George Lucas Picks Site for His $1B Museum

The force, it seems, was with Los Angeles. And San Francisco was left on the dark side. Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team were on the side of the City of Angels over the City by the Bay on Tuesday, choosing LA as the home of a museum that will showcase his life's work along with a huge collection of exhibits on film history and art, the AP reports. After what organizers called "extensive due diligence and deliberation," they announced that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be built in Exposition Park, where it will sit alongside the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Science Center, which houses the space shuttle Endeavour. Lucas has been trying to build the museum for nearly a decade and is financing the project by himself with plans to spend over $1 billion.

The museum will house Lucas's personal collection, which includes 40,000 paintings, illustrations, and film-related items including storyboards and costumes from The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca and, of course, Star Wars. The museum had several possible locations after Lucas abandoned plans to build it in Chicago, but the choice eventually came down to perpetual rivals in Northern and Southern California, with San Francisco offering Treasure Island, with its scenic views in the middle of the bay, as a home that the museum would have had virtually to itself. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti emphasized that it would not be just "a Star Wars museum." "This is a collection of narrative art in a city that has the best storytellers and story makers in the world," he said at a news conference. (More George Lucas stories.)