Of Stars and Stern

A conversation with George Lucas

George Lucas

NEW YORK -- Deep inside the well-fortified cinema at Broadway and 13th Street, on the night of May 8, a resounding sucking sound could be heard. Only the very privileged had been permitted to enter this theater-turned-Star-Wars-shrine, and at that their tickets had to be authenticated by hand-held black-light wands. Dry-witted film critics filled most of the seats. A giddy Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala) was in attendance, as was Samuel L. Jackson (a Jedi master) and Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks). But the sucking sound was coming from Howard Stern as he ingratiated himself to as many people, including security, as humanoidly possible.

Somewhere between the original 1977 Star Wars (which was largely panned) and this year's The Phantom Menace (which has been inordinately hyped), reality has taken a hard left. What began as a movie aimed at 10-year-old boys became first a fad, then a belief system, then a merchandising tsunami. Now, Star Wars' creator and intermittent director, George Lucas, is retreating from his L. Ron Hubbard status back to the safe harbor of "It's just a movie." In a press conference at Manhattan's Regency Hotel ballroom (which at first he declined to do and then agreed to), Lucas suggested that though Star Wars is "designed to make people think about the larger mysteries of life, there are definitely not enough answers in Star Wars to constitute a religion."

But what about all the hype? Sitting under the glare of TV lights, Lucas cried uncle. "I'm a little surprised at the imbalanced attention the film has gotten. Actually we have tried very hard to not let the film be over-hyped, and it got out of control and over-hyped anyway."

And the issue of fans worshipping at the temple of FAO Schwarz? Lucas awarded himself an ecclesiastical indulgence: "Well, it doesn't seem to bother the Church very much." Then he positioned himself as the underdog. "The movie and the merchandising are two different things. They are not connected. I have had to make sure that I have exploited everything I possibly can on the movie. It's like being an Indian, when you kill a buffalo, you have to use everything. I'm a very small company relative to the studios."

Late that same day, a different scenario was revealed by producer Rick McCallum. Asked point blank whether the press was even needed, he answered, "Not really, no." In other words, Star Wars is a project with no downside, no risk, even with its $115 million budget. McCallum elaborated, "We have a lot of other [related] businesses. We have the books, which are expected to be huge. The soundtrack, which is expected to be very huge. And the toys are huge."

Yet though the power of the cult, if not the Force, places Lucasfilm above the critics, the filmmaker has not been able to extract himself completely from the system. The usual understanding that reviews should not appear more than 24 hours before the release was breached, mostly at the behest of info-hungry readers. Rolling Stone and the New York Post printed reviews two weeks in advance. Lucasfilm feels abused.

McCallum has seen the light and it's emanating from the monitors of computer screens. "There are 1400 Star Wars Web sites now with an average daily involvement of seven or eight million people. Worldwide, on peaks like when the trailer comes out, there's 30 to 40 million people. You can have a kid write an article that eight or 10 million people read in a week. That's five times the subscription rate of Time or Newsweek." Bottom line for McCallum is that this will probably be the last time the press gets a whack at previewing a Star Wars movie.

Meanwhile, this imbroglio over hype and control has produced a counter-swing subcult embodied in the single persona of Howard Stern. So sycophantic was he at the screening that he rearranged the gravitational pull in his immediate vicinity. When he next got on the air, however, he did an about-face, reaching the by-now hardly original critical conclusion that Stars Wars is not as good as it gets.
-- Cynthia Amsden

---

Back to Middling Menace

---