George Lucas now has a new hope (sorry) concerning a location for the Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art he’s been trying to get built for several years now. For a while, it looked like his new project would land on Chicago’s lakefront, but an organization called Friends Of The Parks filed a lawsuit to halt construction on the would-be museum site (currently a parking lot). That bit of obstructionism seems to have worked, as earlier this month Lucas announced that he’d find some other city in which to spend his millions. That other city is looking like it might be San Francisco.
Lucas is currently in discussions with Mayor Ed Lee about building the museum on the west side of the artificial landform in San Francisco Bay known as Treasure Island, SFGate reports. The Northern California city’s Crissy Field was originally planned as the museum’s location, but after negotiations stalled, that idea was scrapped in favor of Chicago in 2014. “I never gave up on the idea,” Lee said of the proposed museum. “We have a chance to bring it back, and I want to be open and positive about it.”
If the museum were to be built in the Golden Gate City, it would offer some symmetry to the 72-year-old media mogul‘s life. Lucas was born and raised in the nearby city of Modesto, and it was in San Francisco’s underground filmmaking scene that he built the foundations of his storied career. In fact, it was when he and his first wife Marcia Griffin were living in the Bay Area in the early ‘70s that Lucas wrote the first draft of a Flash Gordon-inspired movie called Star Wars. Later that decade, he began building his film production nirvana Skywalker Ranch about an hour away in Nicasio.
And if the second round of negotiations goes nowhere, another California city farther south has also signaled interest in hosting the potentially massive money generator. Mayor Eric Garcetti issued a statement a few days ago saying, “We would welcome it in Los Angeles.”
[via IGN]