Although he stands among an elite few who have so prospered thanks to American capitalism and artistic freedom, George Lucas is still The Greediest Crybaby In The History of the World. Walt Disney paid Lucas an incredible $4 billion for the rights to “Star Wars” and in return he labels them “white slavers.” Lucas also believes Soviet Union-era filmmakers enjoy more artistic freedom than Hollywood filmmakers.
George Lucas has criticized the latest installment of “Star Wars,” the series he created, in an interview with Charlie Rose, describing the film as too “retro” for his taste and jokingly comparing the Walt Disney Company, which bought the rights to the franchise in 2012, to “white slavers” who had bought his children. …
At one point he said that filmmakers in the Soviet Union had more freedom than their counterparts in Hollywood, who, he maintained, “have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.”
The uber-wealthy, super-greedy Lucas also singled out American capitalism as a problem:
The other thing that got abused [after the success of “Star Wars”], naturally in a capitalist society, especially in an American point of view, the studios and everything said, ‘Wow, we can make a lot of money. This is a license to kill.’ And they did it. And of course the only way you can really do that is not take chances. Only do something that’s proven. … Now, if you do anything that is not a sequel or not a TV series, they won’t do it.
George Lucas complaining about greed is like grass complaining about green. Even though he will never be able to live or eat any better, this is still the same George Lucas who, for decades, has serially-gouged his working class “Star Wars” fans with various VHS, DVD, Bluray, and Digital releases. After you purchase the original trilogy on VHS, he tells you he will only release the altered version on DVD. After you buy those, he then releases the original versions.
Rich Hollywoodists sticking it to other rich Hollywoodists is sport. Lucas regularly sticks it to the working class. Moreover, he still refuses to release the original versions of the original trilogy on Bluray, and even the butchered versions are priced much higher than most blockbusters. That’s greed.
Lucas is also one of the few people who can force me to defend Hollywood. There is no question that Hollywood is, for the most part, run by awful people — most of them greedy leftists like Lucas. It is painfully obvious, though, that Lucas knows nothing about the treatment of Soviet-era filmmakers.
Segei Eisentstein, the most celebrated (and talented) of Soviet filmmakers, had a film (“Alexander Nevsky”) pulled from circulation by his own government; his other masterpiece, “Ivan The Terrible, Part 2,” was never released because Stalin believed (accurately) that the film was an allegorical criticism of his paranoid reign of terror. Eisenenstein died (age 50) before the completing “Ivan The Terrible, Part 3,” and the government confiscated or destroyed the footage.
Early in his film career, a Bolshevik true believer, Eisenstein was happy to make propaganda films for his government, but even those meant heavy state oversight, including intimidating story sessions with Stalin himself. He was later forced to publicly renounce some of these earlier films because they didn’t line up with the increasingly rigid doctrines coming from the Kremlin.
And this is Sergei Eisenstein, who only escaped execution or the Gulag due to his international fame and failing health. From themes to dialogue all the way down to camera angles, Stalin personally micro-managed the Soviet film industry for decades, and did so using fear and intimidation. After directing one of the most famous films in Soviet history, her next film resulted in director Margarita Barskaia being sentenced to a Gulag, where she died at age 36.
Between the artistic and financial freedoms inherent in the American way of life, no group in the history of the world has benefited more than Hollywood, and among those elite few, George Lucas stands alone buried in blessings.
And yet, Lucas remains a small and bitter man.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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