Gandalf the Cyan

[oojason said:](post/id/1417499]

‘A Conversation with Marcia Lucas’:-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2CPTf5J_5g - a 75 minute video at the AVFilm youtube channel. (2024)
 

The blurb: ‘AVFilm is proud to present a conversation with Marcia Lucas, renowned Academy Award-winning film editor of Star Wars: A New Hope. Her most notable works include American Graffiti, the Star Wars trilogy, Taxi Driver, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. Marcia Lucas was joined on stage by AVFilm Executive Director Kathryn Hecht and Sundance Director Emeritus John Cooper for an intimate, deep dive into the world Ms. Lucas navigated and shaped with her landmark contributions to filmmaking.’

Huh that’s wierd, the original video was deuploaded and replaced with a 60-minute version. The old one hasn’t been archived, sadly.

Ah well, it’s still a nice interview, and it’s nice once again getting to hear her side of the story.

Looking forward to this!

Looks nice!

Most fans just aren’t very interested in the history of Star Wars, real or fabricated. If they are, they’re probably content with Empire of Dreams or I guess Wookieepedia. I feel like if there was greater interest, his revisionism would be more well-known as well, or at least more people would notice the discrepancies.

At the very least, a decent number of people have seen Vice’s documentary, which does at least cover the real history, if not call out the revisionist claims. Though it’s still a comparatively small percentage of the fanbase, unfortunately.

I wonder whether he meant “3 stories in mind” as in “a trilogy in mind”, or whether he really was making stuff up. I can imagine him telling tall tales to inflate his ego, but it seems bizarre to do the same to his own close friend. Then again, he’s said as early as ~1983 that Vader was always meant to be Luke’s father, so who knows?

SparkySywer said:

Star Wars doesn’t have to be Cocomelon to still be for kids. It can still have some level of maturity while not being on the same level of maturity as media made for adults.

Yeah, I’m of the opinion that Star Wars was always made with kids in mind. We know for a fact that Lucas was heavily inspired by the Flash Gordon serials of his youth. The crucial difference is that the OT (and probably ROTS) were mature kids’ movies (that could also be enjoyed by adults), whereas TPM and AOTC were more lowbrow.

WRT Owen/Beru’s corpses specifically, keep in mind that kids’ media back in the day was less watered-down than the stuff nowadays. I imagine that shot would have overall been considered acceptable, especially since it’s short and a relatively insignificant part of the film.

“Master, Destroyers! …They have shield generators!”

Vladius said:

New unpopular opinion - Rise of Skywalker is the best of the sequels and it’s not even close.

Agreed. The general vibe is great, it comes the closest by far to capturing the feel of SW.

It’s nice, though I do think the 2nd shot should have more mist if possible.

Yeah, Lucas stops at nothing to erase people whom he (I guess?) doesn’t like. It’s so bad that even Scott Ross (former head of ILM) says that he was written out of history, no idea why. I wish more people knew about his dishonesty, especially since Lucas has a weird cult of personality among certain fans who will actively defend his pseudohistory.

Today* marks the 10th anniversary of the old EU being decanonized.

*Well, for me–it’s probably yesterday for where a lot of you guys live

A few years back some people uncovered a master copy of the Swedish TV version, and upscaled and color-corrected it. It’s a different cut with some scenes removed. They’ve only uploaded 35 minutes of it to YouTube, but they’ve said fairly recently that they’re eventually going to release the whole thing to archive.org.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wruAk8GbaJ8
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwfFZmXEBmM&t=193s
(Note that the YT version features alterations to the soundtrack to bypass YT’s DRM)

Channel72 said:

• Even if this was supposed to be some insane strategic gamble on Leia’s part, they still make no effort to evacuate the base, like they do with Echo Base in Empire Strikes Back. The moment Leia arrived at Yavin, they should have initiated an evacuation of all personnel except for the fighter pilots necessary to attack the Death Star.
• And then even after they miraculously blow up the Death Star via Luke’s one-in-a-million shot, instead of immediately evacuating, they still don’t evacuate the base. Instead, they stay around for an award ceremony. It’s unclear why a fleet of Star Destroyers doesn’t immediately show up at Yavin and obliterate the base.

