DealBook Column: The Election Won't Solve All Puzzles

Here comes more uncertainty.

It may sound counterintuitive, but whatever the outcome of the election — whether President Obama or Mitt Romney wins — the economy and markets are likely to face more uncertainty, not less, over the coming year.

“Uncertainty” has become the watchword over the last several years for many chief executives, politicians and economists as an explanation — or perhaps an excuse — for the economy’s slow growth, for the lack of hiring by business and for the volatility in the stock market.

“The claim is that businesses and households are uncertain about future taxes, spending levels, regulations, health care reform and interest rates. In turn, this uncertainty leads them to postpone spending on investment and consumption goods and to slow hiring, impeding the recovery,” a group of professors from Stanford University and the University of Chicago wrote in a study that found “current levels of economic policy uncertainty are at extremely elevated levels compared to recent history.” (The professors have created a Web site, policyuncertainty.com, where you can track the “uncertainty” levels.)

Come Wednesday morning, we should know who our president will be. But the uncertainty hardly ends there.

Almost immediately after the elections, the next big talking point on Wall Street and in Washington is going to be the now infamous “fiscal cliff,” a series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that was the result of a Congressional compromise reached last summer and is to take effect on Jan. 1, unless Congress finds an alternative. Some economists say the tax increases and spending cuts in the existing agreement could shave as much as 4 percent off G.D.P. if they are not renegotiated. Already, executives say that the uncertainty over the outcome of the fiscal cliff is causing them to hold back from making new investments.

But the greatest likelihood is that the fiscal cliff isn’t going to be resolved soon at all —the betting line of the political cognoscenti is that no matter who wins, Congress will find a way to kick the issue down the road, perhaps as far as the fall of 2013, providing a new cloud of uncertainty over the economy.

For investors, the fiscal cliff includes a tax increase on dividends (making them the equivalent of ordinary income, on which rates could rise to as high as 39.6 percent) and capital gains (up to 20 percent from 15 percent). In a note to clients sent out on Sunday night, Goldman Sachs said that it expected the rate for both dividends and capital gains to be negotiated to 20 percent in either a second Obama term or a Romney presidency. But more important, Goldman noted that when similar tax increases were on the table in 1970 and 1986, “the S.& P. 500 posted negative returns in the December prior to implementation as investors locked in the lower rate.” December, the report said, “has the second-highest average monthly return” since 1928.

Many investors have already begun selling stocks and companies in anticipation of tax increases. Speculation was rampant last week that one of the reasons for the timing of the sale of George Lucas’s company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4.1 billion in cash and stock, was the impending changes in tax policy. (Mr. Lucas has said that he plans to donate a majority of his wealth to charity.)

Once we get past the fiscal cliff, if we do at all, there is Europe. Remember Europe? The issues in Greece and Spain have managed to stay off the front pages during the election run-up, but they have not gone away. Some economists have argued that things have gotten worse. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, who will face election in 2013, said on Monday that the fiscal crisis in Europe was likely to last at least five years. “Whoever thinks this can be fixed in one or two years is wrong,” she said.

And don’t forget the Middle East. That “uncertainty” for the world — and the global economy — isn’t going away anytime soon either. Questions about a possible attack on Iran will persist under either candidate.

And finally, there is Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, one of the biggest uncertainties of them all. As I reported in this column two weeks ago, the greatest likelihood is that Mr. Bernanke will step down at the end of his term in early 2014 no matter who wins the election.

It’s possible — though unlikely — that his departure could happen even sooner if Mr. Romney wins. Over the next year and a half, Mr. Bernanke’s future as the Fed chairman will feed a sense of uncertainty among investors who have become accustomed to his easy money policies. If President Obama wins, he is likely to appoint a successor to Mr. Bernanke who is dovish on monetary policy, and more likely to keep printing money as Mr. Bernanke has, a strategy that comes with its own risks. If Mr. Romney wins, he may appoint a more hawkish chairman, a move that could create a different sense of uncertainty about how the Federal Reserve will unwind itself from Mr. Bernanke’s policies.

None of these issues are new. President Obama took office facing a fiscal policy dispute that was not and probably could not be settled given the gridlock in Congress. No solution is in sight for Europe’s problems. Tension in the Middle East is escalating as fast as nuclear technology. And the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is at its most opaque since the Reagan administration.

