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George Lucas breaks ground on LA’s Museum of Narrative Art
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Wielding a silver shovel instead of a lightsaber, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas joined a handful of elected o cials Wednesday in breaking ground on a billion-dollar museum dedi- cated to the art of visual storytelling.
Construction of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a dream of the 73-year-old writer-director for more than a decade, is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.
Trucks rumbled by the museum site near downtown Los Angeles as Lucas, dressed casually in a white- and blue-checkered shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, thanked more than 100 well-wishers. Among them was his collaborator and longtime friend, direc- tor Steven Spielberg.
“I think it’s important to have a museum that, as I was joking and saying, supports all the orphan arts that nobody else wants to see, but that everybody loves,” Lucas said, describing the project.
His museum’s mission, he added, will be to explain the myths, legends, stories and por- traits of people that shape societies and bring them together as one. e art will range from paintings and digital works to comic strips and, yes, movies like “Star Wars.”
“To my feeling, popular art is an insight into a society and what they aspire to, what they really want, what they really are,” Lucas said before grabbing a shovel and joining several local o cials in turning over some dirt.
At times, the groundbreaking resembled a movie premiere minus the red carpet, with television cameras and photographers
capturing the moment. Lucas called on Spielberg to join him on the mound of dirt, directing his friend to give a thumbs-up to the cameras.
“It’s a great location,” Spielberg told him as they headed to a private reception. Lucas pointed out the blocks-long museum site that until recently was a parking lot behind the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum where the 1932 and 1984 Olympics took place.
It will be transformed into a multistory museum resembling Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon spacecra that appears to hover over an area surrounded by 11 acres of green space. e museum itself will contain more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, underground parking, a restaurant, movie theaters and other amenities. Numerous programs are being planned for children from surrounding schools.
Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, are picking up the cost, which museum o cials expect will exceed $1 billion for construc- tion and its operating endowment. at will make it the largest public gi ever given to a municipality, local o cials say.
e museum will be in Exposition Park, across the street from the Natural Histo- ry Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Science Center and the Califor- nia African American Museum and on the edge of the University of Southern Califor- nia, where Lucas studied in the 1960s.
Although Lucas attended college near- by, the site was the third choice for the museum. Lucas and his wife couldn’t reach an agreement with the director’s hometown of San Francisco or his wife’s hometown of
Chicago.
e museum’s wide-ranging collection
will include paintings by Norman Rockwell, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, comic strips by “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz and underground artist Robert Crumb, animation from lms such as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and special e ects from lms such as “E.T. the Ex- tra-Terrestrial.”
Classic lms represented will range from 1927’s futuristic masterpiece “Metropolis” and Orson Welles’ groundbreaking 1941 lm “Citizen Kane” to the Lucas-Spielberg collab- orations on the “Indiana Jones” movies.
And, of course, e Force will be strong at the museum. People will nd everything from Luke Skywalker’s rst lightsaber to Darth Vader’s helmet. Storyboards laying out the tale that Lucas created and that lives on in new lm iterations also will be on display, along with stormtrooper uniforms and other set pieces.
Lucas, who has said mythologist Joseph Campbell’s “ e Hero With a ousand Faces” helped inspire his “Star Wars” sto- ries, remarked Wednesday that he believes that without such tales, people don’t come together to gain common cultural under- standing.
“Whether it’s a cave painting or whether it’s Apollo as a statue or whether it’s the Sistine Chapel, whether it’s Napoleon on a horse, whatever it is, that’s what we aspire to,” he said.
And that’s a message, he added, that he hopes museum visitors will come away with.
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