walking_carpet said:

georgec said:

The story of George Lucas' career is a psychologists' wet dream. You see all the effects of people lauding him and giving him credit on the way he did business after Empire. He heard people saying how great he is so often that he began to believe it, and afterwards anybody who disagreed was cast aside. It's so simple in the cause/effect yet so intriguing.

Then you have the unwavering Lucas defenders who defy all logic and facts to salvage his image and prove people wrong because they don't "get" him or something like that.

he has a core sycophancy and personality cult second only perhaps to joseph stalin.

I think it's comments like this that make Lucas feel the way he does though.

Anchorhead said:

AWN article; "Because of the Northridge quake, a lot of the original footage was water damaged. That’s why we knew when we went in that we were going to have to do some extensive restoration work....George went through with the editor, picked a bunch of stuff and re-edited it slightly, just to make it more what he wanted. He realized that there were scenes he wanted to expand upon… at the time with the budget that he had,"

Honestly. Lucas' continued use of - the originals were damaged, I mean it was the limited budget, I mean it was my Original Vision. Good God, man - pick one lie and stick to it. It's the same set of pat answers he trots out for repressing the original version of Star Wars.

All kidding aside, the man needs an intervention - or he needs to be institutionalized. Anymore these days, he seems to have fluid stories for every project he's involved in. He's already started it with the Red Tails promotional junkets - it was the studios trying to suppress history\me\my project - it was the critics, I mean the fans. The guy is a pathological liar.

This is the other thing. OK, the originals were "half-complete films." Fine. So what's the completed version? The 97 release? The 04 release? The 11 release? I might buy this if he could actually stick to a consistent story. I'm not trying to criticize the man so much as trying to make sense of something I can't understand.

If the OOT was just there, this whole discussion would be academic. Lucas has taken a lot of undeserved heat and had to endure a lot immature childish comments, but the question it begs to me is, why is it so important to him? He obviously has fans since there are people who'll buy almost anything with the Star Wars name on it and more importantly, he's rich beyond measure and continues to become richer. Why does this bother him so much? It's your movie George, you said so yourself, that's fine. Do what you want with it, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to like it. That's fine, hell, I think Michael Bay is a bad filmmaker and his answer would be "Fuck you Mike. I drive a Ferarri, you work at a grocery store." Whatever one thinks of the man, he doesn't give a shit about critics.

Lucas is right, he's come under a lot of scrutiny and some of it wasn't deserved. Some of it was. But if it's more than many other filmmakers (and that's debatable), it's because Star Wars looms larger in the cultural consciousness.