The year 1983 should have been one of triumphal, Ewok-like celebration for George Lucas. At last, he thought, he was finally free of the story that had dogged him for ten years. He had just turned thirty-nine, and though his friend Steven Spielberg had taken back the crown of biggest blockbuster of all time with ET: The Extra Terrestrial the previous year, Lucas had made the best-selling movie trilogy of all time. Return of the Jedi was a smash hit. Opening in just over a thousand theaters, it made $6 million in its opening day—a new record—and $45 million in its opening week. There were even reports that some hard-core fans had camped out all night to be the first in line, which was then unheard of. By the end of the year, the movie had raked in more than $250 million.
Reviewers professed to like Jedi somewhat less than Empire, now recognized as a classic of the genre, but moviegoers were voting the other way. Meanwhile, the official Star Wars fan club hit its first peak in 1983 with 184,000 members. The novelization of the movie was the best-selling book in America. With the profits from all of this, Lucas could finally complete Skywalker Ranch, the design of which he had been restlessly tinkering with for years (most recently adding a giant water feature, Lake Ewok). It should have been heaven.
Instead, it was arguably the worst year of his life.
The first blow, even before news of Lucas’s divorce became official, was the arrival of the manuscript of Skywalking, the biography written by Dale Pollock. The experience apparently scarred the intensely private Lucas for life. Pollock remembers being summoned to Lucas’s home in San Anselmo shortly after the filmmaker read the manuscript. Inside, spread out on a large workbench, “was just about every page of the manuscript with a red paperclip on it,” Pollock says. “It was clear we were not going to agree on what was inaccurate. He would say things like ‘It says here I’m frugal. I’m not, I’m very generous. I want that changed. It’s inaccurate.’”
Of course, one can be frugal in business and generous with friends and charities at the same time. Indeed, this is the picture that emerges in the book; we learn of Lucas carefully accounting for every dollar spent at his company, while sharing his Star Wars points when he didn’t need to, and keeping his charitable giving under wraps for fear of being labeled an easy mark, à la Scrooge McDuck.
Pollock pushed back as best he could. “I told him, ‘I’m happy to put in something that says you disagree with this,”’ he remembers. ‘“But I’m not taking out what I wrote. Matters of opinion are not subjects of accuracy.’ What he said to me at the end of our unfruitful conversation was ‘I’ll never do this again; no one will ever do this to me again; I will control everything that’s written about me.’ He’s stayed pretty true to that.”
To this day, Lucasfilm contends that some of the eighty hours of interviews Lucas gave to Pollock were off the record; Pollock, now a film school professor, says he would have turned his tape recorder off if he’d heard Lucas utter the words “off the record.” There were rumblings of lawsuits, from both Lucas and Coppola, whom Lucas had attacked in his interviews, alleging that Coppola had stolen Apocalypse Now and never really stood up for American Graffiti.
But Pollock had actually held back on some of the worst things Lucas had said about Coppola. (They remain unpublished; Pollock has refused entreaties from publishers to print the Lucas tapes in their entirety.) He sent both men copies of tapes that proved his point. The threats of lawsuits vanished. Lucas even signed a copy of Skywalking for the author, an inscription that may well go down in history as the most lukewarm dedication from a subject to his biographer. It reads:
To Dale. You have captured an imprint of the first thirty nine years of my life. I am now able to close the book on the past (your book) and look forward to the future. It has been an interesting and sometimes unnerving experience. I’m glad we were able to do it together.
May the force be with you.
It was only after the book was published, Pollock says, that Lucas’s friends told him of the filmmaker’s true intent in participating: to help him reconcile with Marcia. “He hoped my recreation of their meeting and their early time together would help make the case why they should stay together,” Pollock says. Even unbidden, he did the best he could. When he finally got hold of Marcia, she complained to him that George “never wanted to go anywhere, hang out with anyone—he was very insular and it just drove her crazy.” This is rendered in the book as “he and Marcia avoid parties, restaurants and travel.” He writes that the “resiliency of their relationship is impressive,” and quotes Lucas’s long-time assistant, Jane Bay: “They just keep getting stronger as a couple.” Marcia is quoted talking about the “tender and cuddly” side of her apparently cold husband, the side that liked to imitate commercials in silly voices and blushed at her off-color jokes. We see Marcia encouraging George to play tennis and go skiing. The fact that Marcia had to make her husband endless rounds of tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the way his mother used to make, goes unmentioned.
