From Amazon.com
Among the wave of film directors who brought fresh blood and maverick sensibilities to southern California in the early 1960s--including Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese--none could have seemed less likely than George Lucas, the short, painfully shy car nerd from Modesto, California. And yet, in a mere four appearances behind the camera over 20 years, he managed to change Hollywood and fundamentally alter the culture. In this lively and informative biography, John Baxter weaves interviews with Modesto townies and Lucas cronies into a portrait of the man as an artistically gifted loner with a grocer's feeling for budgets--an important director who was also unmanned by directing and a self-effacing man whose notes for
Star Wars reveal an ambition to make an American epic on the scale of Kurosawa's samurai stories. Baxter skillfully shades in Lucas's emotionally straitened adolescence, his lack-of-anything-better-to-do enrollment in USC's film school, and his relationship with Coppola, whose operatic maneuverings made the small, European-ish
American Graffiti possible, even as his flamboyance estranged the two. Baxter also takes Lucas to task--Lucas lied about losing his virginity in the back seat of a car, he argues--but by the end the author has been won over, appreciating Lucas's films less than he admires the basic goodness and integrity of the man who put up money for Kurosawa's
Ran and Coppola's
Tucker, for no other reason than because he felt that small-town boy's sense of debt to his mentors.
--Lyall Bush
From Publishers Weekly
An astute look behind the myths of the man and his work, this intelligent biography delivers a mixed verdict on director/ producer George Lucas's films: "Thanks to him... American popular culture had been immeasurably enriched in technique, widened in scope, but cheapened in content," writes Baxter, a biographer of Fellini, Spielberg, Kubrick and Woody Allen. "In his hands, cinema became synonymous in sensibility and style with the comic book, the hamburger, the soda." Yet Lucas fans won't mind, and may not even notice, Baxter's quietly devastating criticism as they feast on his detailed behind-the-scenes account of the making and marketing of American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Willow and assorted sequels. Baxter presents the merchandising billionaire (who once observed that Star Wars "was designed around toys") as a socially inept director who finds the Hollywood filmmaking process boring and irritating. At the same time, Lucas has merely dabbled in what he claimed was his lifelong ambition of making inexpensive, personal, even experimental films as an alternative to the Hollywood system. In addition to offering an intense scrutiny of Lucas's creative process, this perceptive bio is peppered with gossipy glimpses into Lucas's rivalry with Spielberg and affair with Linda Ronstadt, details of Carrie Fisher's drug use, Francis Ford Coppola's hectic sex life and the battle waged by a new breed of directors to gain the upper hand over studios and investors in financially controlling their own films. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
