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Post by the Scribe on Apr 8, 2020 0:59:09 GMT
  George Lucas and Linda were rarely seen together and eluded photographers. The houseboy comment below was quite amusing. Frankly, I don't see how Linda could let George get away but she always seemed to have a commitment problem and liked her freedom. I believe their split was also around the time she began to have a lot of physical maladies.
  Linda, Dolly, Emmylou and their HouseboyAnd by December 1983, Lucas started dating the flamboyant singer Linda Ronstadt after meeting her backstage at one of her concerts.
This was another odd pairing of someone quiet and introspective and 'not terribly adventurous in bed', with his opposite, according to Griffin.
Lucas was warned that Ronstadt had a roving eye and wasn't interested in settling down.
She was a known heartbreaker and a man-eater, having had high-profile romances with musician JD Souther, journalist Pete Hamill, California governor Jerry Brown and Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.
She also dated Steve Martin, Jim Carrey and Little Feat singer Lowell George.
Just like Lucas, she valued her privacy so they were never photographed together.
'Lucas was so low-key that as he trailed along after Ronstadt in a San Anselmo [California] drugstore, the proprietor thought he was her houseboy,' Jones writes.
'George is lucky to be with her,' the author quotes an unnamed friend. 'He will have more fun than he's ever had in his life. Then she will break his heart into thousands of pieces and go on to someone else.'
They dated for five years and never discussed their relationship publicly but Ronstadt rented a house in San Francisco, where she traveled from her home base in Los Angeles and 'playfully carried around an Empire Strikes Back lunchbox'.
Lucas was smitten and jumped into dance and guitar lessons - but only for a couple of months.
He tried to morph into someone cool, ditched his eyeglass frames for contacts and shaved the hairy beard consuming his face.
Rumors swirled that they had gotten married but they hadn't. They did get engaged - 'ring on the finger and all', Ronstadt blurted out.
She began spending more time at Skywalker Ranch, riding horses and used Skywalker Sound recording studios facilities for her 1987 album of traditional Mexican folk songs, Canciones de Mi Padre.
Lucas was falling head over heels and suggested building a honeymoon cottage on the property adjacent to his Skywalker compound.
But the cottage never materialized and the relationship had evaporated by 1988 after five years.
That same year he adopted another daughter, Katie, and adopted a son in 1993.
In her own post-relationship family building, Ronstadt adopted a baby girl in 1990 at age 44, and she followed that up four years later by adopting an son.
Despite Lucas's film successes, he declared his children were his proudest achievement and wanted his epitaph to be 'I was a great dad'.
He had learned to relax finally with children and being a father made him happier than he had ever been.
Friends say they've 'never seen him this happy' as he is now that he's married Hobson. He has also said that having children (his daughters pictured right) helped him learn to relax
'Now I know the truth: Children are the key to life, the key to joy, the key to happiness,' he said.
But it was lonely having kids as a single parent.
Lucas, despite being the head of a billion-dollar company, viewed himself as 'the misunderstood little guy'.
Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3992000/George-Lucas-dating-chronicles-revealed-bubbly-film-editor-deemed-stupid-Valley-girl-heartbreaking-singer-Linda-Ronstadt-kept-wraps-Ivy-League-exec-finally-won-Star-Wars-creator-s-heart.html#ixzz4a3T9c3Zb
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 9, 2020 8:23:42 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 9, 2020 8:24:25 GMT
They confused Linda with George's actual wife. Linda came in between her and Melody. It is difficult to find out much about Linda's personal life from 1980 on (until she adopted). I call them the missing decade or "the Living Years." If she wrote about that time period it would be a best seller and a movie. Possibly a tv mini-series lol. I would call it "Blue By You, Blue By Me: The Linda Ronstadt Story" |
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Post by the Scribe on May 5, 2020 12:09:01 GMT
Few people know George Lucas had a near death experience. Actually he was dead and came back. And no, it wasn't during a mariachi concert where his girlfriend/fiance Linda Ronstadt was the headliner.
George Lucas on the Meaning of Life“There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason.”
www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/17/george-lucas-meaning-of-life/
BY MARIA POPOVA
When a frustrated young woman asked the most brilliant man in the world why we’re alive, Einstein responded in five poignant lines. This question — at the heart of which is a concern with the meaning of life — has since been answered by many other great minds: For David Foster Wallace, it was about going through life fully conscious; for Carl Sagan, about our significant insignificance in the cosmos; for Annie Dillard, about learning to live with impermanence; for Richard Feynman, about finding the open channel; for Anaïs Nin, about living and relating to others “as if they might not be there tomorrow”; for Henry Miller, about the mesmerism of the unknown; and for Leo Tolstoy, about finding knowledge to guide our lives.
