George Lucas is "moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff."

He's not going to make movies anymore? It seems to me he bowed out of movie-making a long time ago. But he's back and saying I'm not going to play anymore because movie executives weren't interested in the movie he made. Don't they know who he is?! Don't they care about about black people?! The movie's about the Tuskegee Airmen, and Lucas is acting as if a historically and racially important subject means that the movie is important and as if executives should bow down when a movie is important when there's no reason to think anything other than that they care about whether a whole lot of people want to see a movie and historical and racial importance is not what brings out the big crowds.

Lucas's whining is too funny. It was his "Star Wars" that ended the great movie period of the early 1970s and got the business focused on giant blockbusters. And now he's supposedly going to "to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses." Well, fine. I look forward to seeing more ironies pile up on top of each other.

Side question: Is the Tuskegee Airmen movie — "Red Tails" — any good?

All preview screenings are wildly optimistic celebrations of the possible. But this was different. This was a rally. “On Jan. 20,” an 89-year-old Tuskegee ace named Roscoe C. Brown Jr., told the crowd, “every African-American in this country ought to go see ‘Red Tails.’ ” Desirée Rogers, who is now C.E.O. of Johnson Publishing Company, said she was splashing “Red Tails” on the cover of Ebony. And Al Sharpton, sounding like a “Star Wars” fanboy in 1977, later insisted that “it’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!”

In other words, it's medicinal. It's medicine that "every African-American in this country" is supposed to take. The rich white man made it. Buy it!

He slipped into a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary studio head.

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”

“And you’re doing it as a throwback movie? You’re not going to do it as a hip, happening-now, music-video kind of movie?”

“No, that’s not a smart thing to do. There’s not really going to be a lot of swearing in it. There’s probably not going to be a huge amount of blood in it. Nobody’s head’s going to get blown off.”

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.”

They have a right to their history... made into a craptastic Hollywood blockbuster? That is, you appropriated black history and absorbed it into the kind of overblown bullshit you made America love? This is all about George Lucas. It's not about rights for black people. It's about you, and if it's awful, it's because you made an awful movie. And you made the movies awful. And now you're going to flounce off and make art movies....

Please just go away.