All of which shows that the comedian Jon Stewart is more on target than ever with the cheeky title of his election coverage on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. Carrying on a tradition, it is known as “Indecision 2012.”

Update that to 2013, and it’s good for another year.

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Obama and Romney Campaigns Begin Skirmish Over Balloting

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Paul D. Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate, and his children spelled out “Ohio” at a rally Sunday.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — President Obama and Mitt Romney hunted for last-minute support on Sunday in a frenetic sprint across battleground states, even as their parties faced off in the first of what could be a growing number of legal disputes over presidential ballots and how they are counted.

In Florida, the state’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Sunday morning that would force the Republican-led government to extend early voting in South Florida after complaints that extremely long lines on Saturday had prevented some people from casting their ballots. The Republican-controlled Legislature cut back early voting, which ended Saturday, from 14 days to eight.

The lawsuit was followed by a chaotic day in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County, which opened one of its election offices for two hours to accept completed absentee ballots and then shut down only to reopen again on Sunday afternoon. Three counties said they would open again on Monday, but Democratic lawyers will continue to argue in court that in-person early voting should continue through Tuesday in Broward County.

In Ohio, Republican election officials will go to court on Monday to defend an 11th-hour directive to local election officials that critics say could invalidate thousands of provisional ballots by forcing voters to attest to the type of identification they provide.

Together, the pre-election legal skirmishes were a potential preview of the clashes that could emerge in as many as a half-dozen swing states over Tuesday’s voting. The closeness of the races in those states has intensified the stakes of voter turnout, smooth operations at polling places, ballot problems and recounts.

In the battles, Republicans are mobilizing to defend against what they say is the potential for voter fraud, and Democrats are preparing to protect against what they say are efforts to suppress voting rights.

“The larger issue, in my view, is the scale of the effort that is required to have Election Day run smoothly,” said Robert Bauer, the chief counsel for Mr. Obama’s campaign. “Any number of things can go wrong, not by anybody’s fault or intention, but we are fully prepared and so, we believe, are election officials around the country.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney presented themselves as agents of change while painting the other as an obstacle — final arguments in a nip-and-tuck race that may hinge on the success of the campaigns’ elaborate turnout operations.

“The question of this election comes down to this,” Mr. Romney told a crowd of about 4,500 on Sunday morning in Des Moines. “Do you want four more years like the last four years, or do you want real change? President Obama promised change, but he couldn’t deliver it.”

Speaking to 23,000 people on a high school football field in Hollywood, Fla., Mr. Obama scoffed at Mr. Romney’s bid to claim the mantle of change, deriding him as a political quick-change artist who is repackaging the failed policies of previous Republican administrations.

“When you make this choice, part of what you’re choosing is who do you trust,” Mr. Obama said. “After four years as president, you know me by now. You know I mean what I say and I say what I mean.”

Racing the sun as well as the clock, both campaigns brimmed with confidence about their chances on Tuesday, though polls showed Mr. Obama holding a slender lead in several of the battleground states he needs to win the Electoral College. That advantage was evident in the itineraries of the two men on Sunday.

While each covered familiar ground from New Hampshire to Ohio, Mr. Romney sought to open a new front with a rally in Pennsylvania. Tightening polls have given him hope that he can take the state from Mr. Obama, who won there by a double-digit margin in 2008. But the president’s advisers dismissed the foray as a desperate move by a challenger running out of other paths to victory.

At the rally in Morrisville on Sunday, Mr. Romney made a point of mentioning a high-profile supporter, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose lavish praise of Mr. Obama’s leadership after Hurricane Sandy has raised Republican eyebrows.

“He’s giving it all of his heart and his passion to help the people of his state,” Mr. Romney said of the governor.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Des Moines, Lizette Alvarez from Miami, and Michael Barbaro from Morrisville, Pa.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Lucas plans 'little personal films' in future

NEW YORK (AP) — George Lucas is done with "Star Wars," but not with filmmaking.

The "Star Wars" creator says he's looking forward to making his "own little personal films" that he doubts will be for the theater crowd.

Lucas spoke Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 Gala, days after announcing the sale of his storied Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. The deal would allow for more "Star Wars" films.

Lucas was "very sad" let Lucasfilm go but excited about his educational foundation, which will benefit from the sale. He also plans to make more movies. His last one was this year's "Red Tails," about the Tuskegee Airmen, but he said he barely got it in theaters. He said the movies he's working on now "will never get into theaters."

