Is George Lucas really serious about returning to the director’s chair?
And for a movie that’s not Star Wars?
It’s been 34 years since his last non-Star Wars movie which was the really cool American Graffiti. A couple of times since he wrapped on Revenge of the Sith, he has talked about his interest in possibly directing a movie about the Red Tails, a World War II action/adventure based on the Tuskegee Airmen.
Well today we get a little closer to this becoming a reality. Variety report that Lucas has hired screenwriter John Ridley to work on the script based on Lucas’ initial story of a group of young pilots who overcame racism to become a distinguished group of fliers who were the first African-American pilots in U.S. military history.
Ridley previously came up with the story of Three Kings but what really got the scribe the gig was his draft for L.A. Riots which he has just turned in for Spike Lee.
Of course we shouldn’t get carried away here. Lucas has hinted before that he would return to the director’s chair but at the moment the only facts are that LucasFilm are financing the film and that he has hired a screenwriter. There’s no mention in Variety’s article of Lucas directing and you really have to wonder whether he has the passion to do it.
Or even the balls to do the movie. The only thing Lucas has to gain by filming this story is to re-gain his reputation with is probably now the lowest it has ever been with movie fans. Is it enough to bring him back to direct something?
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George Lucas has been talking about this movie for the last…fifteen years now. I think after the lackluster Star Wars trilogy he needs to make something worth watching and a docu-drama might help him rehabilitiate his critical if not commericial standing. The question is, will he made a historical docu-drama, or go the Michael Bay route and make a poorly veiled action flick?
John Ridley’s name doesn’t fill me with confidence either. I’ve seen nothing from him that says he’s ready for a job like this. And then there’s the way he throws around the “N” word, even thinks it’s a good thing. A self-hating black writer wouldn’t be on my list of choices for screenwriter.
But that said, this is a story that needs to be told with as much creative force and with the best production values Hollywood can muster. Let’s hope that Lucas/Ridley can do that in spite of themselves.
Oh, Two side notes. First: The first African-American aviators volunteered for military service in 1914 during WWI with France’s Aeronautique Militaire, in the Laffayette Squadron. One of them, Eugene Bullard, an American expatriate, won the Croix de Guerre for his valor and after the war was asked by the French government to allow them to use his jazz club in Paris to spy on the Nazi’s. And another of these blakc WWI aces was depicted in the movie Flyboys, very poorly though. Not surprinsingly, by the time these men were finishing their service in France in 1917 the US was finally entering that war, and announced the US Army Air Corps was looking for aviators, indeed was desperate for American pilots –specifically from the Laffayette Squadron since the US had just invented mass aviation and only had a handful of trained pilots. The black pilots from the LS applied, but, no surprise, were told as desperate as the US was for experienced pilots they simply didn’t want black pilots.
Second side note: The Tuskeegee Experiment, contrary to popular misconception, was not set up to evaluate or prove that black aviators could do the job as well as their white counterparts. It was in fact established to do exactly the opposite. The War Department (the Dept of Defense’s name before 1951) wanted to conclusively prove a “finding” by the War College. The “finding” was a report by the WC contesting the idea that black soldiers were equal to white ones, despite that blacks have fought in and distinguished themselves in every American war since the Revolution. The War Department’s contention was that if given equal facilities and training to their white counterparts black soldiers would not perform at the same level and would flee from a fight.
THAT’S what the Tuskegee Experiment was set up for. Any movie about the Tuskegee Airmen should make this a prominent part of the story, since it’s the whole reason the Tuskess Airmen came into being in the first place. But somehow I think a self-loathing scribbler like Ridley will miss it, or if it’s included, it will somehow wind up on the cutting room floor, dismissed as “slowing the film’s face,” or “unneccessary exposition that doesn’t move the plot along.”
Hollywood should make films about both these groups of aviators, though considering the way the US Air Force museum has sanitized it’s treatment of black pilots, I wouldn’t expect a lot of help from the DoD for two films like that.
I look forward to the CGI soldiers, an inappropriate fart and/or belch, and Jett Lucas playing Roosevelt.
Lucas’ art film days are now upon us!! Run for your lives!!!
As long as Lucas does not write the script it would be intresting, as a technical director Lucas does actually know what he is doing. I would actually like him to do smaller movies to see what he can bring.
Lucas was never slated to direct this–he was always attached as producer and story writer, but NOT director and/or writer. I think its for the best that he has a hired writer–and a very talented one at that–writing it, and then someone else direct it. He simply isn’t a very good director anymore and even Star Wars and Graffiti were products of mainly collaboration and luck, but like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Empire Strikes Back he exhibits his potential with being a more hands-off creative force behind a film. I’m looking forward to this, whenever it eventually gets made.
Wouldn’t suprise me if Spielberg ends up with it… and that might be a pretty cool thing.