Mythmaker:: The Life and Work of George Lucas [Hardcover]

John Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 1999

George Lucas is one of the most innovative and commercially successful players on the movie scene today. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, together with the three "Indiana Jones" films-all six of which he conceived, produced, and co-wrote-comprise the most popular group of films ever made. Lucas masterminded a revolutionary shift in the control of funding and profits of Hollywood films away from the studios into the hands of the filmmakers themselves. His state-of-the-art film exhibition techniques (such as THX sound systems) have transformed the cinematic experience, and his Industrial Light & Magic is the finest special effects studio in the world. Yet he has remained an enigma and a recluse--until now.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Among the wave of film directors who brought fresh blood and maverick sensibilities to southern California in the early 1960s--including Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese--none could have seemed less likely than George Lucas, the short, painfully shy car nerd from Modesto, California. And yet, in a mere four appearances behind the camera over 20 years, he managed to change Hollywood and fundamentally alter the culture. In this lively and informative biography, John Baxter weaves interviews with Modesto townies and Lucas cronies into a portrait of the man as an artistically gifted loner with a grocer's feeling for budgets--an important director who was also unmanned by directing and a self-effacing man whose notes for Star Wars reveal an ambition to make an American epic on the scale of Kurosawa's samurai stories. Baxter skillfully shades in Lucas's emotionally straitened adolescence, his lack-of-anything-better-to-do enrollment in USC's film school, and his relationship with Coppola, whose operatic maneuverings made the small, European-ish American Graffiti possible, even as his flamboyance estranged the two. Baxter also takes Lucas to task--Lucas lied about losing his virginity in the back seat of a car, he argues--but by the end the author has been won over, appreciating Lucas's films less than he admires the basic goodness and integrity of the man who put up money for Kurosawa's Ran and Coppola's Tucker, for no other reason than because he felt that small-town boy's sense of debt to his mentors. --Lyall Bush

From Publishers Weekly

An astute look behind the myths of the man and his work, this intelligent biography delivers a mixed verdict on director/ producer George Lucas's films: "Thanks to him... American popular culture had been immeasurably enriched in technique, widened in scope, but cheapened in content," writes Baxter, a biographer of Fellini, Spielberg, Kubrick and Woody Allen. "In his hands, cinema became synonymous in sensibility and style with the comic book, the hamburger, the soda." Yet Lucas fans won't mind, and may not even notice, Baxter's quietly devastating criticism as they feast on his detailed behind-the-scenes account of the making and marketing of American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Willow and assorted sequels. Baxter presents the merchandising billionaire (who once observed that Star Wars "was designed around toys") as a socially inept director who finds the Hollywood filmmaking process boring and irritating. At the same time, Lucas has merely dabbled in what he claimed was his lifelong ambition of making inexpensive, personal, even experimental films as an alternative to the Hollywood system. In addition to offering an intense scrutiny of Lucas's creative process, this perceptive bio is peppered with gossipy glimpses into Lucas's rivalry with Spielberg and affair with Linda Ronstadt, details of Carrie Fisher's drug use, Francis Ford Coppola's hectic sex life and the battle waged by a new breed of directors to gain the upper hand over studios and investors in financially controlling their own films. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 450 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (October 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380978334
• ISBN-13: 978-0380978335
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,507,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Baxter was born in Sydney, Australia, but raised in a small country town called Junee. With little else to do, he went to the movies three times a week for most of his adolescence, which provided an instant education in Hollywood movies with which he was often able to embarrass film celebrities ("You SAW that thing?")
His second interest, however, was science fiction, which he began writing in his late teens. He sold stories to the same British and American magazines as J.G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch, and in 1966 his first sf novel, THE GOD KILLERS, was published in both the US and Britain. He also edited the first-ever anthologies of Australian science fiction, and wrote the first history of the Australian cinema.
In 1969, he came to Europe, settled in London, and began writing books on the cinema, including a biography of the director Ken Russell, and studies of John Ford, Josef von Sternberg and the gangster and science fiction film genres, and working as an arts journalist for various magazines, and for BBC radio. He also served on the juries of European film festivals.
In 1974 he was invited to become visiting professor at Hollins College in Virginia, USA, where he remained for two years. While in America, he collaborated with Thomas Atkins on THE FIRE CAME BY; THE GREAT SIBERIAN EXPLOSION OF 1908,and wrote a study of director King Vidor, as well as completing two novels, THE HERMES FALL and BIDDING.
Returning to London, he published the technological thriller THE BLACK YACHT. In 1979 he moved to Ireland, and the following year returned to Australia, where he co-scripted the 1988 science fiction film THE TIME GUARDIANS, starring Carrie Fisher and Dean Stockwell. He also wrote and presented three TV series on the cinema, and produced and presented the ABC radio programme BOOKS AND WRITING.
In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a screenwriter and film journalist. The following year, he met his present wife, Marie-Dominique Montel, and re-located in Paris.
After moving to France, John published biographies of Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Robert De Niro, as well as three books of autobiography, A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT, dealing with his fascination for collecting books, WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: SEX AND LOVE IN THE CITY OF LIGHT, of which the SUNDAY TIMES of London wrote "it towers above most recent memoirs of life abroad," and IMMOVEABLE FEAST: A PARIS CHRISTMAS. His most recent book is CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, a guide to erotica in the 20th and 21st centuries. His translations of MORPHINE by Dubut de la Forest and FUMEE D'OPIUM of Claude Farrere will be published shortly by HarperCollins.
John is co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop and a frequent lecturer and public speaker. His hobbies are cooking and book collecting. He has a major collection of modern first editions. When not writing, he can be found prowling the bouquinistes along the Seine or cruising the Internet in search of new acquisitions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars To Myth or Not to Myth, December 29, 1999