When it came to editing Star Wars, writes Pollock, “Marcia is indispensable to Lucas because she compensates for his deficiencies. Where George is not unduly concerned with character and lacks faith in the audience’s patience, Marcia figures out how a movie can be made warmer, how the characters can be given depth and resonance.” Lucas’s less laudatory way of putting this was to say that Marcia was great at the “dying and crying” scenes; she edited the Yoda death scene in Return of the Jedi, one of the slowest and most tender moments of the series. According to Marcia, the conclusion of Return of the Jedi marked the only time George paid her a compliment on her work—telling her she was a “pretty good editor.” How that rankled.
Skywalking came too late to have any effect on the Lucases’ marriage. George and Marcia Lucas officially separated on June 30, 1983. (It would be almost thirty years to the day before Lucas married again.) At the beginning of that month, they had held a tearful meeting to tell the staff at Lucasfilm; the press announcement was made about two weeks after that, on June 13. The Lucas marriage was officially dissolved on December 10, 1984.
The divorce papers in the public record are minimal, both parties having signed a settlement that remains sealed to this day. All we know is that they would share custody of Amanda and that Marcia had agreed to the deal George offered, waiving her rights to receive further spousal benefits under California law. A Marin County judge agreed to keep the settlement under wraps because of the harm that media attention could inflict on the Lucases’ daughter.
We might agree with the judge and draw a veil over the whole sad scene. But as much as the company would prefer to forget it, the fact remains that Marcia’s departure was one of the most costly financial disasters in Lucasfilm history. The company had, in effect, just lost its cofounder. “I think people sometimes forget that Marcia Lucas owns half of this company,” Lucasfilm’s second CEO, Bob Greber, pointedly told Pollock before the divorce. He added that her unofficial title was “Lucasfilm’s cheerleader.” Her departure cast a pall over everything. Greber himself would leave in 1985, after trying and failing to persuade Lucas to make more Star Wars films.
Losing his wife cost George Lucas more than the budget of another Star Wars film, with no return on investment. He was determined to be done with Marcia, and he was determined not to part with Skywalker Ranch. That made for an expensive settlement. Press reports at the time of the divorce pegged Marcia’s payout at between $35 million and $50 million. Her prenuptial agreement with Rodrigues, signed five years later, states that she still has a forthcoming note from Lucasfilm worth around $25 million, which is to remain solely her property. By the time Marcia and Rodrigues separated in the summer of 1993, her ex estimated Marcia’s net worth at $60 million. Her income—from real estate and from points in Star Wars—was $7 million a year.
None of that, of course, guaranteed Marcia happiness or made up for her lack of a career later on. Nor did the fact that she and Rodrigues had a child, Amy, in 1985, or their wedding on Maui in 1988. According to court documents, they had five cars, including three Mercedes and a Jaguar. On top of their $1.6 million home in Marin, they owned a million-dollar ski home in Utah and a million-dollar beach condo in Maui. They would fly first class with Amy and her nanny on the Concorde to Paris, and stay at a $2,500-a-night suite in the Ritz. But Marcia found herself shunned by many former friends of the Lucases and was unable or unwilling to return to a film-editing career.
Marcia and Tom were divorced in 1995 after two years of separation. She gave Rodrigues most of the cost of a substantial house in San Anselmo, and a generous amount to make sure Amy had equal access to anything she could get at Marcia’s home. But Rodrigues complained that he’d had to put his career on hold while Marcia wanted him available to “play and travel.” Thus began a long and contentious legal wrangle over the size of their settlement. Ultimately, the judge concurred with Marcia that Tom’s cut was more than generous, and he retreated to a winery he’d bought north of Marin.
George and Marcia would stay in touch only as much as necessary for Amanda. Their subsequent activities would often make it seem as if they were in competition. Marcia funded a postproduction center at USC that bore her name; Lucas donated his $175 million building to their alma mater. Marcia bought a house in Pacific Heights; Lucas moved his company to the nearby Presidio. Marcia never quite understood what George was doing with his company. In 1999, she told author Peter Biskind that the Lucasfilm empire was “an inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn’t going to make more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with a huge facility and enormous overhead. Why did he want to do that if he wasn’t going to make movies? I still don’t get it.”
