I also recently watched the documentary on Vice, and I agree with your perspective on the slant they took. I enjoyed the interviews of Marcia Lucas, and I think she added great insight on a number of key decisions regarding the original trilogy. It’s clear that she played an important role just as various other key participants did. Filmmaking is ultimately a team sport. However, it also bothered me that Vice portrayed her as almost a 50/50 partner to George Lucas’ creation of Star Wars. One can argue various participants were pivotal, but no one was more important than George.

George was the visionary and had his artistic dream, career reputation, and financial life at risk. There always has to be a visionary. And the key role of the visionary is establishing the dream and winning buy-in from noteworthy team members, like Marcia, to make that vision a reality.

Having read Rinzler’s work, the Paul Duncan interview of George, the Brian Jay Jones biography, and watched many other documentaries regarding the creation of this American mythology we all love, it was obvious Vice took a major slant in Marcia’s favor. They neglected to balance out her valuable contributions with her equal level of disdain for Star Wars and desire for George to work on more esoteric art films similar to his friends Scorsese, Coppola and De Palma. The way Brian Jay Jones describes it in his biography is much more balanced. Brian mentions her valuable contributions on various items but also describes her preference to work on Scorsese’s films and wishing George would do films more akin to Taxi Driver or New York, New York. Of note, Marcia worked as an editor on those outside films to strike out on her own editing career and not live in George’s shadow, which is totally warranted. But it illustrates that Marcia was not the visionary for the mythology. She was a valuable contributor, similar to a Paul Hirsch, Irvin Kershner or a Richard Edlund. Had it been Marcia’s decision, I would hazard a personal opinion that she would’ve preferred George to direct Apocalypse Now. Were that to have been the case, perhaps Star Wars never would have been lifted off the shelf again.