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One decision Lucas has already made: to place Lucasfilm on hold and take a two-year sabbatical. His company will continue—he is not intimately involved in its day-to-day operations anyway—and he will finish his duties as co-executive producer of the Indiana Jones film. But that, he maintains, will be all. He will spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies. He will also read and write, retreating to what Marcia calls his "treehouse environment," a little suite in a former carriage house a few steps away from the rest of their Victorian-style home in San Anselmo. There, near his Mickey Mouse phone, his Wookie pencil holder and his telescope, he has books on mythology, like Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and five three-ring notebooks, in which he has written notes on the history of Star Wars, past, present and future.
The films that record what went on in the beginning—if they are ever made—will be altogether different in look and tone from the existing trilogy, says Lucas. They will be more melodramatic, showing the political intrigue and Machiavellian plotting that led to the downfall of the once noble Republic. They will have only enough outward action to keep the plot moving. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the elderly Jedi who was played by Alec Guinness in the Star Wars series, and Darth Vader will be seen as younger men, while Luke Skywalker may make a brief appearance as a baby in Episode III.
The sequels, the three movies that would follow Jedi, are considerably vaguer. Their main theme will be the necessity for moral choices and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong. There was never any doubt in the films already made; in those the lines were sharply drawn, comic-book-style. Luke, who will then be the age Obi-Wan Kenobi is now, some place in his 60s, will reappear, and so will his friends, assuming that the creator decides to carry the epic further. Hamill and the others will get first crack at the roles—if they look old enough.
The abundant fantasy on the screen is a mere sliver of Lucas' imaginary universe. Behind any creature may be a little volume of fable or cultural anthropology. Chewbacca is a favorite of Lucas', and he can go on and on about the Wookie tribe. They come from a damp jungle planet where they reside in tree houses and live to be 350 years old. The six-breasted females deliver their offspring in litters. After an invasion by Imperial forces, which may be alluded to in the "prequel," the Wookies were rounded up by slave traders and sold throughout the Empire. Chewy was rescued by Han Solo and installed as his copilot. Got that?
If the saga sometimes sounds like a comic book or a children's TV serial, magnified a thousand times over, it is no accident. Lucas grew up on both. His father George Sr., who owned a prosperous stationery store in Modesto, was a rigorous man who tried to teach his son and three daughters the old-fashioned virtues: early to bed, early to rise; be true to yourself; work hard, be frugal. His father was convinced that the son paid no attention. "He never listened to me," says George Sr. "He was his mother's pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it. He was hard to understand. He was always dreaming up things."