"They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway, but if I get in there, I'm just going to cause trouble..."

"... because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, 'OK, I will go my way and let them go their way."

They = Disney. Me = George Lucas.

"They wanted to do a retro movie. I don't like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them different... I made them completely different – different planets, different spaceships to make it new."

Disney is like the government (like the left-winger's idea of the government). It's better at knowing what you want (what you should want) than you are.

"If you’re running a Hollywood studio, you may well think there are too many blockbusters."

"But that doesn’t mean there are too many of your blockbusters. You can only control your slate, and you want the other guys to cut back."

Mr. Spielberg, one of the most celebrated in Hollywood history, said that he had trouble finding a distributor for his acclaimed 2012 film “Lincoln,” which almost ended up on cable. And George Lucas, director of the original “Star Wars” franchise, said he had similar problems with “Red Tails,” an action adventure about African-American flying aces.

“You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater!” Mr. Lucas said this summer at the opening of a new media center at the University of Southern California.

Why are these medicinally historical films considered blockbusters? I know it's because some grotesque amount of money was thrown into them, but why was that done? Because Spielberg and Lucas threw their weight into these projects?

How entitled they feel — how the rich assume they should get richer and richer by dumping vast sums of money into their work! Ironically, the film projects about which they feel so entitled are the ones that purvey their supposedly liberal values, challenge the privilege and entitlement of the rich. Rich other people.

As for the actual non-rich who exist in large enough numbers to make a blockbuster strategy work (when it works), they seem to prefer those stories about boyish adventurers in outer space.

Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the recent “Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment”... that the blockbuster syndrome “turns out to be a winning strategy. It makes sense for the studios to spend disproportionately on a select group of the most likely winners.”...

“The marketplace for entertainment is extremely cluttered,” Professor Elberse said. “When there wasn’t a whole lot of competition, small movies worked, but with so many demands on our time, you really have to convince consumers that they need to see this on the big screen at the same time their friends are seeing it. You need the wow factor. That’s a tough challenge.”

George Lucas: "I’ve been surprised to see some people characterize this as vindictive."

"I wouldn’t waste my time or money just to try and upset the neighbors."

Very funny. The liberals of Marin County blocked his expansion of his film studios, and he gave up and said he'd sell the land to a developer to bring "low income housing" to the area.

Ha ha ha. Whatever you do... don't call them "hot tubbers."

"I’m a ’60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing."

Said George Lucas, who has $3.2 billion.

Sorry to link a second time to the same article, but I find George Lucas and the NYT article fawning over him just so hilarious. This I-am-the-99% quote comes in the context of talking about Lucas's girlfriend of 5 years, Mellody Hobson. Lucas is 67. The article declines to tell us how old she is, but a quick Google shows she's 42. Lucas has made a movie about black people and Hobson is black "and a friend of the Obamas’ and Oprah Winfrey’s." Lucas is calling himself a 99 percenter in the context of contrasting himself to her:

“And she’s an East Coast, Princeton grad, Wall Street fund manager, knows all the big players, works in the big world. You would never think that we would get together, have anything in common. But when we did, we realized we had everything in common. It was the most unlikely coupling.”

He doesn't know "big players" and work in the "big world"?!  What delusion!

What delusion? It's the delusion of a ’60s lefty who imagines himself at one with some idea he has of the underclass.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

It's interesting that his girlfriend is a buddy with all the Obama people. At the time of the AF1 panic-inducing flyover of Manhattan, it was redtails accompanying the plane. That has never been explained. A lot of people speculated it was related to this film.

Thanks for reminding us of that! Here's a NY Post article from April 27, 2009:

A jumbo jet being chased by a F-16 fighter jets buzzed Lower Manhattan this morning, panicking New Yorkers, many of whom were forced to evacuate their office buildings.

President Obama was in Washington at the time, but the low-flying 747 circling the Statue of Liberty was one of the planes used as Air Force One, sources said...

Here's my post reacting to the official story, which was that the flight was for the purpose of taking an inexplicably crappy photograph.

AND: Remember that 2009 Halloween party at the White House that we just found out about: "George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests."

George Lucas is "moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff."

He's not going to make movies anymore? It seems to me he bowed out of movie-making a long time ago. But he's back and saying I'm not going to play anymore because movie executives weren't interested in the movie he made. Don't they know who he is?! Don't they care about about black people?! The movie's about the Tuskegee Airmen, and Lucas is acting as if a historically and racially important subject means that the movie is important and as if executives should bow down when a movie is important when there's no reason to think anything other than that they care about whether a whole lot of people want to see a movie and historical and racial importance is not what brings out the big crowds.

Lucas's whining is too funny. It was his "Star Wars" that ended the great movie period of the early 1970s and got the business focused on giant blockbusters. And now he's supposedly going to "to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses." Well, fine. I look forward to seeing more ironies pile up on top of each other.

Side question: Is the Tuskegee Airmen movie — "Red Tails" — any good?

All preview screenings are wildly optimistic celebrations of the possible. But this was different. This was a rally. “On Jan. 20,” an 89-year-old Tuskegee ace named Roscoe C. Brown Jr., told the crowd, “every African-American in this country ought to go see ‘Red Tails.’ ” Desirée Rogers, who is now C.E.O. of Johnson Publishing Company, said she was splashing “Red Tails” on the cover of Ebony. And Al Sharpton, sounding like a “Star Wars” fanboy in 1977, later insisted that “it’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!”

In other words, it's medicinal. It's medicine that "every African-American in this country" is supposed to take. The rich white man made it. Buy it!

He slipped into a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary studio head.

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”

“And you’re doing it as a throwback movie? You’re not going to do it as a hip, happening-now, music-video kind of movie?”

“No, that’s not a smart thing to do. There’s not really going to be a lot of swearing in it. There’s probably not going to be a huge amount of blood in it. Nobody’s head’s going to get blown off.”

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.”

They have a right to their history... made into a craptastic Hollywood blockbuster? That is, you appropriated black history and absorbed it into the kind of overblown bullshit you made America love? This is all about George Lucas. It's not about rights for black people. It's about you, and if it's awful, it's because you made an awful movie. And you made the movies awful. And now you're going to flounce off and make art movies....

Please just go away.