What makes a mogul? The legendary Sam Goldwyn was "one of the lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears that it likes to weep," wrote Lindsay Anderson almost 50 years ago. Current wisdom has it that these glorious monsters of Hollywood's Golden Age have long been replaced by pen-pushers and number-crunchers, but George Lucas, creator of the two most profitable movie cycles in history (Star Wars and Indiana Jones), surely has some claim to the title, even if he seems painfully colourless in comparison.
Hubris and self-indulgence did for the first wave of New Hollywood directors in the 1970s, but the rise of the new generation of "movie brats", like Lucas and Steven Spielberg, owed as much to generational change as anything else. The counterculture was floundering, and the nerds Spielberg and Lucas - their imaginations forged by the Bmovies, TV serials and comic strips of their own childhoods in the 1950s - were in tune with a new desire for old-fashioned, escapist storytelling.
Lucas's first big hit (and still his best film), American Graffiti, a lovingly detailed recreation of his own teenage experiences in the Northern Californian town of Modesto, fetishised the detail of American teen experience before the fall from grace of the Sixties. At the time, the studios found the script archaic. Surely what young audiences wanted was rebellion, sex and drugs? Wrong. American Graffiti was not just a huge hit - its effects still ripple across global pop culture 25 years later: every time you pass an Eddie Rocket's restaurant, you're seeing Lucas's nostalgic dream in bricks and mortar.
Star Wars, with its mish-mash of influences from pulp science-fiction, Tolkien and Westerns, was similarly scorned by Lucas's own contemporaries, who sniggered at its juvenile gaucheness. But their self-consciously "adult", "serious" films floundered at the box office, while Star Wars soared. "This film was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine with them of their own adolescence, a chalice of a self which was better then, before the world's affairs or - in any complex way - sex intruded", noted one critic, summing up the principles which have informed much Hollywood product since.
How influential is Lucas? This, after all, is a man who has directed just four films in 28 years. But, as critic David Thomson remarks, "Lucas testifies to the principle that American films are produced, not directed". Actors have never interested him, and he quickly grew to hate the pressures of directing. His fraught experience on the first Star Wars movie convinced him that he should henceforth only produce, and gave him the financial and political clout to do so. His recent return to directing only came when he decided that digital effects would essentially allow him to make The Phantom Menace on the computers at his home on Skywalker Ranch - although his faith in the power of technology is hardly supported by the finished film.
His huge fortune is based less on the actual movies (although he retains a proportion of box-office profits which other film-makers can only dream of) than on his intuitive understanding of the importance of merchandising; the toy licensing agreement he secured in the 1970s at the expense of the hapless Twentieth Century Fox has proved to be one of the most one-sided deals since Manhattan was sold for a handful of baubles.
Much of that fortune has been poured into the obsessive sculpting and expansion of Skywalker Ranch, its painstakingly manufactured simulacrum of an Arcadian idyll itself a triumph of special effects. Surrounded by electric fences, the most modern surveillance technology and security systems which would put the Pentagon to shame, Lucas looks increasingly like a hi-tech version of William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes.
Baxter's stolid biography makes much of those parallels, and half-heartedly attempts to find a Rosebud in his subject's childhood relationships with a strict, Methodist father and distant, invalided mother. Not surprisingly, he doesn't succeed: like his films, Lucas remains one-dimensional, his humanity limited, his personality suspended forever on the cusp between adolescence and full adulthood.
Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times journalist
