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George Lucas' business conglomerate

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To the moderators: If you remove messages, please, for constructive purposes, leave the users with some feedback and reason!

Excercept from Time Magazine, Monday, Mar. 6, 1978
George Lucas' Galactic Empire
Get ready for Star Wars II, III, IV, V ...
[...]
The whole purpose of his cosmic [business] conglomerate, Lucas says, is to make money so that he and his friends can escape the tyranny of the studios and make good movies—or at least the kind of movies they like. He was traumatized by his experience with American Graffiti, where Universal arbitrarily cut five minutes from his finished version of the film. He vows that it will never happen again. "It wasn't a film by Lucas," he says bitterly. "It was a film made by me with changes by the studio. That isn't fair." One of the first jobs of Medway Productions will be to put American Graffiti back into distribution. It will be shown, with the five minutes restored, this May.

"I'm simply trying to become a free man. I'm trying to set up an alternative film making that allows me more freedom to do what I want, within certain parameters. We're trying to make a company that will respect the personality and individuality of film makers. Part of my good fortune is to be making progress in that direction. I feel it's a destiny of sorts." He is already helping, free of charge, his friend Francis Coppola cut his epic Apocalypse Now and trim it to something like four hours.
[...]
Lucas said when he was making Star Wars that he was giving up directing, and, true to his word, SWII will be directed by Irvin Kershner (The Flim Flam Man and Raid on Entebbe). "But I've always thought," he says, "that sooner or later, somewhere down the road, I will go back and do another one. But it will be toward the end of the cycle, about 20 years from now." Would you believe 2001?

20 years from 1978 takes us to 1998, at which point Lucas was seated in the director's chair for Episode 1. While this is likely as much a coincidence as it was a conscious decision on his part, imagine for a moment what a Star Wars legacy we could have been left with if he had stayed as true to his talents and original vision as he did to his promise of directing!
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Wow. I'm amazed at how you keep finding all this stuff.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
Wow. I'm amazed at how you keep finding all this stuff.

Actually, it's not that hard at all. It's all out there, but some of it can be a bit tedious to track down, but since I'm having fun looking it up and reading the articles in their entirety, I hope I can serve a purpose by posting the most interesting parts of them here. If people aren't too bothered by these posts, I'll keep posting these snippets from time to time.

I think it's much more interesting to find out what the people who were involved with these films were really thinking and doing back then over listening to the latest iteration of Lucas' retrospective comments about his supposedly grand vision, which never actually existed, at least not nearly as set in stone and as detailed as he claims.
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Originally posted by: lord3vil
make good movies—or at least the kind of movies they like.

At least.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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He was traumatized by his experience with American Graffiti, where Universal arbitrarily cut five minutes from his finished version of the film. He vows that it will never happen again. "It wasn't a film by Lucas," he says bitterly. "It was a film made by me with changes by the studio. That isn't fair." One of the first jobs of Medway Productions will be to put American Graffiti back into distribution. It will be shown, with the five minutes restored, this May.


If he was traumatised with AG,then i guess i was traumatised for years which led him to make Howard the duck.
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Originally posted by: ADigitalMan
Originally posted by: lord3vil
make good movies—or at least the kind of movies they like.

At least.

I don't know... The rate at which Jar Jar almost disappeared from the prequels after TPM makes it easy to question even this. Lucas was very fond of Jar Jar as a technical achievement and conceptual character. I think that, for all practical purposes, it's only about the money for him nowdays. While you will probably be right in saying that Lucas simply likes to make the kind of movies which appeal the most to the market, regardless of his own tastes and opinions, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this isn't what he meant when he said this back in 1978.