LUCAS TO RETIRE FROM BLOCKBUSTERS, MAKE “PERSONAL” FILMS

LUCAS TO RETIRE FROM BLOCKBUSTERS, MAKE “PERSONAL” FILMS

Apparently disgusted with his treatment by Hollywood studios when he approached them to finance Red Tails, his film about World War II’s famed Tuskegee Airmen featuring an all-black cast, George Lucas has told the New York Times that he will no longer make films for Hollywood (with the possible exception of another Indiana Jones movie). He is, he said, “retiring, in a way, from my past.” Instead, the Times reported, Lucas plans to devote the rest of his life to making small personal films for art-house audiences like the ones he was experimenting with when he was a student at USC. However, the Times observed, “Before he takes his digital camera with him into obscurity … he wants to prove that with Red Tails, he can still make the kind of movie everyone in the world will want to see.” He has a lot riding on that movie, which opens on Friday — $54 million of his own money, he says, which he put up after executives at every major studio rejected it. One studio’s executives didn’t even show up for a screening, Lucas said. “Isn’t this their job? … Isn’t their job at least to see movies? It’s not like some Sundance [Film Festival] kid coming in there and saying, ‘I’ve got this little movie — would you see it?’”