Director: Kevin Burns, Edith Becker
Cast: George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher
Have I Seen it Before: I’m almost positive that I have watched it before. By all indications, it as the main feature included in the initial DVD release of the original trilogy in 2004, and I was there the day it came out, my copy long-since reserved*.
Did I Like It: The documentary is fine. it’s professionally made, and it has access to its subjects, and a thoroughness in its exploration of the topic.
But let me take a moment from another piece of recent documentary filmmaking to illustrate this film’s weakness.
After Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) was released, George Lucas never gave an interview that wasn’t at least on some level about selling one of his movies or businesses. He has controlled the narrative of the story of how his films, just as closely as he controlled the story of the saga itself.
Now that he has retired from big-budget moviemaking and the Lucasfilm family of companies, he doesn’t need to have that same control anymore. In Disney+’s docuseries on Industrial Light and Magic, Light and Magic I finally saw Lucas be interviewed and have the filmmaker push back. In the talking head, he looked like someone had farted, but the truth of the moment was at least at least illuminated, if not fully explored.
There are no moments like that in this film. It’s a fully-approved exploration of the party line. Vader was always going to be Luke’s father**, Leia was always going to be Luke’s sister***, and Jabba was always in A New Hope****. It’s not hard to figure out that the truth is more complicated. The truly great documentary about Star Wars hasn’t been made yet, but the possibility exists now, and I’m waiting to see it. Not, a polemic like The People vs. George Lucas (2010) but a more concerted effort to illuminate the man who made those films and the process he took to get it done. A film version of Michael Kaminski’s The Secret History of Star Wars: The Art of Storytelling and the Making of a Modern Epic would be really something.
*I remember it so well because some girl had turned me down that night, and I remember watching the trilogy and by about the midway point of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), I had gotten over the unpleasantness earlier in the evening.
**Was never written down before the second draft of Empire.
***Wasn’t decided until well into the production of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) when Lucas was drowning in what he wrought and decided he never wanted to make the sequel trilogy that would have introduced “the other.”
****Still doesn’t fit into the movie. It introduces the Millennium Falcon right before the scene that actually introduces the ship. Fight me about it.