George Lucas Is A Sexist Racist?
(The following was first published on AtThaMovies on 14th December, 2015. It is a part of a far longer article entitled: I Love Star Wars; I Hate Racism.)
May 19th, 1999. Six months prior to The Millennium, all anyone wanted to think about or to talk about was the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
It had been sixteen years since Return of the Jedi and despite Lucas anticipating that sales of the Expanded Universe of comic-books, novels and merchandise would dwindle, the opposite happened, and encouraged by climbing sales, he decided to create a new trilogy of Star Wars films.
In a bold move, Lucas spent $18 million updating the original films as a way to to celebrate the 20th Anniversary release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. However, it was also a clever pre-marketing tactic used to raise awareness of the films and attract a new audience. This kept the Star Wars brand fresh and at the forefront of the public’s mind whilst anticipating the release of the prequel films.
Lucas felt that by updating the original trilogy’s special effects, film transfer and audio tracks, they would merge seamlessly with the new films in preproduction. Some years later, Dennis Murrin, who was the Special Effects Supervisor on The Special Editions, commented:
“You know, I was fine with doing it, I didn’t feel at all that we were hurting anything. My feeling always was that the original version was always gonna be there, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily happened… But at the time my feeling was that we could finally make these shots better, you know. He went through and picked a bunch of shots, and I picked a bunch of shots and we redid them so they just looked a lot better. I was fine with it, and I think it’s gone overboard, I think it’s been done too many times and too many shots, but I just feel as long as the original version is always there that it’s fine to be able to work on it later on, and sort of like ‘so what’, you know?”
In 1997, Lucas’ gamble paid off. The theatrical release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Special Edition grossed $138 million domestically and $118 million worldwide.
It’s hard to remember the mania that surrounded the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It was everywhere and while we all attempted to ‘keep our cool’, there was incredible excitement surrounding its release. The film went on to gross over $924 million worldwide and what we tend to forget is that it was very well received by both the public and the critics.
Shortly after The Phantom Menace’s release, numerous ethnic and feminist groups voiced their concerns over the design and use of characters in the film. The American civil rights activist, Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr, accused Lucas of designing Jar Jar Binks to be a Jamaican stereotype. Jackson stated:
“Pretending a brother is an amphibian by making him orange is an even greater insult,”
Reverend Al Sharpton agreed with Jackson’s opinion and added:
“All you have to do is listen to the jive-ass fool. I mean, the dude speaks ebonics, man.”
Professor Michael Eric Dyson of African-American studies at Georgetown University felt compelled to add:
“The leader of Jar Jar’s tribe is a fat, bumbling buffoon with a rumbling voice, and he seems to be a caricature of a stereotypical African tribal chieftain.”
George Lucas continues to deny that racism played any part in the creation or design of Jar Jar Binks or the Gungans. In an effort to make light of the accusations made against him, Lucas retorted:
“How in the world you could take an orange amphibian and say that he’s a Jamaican? It’s completely absurd. Believe me, Jar Jar was not drawn from a Jamaican, from any stretch of the imagination.”
Lucas added:
“Those criticisms are made by people who’ve obviously never met a Jamaican, because it’s definitely not Jamaican and if you were to say those lines in Jamaican they wouldn’t be anything like the way Jar Jar Binks says them. They’re basing a whole issue of racism on an accent, an accent that they don’t understand. Therefore if they don’t understand it, it must be bad.”
In the wake of the publicity surrounding The Phantom Menace and the debate over Jar Jar Binks, other groups looked to gain media exposure for their own civil right protests. Growth hacking this increasing trend, Jewish and Italian-American groups criticised the character Watto, feeling that he was reminiscent of Sir Alec Guinness’ apparently stereotypical portrayal of the character Fagin in the cinematic adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
This claim was refuted by Lucasfilm. However, Rob Coleman, the lead animator of Watto in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, disclosed that Sir Alec Guinness’ portrayal of Fagin was used as a point of reference as he worked on Watto.
Some Asian-American groups declared that the villain, Vice Nute Gunray, was a modernised, racist caricature as it mimicked their appearance and voice. The radical feminist group, N.O.W., also claimed that George Lucas was a “misogynistic woman basher”, adding:
“In Lucas’ films, women are schizophrenic, multiple personalities, playing either the sexy seductress, who tempts the pure-hearted hero to commit a wrong, as Leia does by kissing her brother Luke as Leia was as the Princess of Dantooine. Women can be more than temptresses. whores, or princesses; they can just as well be Monica Lewinsky or Hillary Clinton.”
Despite this negative press, Lucas looked relatively calm and somewhat amused as he looked to diffuse the situation. However, in his interview with BBC News as part of an article entitled Lucas Strikes Back (1999), he declared:
“There is a group of fans for the films that doesn’t like comic sidekicks. They want the films to be tough like Terminator, and they get very upset and opinionated about anything that has anything to do with being childlike.”
“The movies are for children but they don’t want to admit that. In the first film they absolutely hated R2 and C3-PO. In the second film they didn’t like Yoda and in the third one they hated the Ewoks… and now Jar Jar is getting accused of the same thing.”
“The American press uses the internet as their source for everything, so when people were creating Websites saying, ‘Let’s get rid of Jar Jar Binks, he’s terrible’ and some of the critics were describing him as a comic sidekick, they came in and they started calling the film racist.”
Prior to the release of The Phantom Menace, George Lucas held an open press conference to announce that there would be a Prequel trilogy. He noted that the films would mirror the original trilogy by Episode I being a ‘fun adventure film’ while the second and third acts would be have a more sinister tone.
In 1994, EW published a brief article about the announcement:
Best of all, Lucas reportedly may direct, something he hasn’t done since the 1977 original. That alone should send the studios scurrying. As one studio chief says, ”Somebody else doing Star Wars means nothing; George Lucas doing it means everything.”
It wasn’t until after the theatrical release of the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Editions that Lucas confirmed that he would direct Episode I. However, Ron Howard later noted that he was approached to direct the film:
“[Lucas] didn’t necessarily want to direct them. He told me he had talked to Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, and me. I was the third one he spoke to. They all said the same thing: ‘George, you should do it!’ I don’t think anybody wanted to follow-up that act at the time. It was an honor, but it would’ve been too daunting.”
At the time, Steven Spielberg was hotly tipped to take over as director for Episode II. In behind-the-scenes footage of The Phantom Menace, he’s shown to be a regular visitor to Pinewood Studios, England. While we can only speculate, this would suggest that they were both looking to ensure a smooth transition from Lucas to Spielberg.
Yet, in the months that followed the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas changed his mind.
As the film was well received, he clearly had nothing to prove. After all, The Phantom Menace continues to be one of the highest grossing films of all time. We also know that he had no intention of directing the following two films.
However, amid negative press and constant questioning about the accusations made that he is a racist and a sexist, he suddenly changed his mind.
It takes tremendous grit and determination to jettison these accusations: Lucas did not want to leave behind a legacy that may label him as something that he clearly feels that he is not, and so he directed the sequels.
