The hit movie that surprised George Lucas: “You never really reach your expectations”
George Lucas is a man who has demonstrated supreme self-confidence throughout his career. As one of the founding members of the New Hollywood movement in the 1960s and ‘70s alongside his pals Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, he helped pioneer Hollywood as we now know it and became a billionaire along the way.
He wasn’t always wealthy or seen as a box office sure-thing, though. In the late 1960s, he and Coppola moved away from Hollywood to San Francisco, hoping to distance themselves from the stifling system that wanted so little to do with them. Lucas struggled to find his feet at first, creating a high-concept sci-fi feature debut called THX 1138 that fell flat with audiences. Dialling back his ambitions with his sights on the long game, he struck gold with 1973’s American Graffiti, a sentimental coming-of-age comedy based on his high school years.
With a few Oscar nominations under his belt, Lucas decided it was time to separate himself from Coppola, found his own company, and get back to his original goal of creating more groundbreaking science fiction. He was betting on Star Wars long before anyone thought it had a whiff of potential. When he signed on as director, he made sure to secure merchandising rights in exchange for a pay cut, a move few, if any, directors would have thought to make at the time, especially on a property that had yet to be tested. He simply believed in himself and his idea and recognized that this was his opportunity to cash in before everyone else discovered what a goldmine they had under their noses.
Lucas’ foresight in reading Hollywood is perhaps even more a key to his success than his creativity. He seems to have had a sixth sense all the way back in the late ‘60s about which way the wind was blowing, and he made the most of it. But in an interview with Screen Daily in 2010, the Hollywood mogul attributed his success to something other than clairvoyance and noted that contrary to how it’s looked from the outside, he finds all of his projects a bit disappointing compared to his expectations, save for one.
“My success is based on what I attempted to do and what I succeeded in managing,” he said. “No matter what you do, you never really reach your expectations. One film I produced came out much better than I believed it would – Raiders Of The Lost Ark – because I had Steven [Spielberg] directing it and he’s a genius.”
Few would argue with his assessment of Spielberg. The director practically invented the modern blockbuster and has managed to imbue his movies with the magic of cinema even as Lucas’s legacy has become increasingly ensnared in the soulless, money-grubbing, franchise-ification of Hollywood.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a pricey gamble for Lucas, but it paid off. With a budget of $20million – nearly twice as much as Star Wars: A New Hope – it raked in nearly $400million and started one of the most lucrative franchises in history.
