You're listening to American Prestige.

To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at AmericanPestigepod.com.

Find the link in our show notes.

Called Apocalypse Now, and he's working on it for years, and it's, you know, it's going to be this, like, big anti-war, Vietnam War film, and you just can't get it made.

And so, but he's can't get it made.

And so, but he's, he's worked it out, like they've scattered locations.

So he gets to a point where he hands it off to his friend, Francis Ford Coppola,

who makes the movie that we now know, Lucas's version would have been different.

But the reason that he feels comfortable doing that is that he decides, he's like, you know what,

all of the ideas I have for Apocalypse now, my Vietnam War film, that can just go into Star Wars.

Like that can just change the outfits a little bit because essentially this is a movie about the Viet Cong fighting the imperialists and

okay make them Ewoks rather than Viet Cong but like basically it's the same plot

so what's kind of remarkable about that is you're like oh right like I kind of vaguely sense

that but this underdog versus you know big empire big empire plotline, for him, that's about

U.S. foreign relations. It's a feel-good movie about like the U.S. losing to Vietnam War.

So what are Lucas's politics? Because I think when you look back on him,

that's not something that comes necessarily to the fore.

I would say that's also true for a lot of the new Hollywood,

which is ironic because these are people who are trained in the 60s,

who are profoundly connected.

I mean, famously, what distinguishes them is that they're film school students.

They're really the first generation who goes through the post-war.

...