Lucas could have recouped his losses from the divorce with one more Star Wars movie. But he was adamant: the trilogy was over. He was tired, worn out by the divorce and the unbearable stress of trying to bring his fantastical visions to life with limited budgets and inadequate technology. He would not make more big-budget explorations of his universe until the technology was ready to make it look exactly the way he saw it in his head, no rubber monsters required.
This didn’t mean that Star Wars was a shriveled-up pea, as Marcia put it. Not quite. There were a handful of deals in the works after Return of the Jedi. There were to be two ABC TV movies starring the Ewoks. The first, Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure, arrived in 1984. It was aimed at children, far more so than anything in the Star Wars universe thus far. But this was George Lucas: anything made for children had to be high quality, or as close as possible on a $2 million budget.
After the disaster of the Star Wars Holiday Special, Lucas had learned his lesson. He kept a close eye on the production of Caravan of Courage and came up with the story behind it: a family crash-lands on the moon of Endor, the parents and children are separated, and the Ewoks help reunite them. It was directed by the independent filmmaker who had lured Lucas to Marin in the first place, John Korty. Still, Caravan of Courage suffered from one major problem of the Holiday Special—a large portion was furry creatures burbling in a language all their own—so actor Burl Ives was recruited to do a folksy voice-over.
The sequel came in 1985, and it was a much darker affair, called Battle for Endor. The parents, who have been reunited with their children at the end of the previous movie, are murdered—along with a whole forest full of Ewoks—by off-world marauders and an evil sorceress. As with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a darker movie than Raiders and one that Lucas says he intended as a direct metaphor for how he was feeling at the time, Battle for Endor reflects the darkness of Lucas’s postdivorce world—a darkness that seemed to be annihilating the innocence of the Star Wars universe.
“The divorce kind of destroyed me,” Lucas admitted years later. He began a rebound relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt, another feisty brunette; they broke up when Ronstadt declared she had no interest in getting married or having children. He experimented with new looks, switched from glasses to contacts, and even tried shaving his beard off. It was, as he said, a classic divorce situation. He called up and reconciled with his old friend and mentor, Coppola. Perhaps most importantly, he was to meet his third and final mentor in the flesh—and not a moment too soon.
Lucas had put Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to good use between the third and fourth drafts of Star Wars. But it seemed at that point a rather utilitarian work and failed to light a spark in the young Lucas. It was not until some indeterminate point after the first movie, he said, that a friend gave him a series of Campbell lectures on tape. Lucas felt Campbell was much more powerful as a speaker than a writer; he described the experience of listening to the lecture as “immediately electric” and resolved to meet Campbell next time he was in town.
Lucas had to wait until May 1983 before finally meeting the famed mythologist, who was almost forty years his senior. Barbara McClintock, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who was then in her eighties, was holding a symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco: The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. Dune author Frank Herbert was in attendance, as was Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart. But when Lucas called McClintock to ask for an introduction, it was not to any of these famed personalities. Rather, it was to Campbell, whose talk was the centerpiece of the symposium. Lucas the space fantasist and mythology nerd must have sat in the audience enraptured as Campbell described his concept of galactic space in soaring rhetoric: “a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence: billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other, many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces.” The stars are at war.
McClintock’s introduction didn’t go so well. Campbell and Lucas were seated next to each other, not speaking. Campbell had enjoyed silent movies back in the 1920s; he didn’t really go for talkies and certainly didn’t care for modern fare. He had a tendency to hold court, and Lucas was not the greatest at breaking the ice. So McClintock called over magician David Abrams, who did a trick that involved putting George’s hand on Joe’s. “That was it,” McClintock recalled. Lucas and Campbell started talking about the impact of a Hero with a Thousand Faces on Lucas’s movies, none of which Campbell had yet seen. They met next for dinner in Hawaii, where Campbell lived. A friendship began to bloom, Lucas later told Campbell’s official biographers.
