George Lucas Is A Lousy Storyteller, Episode Two

As noted, Lucas alone never rises as high as he does with collaborators.  He’s been extremely fortunate in his career to have been in the right place and the right time and to have struck alliances with numerous creators who possess a far better story telling sense than him.  Walter Murch, Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan, Stephen Spielberg, Ron Howard, and the aforementioned Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck.

But he bungled the Star Wars franchise at the very beginning, demonstrating he lacked insight into the reason his film became such a huge success.  He started on an enviable high note, but instead of sustaining it he immediately set to work sabotaging his own concept.

Lucas changes his own history repeatedly, ghosting people whom he feels have failed him (such as Jim Nelson, the original associate producer of Star Wars who took the fall for budget and schedule overruns) or else stand up to him creatively (viz. Irvin Kershner, the legendary “last man to say no to Lucas” who overruled his boss to shoot the famous “I know” line in The Empire Strikes Back that delighted audiences, a situation Lucas never allowed again). 

Star Wars began life as the (hopefully) first script in a proposed film series, with Lucas recruiting Alan Dean Foster to write both the novelization for the movie and an original novel, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, to serve as a low budget sequel should the movie falter at the box office.

It’s long been speculated that Foster also did an uncredited re-write on the first Star Wars movie but he has formally denied this and so we will take him at his word and just say for once in his life George Lucas actually wrote a good screenplay.

But when the first film became the biggest hit of all time, Lucas forgot about moving the story forward and instead concocted a grandiose scheme that would involve four sets of trilogies with a standalone movie between each trilogy for a total of 19 movies.

This was a mighty high aim in 1977 (though Marvel and Eon Productions have proved it can be done).  It would have been a challenge had the original Star Wars been the first film in the series, but instead Lucas retconned it to be the first film in the second trilogy, with the first three to be filmed after episodes IV / V / VI were complete.

Again, this might have proven workable, had not Lucas decided the Star Wars saga would be about the ultimate dysfunctional intergalactic family.

Oh, no.  No, no, no, George.

Audiences responded as strongly as they did because they’d been primed and waiting for Star Wars all their lives.  From Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to Lost In Space and Star Trek, they’d been given a taste of what glorious space opera could be, but instead of focusing on the whiz bang and daring-do that makes that sub-genre popular, Lucas opted to focus instead on Darth Vader’s lifelong hissy fit.

Here, let me say it out loud: 
The success of Star Wars occurred despite George Lucas, not because of George Lucas.

It occurred because comic books and video games and novels and animated series and fan films gave the audience what they really wanted.

Lucas infamously bragged that when he sent the first draft of what became Episode I: The Phantom Menace to fellow directors and screenwriters, they all told him it was perfect and not to change a word.

The only way to get more smoke blown up an ass
would be to set fire to a donkey’s stall.

The Phantom Menace unravels like a tyro’s screenplay, with numerous scenes ending on some variation of “I can’t think of anything else to say so I must ask you to go now” (hint: It’s called” CUT TO:” George). It’s far from the worst script ever written, but lordie, it sure ain’t a good one, much less a great one.

And Lucas, despite the boffo b.o. stung by audience reactions, proceeded to change plot points for succeeding Star Wars movies based on their set-ups not being fully appreciated.

If the audience can recognize a clue when it’s dropped in front of them, it ain’t gonna be a surprise when you finally reach the big reveal, right?

Yet if you panic at initial reactions, you undermine the (allegedly) carefully constructed story you built on those clues.

You can’t have your polystarch portion bread and eat it, too, George; either stick to your plan or play it by ear, but if you choose to plan, don’t gut it because you lack faith in your own storytelling abilities.

And there was a collective sigh of relief when The Rise Of Skywalker finally brought the original saga to an official close so audiences could forget about that and shift their attention to the more satisfying TV series such as The Mandalorian.

Lucas, lacking an understanding of why thematic structure is important in storytelling, contradicts his own mythos again and again and again.

He turned The Force from something any dedicated being could aspire to master into a luck-of-the-draw genetic mutation, creating a race of elitist super-beings who are justified in treating non-Force users like crap.

After plucky young Anakin saves Princess Amidala’s home world, she doesn’t visit the ATM machine in order to buy his mom’s freedom.  She does develop romantic feelings for him and marries him when he grows a pair.  Yuck.

Outside of making her catty, he gave no thought to Leia’s character, having her shrug off the destruction of her home world as if her bagel fell cream cheese side down, then letting her father -- purportedly as mighty a master of The Force as ever existed -- to torture her with drugs and a hypodermic needle yet she never displays any psychological ill effects from this nor does he recognize her as his own daughter (proof positive Lucas never possessed any clear idea of what he intended to do with the series).

Jar Jar Binks, whom Lucas apparently originally conceived as an undercover villain who only pretends to be inept, gets virtually written out of the storyline when audiences responded negatively to him, despite Lucas laying clues that would later reveal his duplicity.

You don’t do that.  You don’t listen to audiences and undermine a sub-plot you’ve already worked out just because they don’t grasp its importance yet.

As a creator, you owe your audience something, and that’s a story told to the best of one’s ability.

Lucas never displayed originality as a creator.  His first hit relied on him tapping into a cultural zeitgeist already primed at the pump:  Boomer nostalgia for the days before the Kennedy assassination.

Lucas cast Ron Howard in American Graffiti based on Howard’s performance in the pilot of TV’s enormously successful sit-com Happy Days (seen as “Love And The Television Set” a.k.a. “Love And Happy Days” on the Love, American Style comedy anthology series). 

Lucas didn’t pioneer new territory, he jumped onboard a train already pulling out of the station.

His later megahit, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, reflects little of him and more of Spielberg.

I’m not an overawed fan of Spielberg’s style of filmmaking, but the guy does know how to tell a story and in his later years turned out some really good work.

Lucas lacks that talent.  He would function best as a journeyman studio director in Hollywood’s golden era, someone to be handed over to a no-nonsense producer with a fully developed script who could supervise the final product without having to step in too often.

Come to think of it, perhaps I’m being too harsh on Lucas.

After all, he is telling stories to the best of his ability.

It’s just that like his retconned Force,
if you don’t already possess the storytelling gene,
you never will.

© Buzz Dixon