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Review [published January 2000]
John Baxter: George Lucas: A Biography
Chris Mitchell
Throughout his film-making career, George Lucas has
continually pushed back the boundaries of technology
in order to realise his ideas on the silver screen. John
Baxter’s biography of the man is not only an account
of Lucas’ personal history but also the transformative
effect Lucas’ fascination with technology has had on
the entire movie industry since the advent of Star Wars.
While Baxter’s biography (published under the
title Mythmaker in the States) is not authorised and
he lacked any direct contact with the publicity-shy
Lucas, his exhaustive research provides a balanced
overview of Lucas’ career. Although Baxter doesn’t
shy away from discussing the detrimental effect of
Lucas’ driving ambition on both his marriage and
many of his friendships, he prefers to concentrate
on Lucas’ movie innovation and the building of the
LucasFilm empire.
What becomes most apparent in Baxter’s portrayal
of Lucas is his fascination with technology’s ability
to create filmic illusion on a grand scale, rather than
a fascination with movies themselves. From his first
experimental picture THX1138 through to Star Wars,
BUY John Baxter books online from and
Indiana Jones and The Phantom Menace, Lucas continually
sought ever-grander ways to put the audience
on the edge of their seats, rather than conveying a message
or making social comment.
In doing so, he inaugurated the age of the blockbuster,
where spectacle took precedence over everything else.
Lucas summed it up himself by saying “I’m a filmmaker,
not a director. I like the physical part of making
movies. I might be a toymaker if I wasn’t a film maker.”
The strain on Lucas’ health making Star Wars meant
that he avoided sitting in the director’s chair for another
20 years until The Phantom Menace. Much of that
strain was caused by the creation of Industrial Light
And Magic to produce Star Wars’ special effects, most
of which had to be created completely from scratch.
Along the way, ILM created Photoshop, which is
now the industry-standard computer graphics application,
and later Pixar, who became a separate company
and pioneered the digital animation of Toy Story and A
Bug’s Life.
It’s apparent that Lucas returned to directing with
The Phantom Menace precisely because the technology
065
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