Kasdan did not provide for the story in Star Wars the same way he did for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
He saved that movie. Other than making the dialog punchier and tightening up the script anyone could have polished up Empire or Jedi. Kasdan never was the author. Nor was Gloria or Willard co-authors on Star Wars the way they absolutely were on American Graffiti.
Lucas is bad on dialog and bad on drama so he hires people who fix those aspects.
Lucas is 100% the author of the OT good or bad, the same way he was for the prequels. Its his story and its in no way collaborative. The stories are his and very personal. They are in his imagination and his head. No matter how much he wished he could hand it off to someone else it was impossible.
It was a mistake to give Disney an outline and to believe they wouldn’t screw it up. He has to write these things and oversee them himself to get the desired result.
This 100%. Obviously film is a collaborative artform but Lucas is the author of Star Wars in the same way that Shakespeare was the author of his plays, which are still preformed by other people hundreds of years after his death.
This is also why Richard Marquand was hired for RotJ. Marquand was a weaker, much less experienced director, but he wouldn’t have the balls to do what Kershner did. He also micromanaged a lot more with RotJ, as opposed to Empire, where he rarely even showed up on set.
This seems doubtful. If Lucas just wanted someone he could control he wouldn’t have asked Spielberg to direct it. I suspect that after the DGA kicked Lucas out and he was left with few options, he decided to effectively direct the film himself and found a young, fairly competent director that he could rely to get the needed shots while Lucas himself oversaw the aspects he considered important.
TFA had the opposite effect on me. Repackaging the first SW movie and relying on nostalgia left me deeply disappointed, and I don’t know why TFA is still regarded so highly. For all their flaws I still find enjoyment in the prequels, but TFA is just plain garbage, and I don’t buy into the whole “they had to play it safe to earn the fans trust”. Bullshit!
Fully agree here as well, with your takes on TFA & TLJ, fmalover. I like how TLJ is an analysis on the mythos of the saga - and that makes it independent from TFA - because TFA contributes absolutely nothing to those mythos. TLJ’s characters might depend on TFA, but not its themes, which is where the movie truly excels. You don’t need to know Finn’s backstory in order for what his story in TLJ says to have value.
It functions perfectly as a coda to the saga. Why does all that’s been said and done in all of SW matter? What does it mean, at the end of the day when you wake up being just a real person, to be a hero? To do the right thing? TFA and TROS have nothing to say and I have no respect to them for it. I guess TFA won back some fans, something that baffles me, and I honestly believe the opinion on that will sour over time. TLJ on the other hand has a whole lot to say and is the perfect epilogue, a coda. A treat.
Though I don’t really agree with your take on TLJ, I can see this point of view gaining traction in the coming years. Certainly TLJ will age better then JJ’s movies, which are more forgettable then anything else.