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Chelation Therapy Shows Slight Benefit in Heart Disease Clinical Trial

LOS ANGELES — To the surprise of many cardiologists, a controversial alternative therapy proved beneficial to people with heart disease, reducing the rate of death and cardiovascular problems in a clinical trial, researchers said on Sunday.

The benefit of the treatment, known as chelation therapy, barely reached statistical significance, and there were questions about the reliability of the study. Even the investigators in the trial said the results were insufficient by themselves to justify recommending use of the treatment.

Still, the unexpected finding should provide some vindication to the National Institutes of Health for sponsoring the $30 million study, which was plagued by delays and problems.

“There may be a biological effect and that biological effect should be taken seriously,” and “pursued with additional research,” Dr. Gervasio A. Lamas of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, the lead investigator, said at a news conference here at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Elliott Antman, representing the heart association, applauded the National Institutes of Health for sponsoring the study while also expressing caution. “Intriguing as these results are, they are unexpected and should not be interpreted as an indication to adopt chelation therapy into clinical practice,” said Dr. Antman, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Chelation therapy involves the infusion of agents that remove metals from the bloodstream.

More than 100,000 Americans with heart disease undergo chelation therapy each year, at a cost of about $5,000 per course of treatment, experts here said. The hypothesis is that chelation can remove the calcium that is a contributor to arterial plaques.

But skeptics said there was not enough evidence backing chelation therapy to even begin a clinical trial. Proponents of the study said that since chelation therapy was already widely used, it should be subject to the same rigorous scientific testing used to study conventional pharmaceuticals.

And some skeptics were not persuaded at all. Dr. Steven Nissen, head of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said the study was “fatally flawed,” with many of the doctors involved being on the fringes of medicine and many patients dropping out of the trial. He said if people got the mistaken idea from the study that chelation was beneficial “it would be a public health catastrophe.”

The study, which began enrolling patients in 2003, was plagued by problems from the start. It fell way behind its goal of recruiting nearly 2,400 patients in three years. The trial was also suspended in 2008 for investigations by government agencies, one over conduct at trial sites and the other about whether patients were being adequately informed that chelation can cause death. The study was allowed to resume the next year, after some changes were made.

The trial ended up with 1,708 patients at 134 centers in the United States and Canada. The patients all had had previous heart attacks.

Half the patients received the chelation therapy, a synthetic amino acid called disodium ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid, or EDTA, as well as other substances. These were given by infusion every week for 30 weeks, followed by 10 more infusions at intervals of two to eight weeks. The other half received infusions of placebo.

After a follow-up of 55 months, 26 percent of those who received chelation therapy had died, suffered a heart attack or stroke, had a procedure to reopen a coronary artery or had been hospitalized for angina. That was less than the 30 percent for those who received a placebo, a difference that was barely statistically significant.

Doctors said there were reasons for caution.

Virtually all the of difference between the treatment and the placebo groups occurred in the third of patients who had diabetes. The placebo contained some sugar, which conceivably could have harmed the diabetics. Also, at least within the first two years, the chelation therapy did not improve physical functioning or psychological well being, according to surveys of the patients.

Dr. Mark A. Creager, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who was not involved in the study, said the chelation infusion also contained a high dose of vitamin C and the blood thinner heparin. It could be that one of those ingredients, not the chelation agent, were responsible for any benefit, he said.

Dr. Lamas, the lead investigator, said the chelation treatment was well tolerated. But he said investigators did not yet know why some patients receiving the therapy dropped out of the trial.

Another study presented at the heart meeting on Sunday found coronary bypass surgery superior to the use of stents for patients with diabetes and multiple heart blockages.

The trial involved 1,900 patients followed for five yeas. About 27 percent of those who received stents either died or had a heart attack or stroke, compared with about 19 percent of those undergoing bypass surgery. There was an increase in stroke risk with surgery, but that was outweighed by fewer deaths and heart attacks.

Previous studies had already suggested that surgery was better for diabetic patients with severe coronary disease, and practice guidelines already say it is “reasonable” to choose surgery. But the new study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, shows the same result even using modern drug-covered stents.

About 700,000 Americans undergo artery opening procedures for more than one blood vessel each year, and about 25 percent of them have diabetes, according to the investigators.

