LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,499,000
SIZE: 3,200 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last night's boozy, late night perusal of new listings in the Sunset Strip area of Los Angeles turned up an updated, upgraded and well-groomed traditional listed with an asking price of $3,499,000 and owned, as per property records, by semi-reclusive Oscar winning film editor Marcia Lucas.
She may be best remembered by (aging) Tinseltowners and Star Wars aficionados as the first wife of filmmaker George Lucas but in all truth Marcia Lucas can lay claim to a chest-puffing claim of a relatively brief but accomplished career of her own as a film editor.
Before hooking up with Mister Lucas in the late 1960s she worked on several Martin Scorsese films including Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver. In 1974 she received an Oscar nomination for American Graffiti, her first film with Mister Lucas. Although her role in the making of the first Star Wars movie is often over looked even by Star Warians—or whatever hardcore fans call themselves—Miz Lucas snagged an Academy Award in 1977 for her editing suite efforts on the ground-breaking sci-fi mega hit.
Miz Lucas went on to edit Episodes V and VI of the seemingly ceaseless Star Wars franchise (The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) but her professional credits all but end abruptly in 1983,* the year she and Mister Lucus not-so-amicably divorced. There are reports ex-Misus Lucas was given a $50 million dollar settlement but, of course, Your Mama hasn't the faintest fact about what the real deal was. Anyways, Miz Lucas later married, made a baby with, and divorced a stained glass artist who had previously worked for her ex-husband. Awwwkwaaaard! Despite her high-profile first marriage and her professional accolades—she does have an Oscar for Star Wars, which her ex-husband doesn't even have—Miz Lucas lives a quiet and privileged life mostly out of the hot glare of Hollywood.
Property records show Miz Lucas picked up the Sunset Strip property that's currently for sale in October 2008 for $3,595,000. It's not clear to Your Mama if Miz Lucas ever occupied the premises—we found digital evidence from a few years ago that the property had been leased on a long term basis—and this isn't the first time Miz Lucas has mounted this particular bronco at the real estate rodeo; She had the house on the market for a couple months in the fall of 2010 with an asking price of $3,995,000.
There's a fireplace in the formal living room and in the formal dining room a bank of French doors connects through to the backyard entertainment and recreation spaces. The custom, eat-in kitchen has white Shaker-style lower cabinetry, rustic, rough-edged limestone (or some other stone) counter tops, glass fronted upper cabinets, (delicious) milk-chocolate colored subway tile back splashes, and high-grade commercial-style stainless steel appliances.
The media room/den adjoins the formal dining room and connects back through to the formal living room allowing for wonderful circular flow of chi throughout the ground floor. Although the staging is typically ho-hum the airy, sun-splashed room manages to strikes a difficult-to-achieve balance between grand and cozy. The vaulted, partly glass ceiling is anchored by a chunky, stone-faced corner fireplace and built-in book shelves add an air of literacy to the booze lovers two-stool walk-in wet bar. A flat screen television was hung very low for optimal viewing angle from the opposite sofa and Palladian-style French doors make and elegant egress to and from the red brick pool terrace.
In all honesty, Your Mama isn't really sure where Miz Lucas currently resides but we did find plenty of evidence in various property record data bases that reveals she dabbles regularly in the buying and selling of multi-million dollar properties, mostly in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii.
In January 2005 she shelled out $6,950,000 for an ocean front house near Kapalua in Lahaina, HI that records indicate she still owns. In late 2002 Miz Lucas paid publishing heir turned internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist William R. Hearst III $3,950,000 for a five bedroom and 3.5 bathroom shingled contemporary in San Francisco's posh Pacific Heights hood that she sold in August 2011 for $5,250,000 and in July 2008 she coughed up $5.2 million for a multi-story residence with more than 5,700 square feet on a double wide lot in the Clarendon Heights neighborhood that property records reveal she sold last October for $4,086,000, a beefy loss of $1,164,000.**
*The Internet Movie Data Base shows Miz Lucus executive produced a little known film (No Easy Way) starring Khandi Alexander in 1996 but that seems more an anomaly than a re-entry into show business.
**Miz Lucas, dear hearts, just might be one of the few who have lost money in the last 10 or 12 years in the electrified real estate game in San Francisco. Good grief. The fast-moving market in San Francisco barely even noticed the spectacular, economy ruining subprime mortgage melt down fiasco in 2007/'08. What little property prices might have dropped quickly rebounded and rocketed off in the other direction.