George Lucas's Xanadu

"What happened to George Lucas?" is among the abiding cultural mysteries of our time. His artistic descent from "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to the flabby, overwrought "Phantom Menace" and its sequels (never mind "The Clone Wars") has been painful to watch. Some critics have attributed the decline of his sensibility to the cloistering and megalomania that are occupational hazards for moguls in any industry.

Given the prevalence of that theory -- the "Citizen Kane" hypothesis -- it's more than a little curious that Lucas has proposed building, in Marin County, a new digital-production facility that looks so much like Hearst Castle, which served as home (and monument) to William Randolph Hearst, the megalomaniac mogul who inspired Orson Welles to create "Citizen Kane." That film's overscale "Xanadu" was Welles's take on Hearst Castle.

Lucas, who helped to design the structure, has said it takes its architectural cues from a 19th-century boys' school in nearby Marinwood. However, the likeness to the Hearst house is unmistakable, the British magazine The Architects' Journal points out. Sadly, it's hard to think that Lucas is being ironic here, as the man's irony was last spotted in the early 1980s.