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Barry Diller Blasts George Lucas as a “Sanctimonious Hypocrite” in Candid Memoir

The mogul recalls a bitter dispute with Lucas over his deal for 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’: "I was enraged."

Diller recalls feuding with his studio’s president, Michael Eisner, about whether to greenlight the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had Lucas as co-writer and executive producer and Steven Spielberg as director. “After the first twenty or so pages, where Indiana Jones gets chased down the mountain by a giant rock, I thought the opening segment alone would cost more than any movie we ’d ever made,” Diller writes. The executives particularly wanted to avoid falling into same trap as 20th Century Fox, which famously gave away Star Wars merchandising and sequel rights to Lucas when they hashed out the original deal for the film that would become A New Hope a few years earlier.

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