Campbell and his wife, Jean, came to stay with Lucas in his ever-widening San Anselmo estate for a week, and Lucas gently suggested showing him the Star Wars trilogy at Skywalker Ranch: “Would you be interested at all in seeing it? I can show you one, or all three of them.” Campbell opted for all three. Lucas suggested stretching them out over three days; Campbell insisted on doing the trilogy in a day. It marked the first time Lucasfilm had screened all three as a movie marathon. They took breaks for meals between each screening. When the credits rolled a third time, the eighty-year-old Campbell sat in the dark and declared: “You know, I thought real art stopped with Picasso, Joyce and Mann. Now I know it hasn’t.” That, McClintock noted, made Lucas’s day.
“I was really thrilled,” Campbell said of the Star Wars series in a later interview. “The man understands the metaphor. I saw things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern problem, which is man and machine. Is the machine going to be the servant of human life? Or is it going to be master and dictate? That’s what I think George Lucas brought forward. I admire what he’s done immensely. That young man opened a vista and knew how to follow it and it was totally fresh.”
Lucas returned Campbell’s compliment in February 1985 at the National Arts Club, where Campbell was being presented with the Medal of Literature. In a potted revisionist history of his writing of Star Wars, Lucas gave a speech in which he said that prior to reading Campbell, he had been reading “Freudians and Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, and all the other mythical heroes of our time.” When he finally came across The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he said, it helped him carve a five-hundred-page script down to two hundred pages. “If I had not run across him,” Lucas said, “I might still be writing Star Wars today.” Of course, as we know, the script emerged more organically, with a far greater range of mythic influences, such as The Golden Bough. Campbell’s book arrived very late in the day, and the majority of the first movie’s script was in place by the time Lucas read Hero. But Lucas was not about to let that fact get in the way of his burgeoning relationship with Campbell, one that reflected well on the saga in retrospect. “He is a really wonderful man and he has become my Yoda,” Lucas concluded.
The following year, PBS broadcaster Bill Moyers, another mutual friend of Lucas and Campbell, told Lucas he was interested in filming multiple interviews with Campbell. “Bring him out to the Ranch,” Lucas insisted. He would cover out-of-pocket expenses for the show. “Just point the camera at him and turn it on. Let’s not make a big deal of this, let’s just get him talking.” The result, some forty hours of interviews edited into a five-episode special called The Power of Myth, hit screens shortly after Campbell passed away at the age of eighty-three; it became one of the most-watched and best-loved shows in PBS history. The franchise that Campbell had inadvertently helped to shape, meanwhile, was not faring nearly as well.
By 1985, the year George Lucas lionized Joseph Campbell at the National Arts Club, Star Wars was far from its mythical heights. The franchise seemed to be petering out as a brand for anyone but the youngest children, and even they were losing interest. There was a Droids cartoon, starring Artoo and Threepio, which lasted for one season, and an Ewoks cartoon, which lasted for two. Initially these cartoons were shown as a Star Wars adventure hour on ABC Saturday mornings, and a new line of Kenner figures and a Star Wars comic book were created to go with them. Viewership figures were great—in a few European and Latin American countries, that is.
Not for the last time, Lucas turned to Disney to help revive the brand. The first Lucas-Disney collaboration was the Michael Jackson vehicle, Captain EO, executive produced by Lucas and directed by Coppola. That blossomed into a Star Tours theme park ride, which opened in Disneyland in January 1987. Disney CEO Michael Eisner helped Lucas open the proceedings with a light saber, a couple of droids, an Ewok or two, and a pair of large mice. Star Tours was situated at the same Tomorrowland that entranced a young Lucas back in 1955, and it had the singular honor of being the first Disney ride based on a non-Disney movie.
Ironically, the concept for Star Tours was based on an idea for a ride related to Disney’s Star Wars clone from 1979, The Black Hole. The total cost of what was to be the first version of Star Tours, $32 million, was twice the original cost of Disneyland itself and exactly the budget of Return of the Jedi.
Outside of Disney Parks, however, the whole Star Wars machine was creaking to a halt. The power in the toy world now resided with Mattel, which was still smarting from its failure to pick up the Star Wars license in 1976. Starting in 1981, Mattel did a reverse George Lucas: the company came up with the toy line first and then built a story around it. The toy was called He-Man. To create a story around the character, Mattel turned to Lucas’s former friend, Don Glut. Working from Polaroids of the toys, Glut created the whole concept of Castle Grayskull, a mysterious location called Eternia. The result was called Masters of the Universe, and inferior as it was, it would steal a good deal of the Star Wars universe’s thunder.