But one of the most profound answers comes from legendary Star Wars director George Lucas. In The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (public library) — that remarkable 1991 anthology that gave us timeless meditations on existence from a number of luminaries — Lucas uses an autobiographical anecdote as the springboard for a larger meditation on the meaning of life and our best chance for reaching its fullest potential:
When I was eighteen I was in an automobile accident and went through a near-death experience. I was actually taken away from the scene, presumed dead, and it wasn’t until I reached the hospital that the doctors revived my heartbeat and brought me back to life. This is the kind of experience that molds people’s beliefs. But I have found that most of my conclusions have evolved from observing life since that time. If I’ve come to know anything, it’s that these questions are as unknowable for us as they would be for a tree or for an ant.
Like John Updike, who argued that “the mystery of being is a permanent mystery”, and like John Cage, who believed that “the world, the real is not an object [but] a process,” Lucas considers the just-is nature of life:
Scholars who have studied myth and religion for many years and have connected all of the theories spawned over the ages about life and consciousness and who have taken away the superficial trappings, have come up with the same sensibility. They call it different things. They try to personify it and deal with it in different ways. But everybody seems to dress down the fact that life cannot be explained. The only reason for life is life. There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason. One might think of life as a large organism, and we are but a small symbiotic part of it.
Lucas arrives at a conclusion rather similar to Alan Watts’s ideas about the interconnectedness of all life and writes:
It is possible that on a spiritual level we are all connected in a way that continues beyond the comings and goings of various life forms. My best guess is that we share a collective spirit or life force or consciousness that encompasses and goes beyond individual life forms. There’s a part of us that connects to other humans, connects to other animals, connects to plants, connects to the planet, connects to the universe. I don’t think we can understand it through any kind of verbal, written or intellectual means. But I do believe that we all know this, even if it is on a level beyond our normal conscious thoughts.
If we have a meaningful place in this process, it is to try to fit into a healthy, symbiotic relationship with other life force. Everybody, ultimately, is trying to reach a harmony with the other parts of the life force. And in trying to figure out what life is all about, we ultimately come down to expressions of compassion and love, helping the rest of the life force, caring about others without any conditions or expectations, without expecting to get anything in return. This is expressed in every religion, by every prophet.
The Meaning of Life is superb in its entirety. Sample it further with answers from Carl Sagan, John Cage, Annie Dillard, Stephen Jay Gould, Arthur C. Clarke, and Charles Bukowski.By the way, this photo is lifted from the Joseph Campbell PBS series The Power of Myth where this particular episode contained a roundtable discussion which included George Lucas and his gal Linda Ronstadt. If I remember correctly this took place at SkyWalker Ranch:
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Post by the Scribe on May 5, 2020 12:19:04 GMT
George Lucas: 25 Things You Didn't Know About the 'Star Wars' Guru
May 14th, 2015 | Gary Susman
Director George LucasGeorge Lucas didn't just create the "Star Wars" universe. The filmmaker, who turns 71 on May 14, pretty much created the cinematic universe we live in now, the ones whose cornerstones include the THX sound system at your multiplex, the Pixar movies that have dominated animation for the past 20 years, and the Industrial Light & Magic special-effects house, whose aesthetic has ruled the Hollywood blockbuster for nearly four decades. He's the pioneer of the effects-driven action spectacle and the conversion from celluloid to digital, the two trends that, for better and worse, have defined Hollywood's output for nearly 20 years.
As ubiquitous as Lucas and his creations loom in our cinematic dreamscapes, there's still a lot that most people don't know about him, from how he got his start to the famous folks who mentored him or were mentored by him, from the size of his fortune to what he plans to do now that he's all but out of the "Star Wars" business.
Here are 25 pieces of little-known Lucas lore, Enjoy, and May the 14th be with you.
1. George Lucas's full name is George Walton Lucas Jr.
2. Like Luke Skywalker, Lucas was a speed demon as a youth. In fact, he dreamed of being a race car driver until, as a teen, he was involved in a near-fatal crash. Nonetheless, his interest in racing persisted, but only as a subject for films, from some of his student shorts to the drag race at the climax of "American Graffiti" to the pod race in "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace."
3. Lucas transferred from Modesto Junior College in his California hometown to the University of Southern California's film school. His roommate there was future "Grease" director Randal Kleiser. His classmates included future "Apocalypse Now" and "Red Dawn" screenwriter John Milius and future editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who would one day be best known for his work on "Apocalypse Now," and who also would co-wrote Lucas's first studio feature, dystopian sci-fi drama "THX 1138," as well as creating its innovative soundscape.
4. After graduation, Lucas, again like Luke Skywalker, sought to become a pilot. He tried to join the Air Force, but he was turned down because of all his speeding tickets. The Army drafted him to fight in Vietnam, but then it rejected him because he was found to be diabetic. So he re-enrolled at USC as a graduate student.
