I’ve just finished reading Brian Jay Jones’ excellent biography of George Lucas after only obtaining it about two days ago. It’s that good.

It’s absolutely essential reading if you have any interest at all in the behind-the-scenes of Star Wars, or of how the so-called New Hollywood filmmakers like Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and (to some extent) Steven Spielberg got their start in the 1970s. There are several chapters devoted purely to Lucas’ time as a student at USC and his attempts to break into the film industry - primarily as an editor - immediately following college, and they are very fascinating, especially if you compare it to the way the film industry operates with new graduates these days. The descriptions of Lucas’ student films alone will make you wish they were on DVD somewhere to watch. I had also known prior to reading this book that Lucas and Coppola had had a working relationship of some sort but this biography really discusses in detail how on-off it was, and how Coppola’s inability to stay out of debt and Lucas’ amazing ability to hold a grudge worked against each other.

Lucas’ relationship with his first wife, Marcia, is also explored in-depth and you really learn how much she influenced the making of the Star Wars films. Jones frequently refers to Marcia Lucas’ take on the storytelling in the films as the “emotional” perspective, compared to George’s clinical and technical perspective, and you can really see that her instincts helped make these movies as awesome as they ended up being. Hilariously the biography loves to mention that Lucas would get super jealous whenever Marcia took off to help Martin Scorsese (she edited Taxi Driver and New York, New York for him, among others) because of Scorsese’s notoriety as a huge womanizer who liked the comforting clasp of chemicals (to borrow a phrase from the late great Carrie Fisher), but not so hilariously the consequences of their divorce led to a very depressing period in George Lucas’ life - markedly depicted on screen, at least allegorically, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I have to admit that the book gets much less interesting once Lucas finishes Temple of Doom and basically retires from filmmaking for the better part of a decade. Movies he helped make which I really wanted to learn more about (for better or worse) like Howard the Duck and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are pretty much glossed over and not given much attention. The ten-year span from 1985 to 1995 (marking the very beginning of Lucas’ pre-production for what would become The Phantom Menace) is covered in a fraction of the pages given to, say, Lucas’ painstaking efforts trying to get THX 1138 distributed. That said, during this period, Lucas primarily focussed on raising his three children (as a single father, no less!), so perhaps it wasn’t the most interesting of times for a biographer to detail.

The discussion of the prequel trilogy is also pretty interesting but - and this is not a fault of the author - I found myself not quite as enthralled possibly because I have been alive for all of those Star Wars movies and consequently witnessed a lot of the phenomena that Jones discusses. There also isn’t as much discussion of the work put into the prequel trilogy in terms of effects and whatnot, which I found disappointing. I am an unabashed defender of the Star Wars prequels (namely Revenge of the Sith, which I will defend on any given day as one of the best Star Wars films - even better than A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, IMO) and so I was a little put off to see that this book takes, albeit more subtly, the perspective that they were vastly inferior films. I wasn’t expecting the biography to be an unbiased one but quite frankly I could go anywhere on reddit and get a “DAE the prequels were shit XD” opinion parroted back at me.

All told it is a really great read, especially in the first two parts of the book. The third part is probably skippable if you’re at least my age (early 20s) and were around for all or most of the prequels, and the hype surrounding Lucasfilm being sold to Disney and The Force Awakens. The details that Jones provides about Lucas’ early life as a burgeoning student filmmaker and then as the biggest gamechanger to mainstream film in the 1970s/80s is absolutely essential reading though, and not something you’ll find from reading Wikipedia for sure.