George Lucas is a petty, toxic little gamma

This article is ten years old, but holy cow if it doesn't still pack a punch.

https://www.tor.com/2012/03/16/lucas-shot-first-the-surprisingly-powerful-sense-of-betrayal-george-lucas-creates/

Even if it is posted on tor.

As I read The Secret History of Star Wars the first time, I was more and more disappointed in George Lucas himself; the man obviously has some talent, but it's squandered because of his resentment of supposed slights, and the lack of adulation that he got from some of his movies that maybe he liked better than Star Wars. Lucas comes across as the guy who was ignored by the popular people in high school—not actively bullied, but just they were totally apathetic to him and ignored him completely—and now in his old age, he's trying to get revenge on everyone who didn't appreciate him as much as he believes he is entitled to.

There are lots of reasons to be disappointed in Star Wars lately, most of them attributable to Disney and Kathleen Kennedy's even more toxic attitude toward the brand, but before there was Kathleen Kennedy, there was George Lucas. And while he deserves a lot of credit for creating some pretty cool movies ~40 years ago, everything he's done since has eroded that accomplishment. His attitude and statements since are the most damning thing of all.

Basically, George has turned around and made the studio system his justification for going back and editing anything he wants. Those heartless men in their Hollywood suits took something precious from him, denied his right to true ownership, and now he’s taking it back inch-by-CGI-saturated-inch. And the fans who are reediting the films themselves, rearranging the prequels so they make more sense, or knocking out those ridiculous “Noooo“s, well, he’s got news for them:

“On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ “

Which is, of course, just another way of saying “they’re my toys and I’m the only person who knows how to play with them properly.”

And that’s not a nice thing to say to the people who made your little empire, who paid for every brick and microchip that line the gold-paved road to Skywalker Ranch. We want to love you, George. You created our collective childhoods. What we can’t understand is how you never seem the realize the sanctity of that. Then again, you don’t even seem to understand the how people connect with each other, much less how they bond with and over a work of art.

We know Star Wars means more to us than it does to you, the man who reportedly hated talking to actors until he directed the prequels, who wanted to replace people with effects in his youth and has nearly achieved that goal. We don’t need Boba Fett’s voice to sound like his retconned father’s—that’s not why we loved that over-armed bounty hunter. We don’t need to see Hayden Christensen’s ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi—he’s not the person who Luke held as he died. You’re taking away the moments that reverberated in us, the little bits and bobs that made a silly popcorn film so damn special. And you have the gall to act above it all when you do it.

“Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie.”

Then why do you need to keep coming back to it? It’s not Homer or Milton or even Dante, we all know that, but couldn’t you make an effort to protect it from the ravages of time?

I suppose this line from a recent interview with Oprah should tell us all we need to know:

“Don’t listen to your peers, don’t listen to the authority figures in your life—your parents—and don’t listen to the culture. Only listen to yourself. That’s where you’re going to find the truth.”

That brand of myopia is painful to hear, because it means that a creator who we piled so much love and admiration onto was never really worthy of those sentiments. That he is, in fact, resentfully dismantling something beloved, and in the name of… truth? A truth that he can’t be bothered to share with the rest of us? Movies are supposed to be made for people who watch them, but George has obviously forgotten what business he’s in.