Book description
The first major biography (since 1983) of the great movie mogul George
Lucas, whose marketing techniques have transformed the film business.
His fourth Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace, released in 1999, was
perhaps the most eagerly awaited cinematic event of all time.
George Lucas is one of the most innovative bigtime players on the movie
scene. His three Star Wars films and the trio featuring the action hero
Indiana Jones (all six of which Lucas conceived, produced and co-wrote)
comprise the most popular group of films ever made. To finance them, he
masterminded a revolutionary redrawing of the financial agreements under
which films were produced in Hollywood, snatching away control of
funding, intellectual content and the distribution of profits from
studios, and placing them in the hands of the film-makers themselves.
Yet Lucas remains (like Stanley Kubrick, the subject of John Baxter's
recent biography) an enigma and a recluse. He has specially built the
Skywalker Ranch a long way from Hollywood - a Victorian village
community in a redwood forest where he and his friends can work in
splendid isolation, free of studio pressure but with the highest
technology. John Baxter is a film critic, novelist, biographer and
broadcaster, whose books on the cinema include The Hollywood Exiles, The
Cinema of John Ford, and highly praised biographies of Ken Russell,
Fellini, Bunuel, Steven Spielberg, Kubrick and Woody Allen. Born in
Australia, John Baxter now lives in Paris.
