Star Wars: the never-ending story

The film took three and a half years to make. It involved dozens of interviews, contributions from thousands of individuals, 44 terabytes' worth of digital footage and filming on at least three continents. And it asked the question that has haunted a generation: Who owns Star Wars?

For those who haven't seen them — and, strangely, I keep meeting people who haven't seen them — the Star Wars movies are a Greek-style tragedy in six parts. They're about a man with a serious anger-management problem who climbs the career ladder and travels a lot. His kids follow him around and want to kill him. A couple of effeminate robots offer comments from time to time, and the whole thing takes place in outer space.

It doesn't sound like much, but the story draws upon every imaginable universal theme, including those of Faust, The Seven Samurai and various myths and Bible stories. It's the summation of every story that's ever been told. It's about coming of age and coming of middle age. Star Wars spoke to a generation of teenagers (mainly boys) in the late 1970s — so much so that they're still obsessed with it now, in their 40s.

Director George Lucas shares their obsession. He wasn't able to create all the special effects he wanted in the first three films, so he remade them — several times. Then he created the three "prequels", which relied almost entirely on special effects. But why not? They're his films, right?

That's the question asked in The People vs. George Lucas, a documentary I saw at the Munich Film Festival last week. The fans interviewed in the documentary argue that Star Wars is so much a part of our common culture that all of us own it in some way — especially after having given Lucas billions of dollars for movie tickets and merchandise.

Some of them believe this so strongly that they've created their own edited versions of Star Wars — restoring some of the original scenes, removing characters they don't like, and excising some of the poorly edited dialogue of the later films. In some ways, they're as bad as Lucas. No one wants to stop tinkering.

When the Blu-ray edition finally comes out, will we face another round of changes? I'm afraid to ask.

Two days after seeing People vs. George, I was flipping channels on TV and came across one of Lucas's earlier films, American Graffiti, from 1973. I couldn't help but admire how perfect that film is: the well-developed characters, the believable situations and dialogue, and the ability to freeze a moment in time as perfectly as a Polaroid picture. Lucas never needed to go back and redo it. He got it right the first time. And that way, it belongs both to him and to us.