Kathleen Kennedy: A Legend in a Galaxy That Rarely Makes Them
The unique hell of running Star Wars as a woman, yet with enormous grace
Yesterday saw an epochal event in the entertainment industry.
Kathleen Kennedy, one of the true legends who walk among us, passed the torch at Lucasfilm after a 14-year run, handing it off to Dave Filoni, now the company’s president and chief creative officer, and Lynwen Brennan, the new co-president.
To say they don’t make careers like Kennedy’s anymore is an understatement, but frankly, résumés like hers have always been of a very limited edition. Since earning her first produced by credit on a little film called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the list of projects she guided to the screen has become almost unthinkable — the kind of résumé that now feels structurally impossible to replicate in a single career.
Just a few entries, pulled almost at random:
Gremlins
Back to the Future
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Cape Fear
Jurassic Park
Schindler’s List
The Sixth Sense
Munich
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
And in this community, she is an actual leader. Within this industry, Kennedy is more than a successful producer. She is someone who has cared deeply not just about the work, but about the future of the business itself. Unlike so many at her level, she did not outsource the hard questions. She involved herself directly in thorny, often thankless issues, from protecting women in the workplace to grappling seriously with the role of AI in entertainment. (I had the privilege of being inside some of those rooms where she led off-the-record discussions on these topics, and the caliber of figures in attendance is a testament to her influence.)
On those issues and more, she could have easily left it to someone else to sort out (and, certainly, most at her level have done just that). But behind the scenes, in quiet but powerful ways, she was constantly searching for ideas to help the industry work together to create something better, in a workplace that is more civil and more inclusive than what she inherited.
What has plagued this town in recent times is the total absence of leadership on the major issues that have descended on us like locusts, and it’s difficult to think of another executive at Kennedy’s level who has been so personally involved, across so many fronts, in trying to confront them.
You hear stories about people. And over the years, I’ve heard from others who have worked with Kennedy about her leadership, how much they learned from watching her and the humanity and grace she brought to situations where neither was required, and certainly not par for executives at her level.
She began her career at a time when you could count the number of female feature producers on one hand, and arrived in an era when the number of women leading major studio divisions, depressingly, is not much larger. Yet her intelligence and authority were so self-evident that no one who actually knew her ever questioned whether Kennedy was the right person to be at the helm of… anything.
Which brings us to Lucasfilm, which was as close as you can come to actual combat duty while working in the entertainment industry.
The Dark Side
There is no fanbase comparable to that of Star Wars. For millions — perhaps tens of millions — this is not merely a franchise but something closer to a religion. Beyond them lies a broad swath of the general population, including virtually every male entertainment journalist of a certain generation, who worships to one degree or another at the church of Skywalker.