George Lucas

MEMO TO director George Lucas: Stick to your word on this one, big fella. You know what I'm talking about here. You said this would be the last Star Wars movie. You said it would end with Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith - by the way, can these titles get any longer? - opening today in theaters everywhere, as they say. So we're holding you to it. No more "prequels." No more "trilogies." Let's give the whole crazy saga a nice long rest after this, shall we? Look, big guy, don't take this the wrong way. This is no knock on the Star Wars movies themselves, which are fine.

Name: Lucas. As in George Lucas. His previous owners were "Star Wars" fans.  They had to find a new home for him when they discovered their daughter's allergies. I still send them photos to keep them updated. Owner: Tobey McGuiness Age: He's 12. A sweet Sagittarius. Home: South Baltimore/Riverside Park Breed: Yellow Labrador Best Trick: Can eat Doritos in a single bound! Favorite activity: Socializing. Whether it be other dogs or people, he loves to meet and greet and is the happiest dog in town.

Are you hurt?" e-mailed a friend in mockery of the Saturday-serial dialogue style in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones. "Are you blind?" I e-mailed back. For the latest entry in George Lucas' transgalactic saga of the moral rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker and the deterioration of democracy into despotism has an electric visual majesty and boasts Lucas' best direction since American Graffiti. All the talk about Lucas as an empire-builder clouds perceptions of him as an artist.

HOLLYWOOD - George Lucas, looking overheated under the midday sun, gamely worked the red carpet recently at the world premiere of the latest cinematic installment to his space saga, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. At one point, Lucas was photographed with one of his most avid fans, a grinning, chubby fellow from Pennsylvania who showed up at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre wearing two-day stubble, a sweat-stained shirt and a brimmed frontier hat that Indiana Jones would admire. That guy, Dave Filoni, also happens to be the director of Clone Wars (which opened this weekend across the U.S.)

Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith is a pop masterpiece. George Lucas has done the near-impossible. He's kept his gloriously hyperbolic space fantasy so idiosyncratic and so personal that even its failings become expressive. From the first word -- "War!" -- Lucas plunges viewers into spectacular upheavals of men, women and aliens, cyborgs and droids, and then into a political maelstrom that's elating in its pertinence and audacity. Lucas dares to hinge it all on a love story: something still outside his writing-directing grasp.

George Lucas is frank, reflective and still energized four days after receiving the AFI Life Achievement Award on June 9 at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. (The ceremony airs at 9 p.m. tomorrow on the USA network.) Over the phone from his home in Marin County in Northern California, the creator of American Graffiti, the Indiana Jones movies and Star Wars sounds eager to embark on his own second career of directing experimental movies. The Star Wars movies are over - Lucas says the idea that there would be three trilogies stems from a joke that he once made about doing a sequel when he and his first cast (Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill)

That Baltimore's museums are awash in 19th-century French art is largely because of the efforts of George Lucas, a homegrown aesthete whose passion for the art of his time left a permanent mark on his native city. Lucas' contribution to Baltimore's cultural legacy is evident in the extensive collection of some 20,000 artworks that he amassed as an expatriate in France during the second half of the 19th century and bequeathed in 1909 to the Maryland Institute College of Art. If You Go A View Toward Paris: The Lucas Collection of 19th-Century French Art runs through Dec. 31 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

The New Yorker for Jan. 6 has an excellent, well-rounded piece on Hollywood, George Lucas and his "Star Wars" industry, which thrives 20 years after the first installment of the futuristic trilogy hit theaters. The article, written by John Seabrook, is occasioned by the rerelease of a digitally enhanced version of the trilogy, beginning with "Star Wars" Jan. 31, "The Empire Strikes Back" three weeks later, and "The Return of the Jedi" two weeks after that. Also, Lucas is now at work on a second "Star Wars" trilogy for release in 1999, 2001 and 2003.

Near, the end draws. Cry or cry not, there is no more. Forgive us the Yoda-speak, but come today the final installment of Star Wars does. Filmmaker George Lucas is ending his epic six-part tale of good vs. evil, the story of how a young Jedi Knight named Anakin Skywalker became the heavy-breathing poster boy for the Dark Side. For many fans, it's also the story of their lives. They packed the multiplexes over and over in the summer of 1977, bought the pajamas and the action figures and headed down a path that led them to this moment - 40 years old and camping out on a sidewalk to get prime seats to a science fiction movie.

When the 40-person staff of BreakAway Games, a computer-game maker in Hunt Valley, shuts down today to see Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, management won't consider it goofing off. It will consider the retreat "research and development." "It's our religion. It's part of our culture. Without these sorts of things, the guys that work here can't get on," said Deborah Wahler, president of the company, which develops game software for the youth market as well as combat simulations for the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., and the NATO Defense College in Italy.