By 

Gayla J. Pierce "[e-mail]" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Mythmaker:: The Life and Work of George Lucas (Hardcover)

How well you like this book is probably going to depend a lot on your motivation for reading it in the first place. The recent *60-Minutes* segment did more in 40 minutes to show the personal side of George Lucas, than this book did in 400+ pages. Much of the personal information seems cursory and under-developed. However, the book does provide a fasinating look at the film industry. The chapters dealing with Star Wars are by far the most interesting and the strongest. They alone make the book worth reading.

I found the author's writing style detached, remote and unengaging, but readable. At points in the book I found myself asking "So what?", "Who care's" or "Why do I need to know this". If you aren't a Star Wars or Indiana Jones fan, the book may become tedious and boring.

At best this book pulls together a lot of scattered information about George Lucas, his life and his filmography into one readable volume. At worst it paints an unflattering picture of a reclusive, immature eccentric who is a victim of his own delusions and self-importance. Reality probably lies somewhere in between. If you are a fan of George Lucas and/or his movies, you will probably want to read this book, but it doesn't cover any ground that hasn't already been covered.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Star Bores, January 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mythmaker:: The Life and Work of George Lucas (Hardcover)

Pop culture biographies depend on a few key factors. One, how much gossip is there? Two, do they shed new light on old stories? And if the biography is based on a filmmaker, as John Baxter's Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas is, we can add a third: what new critical re-examination do they provide?

As I read Mythmaker, I kept thinking, "Where have I read this before?" Baxter dutifully retells all the uphill battles in making Star Wars: the struggle to sell the idea, the agony of production -- and its much more difficult post-production, an early screening evisceration at the hands of Brian De Palma which was later defended by Steven Spielberg, and finally, Lucas' discovery of just how big a phenomenon he'd created when he went to the Hamburger Hamlet across the street from Mann's Chinese and saw the lines queued around the block. These are great stories, to be sure. But Baxter takes almost all of them at face value, never digging deeper under the surface to find the real story. The book lifts liberally from other works on Lucas, notably Dale Pollock's Skywalking, Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Empire Building. And since Lucas argues, correctly, that Biskind is basically taking everything from Skywalking anyway, that pretty much leaves two sources.

Matters aren't helped any by a number a factual errors. At first, it's simply distracting when he makes the casual claim that Spielberg lost the Best Picture Oscar for Jaws to Fellini's Amarcord. The point of fact was that Spielberg wasn't even nominated while Fellini was (and later lost). And perhaps a reader can shrug off Baxter's repeated flubs of Episode One - The Phantom Menace, calling it Part One and, later, The Phantom Empire, while only a student of Star Wars minutiae would know that Ian McDirmid, not Terence Stamp, plays Darth Sidious. But after about a hundred pages, the mistakes become more glaring, culminating in a monumental mistake as Baxter describes Lucas' efforts with Willow. He writes that Lucas took Willow to the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, hoping that audiences would embrace it the same way they did Spielberg's E.T. in 1992. Even if we forgive Baxter for what is basically a copy editing mistake, I had to stop and wonder, "Was anyone at the publishing house actually reading this book, much less proofing it?"

All of this would perhaps be forgivable if the book were well-written. And Mythmaker gets off to a good start detailing Lucas' early life, particularly his chafing childhood under a strict father who values business over imagination -- who can't understand his son's constant dreaming and desire to leave the desert suburb of Modesto, California. Baxter shows numerous influences on Lucas' life and how they would show up in his films. Lucas' feelings for Modesto show up in Luke Skywalker's dismissal of Tatooine. Lucas' father issues get dramatized in Luke's redemption of Darth Vader. Baxter even describes in great detail, Lucas' early student films at USC, showcasing his early obsession with cars, as well as one about a local radio deejay called "The Emperor."

