George Lucas has called San Anselmo home since the 1970s.
While Star Wars characters have the luxury of parking their vehicles with the help of tractor beams and the Force, George Lucas has to use a driveway like the rest of us. And the renowned filmmaker is pretty protective of his personal driving lanes—which is why he’s filed a complaint in Marin County Superior Court to ensure his property rights to a slice of land he uses as a driveway to one of his several properties in San Anselmo.
The property in question is located on Coogan Avenue; its assessed value is just over $1 million and includes an 1,170-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom house.
According to the complaint filed this past spring, Lucas depends on the strip to get from Essex Avenue to the residence and, as the only landowner to use the strip in the over 30 years since he purchased the tract, has operated under the assumption it’s within his property line. But it’s recently come to light the driveway is not within his parcel’s boundaries—rather, an easement on the land seems to have been granted at some point to several of Lucas’s neighbors, all of whom are since deceased. Lucas is suing to prevent those neighbors’ heirs from staking a claim on the driveway. The Town of San Anselmo and the heirs of the deceased neighbors are all named as defendants in the complaint.
Lucas says he’s solely maintained the driveway since purchasing the property in the early ‘90s and surrounding neighbors have no access point to it. His attorneys are chalking the situation up as a mapping error from a long time ago, in a surveyor’s office far, far away.
Lucas owns nearly two dozen properties in San Anselmo and is known to be protective of his “empire,” as it were. In 2020, he filed a lawsuit to prevent heirs of the previous owner of a San Anselmo home he purchased in 2007 from claiming land rights to a sliver of the property whose ownership wasn’t specifically delineated when the land was carved up in the early 1900s.