Similarly, in 1982, the GI Joe franchise had been revived as a series of Star Wars–sized figures, together with a whole mythology, a Marvel comic, and a brand new enemy, the evil Cobra Force. Once again, it was the Star Wars playbook, but this time married to a muscular Reagan-era patriotism. GI Joe was Stallone’s Rambo writ small. He-Man seemed more like Arnold Schwarzenegger writ small (with so much similarity that Mattel had to fight off a lawsuit brought by the owners of Conan the Barbarian).
Kenner, which was still using the tagline “Star Wars is Forever,” saw the writing on the wall as early as 1984. Sales of action figures had dropped off precipitously after Return of the Jedi; the movie had so much finality to it that there was nowhere left for kids to go. Darth Vader and the Emperor were definitively dead—what stories could you act out without the bad guys? (An avid action figure director at the age of ten, I remember getting around this problem for a while by claiming the Emperor had been cloned—but got bored and packed my Star Wars figures away in the attic by the age of twelve.)
Desperate to keep Star Wars alive, Kenner designer Mark Boudreaux led a team effort to come up with a whole story that would follow on from Return of the Jedi, and they kitbashed some prototype action figures using spare parts. The concept was called “The Epic Continues.” The idea was that the Emperor’s death had allowed a “genetic terrorist” called Atha Prime to return from the galactic exile he’d been banished to after the Clone Wars, bringing with him a whole bunch of Clone Warriors. Simultaneously, Grand Moff Tarkin was to return, revealing that he had somehow survived the destruction of the Death Star and lead resurgent Imperial forces, and Luke and Han were to enlist the help of a bizarrely named new species from Tatooine called the Mongo Beefhead Tribesmen.
Boudreaux gave the presentation to Lucasfilm, fully aware that the future of Kenner could hang in the balance. Years later, he still vividly remembered Lucasfilm’s response. “They said, ‘Thank you very much, you guys have done an awesome job, but for now we’d like to do some other awesome things.’” He wasn’t to know that Lucas was jealously guarding his vision for the Clone Wars—or that in the perfectionist universe of the Creator, there was no room for Mongo Beefhead Tribesmen. Kenner, Lucasfilm’s longest-running licensee, shut down its Star Wars line in 1985, and General Mills spun the company off the same year.
Marvel had been running into similar problems in its attempt to keep the Star Wars comic book relevant. The writers found a way to place Luke and friends in the throes of conflict with an alien invasion of the galaxy following the events of Return of the Jedi, but they could only keep that going for three years. The art looked tired, despite its attempts to keep up with the times: Luke Skywalker sported a mullet, a headband, and six-pack abs. After nine years, the comic ceased publication with its 107th issue in May 1986. The newspaper comic strip had shut down two years earlier.
In the mid-1980s, you were more likely to read about Star Wars in a political context than anything else. The popular moniker for President Reagan’s new missile defense system was first used by the Democrats and intended as an insult, but the name stuck, and Reagan didn’t correct it until after his reelection. For Lucas, a lifelong liberal, it was the ultimate irony, given the fact that the prime evil of the Star Wars galaxy had been based on the previous two-term Republican president. Lucas, as you may remember, wrote the original movie in the shadow of Vietnam and with Apocalypse Now buzzing around his brain. The Empire is granted the superior technology of the United States and a Nixonian leader we barely see, and the first draft of the script sees its space fortress brought down by creatures inspired by the Viet Cong. By the time those creatures make it onto the screen in Return of the Jedi, they have been deliberately disguised as cute teddy bears. (The signs Lucas stuck up around ILM at the time—“dare to be cute”—suddenly take on new meaning.) The Nixon character, Emperor Palpatine, is cloaked in the garb of a Sith, but did you notice something about the room in which we meet him on the second Death Star? As Lucas pointed out to Ian McDiarmid on set, Palpatine’s office is oval.
By the time the classic trilogy had wrapped up in 1983, Lucas’s original intent had become so buried under layers of interpretation that Washington Post reviewer Gary Arnold praised his feel-good epic for helping to “close some of the psychological wounds left by the war in Vietnam.” Other reviewers at the time, and cultural critics since, have made the same mistake: how clever of Lucas to put America in the underdog position, they said. Arnold was nearer the mark when he said that the franchise “tapped into inspirational depths that transcend political allegiance. It reflected politically uncomplicated yearnings—to be in the right, to fight on the side of justice against tyranny.”
