George Lucas (John Baxter, 1999, Harper Collins)
Lucas was overdue for a proper
biography: previous volumes such as
Dale Pollock's Skywalking and Garry Jenkins' Empire Building
were too Star Wars-focussed and spottily researched. Baxter
gets
off too a bad start, with an opening that indulges in the cliché
of Lucas as a Kane-like recluse (possibly partly true, but a
cliché nevertheless) and which presumes to know his thoughts
("As he neared his sixtieth year, George Lucas sat... and thought about
destiny.") The book hits its stride in its early passages detailing
Lucas' time at film school and his early period working with Francis
Ford Coppola. (Perhaps Baxter was
thinking about how comprehensively Joseph McBride's biography of Steven
Spielberg
had outclassed his own in its coverage of that director's early years).
While it remains engaging throughout, when Baxter strays into areas
that
are more familiar (and in which his assertions can be more readily
checked),
there are some startling lapses of research. He credits Jim Henson with
performing Yoda, for example, even though simply reading the credits of
The Empire Strikes Back would have told him the role belonged to
Frank Oz. Such shoddy mistakes unfortunately discredit the rest of the
book,
leading to doubt about everything Baxter has written beforehand.Click here
to buy this book from Amazon.
