The one aspect of Lucas’s activities not relocated to Skywalker by the late nineties was Industrial Light and Magic, which still operated out of San Rafael, outside San Francisco. In 1988, Lucasfilm had opened negotiations with Marin County to develop more of the ranch as a production facility, and to move in ILM. When the supervisors bridled, Lucas offered to set aside most of the remaining thousand acres for ‘conservation,’ while continuing to own and patrol it. Meanwhile, he kept buying surrounding properties, though not without a fight from local farmers and the zoning authorities. By 1996, he owned 2500 acres and was negotiating for more.
The battle with his neighbors was typical of Lucas’s tentative hold on his retreat. In a quarter-century, more than the ranch had changed. Lucas was the second-largest employer in the county. Power calls to power; money draws money. Skywalker had become a focus for the hopes, ambitions, and needs of millions. There was magic in this place, but also greed, resentment, and fear.
Around dawn on any fourth of July during the mid-1990s, hundreds of people would have been on the road heading for Skywalker Ranch, and Lucas’s annual cook-out.
The first of them had flown up from Los Angeles on the early shuttle and collected rented cars at San Francisco airport – or been collected, if they had that kind of clout, as many did; there are some invitations that even the highest executives disregard at their peril.
Leaning back in their limos, the agents, producers, and stars skimmed Variety and Hollywood Reporter. It would be a long trip, and the headlines reminded them why they were making it. ‘Star Wars’ All-Time Boxoffice Force,’ shrilled Variety. ‘Lucas’ Series Paid off in Spades.’ The story spelled out the news, happy for their host, that the three Indiana Jones films he’d produced and helped write, the Star Wars trilogy he’d conceived and the first of which he’d written and directed, the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and the animated films in the series The Land Before Time were all making money.
So were his other enterprises. LucasArts Licensing was earning millions from franchising toys, clothes, drinks, candy, comic books, and games inspired by his films
Industrial Light and Magic, founded by Lucas in suburban Los Angeles in 1975 to produce the special effects for Star Wars, was now worth $350 million, and had become the world’s premier provider of movie special effects. It created Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs and arranged for Tom Hanks to shake hands with Jack Kennedy in Forrest Gump. THX Sound, developed by Lucas engineers, was gaining ground in theaters across the world, and his recording complex, Skywalker Sound, had a reputation as the best in America. LucasArts Games, LucasArts Learning … Whatever George Lucas touched turned to gold. And the gold stuck to his fingers. No financial pages listed these companies. Lucas owned every share of stock himself.
That the staid Sierra Club trusted him with its merchandising wasn’t surprising. Lucas radiated probity – too much probity, thought some. Though the movie journal Millimetre lauded Lucasfilm as ‘a profitable multi-departmental corporation that defines the cutting edge of American film-making,’ the Boston Globe detected an omnipresent fogey-ism in its creations. A Lucas production, it wrote, ‘always seems to be about something like pre-war adventurers or pre-Vietnam teenagers or pre-television broadcasting. Even Star Wars is set in the far past, not the far future, and its style famously turned American movies back to old-fashioned (critics say old-hat) narrative strategies.’
Few of the people who distributed Lucasfilms’ products, worked on them, bought or sold their merchandise or otherwise derived a living from the group, had any such criticisms. True, British actress Jean Marsh, who played Queen Bavmorda in the fantasy Willow, did remark tartly that none of its actors relished being merchandised – ‘We would all pay not to be on the T-shirts and things’ – but she was in the minority. Most felt that, as long as it filled the coffers, Lucas could dramatize Pollyanna, or film Aesop’s Fables.
The cars took at least thirty minutes to skirt downtown San Francisco, cross the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, with giant tankers creeping out to sea so far below that they looked like models in a special-effects sequence, and climb the curve of the cliff onto Highway 101, the sole autoroute north into Marin County, and another world.
The social misfits and renegades who fled here in the late sixties, seeking to preserve the spirit of the Summer of Love from a San Francisco inhabited by panhandlers, dope addicts, porn-movie producers, and prostitutes, discovered a haven in old and sleepy towns like San Anselmo, San Rafael, Mill Valley, and Bonitas. Locals found themselves patronizing the hardware store along with long-haired, bearded men, ethereal-looking women in ground-brushing muslin, and barefoot babies. Teepees and geodesic domes mushroomed in the woods, fringed by private gardens of organic vegetables, with, just a few yards down the track, a patch of marijuana, exclusively for private use.
To the relief of locals, the newcomers weren’t particularly anxious to share their new lifestyle. When the town council of Bonitas, on the Pacific Coast, erected signs saying ‘Welcome to Bonitas,’ the hippies took them down. Most felt they already had just as many friends and neighbors as they needed. ‘The ideal in those days,’ said one refugee from the midwest who briefly settled there in the 1970s, ‘was a narrow road winding through the woods without any signs, and a little house at the end. I couldn’t stand it. That’s no way to live – without people. I moved to San Francisco.’
Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate, gave the first clue to Lucas’s guests that they’d moved into this new world. Once San Francisco’s yacht port, a cluster of boatyards and little dockside bars, its waterside warehouses now belonged to companies making models for movies, or sound designers like Ear Circus, the company of Randy Thom, who’d won an Oscar for the sound recording of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and who’d worked too on Lucas’s ill-starred production Howard the Duck.
Thom, large, bear-like, and, like most of the people behind the scenes of special-effects films, shy and soft-spoken, was also on the road, heading north to the ranch. He’d had an office there while he was working on Howard the Duck, but after that he’d gradually moved away, until now he hardly visited the place. Like a lot of people who’d joined Lucasfilm in the heady days of its crusading energy, he’d made his own way. Except for Dennis Muren, now head of Industrial Light and Magic, none of the people who’d started ILM under John Dykstra still had jobs there. Nor did most of those who worked on Star Wars in other capacities
Lucas’s wife Marcia had gone too, divorcing him in 1983. It surprised many people that the marriage had lasted so long. Marcia edited Lucas’s early films, and was good enough to be asked by Martin Scorsese to cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Taxi Driver, and New York New York. In George’s conflicts with the studios and with Francis Coppola, she’d remained loyal, even when she didn’t share her husband’s