No one knew this better than Reagan, who had been elected in the same year Empire won the box office.* Reagan had described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in March 1983, a month after the first US screening of Star Wars on HBO and two months before the release of Return of the Jedi. The full quote is “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” Reagan’s chief speechwriter Anthony Dolan says no Star Wars reference was intended; there have, after all, been one or two empires throughout history, evil or otherwise. What the world heard, however, was a reference to a fictional galactic empire.
There was a similar situation later that month, when Reagan unveiled the concept of defensive systems that could intercept intercontinental missiles during a half-hour live TV address on the defense budget. He left the details hazy, probably because the notion of space satellite X-rays powered by nuclear explosions may have made the technology seem as incredulous as it in fact was. (In terms of its feasibility, Reagan had been sold a bill of goods by Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.)
The front page of the next day’s Washington Post carried a rebuttal quote from the lion of the Left, Senator Ted Kennedy, blasting Reagan’s proposals as “misleading Red scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.” Perhaps realizing that a “Star Wars scheme” sounded a little too exciting to pin on his opponent, Kennedy threw a few other, less appealing and more preposterous metaphors into a speech at Brown University in June: Reagan was proposing a “supersonic Edsel,” a “Lone Ranger in the sky, firing silver laser bullets and shooting missiles out of the hands of Soviet outlaws.” But it was too late. The “Star Wars” nickname stuck. Cartoonists showed Reagan introducing his latest advisers, Artoo and Threepio. Time magazine had a cover story about Reagan and defense in April; it was only the second occasion the words “Star Wars” had appeared on the cover of Time. (The first was its cover on Empire; that vital review in 1977 had only said, “Inside: Year’s Best Movie.”)
Reagan was suspiciously slow to defend his Strategic Defense Initiative against the Star Wars comparison: he waited two years. It evidently didn’t hurt him in the 1984 election, which he won in one of history’s greatest landslides. Finally, in March 1985, the president gave a speech before the National Space Club. “The Strategic Defense Initiative has been labeled ‘Star Wars,’ the president said, “but it isn’t about war, it’s about peace . . . and in that struggle, if you will pardon me stealing a film line, the Force is with us.” It was a masterful piece of political jujitsu on the Great Communicator’s part—but pedantically speaking, that wasn’t the line Reagan was looking for. “The Force is with us” was not used in a Star Wars movie until Attack of the Clones in 2002, when it was spoken by a Sith.
Meanwhile, the Soviets were doing their best to pin the evil empire label back on the United States. The movies would not be shown in Russia until the 1990s, but the Washington bureau chief for TASS, the Soviet Union’s centralized news agency, did his best to put a political spin on his Return of the Jedi review. “Darth Vader in America now,” said the reviewer, “is not only a cosmic brigand in an iron suit.” An unnamed “local journalist,” he said, had “pinned the same tag on President Reagan.” The magic mirror of Star Wars always reflected your enemies as the Imperial evildoers.
Lucasfilm took pressure groups on both sides of the political debate to court for using the words “Star Wars” in ads for and against the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its argument was that a real-life conflict damaged a franchise built entirely on imaginary warfare. The company ultimately lost the case, with the judge arguing that those two words were way too common in the English language for him to grant the plaintiff relief. “Star Wars, your honor, is a fantasy,” complained Lucasfilm lawyer Laurence Hefter. “It’s something that doesn’t exist.” By the time he said that, it was starting to feel like the franchise didn’t exist either.
As the tenth anniversary of the original movie approached, there was little left of the franchise but nostalgia. The Star Wars fan club sent out its final issue of the Bantha Tracks newsletter in February 1987 and promptly shut down. Dan Madsen, the kid from Colorado who had replaced his Star Trek posters with Star Wars posters in 1977, was now running the Star Trek fan club. Lucasfilm contacted him in early 1987, brought him out to Skywalker Ranch, and asked him if he would also run the successor to the Star Wars fan club. It was to be called the Lucasfilm Fan Club, and it would focus on non–Star Wars movies on the Lucasfilm docket. “I definitely got the feeling he was trying to step away from Star Wars,” Madsen says. “It was hard to be a Star Wars fan at that moment.” Disappointed, he nevertheless accepted the offer: “I just had fun covering the other movies and bided my time.”
