bkev said:
Good ole George confirms Ford, Fisher and Hamill all back. This is starting to feel surreal.
Liked his little dig at Disney, though. Apparently he's not a fan of big reveals and publicity stunts. Still, it worries me that he's involved enough to be the one to officially confirm all this.
www.digitalbits.com had a nice article from Bloomberg.com I believe about the whole process of Disney buying Lucasfilm.
The jist of it is that Lucas was writing Episode 7 BEFORE he was approached by Disney, so he was going to do 3 more movies on his own. Disney CEO threw it out there about buying Lucasfilm, and Lucas balked. A few years later, Lucas had lunch again with the Disney CEO and said he was ready to sell.
The reason he didn't want to sell is that he didn't want to give up creative control of the SW universe because he knew it would be the first sentence on his gravestone, and was worried where anyone else would take the franchise if he relented.
So his compromise to Disney was he would sell, but he would keep his people in place running the SW opersation (Kathleen Kennedy), so he still has some input.
The article talks about when they start shooting it is Disney's final decision for anything in the movie, and Lucas cannot just come in at the end and edit it the way he wants it. The 64,000 dollar question, will Lucas be able to stay away from SW when they shooting Episode 7?
The fact that he already spilled the beans on the signing of Carrie, Harrison, and Mark tells me he won't go quietly.