EDINBURGH 2023: Connor Ratliff Guest Blog

Connor Ratliff on Creating characters that exist on multiple layers.

One thing I’ve learned while doing improvised comedy over the past decade or so: it can be tricky getting a laugh with a pop culture reference.

The increase of on-demand entertainment means that even the biggest hits in music, movies, TV, literature, etc only reach a fraction of the population. If you make a reference to something, you have to be prepared for half the audience not having seen/heard/read the thing you're talking about.

I've been doing my "George Lucas" character since the 1990s. It began as a goof to amuse friends – we loved George Lucas and had grown up on his movies but were also fascinated by the ways he was going back and tampering with his old films to “improve” them in ways that infuriated many of his biggest fans. My friends would ask “George” a question about what kind of new things he had planned for the Star Wars franchise, and I would instantly have an answer. It was the very definition of an inside joke.

Smash cut to 2014, when I launched The George Lucas Talk Show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. The premise was that “George” - who had just announced his retirement from filmmaking IRL - had decided to tackle the personality-based medium of the late-night talk show as a hobby. Some people do puzzles or go fishing in retirement; George would conquer one of the few corners of show business that he hadn’t already revolutionised.*

[*Lucas’ true-life retirement project was no less ambitious – a billion-dollar museum in the Los Angeles, due to open in 2025.  The Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art has been a long-running topic on the talk show, even inspiring an original song and corresponding animated music video.]

I would pretend to be “retired filmmaker George Lucas” but the guests would be real people, just being themselves – everyone from Jon Hamm to Aimee Mann and Ziwe would show up to chat with George. And this formula worked on multiple levels. The guests would often serve as surrogates for the audience, providing me with a way of gauging whether or not I was being too obscure. If I needed to explain something to a guest, it probably meant that a chunk of the audience needed that explanation, too. Meanwhile, if a show ever started to go off the rails, I could lean into the central conceit, that “George Lucas” was not a naturally gifted talk show host, despite his occasional comedic cameos in things like Beverly Hills Cop III or Just Shoot Me. “I’m one of the most famous and successful billionaires in the world but I am also struggling to host this midnight comedy talk show” is one of the most weirdly crowd-pleasing things you can portray on stage.

Arguably, this show had the freedom to be as much of an inside joke as when I was doing it just for my friends. After all, it was a 5-dollar midnight show in the East Village – presumably anybody who showed up knew what they were getting into. But I was determined for it to be something that anybody could enjoy, even if they had never seen a Star War.

What at first might seem an unsolvable problem – how do you make a "George Lucas" show that can be equally enjoyed by fans and non-fans alike – is really just a heightened version of what any show faces. Who's in the audience? How knowledgeable are they? What do they like? What do they want? Oh, and tomorrow night’s crowd will be entirely different, each with their own disparate experiences and points of reference.  In my experience, the surest path to failure is to try to please everybody by flattening your material until it will be 100% understood by absolutely anyone. The way to avoid this is to never fear that specificity will alienate an audience, but to be mindful of the best way to present it. As an audience member, I don't simply want to experience stuff I already know, regurgitated into a new shape – I want to be intrigued, surprised, and on some occasions, I even want to be baffled.

Most people have heard of George Lucas, even if they think they don’t know much about him. But how many of those same people are familiar with the character of Watto The Toydarian? A minor villain from the first two Star Wars prequels, Watto was a deeply problematic junk shop owner.

But in the world of The George Lucas Talk Show, Watto is reborn as George’s talk show announcer and sidekick. Instead of being the CGI alien of the big screen, we presented actor Griffin Newman (The Tick, Disenchanted) dressed in a tight blue bodysuit with a tiny elephant trunk for a nose.  

Griffin’s take on the character is a full-on reclamation, pushing beyond the limits of the movie in ways that are often thrilling. He transforms Watto with a performance that is both a commentary on the original while also deepening him into a richer and more nimble comedic role, subverting his stereotypical origins while doubling down on his pride in being a groundbreaking creation from the mind of George Lucas.

And that last detail is, truthfully, all anybody in the audience for our show needs to know. “Get a load of this crazy alien character George Lucas created” is the vibe that comes across the instant they see him in the costume and hear his voice.

This August, we’re taking George & Watto to Edinburgh for a run of three totally different shows – the improvised Talk Show with guests, a one-man GEORGE-prov show in which "GL" shows off his improv skills enhanced by state-of-the-art digital technology, and a fully-scripted play, entitled The Baron & The Junk Dealer, in which “George & Watto” play real characters experiencing an existential crisis on a desolate planet.  The latter is a sci-fi tragicomedy in which no direct reference is ever made to Lucas, Watto or anything related to Star Wars.

In each of these shows, the goal is not to perform cosplay in front of a group of knowing Star Wars fans, but to present characters who will potentially appeal to the audience member who just walked in off the street with no context whatsoever.

On our best nights, The George Lucas Talk Show has baffled at least a few of its audience members. Some would then return to watch it month after month. Every now and then, one of them has come up to us after a show to confess, "I finally saw my first Star Wars movie." To those people, the real thing is a reference to our show, not the other way around.

Ultimately, the point of doing these characters is to be delightful. We want audiences to have fun, and not need to watch a bunch of other things in order to understand what we’re doing. And for anyone who fully comprehends the various strands of Lucasfilm history we’re pulling from, we hope it’s a fun but totally inessential bonus.

What’s not to like about a retired, wildly influential billionaire storyteller and his oft-reviled CGI creation, holding court on stage? Reading back that description, it occurs to me that I would be drawn to create shows about these two even in a world where George Lucas never existed.

Connor Ratliff is an actor, comedian and podcaster based in New York City. His film & TV credits include The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Search Party, Orange Is The New Black, and the forthcoming Mean Girls movie musical.  His Webby Award-winning podcast, Dead Eyes, was named “Best Podcast Of 2022” by Vulture.  

The George Lucas Talk Show will be performed at 11.35pm in Assembly George Square Studios (Studio Two) on 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th August

Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/the-george-lucas-talk-show

George-Prov: An Improvised Theatrical Experience’ will be performed at 5.55pm in Assembly Roxy (Downstairs) from 25th – 28th August

Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/george-prov-an-improvised-theatrical-experience

The Baron and The Junk Dealer will be performed at 5.55pm in Assembly Roxy (Downstairs) from 2nd – 24th August

Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/the-baron-and-the-junk-dealer

Photo credit: Mindy Tucker

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