Respuesta: George Lucas se RETIRA
THE NUCLEAR DISASTER
There’s an episode late in Lucas’s popcorn period that nicely encapsulates the break between him and his fanboys. I speak, of course, of nuking the fridge.
In 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the fourth and least-liked of the Lucas/Spielberg collaborations, Indy steps into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear bomb. Like “jumping the shark,” “nuke the fridge” became shorthand for a creative nosedive and inspired a “South Park” episode in which Lucas and Spielberg rape their archaeologist hero. “Blame me,” Spielberg told Empire magazine last fall. “Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.”
What the blistering fan reaction illustrates is one downside of Lucas’s naïve style. By persuading us to drop our snarky defenses and embrace his fables, Lucas had forged a bond with fanboys like no filmmaker, outside of Spielberg, before or since. (Adjusted for inflation, the three original “Star Wars” movies and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” still rank among the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.) But naïveté is a fragile emotion. When Lucas goes back and futzes with his mythology — has Greedo shoot first or creates a goofball like Jar Jar Binks or makes Indy uncool by sticking him in a refrigerator — he isn’t just messing with beloved movies. He’s telling fanboys the naïve belief they gave to him was misplaced.
“What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?” Lucas once asked his biographer, Dale Pollock. Now imagine it being yanked away. If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood. He’d become their dad.
When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.
But now we’re talking about science rather than emotions, and the Lucas magic is lost.
SPIELBERG UNPLUGGED
I mentioned to Lucas that his pal Spielberg, who released “The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse” in December, was directing movies as if he were raging against the dying of the light. “Steven is a born director, which is why he’s such a genius,” Lucas said of the 65-year-old Spielberg. “He’s truly a cinematic genius. But he’s like a kid with a video game. It’s like: ‘C’mon, we’re going. We’re leaving now.’ Death comes. . . . And then Steven goes: ‘I got one more game! I got one more game!’ ”
“One day,” Lucas says, “they’re just going to unplug it and say, ‘You’ve got to go home now.’ ”