Starlog magazine, at least, couldn’t let the tenth anniversary of the first Star Wars release pass without commemoration. That May, it threw a convention at a hotel near LAX; ten thousand fans showed up. George Lucas was the guest of honor and gave a speech after being presented, by R2-D2 and C-3PO, with a giant birthday card, signed by thousands of fans. He was surprised by how much Star Wars had taken off, he said, and someday—no promises—he hoped to get back to it. That got a loud cheer.
Then there was a surprise Madsen had helped arrange: Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, bounded onto the stage. Lucas wasn’t one for surprises—and looked shocked. Roddenberry, a big bear-hugger of a guy, enthusiastically grasped the arm of the quiet, reserved Lucas, who was about a foot smaller. It was the one and only time these giants of the geek world were to meet. Madsen was the only one who thought to snap a picture.
Also speaking at this first tentative Star Wars convention was Howard Roffman, the new vice president of Lucas Licensing. Roffman, an ambitious and accomplished young lawyer, had joined the company in 1980 at age twenty-seven, the week Empire Strikes Back came out. He was quickly promoted to general counsel. In 1987 he had been given the seemingly impossible task of fighting the power of He-Man and GI Joe. Could Star Wars toys be revived without any Kenner-like plan for new stories? “It was not a great time to get that job,” Roffman remembered in 2010:
But I thought, “I’ll show them. I’ll be the greatest salesman who ever lived.” I went out to every retailer, every licensee, trying to convince them to restock Star Wars, and to a one they told me, “Kid”—I did look like a kid back then—“Star Wars is dead.”
I had to go back to George Lucas and deliver the news. That was a meeting I wasn’t looking forward to. I thought it was going to be a situation where he presses a button and your chair falls through the floor and into a tank of piranhas.
I’ll never forget it. . . . He looked at me and narrowed his eyes and said:
“No it’s not dead; it’s just taking a rest. A lot of kids really love those movies. Someday they’re going to grow up and have kids of their own. We can bring it back then.”
That was the moment I realized that George Lucas really is Yoda.
Meantime Roffman, and Lucasfilm, focused their attention on other brands. The company had a couple of notable failures in 1986 with Howard the Duck and Labyrinth, both produced by Lucas (and directed by Lucas friends Willard Huyck and Jim Henson respectively), but Lucasfilm had high hopes for its movies in production: a fantasy called Willow, starring Warwick Davis, who had played the lead Ewok, Wicket, in Return of the Jedi; a Coppola biopic of automaker Preston Tucker; and the third Indiana Jones film. There was also Lucasfilm Games, a profitable new division that was later renamed LucasArts. It produced a string of hits such as Maniac Mansion, an adventure video game with a TV show tie-in, and had many more titles in the works. Ironically, the one thing the games division couldn’t produce at the time was Star Wars games, for which Atari, and later JVC, held the license.
There was one form of Star Wars game that Roffman’s team was able to license, however, and it was the geekiest version of them all. The Star Wars role-playing game, made by a tiny company in Pennsylvania called West End Games, launched in October 1987. For the next three years, it would be about the only thing going on in the Star Wars universe. Those Dungeons & Dragons players who switched to playing Star Wars would be like the Irish monks who saved civilization by copying ancient scrolls through the Dark Ages.
It’s an apt metaphor, since the role-playing game wasn’t just preserving the memory of Star Wars. It was cataloging and enhancing it. To create the sourcebook for all those dungeon masters out there, West End Games editor Bill Slavicsek had to invent names for all the alien races, all the ships, all the weapons and droids. He had to figure out the nuts and bolts of how Lucas’s universe worked, and fill in all the gaps that the Creator hadn’t bothered to think about.
At the time, it seemed about the nerdiest thing you could possibly do. But Slavicsek’s work—and the contributions of writers who came after him—would prove incalculably important to the coming Star Wars revival.
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* The question of whether a couple of uncomplicated, feel-good, California-made movies nudged voters toward this uncomplicated, feel-good, California-made movie actor candidate is one I’ll leave to the psephologists, though the very idea would horrify the liberal Lucas.