George, meet George
A brief conversation with George Lucas
Three weeks ago I decided I was going to interview George Lucas, so Idecided not to get a haircut. Instead, I decided to grow a beard andswoosh my hair back; I started studying up on what George likes towear. After collecting a hundred pictures of George I concluded thathe prefers navy blue sweaters, white button down shirts, blue jeans,and tennis shoes, above all other outfits.
Three weeks passed. My beard had grown in, full and lush. My hair waslong and trained to do the swoosh. I had my George clothes laid outfor a week. When I went to class that morning, George was getting atour of the school. Someone said it took two hours to get him out ofthe Gene Siskel.
That day I had a peanut butter and jelly in the park and visited thelibrary, where I picked up a copy of the Platypus Review (firstedition) and scanned it nervously as I waited for the elevator, onlyto discover an article about a Hungarian man named Georg Lukacs. Hewas some sort of big time Marx theorist back in the turn of thecentury, not this past one, but the one before it. So luck be a lady,I had a gift for George, which calmed my nerves.
Back in class we watched a Nam June Paik video from the seventies. Atthe beginning of the video he said something about how in the futurethe TV Guide would be as large as the Manhattan telephone directory,assuming that in the future anybody and everybody could broadcasttelevision signals. Of course we all know that, save for for publicaccess and Youtube and it's many incarnations, only large corporationshave the money to win the federally organized bids for televisionstations.
At five o'clock it was interview time. I was down there in the fancygarden-restaurant underneath the museum. All the doors were closed andthe restaurant manager had people running around tables, trying tomake the place look better. There were three cameras set up and lightboxes and a crew running here and there. A chair was set up comfy andempty, with lots of light on it for George. The chair for me satbetween a light box and a big HD camera, and the crew pushed the boxand the camera in so that when I sat down I was of squeezed into asort of uncomfortable fancy technology cave.
So George comes in wearing his navy blue sweater, jeans, and tennisshoes. My shirt was white and his was white with stripes on it.George had a diet coke. People watched George and then they looked atme getting ready to ask him questions, and then they looked back athim, and then back at me. I knew I had already done a good job: theweekend before I was at a Halloween party and some kid said I lookedjust like George Lucas.
So there was George, and I was all kinds of excited having nailed myGeorge costume. The director of the interview looked over at me andsaid, "Come on," so I walked over towards the interview station. Fromthe other side of the restaurant came George and we met halfway, me inmy blue sweater and him in his blue sweater and him with his beard andswoosh hair and me with my beard and swoosh hair and he lookingsurprised at seeing himself and me looking back surprised to have sucha long look with George Lucas. In slow motion he held up his emptyglass to me and said, "Will you put this on the table?" I took hisempty diet coke glass out of his hands and sat it down on the table.
For three weeks I was getting ready for this interview, not knowingthat I would only have ten minutes to talk to him. Now, I'm along-winded person and I knew that he tended to talk too, so mystrategy was to just pick one thing to talk about. I took the last sipfrom my third glass of water and just like I had practiced said, "SoGeorge, (a snicker arose from the crowd) in the next ten or fiveyears, where do you think you will find your viewership?" He told mesome things I already knew about not getting profit from theaterreleases and all profit coming from DVD and TV. "But," I prodded, "infive or ten years how do you think your audience will be experiencingmedia?" George geared up with a ruffle from his beard and exclaimedthat the Internet is undoubtedly the next frontier. I wanted to getinto the relationship between media and personal interaction, butbefore I could get it going George had already gone into a musing onThe Big Question: whether or not people are going to pay for media.Sure they can download movies, but why not just watch free YouTube?
He talked about money for a while and then, just as we were reallygetting to something, I was out of time. George seemed surprised thatmy time was up. He smiled and I got out of my chair. We shook handsand then I slipped the Georg Lukacs article out from between the pagesof my notebook. I unfolded the article and gave it to him and helooked up, a little confused. I pointed at the picture of Marxistdemigod Georg Lukacs, leaned down real close to his face and said,"Look it's you!" He looked at it and I walked away. He looked up at meagain, and I said, "something to read on the bus?"