5. Lucas's biggest mentor and collaborator in his early years was none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas's first Hollywood job was as a student intern on one of the first major features Coppola directed, the 1968 musical "Finian's Rainbow." In 1969, the year Lucas served as a jack-of-all-trades on the shoot of Coppola's drama "The Rain People," the two men founded American Zoetrope, a San Francisco-based independent studio meant to make avant-garde features. One of the company's first films was Lucas's "THX 1138," which flopped in 1971 but proved an influence on later futuristic sci-fi films and TV shows. After Coppola's success with "The Godfather," he urged Lucas to write and direct something more commercial. The result was the smash nostalgia piece "American Graffiti," which Coppola produced and made a fortune from as an investor. Despite all but imploding after the cost overruns from Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979) and "One From the Heart" (1982), the studio survives today and is run by Francis' filmmaker children, Sofia and Roman Coppola.
6. Another early professional filmmaking job for Lucas: camera operator on the Maysles brothers' legendary Rolling Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter," which chronicled the free 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California where the Hell's Angels the Stones had hired to do security stabbed a concertgoer to death.
7. Lucas nearly directed "Apocalypse Now," according to early Zoetrope principal Murch. He said Milius wrote the script for the nightmarish Vietnam War drama back in 1969, at the height of the war, when no studio would have dared release it. Instead, Murch has said said, Lucas took the script's central plot element -- guerrilla rebels fighting a lumbering empire -- and turned it into "Star Wars."
8. As prolific as Lucas has been as a producer (26 features over the last 45 years), he's received script credit as a writer on just 16 and has directed only six.
9. The most notorious piece of "Star Wars" lore is the 1978 CBS "Star Wars Holiday Special," a hilariously bad piece of variety TV that includes song-and-dance numbers (including Carrie Fisher singing lyrics to John Williams famous "Star Wars" theme music), long stretches of Wookiee grunt-and-groan conversations that go untranslated into any human language, and a ten-minute cartoon that marks the first appearance of Boba Fett. Lucas has long since disavowed any involvement with the show, which aired only once but has circulated in homemade VHS recordings and on file-sharing sites ever since. Lucas has said he refuses to release the show on home video, though the Boba Fett sequence does show up as an Easter egg on the 2011 "Star Wars: The Complete Saga" Blu-ray set.
10. Lucas was a big fan of legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa; indeed, many critics have found similarities between "Star Wars" and Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress." When Kurosawa was in a career slump, Lucas and Coppola helped get him funding to make "Kagemusha," earning a producer credit for themselves. The 1980 classic resulted in a comeback for the 70-year-old director, who went on to follow it up with "Ran," one of his greatest successes.
11. Lucas helped protege Lawrence Kasdan, a screenwriter on "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," get his start as a director. He served as an uncredited producer on "Body Heat," the steamy 1981 thriller that launched the "Big Chill" filmmaker's directing career and made an instant star out of Kathleen Turner.
12. Lucas has blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos in six movies, two of his own ("Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith") and four by others ("Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird," pal Steven Spielberg's "Hook," "Beverly Hills Cop III," and "Men in Black"). He's also appeared as himself on the TV shows "Just Shoot Me" and "The O.C."
13. Lucas has been married twice: to editor Marcia Griffin (who won an Oscar for "Star Wars") from 1969 to 1983 and to DreamWorks Animation board chair Mellody Hobson since 2013. He has four children.
14. In the mid 1980s, singer Linda Ronstadt stopped dating then-unknown comic Jim Carrey (who, at 22, was 16 years her junior) and briefly dated Lucas, then 39, who had recently separated from his first wife.
15. During his split from Griffin, Lucas sold off the computer graphics research division of Industrial Light & Magic in order to pay the divorce settlement. The division, which had done the pioneering computer-generated animation for the Genesis planet sequence in 1982's "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," was sold to Steve Jobs, who renamed the company Pixar. Within a few years, Pixar was releasing award-winning animated shorts, and eventually, the first full-length computer-animated feature, 1995's "Toy Story." And the rest is animation history.
16. After President Ronald Reagan began referring to the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative as "Star Wars," Lucas filed suit to prevent lobbyists from using his creation's name for the proposed weapons system, but he was unsuccessful.
17. Lucas sold Lucasfilm, the owner of the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" franchises, and the parent company of Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts (Lucas's video game division), to Disney in 2012. The deal was worth $4 billion, making Lucas the biggest shareholder in Disney aside from the estate of Steve Jobs.
18. According to Forbes, Lucas's current net worth is $5.2 billion.
19. For more than 30 years, Lucas has been brewing story ideas for "Star Wars: Episode VII," but he has said that the makers of the forthcoming film, due in December, chose not to use them.
20. Lucas has signed the Giving Pledge (along with other billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett), promising to give away half of his fortune to charity.
