The Toronto Star has an article on George Lucas:

Lucas may be the master of all he surveys, which at the Skywalker Ranch is a vision of rolling hills, verdant vineyards, rustic manors and the man-made Ewok Lake, named for the cuddly furballs from Return Of The Jedi.

Yet he prefers to be thought of as just one wizard among many at Skywalker, a message he telegraphs with his don't-mind-me attire: casual shirt and sweater, blue jeans and white sneakers.

Lucas, who turns 58 on Tuesday, greets his media guests in the manner of a busy technician who is indulgently interrupting more important work. It's immediately clear he's there not so much to answer questions as to confront what he calls the many myths he feels the media have wilfully spun about him and Star Wars.

The main one being that he's on the defensive about his billion-dollar space-opera franchise. Press cynics believe he's aggressively hustling Attack Of The Clones because of strong competition from the record-breaking box-office returns of Spider-Man, and because of widespread disenchantment over The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Lucas doesn't need to remind anyone of how well Phantom did commercially in 1999: almost $1 billion (U.S.) in global ticket sales, enough to rank it Number 3 on the all-time money-makers list (after Titanic and Harry Potter), plus an additional $2 billion in merchandise tie-ins.

Still, there's a perception he dropped the ball with Phantom, returning to Star Wars after a 16-year hiatus with a film too short on plot and too long on contrivance to do justice to the series.

Lucas now admits ? and he didn't say this in 1999 ? that he was working from a disadvantage with Phantom. Having chosen to go the route of a prequel set in the distant past, he couldn't use any of the human cast members of the original Star Wars trilogy. He had to build the first tale around 8-year-old Jake Lloyd in the role of doomed hero Anakin Skywalker, who grows to become the villainous Darth Vader in later episodes.

"I knew when I did the first film that I was going to be in trouble," Lucas says. "Because we did our focus tests, we asked everybody (the fans), and they said, "We do not want you to start this on Episode I. We want Episode II.'

"But I was saying I have to start at the beginning, because that's the whole point: It's Episode I. I have to start with him as a little kid. ... In the end, Episode II doesn't work as well if you haven't seen Episode I."

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