JesusRocks alerts us to an article on George Lucas, Star Wars, and filmmaking. From The Baltimore Sun:

In the rare piece of writing about George Lucas of which Lucas himself approves - a 1992 coffee-table book called George Lucas: The Creative Impulse: Lucasfilm's First Twenty Years - the author, Charles Champlin, borrows a friend's description of the colossally successful writer-director: "Part Walt Disney, part Thomas A. Edison, part Henry David Thoreau, and, in his financial shrewdness, part A.P. Giannini (the founder of the Bank of America)."

But Lucas is more like a tycoon version of the kind of self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws or wire-hanger sculptures. Fine arts critics have a name for what these characters produce: their quirky private mythology is called "outsider art." Lucas at his most likable has a strain of the outsider artist in him. When he made Star Wars, he was following his own impulses and bucking the studio heads who thought space fantasy and heroic legendry were dead.

Earlier this month, Lucas invited a group of journalists to tour his base at Skywalker Ranch and watch a digitally-projected screening of his latest movie, Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (which opened nation-wide last week.) The morning after, he sat down for six half-hour round-table talks with a dozen reporters at a time, and engaged in interviews one-on-one for the rest of the day. If he was nervous about the reception for the latest installment of his projected six-part saga about a distant galaxy's fall from democracy and a young hero's decline into arch-villainy, Lucas didn't betray it.

The Star Wars series has become the kind of pop-cultural event that fuels Internet traffic and stops street traffic. Speculation about whether Attack of the Clones would surpass the disappointing Episode One: The Phantom Menace, which opened in 1999, has raged through webs and fanzines for the last two years. But despite the whitening hair and thickening torso of middle age, Lucas retains the youthful confidence he had 25 years ago, when friends like Brian De Palma predicted that Star Wars would bomb.

Why shouldn't he be confident? The Phantom Menace grossed close to a billion dollars worldwide despite withering reviews. And why should he worry about Spider-Man siphoning off interest in his adolescent fantasy? In 1981, the trade press was trying to get him concerned over Superman II - but the comic-book hit didn't get in the way of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In person, Lucas has a potent anti-charm. He speaks with the point and energy of a champion school debater: if a reporter asks him about digital technology, he exhausts the subject . He doesn't get personal or wax poetic - he lets Skywalker Ranch do that for him. It's like the Shire from Lord of the Rings filled with 19th-century-style cottages and mansions housing the most advanced technology in the world.

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