Star Wars/Hidden Fortress

I was at my local geek haven, the comic shop, shooting the crap about Star Wars. One guy dropped the classic argument 'Oh yeah, it's practically a remake of a Kurosawa movie anyway!"

Of all of the "George Lucas sux!" arguments in the world, this has to be the worst. Here are why I think that:

1- Lucas readily, graciously, and frequently admits his inspiration from Kurosawa and specifically "Hidden Fortress."

2- The movie is almost NOTHING LIKE STAR WARS. There's a princess who is NOT like Leia. There's a general who is very much NOT like Obi-Wan. There's no Luke. No Han. No Death Star. No rescuing the princess. No Vader. No Force. No final battle. No Rebellion. You could make a connection between the gold hidden in firewood and the Death Star plans, but that connection is pretty weak. The plot to "Hidden Fortress" hinges on the fact the General and the Princess, who are together the entire film, are in disguise as peasents.

3- The part Lucas acknowledges his debt to the most, the two peasents 'inspiring' the droids is a pretty loose inspiration. While he borrowed the storytelling device of framing the story through the eyes of the two least powerful characters, the two pairs couldn't be more different. The peasents are nasty, difficult to deal with by the main heroes, and at one point plan to rape the princess.

4- And yeah, both films end with vaguely similar sequences of award being given, although "Fortress" ends ulitmatly with another scene of the peasents skipping away happily with their monetary reward.

It seems to me that anyone who belittles Star Wars or Lucas with this argument must be a poser of the worst sort, because they clearly HAVEN'T SEEN "Hidden Fortress" and are just parrotting what another snooty fanboy once said or are so blinded by fanhate they can't think straight.

...

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Actually, Lucas' first 1973 treatment was a literal remake of the film, and Lucas even copied entire passages from its summary in Donald Richie's famous book The Films of Akira Kursawa (probably because he didnt have home video and couldn't remember every plot detail). But yes, the final film deviated quite a bit, more than enough to constitute a unique entity in its own right. Still, the similarities were such that Gary Kurtz contemplated purchasing the rights from Toho just in case. I like to think of it as "inspired by" rather than a remake.

--EDIT: Zombie84 pretty much said the exact same thing I said, but much more efficiently.  I'll leave my original post here anyway.  Just goes to show you can't write a really long response without expecting someone else to beat you to it :-) --

---ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS---

The thing is, "Star Wars" DID start out as a remake of "The Hidden Fortress."  So much so that Lucas considered getting the rights to the film in order to avoid a "Fistful of Dollars" scenario (Kurosawa sued Leone for plagiarizing "Yojimbo," which he did).  That was '73, '74, something around there.

The reason the final product is so different is that when Lucas' "Apocalypse Now" project fell through, the vast majority of his screenplay/story for "Apocalypse" ended up being the story for "Star Wars."  Eventually, "Apocalypse" would end up being completely rewritten and made by Lucas' friend Francis Ford Coppola.

Mix in a few original ideas here and there (to be fair, most of Lucas' "Apocalypse" was fairly original, but in this sense I mean not taken from another work, his own or someone else's), and he ended up with a screenplay very different from "The Hidden Fortress," but with clear echoes of that film.

So "Star Wars" DID start out as a "Hiden Fortress" remake, but in the end we got a film that was vastly different from "Fortress," but clearly inspired by it.

The argument does hold some weight, but not enough for anyone to claim that the final product was a remake of anything.

By the way, if you haven't read "The Secret History of 'Star Wars,'" I highly recommend it.  While it's not the most well-written work, it has a wealth of very good, very accurate, highly-researched information in it.  Every fan of the OT should read it.  Much of the above I learned from the first 100 pages of that book. (I need to go buy it - you can get the first 100 pages online for free, so sadly that's all I've read.  I really want to find it and read it in its entirety.)