That Baltimore's museums are awash in 19th-century French art is largely because of the efforts of George Lucas, a homegrown aesthete whose passion for the art of his time left a permanent mark on his native city. Lucas' contribution to Baltimore's cultural legacy is evident in the extensive collection of some 20,000 artworks that he amassed as an expatriate in France during the second half of the 19th century and bequeathed in 1909 to the Maryland Institute College of Art. If You Go A View Toward Paris: The Lucas Collection of 19th-Century French Art runs through Dec. 31 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

George Lucas is frank, reflective and still energized four days after receiving the AFI Life Achievement Award on June 9 at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. (The ceremony airs at 9 p.m. tomorrow on the USA network.) Over the phone from his home in Marin County in Northern California, the creator of American Graffiti, the Indiana Jones movies and Star Wars sounds eager to embark on his own second career of directing experimental movies. The Star Wars movies are over - Lucas says the idea that there would be three trilogies stems from a joke that he once made about doing a sequel when he and his first cast (Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill)

WASHINGTON - Politics gets into everything these days, even Star Wars. "George Lucas must be a Democrat," said my 15-year-old son when he arrived home from the opening day of the latest Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. Ah, the Force is strong in this one, I thought, echoing Darth Vader. For, without the benefit of any advance word or special Jedi abilities, my young Jedi easily detected the anti-Bush propaganda that some liberals, to their delight, and some conservatives, to their fuming outrage, allege is embedded in Mr. Lucas' new flick.

Jade Fertich day-tripped down to Baltimore yesterday not because he was worried about the end of Pimlico; he feared the end of the world. "Lots of sin coming in," the Mechanicsburg, Pa., resident advised, surveying the beer-burdened Preakness Day crowd entering the race course. "Drunkards shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Despite sunny skies, the start of the day did have a certain cataclysmic feel. Medics pocketed fistfuls of surgical gloves. A policeman stood on a median with his hands in his pockets, as if he had already realized the futility of directing traffic.

MEMO TO director George Lucas: Stick to your word on this one, big fella. You know what I'm talking about here. You said this would be the last Star Wars movie. You said it would end with Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith - by the way, can these titles get any longer? - opening today in theaters everywhere, as they say. So we're holding you to it. No more "prequels." No more "trilogies." Let's give the whole crazy saga a nice long rest after this, shall we? Look, big guy, don't take this the wrong way. This is no knock on the Star Wars movies themselves, which are fine.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas: good friends, collaborators, and Mr. Nice Guys no more - at least in their moviemaking. Spielberg and Lucas will duke it out this summer with two apocalyptic sci-fi fantasies: Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith opens today, and Spielberg's War of the Worlds opens June 29 worldwide. It's a clash of titans. No other directors have the knack of consistently delivering entertainment that satisfies huge audiences and invades their collective consciousness.

Without Rick McCallum, we may never have learned how Anakin Skywalker, with the potential to be the greatest of all Jedi Knights, instead chose to become Darth Vader, the near-perfection of evil. A week before the premiere of writer-director George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, McCallum, the producer of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, remembers with pleasure the crack creative team he'd assembled. "On the first Star Wars movie, George had the worst crew in England," says McCallum over the phone from London.

So you wonder what film writer-director Lawrence Kasdan really thinks of George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films? In anticipation of Star Wars: Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones, the newest installment of the Lucas film series, which opens Thursday, he spoke about Lucas in a telephone interview from Vancouver where he's directing Stephen King's Dreamcatcher,. Kasdan rose to fame as the screenwriter for two of Lucasfilm Ltd.'s best films, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Near, the end draws. Cry or cry not, there is no more. Forgive us the Yoda-speak, but come today the final installment of Star Wars does. Filmmaker George Lucas is ending his epic six-part tale of good vs. evil, the story of how a young Jedi Knight named Anakin Skywalker became the heavy-breathing poster boy for the Dark Side. For many fans, it's also the story of their lives. They packed the multiplexes over and over in the summer of 1977, bought the pajamas and the action figures and headed down a path that led them to this moment - 40 years old and camping out on a sidewalk to get prime seats to a science fiction movie.

Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith is a pop masterpiece. George Lucas has done the near-impossible. He's kept his gloriously hyperbolic space fantasy so idiosyncratic and so personal that even its failings become expressive. From the first word -- "War!" -- Lucas plunges viewers into spectacular upheavals of men, women and aliens, cyborgs and droids, and then into a political maelstrom that's elating in its pertinence and audacity. Lucas dares to hinge it all on a love story: something still outside his writing-directing grasp.