The study results were also published online by the New England Journal of Medicine. Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific provided the stents used in the study.

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Fight Growing Over Online Royalties

The debate playing out in Washington has echoes of a presidential race. One side says businesses will suffer unless the government steps in to lower costs. The other accuses jet-set industrialists of a ploy that will cheat the middle class.

These attacks, however, are not between candidates for the White House. They are being made in a battle over the obscure but increasingly vital issue of royalty rates for streaming music online. The issue pits the survival of Pandora Media and other Internet radio services against the diminished paychecks of musicians in the digital age.

This fight has raged on and off for more than a decade, and it was renewed recently with a bill in Congress that would change the way digital royalty rates are set. But with streaming music starting to account for a significant chunk of the music industry’s revenue, and Pandora now a scrutinized public company, the issue has touched a nerve as never before.

“This is not just about our present; it is about our future, our ability to make it in the digital age,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America. “Artists and labels and the entire music community need to earn a fair return on the creative works that are the reason companies like Pandora exist.”

Tim Westergren, the founder and public face of Pandora, has denounced the current system’s “discrimination” and urged the service’s 175 million users to contact their representatives in Washington. Music industry groups and labor unions have also gone public, casting it as a fair-pay issue.

Rates are set by three judges on the federal Copyright Royalty Board, but they apply a different standard to Internet radio services like Pandora than they do to satellite and cable radio outlets like Sirius XM and Music Choice.

Sirius, for example, pays 8 percent of its revenue to record companies and artists. Pandora pays a fraction of a cent each time a song is streamed, which last year amounted to about 54 percent of its revenue, or $149 million.

“The rate being too high dramatically depresses how much music gets played,” Mr. Westergren said in a recent interview. “It has really suffocated the industry.”

The Internet Radio Fairness Act, introduced in September, would move Internet radio companies from their “willing buyer, willing seller” standard — which critics like Pandora say results in an unrealistically high rate — to the one used for satellite and cable radio. To determine a fair rate, that standard directs the judges to consider factors including whether the prices will have a “disruptive impact” on the industry.

Music industry groups also want one standard, but one that keeps rates high. For years they have also been pushing for laws that would require terrestrial stations to pay royalties to labels and artists. (In the United States — and almost nowhere else in the world — radio stations pay royalties only to music publishers.)

Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican of Utah who co-sponsored the bill, said in a phone interview that the bill was meant to encourage growth in the streaming business. But when Mr. Chaffetz, whose campaign committee has received $2,000 from Pandora, was asked to respond to complaints that the changes would hurt musicians, he could not resist taunting a bit.

“The old-school dinosaurs are trying to help, but they’re stuck in the tar,” he said. “They can go talk to the pterodactyls.”

Pandora has been down this road before, and in 2009 reached an agreement for a temporary discount of about 40 percent off the royalty board’s rates; that deal expires in 2015.

This time Pandora is a different beast: a company with a $1.4 billion market capitalization. Each month, 58 million people use it to stream more than 1.1 billion hours of music.

Streaming is now on every horizon in the music industry. SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Internet and satellite radio, recently announced that it had crossed the $1 billion benchmark in payments to labels and artists.

The royalties issue, Mr. Westergren said, has become a question about the wider health of the streaming business, which he believes has been stunted by royalties.

“This is not an argument about going out of business,” he said. “A fix here would be for the whole industry.”

But there is wide anger in the music industry that the bill would enrich technology companies at the expense of musicians. MusicFirst Coalition, which includes the recording industry association, SoundExchange and others, says it believes that if Pandora gets everything it wants, it could cut its royalty bill by up to 85 percent.

For Pandora, the critical question is whether streaming businesses can be successful at all in the current system. Digital music services have proliferated over the years, but just as many have died, and popular arrivals like Spotify have yet to turn a profit.

Clear Channel Communications, the radio giant, has recently moved more aggressively into streaming with its iHeartRadio app. Robert W. Pittman, its chief executive — who has been outspoken on the royalty issue — said in an interview that a change could generate more money for the music industry by allowing streaming businesses to thrive.

“It’s not so much about rates as about how much dollars you spend,” Mr. Pittman said. “The amount of dollars to artists is rate times volume. If the rate suppresses the volume, there’s less money. If it encourages volume, there’s more money.”

