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Lucas had stopped in to talk and answer questions for about 50 students in the journalism school's documentary film program. And it was a nice, congenial -- if dry -- talk until he turned it into a forum for bashing movie critics and denying that his "Star Wars" characters draw on racist caricatures. But I'll get to that in a minute.

For the first hour, Lucas rambled on about technical matters, pausing occasionally to touch on big issues, like the subjective nature of truth and the way that individuals perceive reality in different, equally valid ways. This was a discussion for documentarians, after all.

But something had been nagging at me ever since I saw his blockbuster opus. I raised my hand, swallowed and asked a question that seemed obvious. "Mr. Lucas, given your anthropological interests, were you surprised by the criticism of 'The Phantom Menace' as having ethnic and racial overtones?"

Bad idea. Lucas launched into a windy tirade against critics and the news media, which he accused of having to manufacture controversy in order to sell papers. "You can't sell newspapers by saying nice things about something," he claimed. "You can only sell newspapers by creating controversies and making controversies."

He seemed extraordinarily defensive. I thought I'd phrased the question carefully enough. I went through the checklist in my head. Did I call him Mr. Lucas? Check. Did I studiously avoid suggesting that I thought the film was racist? Check. Did I phrase it in such a way that he wouldn't feel attacked? Not according to him.

"You hurt my feelings," he told me privately after the discussion ended. And I suppose that's a possibility. But Lucas, as he had shown, isn't willing to extend his viewers the same courtesy.

I assume that he felt attacked. Maybe it was the setting: There were dozens of university students seated before him in rapt attention, eager to learn from him, the George Lucas. And I had burst his bubble -- again. Back when "The Phantom Menace" came out last summer, several critics accused Lucas of perpetuating racist stereotypes, particularly with the Gungan character Jar Jar Binks. Joe Morgenstern, writing for the Wall Street Journal, called Binks a "Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen."

Lucas stubbornly dismissed the idea that Jar Jar could be linked to stereotypes of African-American slaves or minstrel characters. "How, in any credible way, could you take an orange amphibian and say that this was a racial stereotype for African-Americans?" he asked.

When I mentioned Jar Jar's Caribbean patois he simply cut me off. "Just because somebody has an accent doesn't make them a stereotype of a particular kind of thing."

And he was right. Accents in and of themselves may not be stereotypical. But it's the overall image of Jar Jar that smacks of racism. His buffoonery, gait, appearance (one journalist thought his ears were reminiscent of dreadlocks) and word choice all combine to make him offensive. Lucas refused to even entertain the possibility his work might contain such stereotypes.

Next page | Blaming it on the L.A. Times