Most impressively, Baxter lands an interview with Lawrence Kasdan, who sheds new light on the writing process of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the struggles to finish Empire Strikes Back after initial screenwriter Leigh Brackett died of cancer. Kasdan talks about the frantic rush to finish Empire (re-written after he turned in Raiders) before photography began, and how Brackett's own fight with cancer imbued the film with its dark tone. For students of Lucas and Spielberg, as well as the writing process in general, these anecdotes alone are almost worth buying the book.

Almost.

Because even if one dismisses Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as the "revenge of the ex-wives," (as Peter Bogdanovich did), it's still an incredibly written and researched book. Baxter's narrative is stilted and incomplete. His notes section is woefully anemic. Where's the documentation that biographies like this stand upon?

But easily the biggest travesty of the book is Baxter's final chapter, which details The Phantom Menace and tries, in vain, to wrap up Lucas' life and work. I was hoping for the same detail to attention with Phantom Menace that Kasdan had supplied with Empire and Return of the Jedi. Instead, Baxter -- possibly running head on into the Lucasfilm wall of silence -- essentially re-processes the press machine. Though he does accurately describe the critical ravaging the film received, he barely delves into the digital process of filmmaking, its toll on the actors or its potential impact on the world of cinema.

Most depressingly, Baxter fumbles the ball when it comes to tying it all together. From the opening pages forward, Baxter describes friends and co-workers who get on Lucas' bad side and never work with him again. And the last five pages feel like Baxter himself fears reprisals from his subject. Rather than provide a coherent thesis, he gives Lucas the easy way out, forgiving him for Howard the Duck and Phantom Menace, with the excuse that Lucas is a man who loves stories.

So after 350 pages, that's all we're left with. Lucas loves to tell stories. Even Biskind went deeper than that to show us a frustrated Lucas caught at the bottom of the Star Wars pyramid, unable to create a movie that doesn't have a strange creature or aerial space battle in it. This is all the more annoying when one realizes Baxter has laid the groundwork for the real story in his early chapters with Lucas and his father. The real inversion of Star Wars' impact on Lucas' life is thematic: rather than redeem his father as Luke did with Darth Vader, Lucas has become his father. He has shown a keen and ruthless business mind, efficiently running Industrial Light and Magic and managing his deals from Star Wars and Indiana Jones to become a multi-millionaire several times over. Lucas' genius is in foreseeing the future of cameras, computers and merchandising, not in Jar Jar Binks or movies about trade federations.

Just as Lucas Sr. shook his head at his son's desires to explore a new medium, one can almost feel George Jr. being pulled dragging and screaming into the new means and medium of film. It took years before Lucas jumped on the computer graphics bandwagon, but Lucas' intransigence runs deeper -- to the core of the love of story Baxter claims Lucas has. In a year that brought us The Matrix, Being John Malkovich and many other groundbreaking films, the story Lucas created for Phantom Menace seems almost quaint by comparison. That Baxter can't, or refuses, to draw this conclusion -- particularly after so laboriously pointing us in that direction -- is the book's biggest failure of all.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Revenge of the Nerd, January 17, 2000

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"di-by-the-book" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mythmaker:: The Life and Work of George Lucas (Hardcover)

I finally finished this book - it took me weeks! I had to keep putting it down due to nausea. I should have quit while I was ahead. It was slow, boring and torturous. Shame on me for buying the book - shame on me for reading it. I equate it with a tabloid cover story, maybe worse. It lacked in content and was full of recounted heresay by " a friend of a friend". I was looking for to learn more about George Lucas whom I have admired since I was a teen ager watching Star Wars. George Lucas has brought UNTOLD happiness into the world with his visions and all John Baxter likes to point out is that he is a short nerd whose wife left him. Who cares. John Baxter's writing in this book is full of bias and overt envy. It rambles off on tangents that make you put the book down and say "what does that have to do with anything? " I kept reading because I had read a review that stated that Baxter was won over in the end. Well I missed something. I don't agree with John Baxter at all and his inference that George Lucas sort of stumbled through his life and kept getting breaks because he was surrounded by competent people. John Baxter was quick to point out every failure (Howard the Duck)- and lose focus on the successes (ILM, Skywalker sound). It seems to me that George Lucas earned his "incomprehensible wealth" through hard work and sacrifice. That's the one thing I gleened from the book throught the heavy envy. This book was ridiculous. If you are a fan of Star Wars or Raiders please don't bother reading it. You will just be annoyed by the heresay. If I sound negative then you are getting a small idea of how negative the content of this book is.