Celebrity neighbor feuds are so common that it even has its own tag. First there was Quentin Tarantino complaining that his coked-up spider monkeys could hardly type amidst the noise of Alan Ball’s minah birds. Then it was Reese Witherspoon’s neighbors pissed about her menagerie of mini-donkeys. And don’t even get us started on Danzig and his infamous pile of bricks. Today, there’s news of a new neighbor feud, a long-running one, this time involving George Lucas and his neighbors in wealthy Marin County, California, just across the Golden Gate from FilmDrunk headquarters.
The long and short of it is, George Lucas wanted to build a state-of-the-art production complex on his ranch in San Rafael, but one of those proto-fascist homeowner’s associations that tells people what they can and can’t do on their own property shut him down. Lucas responded by following through on a threat to use the land for low-income housing instead. And to rich people, low-income housing is worse than warm gazpacho. “Muffy, come quick! The yacht’s covered in negro urine!”
Lucas withdrew his plans last month to build a large mission-style movie-making studio on Grady Ranch, [pictured, courtesy of Movies.com] blaming the Lucas Valley Estates Homeowners Association for being Nimbys and torpedoing it.
Several Lucas Valley Estates homeowners had, in fact, said that they considered the historic Lucas-owned farmland their back yards. They claimed the proposed 263,701-square-foot digital technology production complex was too large, would displace too much dirt, would change the course of a creek going through the area, create too much traffic and hadn’t been studied enough.
In the letter withdrawing the plan, Lucas said he no longer believed he could maintain a constructive relationship with the neighbors and castigated Marin for being “a bedroom community” that is better suited for subdivisions instead of business. The letter said he would build the studio in another more welcoming community and “find a developer (for Grady Ranch) who will be interested in low-income housing since it is scarce in Marin.”
“We don’t know yet what might be able to be developed there, but the notion of being able to explore his property and see if some beautifully designed family or senior housing can be developed there is too wonderful to pass up,” said Thomas Peters, president and CEO of the Marin Community foundation. “One of the incredible offers that Mr. Lucas made is that he would make available the extensive technical studies that have been done on that land, including water, topography, creek access and other engineering data that would give us a head start and help us determine whether senior or affordable housing can be built there.” [SFGate]
Mmm, the housing that spite built, delicious. God I hope this goes through. This almost makes up for the prequels. There’s nothing better than entitled Marin dickheads getting out-snobbed by a slovenly human bullfrog from Modesto. Enjoy your housing project and old folks home, shitheads!