Innovation According to Star Wars

In my last post on the Star Wars universe, I advised disgruntled fans that creating an original piece of work would help them sympathize with authors better. I want to elaborate with an obvious, specific case—George Lucas.

Lucas will go down in history as one of the creative powerhouses of the Twentieth Century, and more influential than all of his more famous movie director friends. He’s not significant like a Steven Spielberg or a James Cameron. He’s more like a Thomas Edison or a Steve Jobs.

Lucas is an innovator, not just with the film frame, but with filmmaking itself. He saw, before anyone else, that the future of movies lay in computers. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the effects house he assembled in the mid-1970s for the first Star Wars, went on to support many of the images that made Spielberg and Cameron famous.

Both Spielberg and Cameron are master tinkerers themselves—always stretching the technology necessary to bring their visions to life—but Lucas has come to their rescue more than anyone else. The liquid metal man of Terminator 2 and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were ILM innovations that both directors learned to apply to their work.

Tracing the history of blockbusters in the 1980s and 1990s is often tracking the history of Lucas’ projects and their offspring. Research at Lucasfilm also advanced computer editing, sound, gaming, and animation, heavily influencing software applications like Avid and Adobe, and giving birth to Pixar Animation.

Armchair historians reduce Lucas to the man who burdened us with special effects films and Star Wars figures. Confused fans malign him for failing spectacularly or spoiling his successes. He’s the perfect example of our anxiety around creativity—we dislike successful art out of envy, and we dislike failed art out of embarrassment. It’s essential to note that the original Star Wars could have gone either way.

In the summer of 1976, in the middle of production on Star Wars, Lucas checked himself into a hospital fearing a heart attack. It was simply well-earned exhaustion. The film crew at Elstree Studios in London laughed at Lucas throughout filming. The famous cast wasn’t much kinder to him. Industrial Light & Magic got off to a rocky start improvising new techniques at every step. The location shoot in the Tunisian desert was a disaster.

It makes sense that Lucas would run into so many problems. His choices on Star Wars were a combination of the unfamiliar and the handmade to create a cosmos that looked both other-worldly and lived-in. A standard film production is enough of a juggling act; Lucas threw two giant medicine balls into the rotation: technological innovation and storytelling imagination.

Film editor Walter Murch, possibly the brightest of Lucas’ brilliant colleagues back in the 70s, uses an interesting metaphor to describe the juggling act of filmmaking. It’s a thought experiment called Negative Twenty Questions.

In the classic parlor game Twenty Questions, a person must use less than twenty questions to identify an object in the room secretly chosen by the rest of the players. In Murch’s alternate version, before the guesser begins, the choosers make their selection individually and privately, so that they might all choose different objects in the room.

As the game progresses, their individual answers to the twenty questions narrow the guesser’s and their own possibilities until everyone either lands on the same object or no object in the room could fulfill all twenty answers.

Murch says this is exactly like filmmaking. An entire cast and crew have an idea of an outcome, and they all contribute, but whether their many contributions build a cohesive movie—never mind a blockbuster or masterpiece—is a gamble made of both improvisation and accident.

A writer-director with an exacting vision has some control over this, but it’s far from absolute, which is why even Spielberg and Lucas could never hedge their bets. You can never turn filmmaking into a calculation; it’s bigger than big data. It’s why screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” Saturday morning movie reviewing is the same thing as Monday morning quarterbacking.

For a filmmaker, the distance between a vision in the mind and the red carpet is a marathon, involving juggling. If you also want your movie to include images and ideas never seen before, the only thing you can do is experiment. As the advertisers of the 1950s used to say, “Throw it up in the air and see if it flies.” Of course, they were talking about single advertisements. Movies are multi-million-dollar undertakings.

Lucas is the king of such costly serendipity. His soundtrack to American Graffiti in 1973 based on a Wolfman Jack show? That’s Lucas showing Quentin Tarantino how to put a soundtrack together. His digital Star Wars prequels that everyone now ridicules? That’s Lucas pioneering countless innovations for all the Oscar-winning ILM effects that followed. He is the only person who ever went to L.A. and left with his own successful studio.

Lucasfilm, including ILM, eventually sold to Disney for $4.05 billion, and the company and its assets have already returned the investment. The only reason he achieved that kind of value is because he was always willing to take expensive, short term, shots in the dark for the long term results.

You can’t produce a Raiders of the Lost Ark if you never make a Howard the Duck and you can never have a Chewbacca without a Jar Jar Binks.