In 1988 filmmakers, preservationists and businessmen went to Congress over legislation responding to a pressing concern amongst interest groups in the film industry. Flouting the Berne Convention for Moral Rights – which would prevent alteration of a cinematographic work by those looking to profit from its reinterpretation – renowned filmmakers such as Jimmy Stewart, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas testified on the importance of preserving a national ”cultural heritage”. Lucas said: ”People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behaviour, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society…A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain. American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history.”
By 1996 his attitude seems to have changed. Lucas began working on the first of many repackagings of the Star Wars films – in 2004 and 2006 for DVD, and in 2011 for a horrifically expensive Blu-ray remaster. In the 1980s, Lucas batted against the colorization and other manipulations of classic films in the name of ”cultural heritage”; more recently, he has exploited every innovation in the special effects portfolio to tweak the udder of his wrinkled old cash cow.
Now, it’s not as if I see this as a desecration of a set of sacred artefacts – I don’t care about Star Wars. But hypocrisy riles me. Lucas, despite being one of Hollywood’s wealthiest and most business-minded filmmakers, is also one of its most outspoken critics.
He began his filmmaking career at the University of Southern Carolina, putting together edgy and artisanal anticapitalist political documentaries and “tonal poems”, structured around a piece of music or found sounds: ”1:42:08” centres on the noise of a Lotus in top gear. His filmmaking outpost, Skywalker Ranch, is located in Nicasio, California, rather than Hollywood – Lucas’s attempt to range his operation against the Hollywood moviemaking machine he has repeatedly condemned. Lucas says in the 2004 documentary “Empire of Dreams”, in one of countless interviews saturated with complaints against the commercialisation of cinema, that he is ”not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry.”
But, like the young and idealistic Anakin Skywalker, Lucas seems to have lost his way, growing into the leader of an evil empire: ”What I was trying to do was stay independent so that I could make the movies I wanted to make,” said Lucas in 2004. “But now I’ve found myself being the head of a corporation…I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid.”
Star Wars was the first modern blockbuster. Its simple structure and morality – the battle of good and evil, light and dark, rebellion and empire – bolstered by expensive and foregrounded special effects and emphasis on action sequences, has served as the blueprint for much popular cinema. Most of all, it was the first film which was written to create a universe of possibility for merchandising. Though today a time before major releases necessarily corresponded with imperious marketing and PR campaigns may seem quaint and strange, the commoditisation of a film franchise was indeed relatively new in 1977. The films have spawned countless innovations in toys and games, and earned Lucas Films billions from clothing, collectables and convention culture. The franchise has, according to Bloomberg, garnered Lucas Films $4.54bn in ticket sales; merchandising has brought in more than $13.5bn.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with this – if parents want buy their brats overpriced replica lightsabers to beat their friends over the heads with rather than bits of old wood, that’s their prerogative. If 40 year-old virgins want to fill their garages full of taxidermised Wookies and rows of plastic action figures, good for them. But there’s a hypocrisy in Lucas’s self-cultivated outsider stance which, in the light of this corporate sovereignty, strikes me as unmerited and pretentious.
This week, Lucasfilm, which is 100% owned by the director, was sold for $4.05bn dollars to Disney, with a view to the creation of more Star Wars flicks. Some critics have suggested Lucas has sold out. My point is that he sold out long ago. And it is unsurprising that the rhetoric of ‘cultural heritage’ has been wheeled out again in the context of this new move: “For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” Lucas has said. “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”
But perhaps more than the money, experts say Lucas was also taking steps to ensure the future of his vision and ideas. Disney says it will produce ‘Star Wars Episode 7” for release in theatres worldwide in 2015, and will release more films every two to three years, projects which Lucas will join as a ‘creative consultant’. “I felt like I wanted to put the company somewhere in a larger entity that would protect it,” Lucas told reporters this week. “We could go on making Star Wars for the next 100 years.” This explains why Lucas has done this now – he wants to ensure that his legacy is not distorted by its inheritors while he still can. So much for ”cultural heritage”.
But there’s another rationale behind Lucas’s timing. Long-term capital gains tax from the sale of assets held for more than one year are currently taxed at a rate of 15% for investors in the 25% income-tax bracket or above, the level in which Lucas lies, and at 0% for investors in the 10% or 15% bracket. In January 2013, those rates are due to increase to 20% and 10% respectively. Lucas, surrounding himself with the finest legal advisors in the country, has designed the sale to take advantage of the lower rates on long-term capital gain while they are certain to exist. What we’re talking about here is not merely an example of financial savvy, but actually a form of legal tax evasion. The same kind of tax evasion that has earned a number of figures, including Eduardo Saverin, one of the founding partners of Facebook, public condemnation, media derision and government criticism in recent months. I doubt though that the billionaire director’s manipulations will undergo the same kind of scrutiny.
In any case, we can see that Lucas is not the devout anticapitalist he claims to be.
