How the Lucas Museum's epic battle for a home ended in L.A.

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Set us as preferred Los Angeles became home to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by promising George Lucas something that San Francisco and Chicago could not: that he could actually build it.The promise came after years of rejected proposals and litigation frustrated Lucas’ efforts to create a museum for the art he and his wife, Mellody Hobson, had collected.The museum’s opening on Sept.

22 in Exposition Park will mark the culmination of Lucas’ long search for a viable site, and L.A.’s campaign to convince him the city would make way for it.Michael Govan, Lucas Museum board member and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said Lucas choosing L.A.boiled down to “audience and the location.”“This is the final jewel in the crown of Exposition Park,” former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a recent interview.The museum’s origin story dates to the late 1990s, when Lucas’ production company Lucasfilm Ltd.

entered into negotiations to redevelop the former Letterman Army Medical Center in the Presidio of San Francisco.Presidio officials asked Lucas if he would help build a museum as part of the development, but the Letterman Digital Arts Center (now known as One Letterman) opened in 2005 without one.

Entertainment & Arts At the time, Lucas’ growing collection of what he calls narrative art was spread out in a number of locations, including in his home and at the Skywalker Ranch postproduction facility in Marin County.In 2010, Lucas formally proposed a museum on the former commissary site at San Francisco’s Crissy Field, but the Presidio Trust opened the location to competing proposals and ultimately rejected all three finalists.

It offered Lucas a different parcel near the Letterman complex; he declined.Garcetti was already courting Lucas and Hobson, and initially proposed that ...