I guess maybe all their transports were tied up elsewhere and couldn’t arrive until a while after the DS had been destroyed?

I really hope that K-2SO will be handled properly in season 2. He’s in the unfortunate position of being a comic-relief character in a show which isn’t supposed to have comic relief. I worry that they’ll have to add in humor to make him fit in (or elsewise his portrayal will be inaccurate to Rogue One to accommodate the difference in tone.) Ideally, his quotes should come across as blunt/edgy, as opposed to comedic. It’s a minor thing, but the addition of comic relief would really change the feel of show, and not for the better.

Fundamentally flawed though TROS may be, I do think it has a fantastic space opera vibe that’s been absent since the OT (other stuff like Rebels notwithstanding.) I also appreciate the sense of scale, with them visiting like 10 different planets. It may contribute to the rushed narrative, but it really feels like there’s an entire big galaxy out there.

I don’t think it’s available any longer, but this is–
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Clone-Wars-Micro-Series-Original-Broadcast-Restoration-Chapter-Format-RELEASED/id/109799

And they’re more accurate restorations than these, too.

The Ewoks in ROTJ were descended from the survivors of a ship that crashed on Endor millenia ago, hence why they speak a “primitive dialect” of an existing language. They’ve been there so long that the story of how they got to Endor has become mythology, rather than history, to them; for example, the ship had a protocol droid onboard which survived but later “died”, who has been glorified as a kind of god.

Pete Byrdie said:

My understanding is that George Lucas maintains he intended for the Jabba scene to be in the movie, but they lacked the money to create the alien Jabba he wanted using stop motion or something.

It’s exceedingly likely that Jabba was originally intended to be a human; it’s been covered thoroughly here-
https://web.archive.org/web/20140928112036/http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html

According to Paul Hirsh (one of the editors) in his biography, Lucas came up with the alien Jabba idea in post-production, but it had to be dropped due to being impossible to achieve with contemporary special effects technology.

If it helps:

#1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfRjN3txdM
#2 has been deuploaded, but a partial reconstruction is available here: https://twitter.com/heyitswindy/status/1764848211343057233
#3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y06AxkJviRQ
#4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oebz9lNo4pA
#5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvI1bNfleFs

And this one; not sure if it was aired during the actual TV broadcast or if it’s a commercial that was aired adjacent to/around the same time as the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6pSxiUEnLU

There are quite possibly others that have yet to resurface, if they will at all.

Yeah, Disney’s anti-tobacco crusade is weird. They act as though banning cigarettes from their films will cause kids to not smoke, as if they won’t ever see someone smoking in public, or won’t learn about smoking later in life.

One of the Bad Batch episodes features a trigger warning for earthquake/tsunami depictions, which was similarly bizarre.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is massively overrated. It’s oversimplistic, repetitive, and a bit boring; it doesn’t have much of an actual story beyond spoiled brats touring the factory and getting killed off in various ways. As someone who’s read most of Roald Dahl’s books, it’s easily one of the poorer entries in his canon.

James and the Giant Peach is similarly overrated.

I can give Lucas a bit of slack for the lucklusterness of the PT and ROTJ, since he was ultimately just trying to make pulpy Flash Gordon-esque adventures, not high-art movies. ANH and ESB, however, were so good that they’re generally considered to have entered into the realm of high art. He then fell into a trap where his subsequent films were expected to be masterpieces as well, and I agree that he could have definitely done better on them. But since he really knocked it out of the park on his first 2 SW films, fans’ expectations were higher than his.

Idea: what if Luke/Leia’s mother was a Jedi? And she got hunted down by Vader, who he saw as betraying him, and was killed, but Obi-Wan saved Luke and Leia?

DZ-330 said:

I think they were trying to copy The Mando naming convention.

Yeah, that was my idea.

DZ-330 said:

^i prefer when titles are “simple,” so this woulda been what I went with, if it were up to me.

For me, it’s not that I like simple titles, it’s that I like the cohesion of the titles. It feels like they all just fit.
(And not gonna lie, your “the” titles are way better than mine.)

Huh, I had no idea they were making such good progress on it. I’ll still watch it, even though I’m not really excited.