Mr. Westergren is revered as a self-made success with real musical bona fides; he is fond of telling stories about his years of scraping by as a touring musician. But the controversy over the Internet Radio Fairness Act threatens to tarnish that image.

The music industry says that if Pandora needs to improve its bottom line, it should sell more ads. When asked to respond, Mr. Westergren makes a gesture of banging his head on a table.

“It’s an easy thing to say,” he said. “But no one has yet explained to us why Internet radio is under a different standard. No one responds to that fundamental premise.”

Advertising sales, which make up almost 90 percent of Pandora’s revenue, doubled in the company’s last fiscal year.

For Mr. Westergren, though, the most difficult aspect of this battle has been the accusation that Pandora wants to take advantage of musicians.

“This adversarial reaction toward Internet radio is counterproductive,” he said. “It’s causing other businesses to sit on the sidelines, and that is hurting musicians. Ultimately, you want to have many boats in the harbor.”

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Jerry Brown Throws Himself Into Prop. 30 Vote

LOS ANGELES — Gov. Jerry Brown jumped up from his desk on the 16th floor of the Ronald Reagan State Office Building the other morning, riled over evidence that his ballot initiative to raise taxes and head off billions in education spending cuts might be headed for a potentially catastrophic defeat.

“This is a measure paid for by relatively few that affects millions of people in this state,” Mr. Brown said, jabbing the air with a pen. “It is hugely important to this state: The idea of what it is should carry it to victory. Just that.”

Perhaps. But with two days until Election Day, Mr. Brown’s proposition is struggling, raising the prospect of as much as $6 billion in new cuts to California’s already battered public education system. It also is emerging as a serious challenge to Mr. Brown, who has affixed his personal prestige to its passage. The outcome holds the potential to hobble a governor whose hoped-for legacy had been wresting California from a fiscal crisis.

Three recent polls have shown Proposition 30, as it is known, declining in support since earlier this year. Now, barely 50 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for it; historically, tax initiatives tend to fail if they fall below 50 percent this close to an election.

So it is that Mr. Brown, after lying relatively low, has sprung to action. He could be found last weekend talking up the initiative before ordering a burrito at the Grand Central Market. It was part of a flurry of journeys to make urgent appeals to voters who at this point might be inured to what have become numbing warnings of economic Armageddon from their state leaders.

“There is no more money,” Mr. Brown said plaintively. “The money is needed for schools. I don’t want people to wake up the day after the election and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I am telling you.”

At 74, Mr. Brown is a politician who tends to plays by his own rules. For one thing, he has enlisted his dog, Sutter, a Pembroke Welsh corgi, as a campaign surrogate, sending his pet to 30 Democratic field offices to drum up support.

But perhaps more consequentially, the governor himself did not begin aggressively campaigning for this initiative until 10 days ago, as polls began registering a decline in support and as the breadth of the financial opposition — including $11 million from an unidentified donor in Arizona — became clear.

Part of this, aides said, is that Mr. Brown, who famously does not delegate authority, has been consumed with work in Sacramento, overseeing the reading, vetoing and approving of more than 700 bills that crossed his desk after the Legislature adjourned.

“I don’t need to go over what the governor does,” Mr. Brown said. “You know all that. It’s a full-time job.”

Beyond that, he said, he thought it was pointless to go out too soon, when people might not be listening and when there is only so much to say.

“There’s only a certain amount you can do,” Mr. Brown said. “You can only push so much through the pipe to the eyeballs. I am pushing the maximum through the pipe that I can.”

Still, initiatives that raise taxes are tough to pass here — even one like this, intended to place nearly all the burden on a relatively small group. (It raises $6 billion with a one-quarter of a cent sales tax increase and an income tax surcharge on those earning more than $250,000 a year.)

“I think it’s great that in the closing weeks, the governor is playing such a strong role,” said John A. Pérez, the Assembly speaker. He said Mr. Brown was a powerful advocate, adding, “In my opinion, it would have been great if he had started on Day 1.”

A defeat would result in cuts in spending on public schools, on top of a series of school cuts that has, by almost every measure, resulted in a marked decline in public education here. In this case, Mr. Brown said, the cuts would probably mean a reduction by three weeks of the school year.

