George Lucas: A Biography. John Baxter
Lucas had sometimes done that, but not lately. Myths don’t hesitate.
There was something presidential, even a touch imperial, in his certainty. Though it wasn’t something he confided to many people, he knew history. He’d read of Julius Caesar looking out on his empire and proclaiming, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ He knew of Napoleon as a young officer surveying a world disordered by revolution and being seized by a vision of mankind united under a single rational mind. Above all, he understood Alexander the Great pausing at the end of his last campaign and weeping because there were no new worlds to conquer.
Yet he, a man less favored in his birth, less wealthy, less powerful, less educated, had achieved more than any of these men. He’d conquered not only this world, but other worlds besides. He was, in his way, master of the universe.
Or so his admirers said.
Was it true? He looked around for somebody to ask, and found only the smiling, alert faces of people anxious to do whatever he ordered, agree with whatever he said, set to work on anything he planned.
A legend is always alone.
On 4 July 1980, while Skywalker Ranch was still scrub and pasture, Lucas hosted his first cook-out on the site. There had been nothing much here in those days: just scrub, some cows, and a few deer which had become over the years the main reason for any stranger venturing this far north in Marin County. The spot where the grills were set up had once been occupied by banks of refrigerators to preserve the carcasses of game slaughtered by hunters.
Twenty-five years of construction and landscaping had transformed the old Bulltail Ranch. Anybody driving up from San Francisco along Route 101 and turning onto Lucas Valley Road at the exit marked ‘Nicasio’ found themselves passing through an expensive housing development, then twisting through an idyllic landscape of rivers and waterfalls. Discreetly, a shining wire fence paralleled the road, just out of sight in the woods. Signs every few yards warned that the fence was electrified – to keep in the deer and other livestock that roamed the estate, explained the custodians of the ranch, though everyone knew of George’s nervousness about strangers, and his fears of kidnap.
After eight miles, a sign so undemonstrative that you might well miss it unless you were looking led to a side road that wound through tall redwoods to a guardhouse. Security staff checked the visitors’ credentials against a list of people deemed persona non grata – ungrateful executives, sceptical critics, invasive journalists, technicians insufficiently respectful of Lucas or his managers. In one famous case, two special-effects technicians had been discovered after a cook-out, ‘drunk as skunks,’ according to one report, in that holy-of-holies, George’s private office. They joined the list of people ‘banned from the ranch’ – a phrase so much in currency within the effects community that one Los Angeles group took it as its business name.
Those who passed inspection were directed down the hill into the huge underground parking station, where their cars’ presence wouldn’t intrude on the rural calm. Any who remembered the ranch from the first cook-out didn’t recognise it now. A three-storied fin de siècle mansion clad in white clinker-built planks like a whaling ship, topped with shingled gables and fringed with wide verandahs, stared west across a wide artificial lake and landscaped grounds to a cluster of equally antique-looking buildings on the far side of the valley.
For centuries, European landowners had built ‘follies’ on their estates. One could have one’s own Roman ruins, with carefully shattered pillars, a picturesquely tumbled wall or two, some fragments of sculpture. Or a grotto in the Gothic style, its fountains decorated with old metalwork that might, if you didn’t look too closely, have been looted from some Etruscan tomb. Such buildings bought the owner an instant pedigree, an off-the-hook connection between a nouveau riche family and the ancient world.
Skywalker Ranch went one better. If anyone asked, staff recounted an invented history as carefully constructed as any screenplay. They were told that the property had been a monastery until a retired sea captain bought it in 1869. He built the Main House, which recalled the ‘cottages’ constructed on Newport, Rhode Island, by Vanderbilts and Whitneys at the turn of the century as summer retreats. The captain added a gatehouse the following year, and a stable. In 1880, he was supposed to have diversified into wine-making and built the large brick winery, which was given art moderne additions by a forward-looking descendant in 1934. In 1915, another innovative son erected a house spanning a brook on the estate, using the then-fashionable Arts and Crafts style pioneered by William Morris in the late nineteenth century. Later additions included the two-story library in polished redwood under a dome of art nouveau stained glass, its shelves housing a well-used and comprehensive reference collection.
On the other side of the valley, ‘unwanted relatives’ of the captain occupied conveniently remote guesthouses – named, in a lapse of historical authenticity, for Lucas’s cultural heroes: Orson Welles, John Huston, George Gershwin. After incidents like the encroachment of the drunken effects men, visitors only entered the main house by invitation. To get into the private compound around the Main House, you needed a coded key-card.
The illusion of old money was as meticulous as anything created in Hollywood at the height of its reconstructive powers in the 1940s. The Victorian-style double-hung windows and other fixtures were made in a workshop on the estate, which also maintained a studio for creating stained glass. The library’s well-rubbed redwood came from a demolished bridge in California’s Newport Beach, the books in its glassed cabinets from Paramount Pictures; they’d once been the studio’s reference library. The two thousand mature oaks, bays, and alders spotted around the 235 redeveloped acres of the ranch were trucked in from Oregon.
One visitor who opened a door marked ‘Staff Only’ found herself staring into a bunker filled with video surveillance equipment. Hidden cameras watched every corner of the estate; conduits snaking under the tranquil meadows carried enough electrical, telephone, and computer cables to feed a small town. The extent of the ranch’s electronics could faze even Lucas. In 1997, looking for a socket into which to plug a journalist’s tape recorder, he pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal a tangle of wires. ‘So that’s what’s under there,’ he murmured.
In 1987, Lucas retained the San Francisco firm of Rudolph and Sletten to build a ‘winery.’ A red-brick two-story building with two large wings and an imposing central entrance leading to a three-story atrium with wooden galleries and a glass roof resembled other wine-making facilities in the area. In fact the building housed Skywalker Sound, 150,000 square feet of state-of-the-art post-production studios in the form of eight mixing stages. San Francisco’s avant-garde Kronos Quartet recorded here. So did the Grateful Dead, and singer Linda Ronstadt. The largest facility, Studio A, also known as the Stag Theater, replicated a high-style pastel art deco cinema of the thirties. Its ninety-six-track mixing console was twenty-four feet long, and on a film like Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer demanded eighty-five technicians.
Elsewhere on the ranch, what looked like a two-story barn held the negatives of Lucas’s films and the Lucas Archive. From 1983, Lucasfilm’s first archivist, David Craig, began photographing, documenting, and collecting the models, art-work – ten thousand items alone – costumes, story-boards and accumulated relics of the Lucas legend: ‘objects of artistic, cultural, and historical significance,’ according to the authorized catalog. Donald Bies became archivist in 1988, and helped plan the building, which opened in November 1991.
Lucas’s own office in the Main House held no hint of how he earned the money to build and maintain this empire. Friends like Steven Spielberg filled their offices with framed posters, awards, and signed photographs from presidents and box-office legends. Lucas displayed no souvenirs at all of his film career – no references to film at all, except for a pair of Disney bookends. Opposite his desk was a large painting of the enmeshed gears of a sixteenth-century clock. The artist, Walter Murch, a minor modernist of the thirties, was the father of Lucas’s close friend, also Walter Murch, who edited American Graffiti and with whom, rare for Lucas, he had remained close since they met at college. Elsewhere in the house hung originals by illustrator Maxfield Parrish and Saturday Evening Post cover artist Norman Rockwell, artist by appointment to those who, like Lucas