What’s in a name? How George Lucas attacked Roger Ebert in ‘Willow’
The number of filmmakers who genuinely ignore what the critics think is probably a lot smaller than the number of those who say it in public, with George Lucas clearly having an axe to grind with one of the industry’s most well-known reviewers.
Directors are human beings at the end of the day, and having something they poured so much time and effort into being beaten into submission by a critical pasting has got to sting. Still, very rarely do they go public with their disdain, even if it tends to be less than subtle when they do.
Lucas had been developing 1988’s fantasy adventure Willow for as long as Star Wars had been swirling around in his brain, but as tended to be the case with the cinematic trailblazer, he had to wait for technology to catch up to his imagination before he could bring it to the screen in line with his vision.
When he did, the end result was a sizeable box office success that earned $137million from cinemas, made history by featuring the first-ever fully digital morphing sequence ever seen in a movie, and earned a pair of Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Sound Editing’ and ‘Best Visual Effects’.
It’s endured as a cult favourite ever since, but presumably, because the most pre-eminent critics in the business weren’t overawed by his filmography up to that point, Lucas opted to have a little fun at their expense when he was naming the characters who populated Willow‘s fantastical world.
Pat Roach’s General Kael took his name directly from Pauline Kael, while the two-headed Eborisk was a portmanteau of Ebert and long-time collaborator Gene Siskel. A nod to the pair being joined at the hip for so long, replicating them as a dual-headed monstrosity was certainly one way for Lucas to let his opinion on the duo be known.
Ironically, Siskel and Ebert ended up panning Willow and giving it two thumbs down, but Lucas wasn’t even the last purveyor of effects-heavy epics to take a shot in their direction. Roland Emmerich was famously so infuriated by the double-act issuing scathing assessments of Stargate and Independence Day that he named the mayor Ebert in 1998’s Godzilla and called the politician’s resident yes-man Gene.
Even less subtle than Lucas was, it yielded much the same result when Siskel and Ebert eviscerated Emmerich’s spin on the iconic kaiju. It’s pettiness on the grandest possible scale, with neither filmmaker having any reason or justification to name unsightly or unlikeable characters after the renowned reviewers other than the fact they wanted to, they could, and they felt like it was something that needed to be incorporated into their work.
