideas, and the remaining 3 that the collaborators helped massage into something amazing. You didn't really see the 5 crap ideas because the collaborators said "No, George. That's stupid and we aren't doing it."
With the PT, surrounded by yes-men and employees, you saw...all 10 ideas. The crap, the ok stuff (that didn't get improved), and the genius.
So, yeah, I think Lucas is a genius...of sorts.
What I
don't thing he is, is an infallible
auteur. The differences between the OT and the PT are too stark for that to be the case, and I can't believe he changed
so much that what came before was all him, just as what came after. But the thing is, from 1977 to 1999, the
myth was that George was the
auteur of Star Wars. He was the singular vision behind
all of it, and it was
all his creation. All the making-of stuff that came out in the 80s supported it, and the collaborators generally took a back seat to Lucas in terms of talking about their contributions during this period. And I think that George...kinda came to believe that about himself, too. Or, he saw the success as being because of him, and that any problems were the results of the limitations he faced, rather than those limitations forcing him to be his absolute best.
If you look at his life in Hollywood, he basically spent his entire career fighting for autonomy and the right to be a completely unfettered
auteur. He didn't want the studio telling him how to make his film, or limiting him with budgets. He fought against the restrictions of technology itself, pushing the limits wherever he could to tell the story he wanted to tell. His career progressed such that those around him became less and less people who would say "No" or "that's not possible" and more and more "Yes," or "We'll make it happen." I can respect that...on a level. As a result, I can imagine that making movies and telling stories are, for George,
intensely personal experiences, because he's basically pouring himself out on to the screen in front of you. When audiences rejected that, said it sucked, said he was daft, that he raped their childhoods, etc...that must have been incredibly painful for him to take, as well as confusing in light of the 22 years previously where he was regarded as a singular, infallible genius (er...Willow notwithstanding).
I respect George's steadfast desire for artists' rights and independence, but I think it went too far and to the point where he was fighting so hard for freedom that he failed to realize he was telling a story
for an audience other than himself. Ultimately, I think he lost sight of the purpose of storytelling itself, which is (in my opinion) a
relationship between the storyteller and the audience, and came to view it purely as a mode for self-expression without regard to (or in some cases, in defiance of) the audience.