{"id":452347,"date":"2026-09-03T17:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T17:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/452347\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T17:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T17:10:08","slug":"george-lucas-says-delayed-1-billion-museum-almost-broke-my-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/452347\/","title":{"rendered":"George Lucas Says Delayed $1 Billion Museum ‘Almost Broke My Will’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGeorge Lucas<\/a> has spent his career doing things people told him could not be done. Building his own museum may have been the hardest.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis has been a long haul,\u201d the 82-year-old filmmaker said Wednesday during a surprise appearance at a press preview of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles<\/a>. \u201cSeventeen years between getting kicked out of cities and trying to get this built, which has in itself been eight years.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPart of the problem is I\u2019m a contrarian,\u201d Lucas continued. \u201cI don\u2019t like to do things that people think can be done. I\u2019m fascinated by doing things that people say can\u2019t be done. And even when you do it, they say, \u2018Well, that\u2019s not any good. You can\u2019t do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThen came his blunt assessment of the undertaking: \u201cI\u2019m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe approximately $1 billion museum, co-founded by Lucas and his wife, business executive Mellody Hobson, opens to the public Sept. 22<\/a> in Exposition Park, across from Lucas\u2019 alma mater, USC. Earlier attempts to build it in San Francisco and Chicago collapsed amid disputes over location, design and public land. Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began the following year, only to encounter pandemic shutdowns and supply-chain delays.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe still had to deal with bureaucracies and people who have contrary thinking,\u201d Lucas said. \u201cBut we managed to make our way through all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDesigned by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, the curving, elevated structure has been likened to a spaceship, a cloud and a tree canopy. The five-story, 300,000-square-foot building is surrounded by a 13-acre campus<\/a> of gardens, paths and public gathering spaces designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer. Inside are more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, two theaters, a free research library, classrooms, a caf\u00e9 and a rooftop restaurant called Skywalker Grill.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe inaugural displays comprise more than 1,300 objects drawn from a permanent collection of more than 40,000 works. They range from paintings by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence and Charles White to comic art, children\u2019s-book illustrations, movie posters, murals and pieces by Banksy and Frank Frazetta. (Works from Disney are notable absent.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd, yes, there is Star Wars<\/a>. The opening cinema exhibition, \u201cStar Wars in Motion,\u201d includes C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Princess Leia\u2019s costume, Luke Skywalker\u2019s battered landspeeder and an enormous model of an Imperial AT-AT. Outside, a bronze sculpture depicts Leia confronting Jabba the Hutt. But the franchise occupies only a fraction of the museum, which Lucas has repeatedly described as a \u201ctemple to the people\u2019s art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a big celebration for us because it\u2019s taken so long to get here,\u201d Lucas said. \u201cBut it\u2019s something that I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring illustrators, artists who illustrate stories that are already written. And most of the stories are myths. They\u2019re not real. But the illustrations make them real.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe museum rejects the customary separation between fine art and popular imagery. Its galleries are arranged around subjects such as love, family, work, childhood, sports, adventure, science fiction and community, placing familiar commercial artists alongside figures more commonly encountered in major art institutions.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Lucas, the stakes go beyond elevating illustrators. He argued Wednesday that shared images and stories create the common beliefs that hold societies together.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful,\u201d he said. \u201cYou combine them together, and those two elements create a society.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNarrative art creates a group of people with common belief systems,\u201d Lucas added. \u201cAnd that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other, and do things that one person can\u2019t do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHobson characterized the institution in similarly populist terms, calling it \u201ca museum by the people, for the people.\u201d General admission will cost $25, while visitors 17 and younger will enter free. Residents of the surrounding 90037 ZIP code will be eligible for free admission through the museum\u2019s LM37 pass.<\/p>\n

\n\tLucas ended his remarks with a characteristically wary acknowledgment of the reporters assembled before him.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI know we have a tendency to draw in because I\u2019m controversial in terms of the media,\u201d he said. \u201cBut hey, I just do what I feel I have to do. And you guys do what you have to do. So I\u2019ll just let it go at that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Lucas has spent his career doing things people told him could not be done. Building his own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[25084,1743,48,52,51,47,50,49,1925],"class_list":["post-452347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-george-lucas","tag-hollywood","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}