21. One of his philanthropic endeavors is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open in Chicago in 2018.
22. His other charitable donations include $1 million toward building the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, D.C. in 2005 and $175 million to his alma mater, the USC film school, in 2006.
23. According to Skywalker Ranch lore, the Marin County, California compound was a monastery 150 years ago. Today, of course, it's the site of Lucas's archives and Skywalker Sound recording studio. There's also a man-made pond there called Lake Ewok.
24. Lucas has never won a competitive Oscar, but in 1991, the Academy gave him an honorary one, the Irving Thalberg award.
25. Lucas has long said that he sought commercial success only to enable him to make the kind of small-scale, experimental, cutting-edge movies he made in film school. The sale of Lucasfilm was supposed to get him out of the blockbuster business so that he could work on these less commercial projects. So far, they have yet to materialize.
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Post by the Scribe on May 24, 2020 20:55:16 GMT
What's New with Linda Ronstadt? She's Singing Her Love Songs to Star Wars Czar George Lucaspeople.com/archive/whats-new-with-linda-ronstadt-shes-singing-her-love-songs-to-star-wars-czar-george-lucas-vol-21-no-12/
By People Staff Updated March 26, 1984 12:00 PM
Linda Ronstadt comes onstage in a strapless silver dress with flowers in her ponytailed hair and long white gloves, all ’50s cute with a little ’40s frump, the princess of the prom. She’s in Santa Barbara, Calif. taping her HBO concert (due in May), singing old, sweet standards from her surprising smash hit of an album, What’s New. Nelson Riddle strikes up his 43-piece band, and she warbles the lyrics to I’ve Got a Crush on You: “How glad the many millions of Toms and Dicks and Williams would be…to capture me.” Plus one Jerry, one Pete, one J.D. and one George Lucas. “I fell,” she sings, “and it was swell.”
Ronstadt’s latest crush, George Lucas, the maker of the Star Wars trilogy, is just her type: bright, creative, curious, interesting and, by all accounts, one of the nicest guys on two legs. He has just as many reasons to fall for her. And they each have one more: They are both private, hermits from hype.
Ronstadt, 38, and Lucas, 39, never have been photographed together. But they have been together often since a friend introduced them in December. She’s a frequent visitor to San Anselmo, Calif., where Lucas lives, and his Skywalker Ranch, a nearby sequestered enclave for filmmaking. And he has visited her Malibu and Brentwood homes.
But they keep it to themselves as much as they can, just as Linda tried to do in her liaisons with former California Gov. Jerry Brown, journalist Pete Hamill and songwriter J.D. Souther, to name a famed few. And no wonder. A San Francisco radio station reported recently that Linda was spotted in a San Anselmo drugstore. Owner Rosa Nguyen didn’t even realize at first that Ronstadt’s companion was Lucas. “I just thought he was her houseboy,” she says.
Lucas and wife Marcia, Oscar-winning film editor, separated last year. Custody of Amanda, 3, the child they adopted in 1981, was shared, although Amanda is now said to spend nearly all her time with Lucas. Marcia is reported to be living with a craftsman who helped make the stained glass used in the buildings at Skywalker Ranch. Linda’s life is equally complicated. She recently stopped dating comedian Jim Carrey, 22, because, according to one friend of his, she refused to stop seeing other men. Could that be Lucas’ fate? Or has she found her true love? She’ll never tell.
Her friends can merely surmise. “George is so lucky to be with her,” says one Ronstadt associate. “He will have more fun than he’s ever had in his life. Then she will break his heart into thousands of pieces and go on to someone else.” Peter Asher, her longtime producer and friend, reportedly concurs: “Linda is already getting restless…. That is just her nature. Linda does have a roving eye, and she does not want to settle down.”
Back in 1977 Ronstadt boldly stated her romantic philosophy: “I used to think you could only go to bed with a man out of pure love. I still think that’s the best reason to, but I don’t fall in love very often…. I mean, you’ve got to get laid. You can’t go on forever without sex. You can’t invent a love affair. I’ve now included pure lust as the second reason to go to bed with someone, and a perfectly acceptable third reason is curiosity. It’s a good way to get to know someone.”
A friend comes rather blatantly to her defense: “She’s not a nymphomaniac…. She’s rich, famous, travels, and will see a guy and go off with him. Men have done this forever, but it gets weird if a woman does the same thing. She’s not like Warren Beatty. Linda’s discriminating.”
Indeed. Few performers have her courage to experiment: rock, folk, punk, standards (in What’s New), operetta (The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway) and, soon, real opera (she plans to do La Bohème in New York next season). But the same goes for men. Lucas might profit by listening to a lyric of another Ronstadt song: “It’s so easy to fall in love.”
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 8, 2021 8:27:47 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 25, 2021 8:45:02 GMT
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