Best Seat in the House

With all this Sandy stuff happening I didn't have a chance to tell you something else important: I saw George Lucas. And I didn't just "see" him, I sat maybe ten feet away from him for an hour while he participated in a panel on the Tuskegee Airmen at the New York Historical Society.

I'm in the extreme minority of people that loved his Tuskegee Airmen movie Red Tails, the way I see it, just because something's corny doesn't mean it can't be great.  It's a movie that plays to George's strengths: a scrappy group of underdogs facing off in dogfights against a force for evil with the odds stacked against them.  This is what he does!

The discussion focused entirely on the airmen (because that was the idea) and there was a Q&A season where everyone asked nice, Tuskegee oriented questions except for one enthusiastic young film student who couldn't help but ask Lucas if he had any advice for him, as an enthusiastic young film student. Lucas said, "I'll give you my standard advice, 'Persistence.'"

Anyway, no matter the topic, it was exciting just to be there. I never thought I'd see George in real life, and there he was. Some asked me Did you ask him why he ruined Star Wars? And to that I can only reply, Take a chill pill. You know he also gave us Star Wars, right?

And speaking of chill, what a poker face this George has. Four days later the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney and the next Star Wars trilogy would be announced and dude gave off no vibe at all that he had a new 4 billion dollars headed his way.