Oh yeah, Secret History of Star Wars is cool. It's a great archaeological work. Zombie's done us all a service by writing that book.

edit (wrong thread)

Vaderisnothayden said:

Oh yeah, Secret History of Star Wars is cool. It's a great archaeological work. Zombie's done us all a service by writing that book.

 I didn't want to respond to this thread until I read Zombie's book. now I did. It was great.

But my point still stands Even if Lucas's early draft was a total 100% rip-off (which it apparently was), his EARLIEST draft was totally different (Journal of the Whills with CJ Thorpe), and the finished product bears only the slimmist vague similarity to the Kurosawa film.

Noting the influence on the early draft is interesting, but to act as if the early and later disregarded influences of "Hidden Fortress" in anyway diminishes the final film is uncritical fanhate bordering in the silly.

Gaffer Tape said:

Did you read the appendices, or has the book changed since the draft I own?  As far as zombie concluded, the CJ Thorpe draft never existed outside of that one-line description of it.

I think you read the earliest version of the book, from March, 2007. It has changed quite drastically since then. It's still changing actually, since I'm doing a quiet revision that should be shipping out beginning in the middle of june.

My first theory was that the solitary sentance was taken from a treatment made in preparation for the rough draft, for various reasons. But it was actually a 2-page treatment Lucas made before the May 1973 hidden-fortress-inspired treatment. He seems to have written it at the very end of January, 1973. This comes courtesy of Rinzler's Making of, which is the first actually validation of the treatment beyond the one sentence that existed beforehand. Annotated Screenplays nonetheless seems to have been written in ignorance to the document, so I assume Rinzler was the one who discovered it. He was probably tipped off because Lucas talks about its content in the "Lost Interviews" that form the basis of that book.

EDIT

See here:

http://www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/journalofthewhillspart2.html

For shits and giggles, I am putting together a list of things which influences SW: (many were taken from the site Z6PO mentioned)
http://noneinc.com/Archive/FlimsiplastDatabase/FD-SW-Inspiration_Combined.html

Silverwook are those Cinefx articles where people claim SW ripped off around online somewhere?

and then am also making a list of things which reference SW:
TV
http://noneinc.com/Archive/FlimsiplastDatabase/FD-SWTV-Refs_Combined.html
Movies
http://noneinc.com/Archive/FlimsiplastDatabase/FD-SWMov-Refs_Combined.html

The Star Wars entry at IMDB has an expanded list which covers video games.
none

To be fair, SkyJedi, Hidden Fortress was popular entertainment, too. Kurosawa made a lot of personal films, like Ikiru and Rashomon, but he had to sedate his financial backers by occassionally making a mass-audience mainstream hit. Hidden Fortress is the most blatantly popular of all his films. It was designed to be commercial. It's also probably why Star Wars was so suited to adapt it.

George does recycle ideas and designs dropped from previous Star Wars films and the Padme/Handmaiden thing in TPM is clearly lifted from Hidden Fortress so I wonder if that was in an early draught of Star Wars at some point.

Fanhate is such a terrible thing.

DoubleFeatureShow.com is a popular film podcast where a couple of dudes with little knowledge but a lot of opinions talk movies. I listen to it occasionally.

Last episode they got to talking about Star Wars, and Kurosawa's influences on it. One of the hosts actually accused Star Wars of stealing shots from Kurosawa's films Hidden Fortress and Hero With 1,000 Faces.

Not only do I stand that this means he has to be a poseur who hasn't actually seen Hidden Fortress it also means he doesn't actually know what Hero With 1,000 Faces even is except that it has something to do with Star Wars, and lets him dismiss a popular film.

He stole "shots" from a book which had no pictures in it? That's one of the stupier argument's I've heard concerning this.

Anyway, I have a whole theory regarding Joseph Campbell anyway, which is that Lucas barely paid any attention to him while writing Star Wars. It was mainly a publicity manifestation.

It seems like everyone on the internet, when they aren't downloading porn and killing time on facebook, wants to discuss movies, but as you said they have as many opinions as they have little facts.