A defeat would constrain Mr. Brown from going forward, putting more pressure on him to find things to cut — or ways to get around reductions. “It’s hard to see where he goes if 30 doesn’t pass,” said Dan Schnur, the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

Mr. Brown disputed the notion that it would hurt him. He noted that he vigorously opposed Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes, in 1978 when he was first governor, and survived that. The day after Proposition 13 passed, Mr. Brown did an about-face and announced he would cheerfully carry it out.

“This would be a huge blow to California and the public sector,” he said of this latest proposition’s potential failure. “As to how or what it does to me as a political leader, I think that’s hard to say. I battled very hard to defeat Prop. 13, and I went on to win by 21 points.

“If you’re only interested in what happens to this one person, Jerry Brown — that’s such a narrow question,” he said.

The difficulties are by no means of Mr. Brown’s making, as he has faced an onslaught of spending and competition from a rival tax measure pushed by Molly Munger, a wealthy lawyer, in a state with a resistance to tax increases. “At the end of the day it is what we’ve seen the last eight times a tax increase was in put in front of California voters: Voters will reject it,” said Jon Coupal, the head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an opponent.

The best hope for Mr. Brown’s initiative is that the prospect of re-electing President Obama draws a big turnout. Polls suggest that Mr. Obama’s supporters are disproportionately in favor of the initiative.

“It is very close,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, which has been polling on the measure. “The numbers that support it are lower than we are seeing when we asked about it a month ago. Passing a state tax increase in California is very, very tough to do.”

The proposition drew the support of 48 percent of likely voters in a survey conducted Oct. 17 to 30 by the Field Poll of California and released Thursday; another 38 percent said they opposed it.

Justine Kennedy, 32, an epidemiologist with a 13-month-old daughter, said she was leaning against it, even if she thought schools needed money.

“My initial reaction is no on 30,” she said. “Is that money really going towards the schools? I just feel like, in the past, money is misused and tends to be abused, especially in the school system.”

Ian Lovett contributed reporting.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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George Lucas' filmmaking rooted in rebellion

LOS ANGELES (AP) — There's no mistaking the similarities. A childhood on a dusty farm, a love of fast vehicles, a rebel who battles an overpowering empire — George Lucas is the hero he created, Luke Skywalker.

His filmmaking outpost, Skywalker Ranch, is so far removed from the Hollywood moviemaking machine he once despised, that it may as well be on the forest moon of Endor.

That's why this week's announcement that Lucas is selling the "Star Wars" franchise and the entire Lucasfilm business to The Walt Disney Co. for more than $4 billion is like a laser blast from outer space.

Lucas built his film operation in Marin County near San Francisco largely to avoid the meddling of Los Angeles-based studios. His aim was to finish the "Star Wars" series— his way.

Today the enterprise has far surpassed the 68-year-old filmmaker's original goals. The ranch covers 6,100 acres and houses one of the industry's most acclaimed visual effects companies, Industrial Light & Magic. Lucasfilm, with its headquarters now in San Francisco proper, has ventured into books, video games, merchandise, special effects and marketing. Just as Anakin Skywalker became the villain Darth Vader, Lucas —once the outsider— had grown to become the leader of an empire.

"What I was trying to do was stay independent so that I could make the movies I wanted to make," Lucas says in the 2004 documentary "Empire of Dreams." ''But now I've found myself being the head of a corporation ... I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid."

After the blockbuster sale announcement Tuesday, Lucas expressed a desire to give away much of his fortune, donate to educational causes and return to the experimental filmmaking of his youth. Still, the move stunned those who've followed him. He'd contemplated retirement for years and said he'd never make another "Star Wars" film.

Dale Pollock, the author of the 1999 biography "Skywalking," said Lucas disdained the Disney culture in interviews he gave in the 1980s, even though he admired the company's founder. "He felt the corporate 'Disneyization' had destroyed the spirit of Walt," Pollock said.

Lucas said through a spokeswoman on Saturday that he never said such a thing. But his anti-corporate streak is renowned. In the Lucasfilm-sanctioned documentary "Empire of Dreams", Lucas says on camera that he is "not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry."

Growing up in the central California town of Modesto, the independent streak was strong in young Lucas. The family lived on a walnut ranch and Lucas' father owned a stationery store. But, like his fictional protege Luke, George had no interest in taking over the family business. Lucas and his father fought when George made it clear that he'd rather go to college to study art than follow in his father's footsteps.

Lucas loved fast cars, and dreamed that racing them would be his ticket out. A near-fatal car crash the day before his high school graduation convinced him otherwise.

