Cinema: Ready, Set, Glow!

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Computer-generated creatures are actors too, and Episode 1 has some of potential Oscar caliber. Watto growls and connives with the swagger of a con man who's not as smart as he thinks. Sebulba, Anakin's rival in the Podrace, walks on his hands and throttles rivals with his feet. "George said, 'Think of a spider crossed with an orangutan crossed with a sloth,'" recalls Rob Coleman, the film's animation director. Coleman would pester Lucas for backstory on obscure creatures like Sebulba, "but I've never been able to stump him. He marinates in this world of his."

Of all his "actors," Lucas is proudest of the digital Jar Jar: "We have the first photo-realistic character that acts." Jar Jar, for whom actor-dancer Ahmed Best was both the voice and a rubberized stand-in, took years to develop. "He was Tex Avery cartoonish in style," says Chiang, "with large eyes and a big mouth." He was given short ears, but Lucas insisted on long ones. The comically androgynous shape came later.

It takes a village to make a movie: all those artists prying the Phantom menagerie out of Lucas' brain. The film had tens of thousands of visual elements, and Lucas signed off on all of them; he would stamp "O.K." or "Fabuloso" on the designs he liked. "George is very collaborative," says Rick McCallum, who produced Episode 1. "But finally it's his word, his world."

The Emperor of this teeming, hugely profitable world can hear the occasional renegade whisper below his palace balcony. "Critics say the problem with George and Steven [Spielberg] is that they've created these well-made megamovies that are basically B movies," Lucas observes. "Jaws, they say, was just a big horror movie. Star Wars is just a big sci-fi film. That our films are not like The Exorcist, The Godfather and the great films of the '70s. Well, they were B movies too. And Gone With the Wind was just a soap opera." Lucas thinks of himself as a Marin County rebel against the Hollywood empire, in a cadre of Bay Area filmmakers that includes Francis Coppola, Philip Kaufman and such visionary avant-guardians of the '60s as Bruce Conner, Will Hindle and Scott Bartlett (his shorts Offon and Metanomen ushered in the digital era).

All right, what powerful man doesn't also want to be universally respected and loved? But now, sitting in a dark theater at ILM looking at his near-finished film, Lucas seems bracingly lighthearted. "What's that? White dirt on the print?" he asks. "Yeah, that's good dirt," says a wiseacre, and everybody laughs. Lucas is a genius at fussing: a sun is setting too fast in one shot, while in others, he wants light rays bouncing off buildings, more traffic, less confetti. No one acts cowed by the billionaire boss.

Four-and-a-half years of energy and expertise guarantee nothing. Episode 1 may be no more than what composer John Williams, who has scored all four Star Wars films, expected the first one to be: "a good weekend movie." To be a big success, a movie need only work for a few weekends. It doesn't need mythic meaning; remember that for years, the all-time box-office champ was The Sound of Music. But the Star Wars saga does touch a deeper chord. "George created a transgenerational phenomenon that's still inexplicable," says Williams. "Maybe it's in the rattling of our collective memory.