Decades before "Star Wars" made filmmaker George Lucas rich and famous, he became smitten with the power of visual storytelling.
Now he wants to create a museum in San Francisco's Presidio that would be dedicated to this art form and house a collection he has been building for more than 40 years.
"At this scale, there's nothing that has ever been done like this," said Lucas during a recent two-hour interview at his 6,000-acre Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.
He submitted a 20-page proposal to the Presidio Trust on Friday, the deadline for bids on the former commissary site at Crissy Field now occupied by Sports Basement, which will relocate. Finalists will be announced in April, and an ultimate decision will be made this year or next, said Craig Middleton, the trust's executive director.
"We received 16 proposals. We're very pleased. We were not really expecting that," Middleton said. "We're very excited at George Lucas being one of them. The proposals are imaginative and creative and speak to the site, which inspired people to think big. We're going to be very transparent and not rush the process."
The Presidio Trust has the proposals on its website,
www.presidio.gov, where the public can post comments. The website says the trust wants to create a "cultural institution of distinction" that would offer cross-disciplinary programs, be compatible with the overall setting, engage the community and be economically viable.
Covering all costs
Lucas is confident that his proposal, three years in the making, would fulfill those goals at no cost to the Presidio Trust. He will pay for everything. The museum would be a gathering place for families, he said, and showcase 150 years of populist art, including the illustrations of Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, comics, children's books, fashion, cinema and digital technology. There would be permanent and rotating exhibitions, and programs that would be an extension of Edutopia, the educational foundation he started in 1991 to improve K-12 learning.
He estimated that the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum would cost him $250 million to $300 million to build and receive a $400 million endowment upon opening and another when he dies.
Although he writes longhand using a yellow tablet and a No. 3 pencil, Lucas noted that he has made significant technological inroads into the film medium and that San Francisco is the home of digital art, which would be a major focus of the museum.
For Lucas, who turns 69 in May, the museum would be the next chapter in a life that began in 1944 in Modesto, where his family owned an office supply store and later a small walnut farm. In October he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion and retired. Three months later, he announced his engagement to Mellody Hobson, a business executive and contributor to ABC News. His successor at Lucasfilm is Kathleen Kennedy, whom he named this past summer.
He is best known as a writer, director and producer whose films include "American Graffiti" and the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" epics. He is also an art collector whose first acquisition was an Uncle Scrooge comic book page by Carl Barks. Lucas paid $25, which was all he could afford in the late 1960s.
His obsession with art began early, when his family would visit the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park.
"To me the escape was to be able to go to San Francisco and see things that didn't exist where I lived," said Lucas, a San Anselmo resident and Presidio tenant since 2005, when his Letterman Digital Arts Center opened.
Growing up, he wanted to be an illustrator. He loved adventure books, Boys' Life magazine and the main periodicals of the era: Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post, which often featured covers by Rockwell.
"There was a giant contrast between what you'd get in Look and Life in photographs and what you'd get with Rockwell," Lucas said. "One was a very idealized version of what we thought we were and the other one was what we actually were. And I found that fascinating. It piqued my interest in art as a way of expressing ideas and ideals more than reality."
Illustration dominates
That interest intensified over the years. About 95 percent of the enormous Lucas collection is illustration. Much of the would-be Presidio collection is stored in vaults.
"I don't have enough walls, which is why I want to build a museum," Lucas laughed, adding that it would fall somewhere between the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which features decorative arts and design.
It's not the first time a museum has been proposed for the Presidio.
The late Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap, planned to build a museum at the historic Main Post to house his collection of modern art, but gave up in 2009 because there was too much opposition. "He wanted to put a glass box in the middle of a historic site," said Lucas, adding that he would conform to the style of the park.
As for criticism of popular art, it doesn't faze him at all. "As a popular artist, I hit the same chord with people that Rockwell hit, that Michelangelo hit, that the people who painted on caves in France hit," Lucas said. "I relate to art more as an emotional experience than as an intellectual experience."