"I decided I'd better settle down and go to school," he told sci-fi magazine Starlog in 1981.

As a film student at the University of Southern California, he experimented with "cinema verite," a provocative form of documentary, and "tone poems" that visualized a piece of music or other artistic work.

The style is reflected in some of the short films he made at USC: "1:42:08" focused on the sound of a Lotus race car's engine driving at full speed and "Anyone Who Lived in a Pretty How Town," inspired by an e.e. Cummings poem. In later interviews, Lucas described his early films as "visual exercises."

Lucas' intellectual explorations led to an interest in anthropology, especially the work of American mythologist Joseph Campbell, who studied the common thread linking the myths of disparate cultures. This inspired Lucas to explore archetypal storylines that resonated across the ages and around the world.

Lucas' epic battle with the movie industry began after Warner Bros. forced him to make unwanted changes to an early film, "THX 1138." Later, Universal Pictures insisted on revisions to "American Graffiti" that Lucas felt impinged on his creative freedom. The experience led Lucas to insist on having total control of all his work, just like Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney in their heyday.

"In order to get my vision out there, I really needed to learn how to manipulate the system because the system is designed to tear you down and destroy everything you are doing," Lucas said in an interview with Charlie Rose.

He shopped his outline for "Star Wars" to several studios before finding a friend in Alan Ladd Jr., an executive at 20th Century Fox. Despite budget and deadline overruns, and pressure from the studio, the movie was a huge success when it was released in 1977. It grossed $798 million in theaters worldwide and caused Fox's stock price at the time to double.

In one of the wisest business moves in Hollywood history, Lucas cut a deal with distributor Fox before the film's release so that he could retain ownership of the sequels and rights for merchandise. He figured in the 1970s that might mean peddling a few T-shirts and posters to fans to help market the movie. Over the decades, merchandising has formed the bedrock of his multi-billion-dollar enterprise, resulting in a bonanza for Lucas from action figures, toys, spinoff books and other products.

Industrial Light & Magic, the unit he started in a makeshift space in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, moved to the ranch in northern California and lent its prowess to other movies. It broke ground using computers, motion-controlled cameras, models and masks. Its reach is breathtaking, notably among the biggest science fiction movies of the 1980s: "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial," ''Poltergeist," ''Back to the Future," ''Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark," ''Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and more.

"Between him and (Steven) Spielberg, they changed how movies got made," said Matt Atchity, editor-in-chief of movie review website Rotten Tomatoes.

These days, the talent at ILM has spread around the globe, and many former employees have become top executives at other special effects companies, said Chris DeFaria, executive vice president of digital production at Warner Bros.

"You meet anybody who's a significant executive or artist at a company, they've spent their time at ILM or got their start there. That's probably one of George's greatest gifts to the business," DeFaria said.

Lucas helped make the tools that were needed for his films. ILM developed the world's first computerized film editing and music mixing technology, revolutionizing what had been a cut-and-splice affair. Pixar, the imaging computer he founded as a division of Lucasfilm, became a world-famous animated movie company. Apple's Steve Jobs bought and later sold it to Disney in 2006.

But the goliath Lucas created began to weigh on him. Fans-turned-critics felt the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy he directed fell short of the first films. Others believed his revisions to the re-released classics undid some of what made the first movies great.

Giving up his role at the head of Lucasfilm may shield him from the fury of rebellious fans and critics. He said in a video released by Disney that the sale would allow him to "do other things, things in philanthropy and doing more experimental kind of films."

"I couldn't really drag my company into that."

Still, Lucas is not planning on going to a galaxy far, far away.

Speaking on Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 event in New York, Lucas said: "It's 40 years of work and it's been my life, but I'm ready to move on to bigger and better things. I have a foundation, an educational foundation. I do a lot of work with education, and I'm very excited about doing that."

This week he assured the incoming president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy that he'd be around to advise her on future "Star Wars" movies —just like the apparition of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi helps Luke through his adventures.

"They're finishing the hologram now," he told Kennedy. "Don't worry."

___

Liedtke reported from San Francisco. Global Entertainment Editor Nekesa Mumbi Moody in New York contributed to this story.

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Opinion: Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do

HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.

Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows.

At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.

Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.

But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”

Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.

People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.

I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”

Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.

Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.

Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.

WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.

My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.

David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.

Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Hallucinations.”

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