Originally posted by: zombie84
So was he a good producer? Abosolutely not. Although he obviously cared about the content more than, say, McCallum, he was negligent and incompetant in his role, and despite the fact that he lached on to Lucas when Lucas was still young and creative, Kurtz' status as "Savior of the OT" is a complete fabrication by the meer coincidence that ANH and ESB are better than ROTJ. McCallum is a million times the producer Kurtz was, though unfortunately associated with poor material, the opposite of Kurtz--but the fact is that the man did his job. There were no scheduling or budgetary issues on any of the PT, even when the script for AOTC was completed until the week before filming. Despite the fact that Lucas may have lost his touch, if i were making a film i would definitly want McCallum and not Kurtz with me!
So was he a good producer? Abosolutely not. Although he obviously cared about the content more than, say, McCallum, he was negligent and incompetant in his role, and despite the fact that he lached on to Lucas when Lucas was still young and creative, Kurtz' status as "Savior of the OT" is a complete fabrication by the meer coincidence that ANH and ESB are better than ROTJ. McCallum is a million times the producer Kurtz was, though unfortunately associated with poor material, the opposite of Kurtz--but the fact is that the man did his job. There were no scheduling or budgetary issues on any of the PT, even when the script for AOTC was completed until the week before filming. Despite the fact that Lucas may have lost his touch, if i were making a film i would definitly want McCallum and not Kurtz with me!
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No doubt ESB went over budget and Kurtz is responsible for that, but so did Titanic. Now James Cameron was in total control of the movie and staked his career on it, but does anyone remember that Titanic had a budget of 200 million in 1997, which was truly outrageous at the time. But the film was a hit, and made a boatload of money, so no harm no foul.
I do remember reading in the mid 90's that Lucas thought he could make each prequel for about 65-70 million each, but in the end turned out to cost about 115 million for each. I just think whenever you are making a special effects movie, whether it is Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or Titanic, going over budget seems to be the norm, cause it isn't like a drama where you are paying the lead actor huge sums of money and thats it.
I do agree that Kurtz gets too much praise sometimes, but you can't deny that SW & ESB seem to be the only two of the 6 that hold up or will hold up as classics in the future. Now is Kurtz the reason for that? Is Kershner the reason ESB was so great? Lucas wrote, directed, and produced the original SW, and that was a classic, so how did he go from that the director of my favorite movie of all-time to directing an underwhelming prequel trilogy 20 years later?
I think OT fans latch onto Kurtz cause he seems to be the last defender of when SW was great. I mean, growing up I watched the OT hundreds of times, and I never knew who Gary Kurtz was, even though his name was at the end credits everytime I watched them. I just really started reading about Gary Kurtz in the past 5 years, cause he seems to make alot of sense about how Lucas changed after ESB, and that just give the public enough for a SW movie, and it doesn't have to be a classic and they will come. Sadly, wasn't George right?