Bothan's Pies

Hah, yeah - that's kind of what I am saying.

He seems to have had a surplas of names, characters, locations and - at best - situations and scenarios, knocking around pretty much since day one. But the actual story that all these things hang on... it's almost as if Lucas thought that the narrative was also in there buried among his notes, and if he just went back and kept mining these concepts the story would work.

While this worked for episodes five and six, where the characters were always moving somewhere new, the flaws of this way of working were exposed when trying to deal with a backstory we already know the outcome of.

I mean, I'm in the camp that loves ROTJ, but I can see its flaws. How all it boils down to is, first act: Nonsensical recue plot simply to return one of our heroes to the fray and, remainder of the film: Rehash of the Death Star attack from the first movie with the unused primitive hairy tribe idea grafted back in - all seasoned with a bit of "certain point of view" backtracking.

It is clear the ideas were being spread thin by that point, but in this case the character arcs could be brought to some kind of satisfying resolution, because he had the freedom to make it up as he went along. The saving grace was that the first two films were good enough to make us care about these characters and what happened to them in ROTJ.

With the prequels, we knew where everything was headed, so that freedom was gone.

zombie84 said:

This is a screenshot from the Making of ESB. This is the vintage papers for his treatment for the sequels, circa 1977 or 1978.

And yes, I'm serious. I took that image from Rinzler's sw.com blog.

It's the same as the prequels. He said he had full treatments for 1,2 and 3 since the 70s. His company even said on some occassions he had scripts. But then ten years ago he admitted all his 'treatments' were was some pages of unordered notes.

He no doubt has these for the sequels as well, because he was considering them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But his actual "treatments" to both seem to just have been him writing "episodes 1,2 3" and "episodes 7,8,9" (and also at one point 10,11,12 as the above shows), on a pad of paper and going to bed. These are the closest to prequel and sequel treatments that have been unearthed so far.

Exactly. If you ask me, it always seems that about 50-70% of the material across ALL SIX of the existing Star Wars films stems from just one extended period of creativity from Lucas during the 70s.

Sure, he may have sat down to go through the whole "writing process" when he realised he actually needed scripts to make the prequels happen, but it is clear the "treatments" were nothing more than a bunch of left over ideas/names/locations that he never got to use in the first movie or its sequels, and the actual writing of the prequels involved ustilising these old ideas, recycling ones which had already been used (... it's like poetry, they rhyme... ) and extrapolating the rest from the existing narrative.

A little harsh maybe, but essentially that's what (it appears) he's been faced with since the success of the SW 1977 - one body of ideas relating to what was initially a single story; nine (or 12, or whatever) little headings on a piece of paper and the task of filling the gaps beneath those headings.

doubleofive said:

I'll never understand why George seems to think he needs to hold the audience's hand now. "I can't have Han shoot first, people will think he's a bad guy!" "I have to show how Vader got back to his ship, people don't know what 'Bring my shuttle' means." "People need to know without a doubt what Vader is thinking, so let's have him express his emotions."

George. Mr Lucas. We've had these movies for almost 30 years, we've never had a problem understanding what was going on. We never thought for the first 20 years that Han was a bad guy. We didn't care how Vader got to his ship. And we knew that Vader was actually experiencing the conflict Luke has mentioned to him after he was captured. I'm pretty sure the next generation can figure it out as well.

Absolutely spot on. It is becoming more and more apparent that this is the motivation behind every single alteration he makes - the complete dumbing down of everything.

For the next release, each copy will actually come with a free Ric Olie, who will stand next to you in your living room explaining what is happening in every single shot...

Jaitea said:

Whilst watching this clip I couldn't help from noticing the changing direction of shadows

 

J

 

That's pretty insane - never noticed that before. You would have thought that, at the very least, as soon as they reached the point in that process where they had to add one shadow they would have realised they had to consider where the light source was going to be for the entire scene...

Off topic, but the way those Gungan musicians movie has always really annoyed me - they look awful.

darth_ender said:

 If he changes something, it's so he can make money off new toys.

Is that a fact? When I read that, I suddenly pictured Vader dolls that yell "Noooooo" when you pull a cord, beanie Ewoks with "real" eyes, and genuine Tatooine rocks for sale...

Anyway - in answer to the question: I like that Lucas finally gave James Earl Jones a screen credit for his work on ANH and TESB for the special editions...

SilverWook said:

Prowse has claimed for years he was unfairly blamed for a script leak during production on Jedi and things got very unpleasant on the set after that.

As far as I understand it, the Daily Mail leaked Vader's death before the movie was released.

Prowse has since claimed a reporter had somehow got wind of Shaw's role as Anakin Skywalker and duped him into showing him the call sheet with Sebastian Shaw's scene on it as confirmation, under the pretense of be interested in interviewing Prowse about his weightlifting career.

Not sure how much truth there is in any of that, or whether that is genuinely the cause of the ongoing rift between Prowse and Lucas either way.

DIP said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUoi-a334uQ

On top of everything everyone else has said about this clip...

A) WTF is going on with the top of Mace's hood being eaten up by the background? and

B) Look at when it gets to the "master or apprentice...?" line at the funeral - how they have obviously replaced part of Mace's shoulder along with the CGI Yoda and the creases in Mace's robes just smear out while the edge of his hood just vanishes BEHIND the added CGI shoulder. Shoddy as hell!

Unless it always looked that way of course, but I'm just not that familar with the prequels. I can't see why it would though, it just looks like poor CGI work...

Well, for me, this goes deeper than the visible physical manifestation of all of this stuff - and includes the general sentiment.

For example, From Peecher's book...

Luke has come back to the Death Star from Endor to force a confrontation with his father. This is the big scene. Richard Marquand describes a George Lucas insight into this scene: "There was a feeling I had that I would like the fight to be bigger than the fight in Empire. And then George said that it doesn't have to be bigger, because basically it can't be.
George is very blunt. He said: 'It's just a couple of guys banging sticks against each other. Don't worry about that. It is bigger because of what is going on in their heads. That is what makes it bigger.' That was nice, because then I saw exactly what he meant and I think up to that point I had missed a trick."

Regardless of what you think of ROTJ as a movie, it is obvious Lucas still grasped the value of 'less is more' even then, wheres now, it would seem, does not trust the audience enough to 'fill the blanks' and be informed by what is happening inside characters' heads - so he adds an ugly big "Noooooooo!" into this key scene.

But really, how could we ever be in a position to second-guess Lucas' "original vision" after this?

I mean, the Ewok designs by Rodis-Jamero, Johnston and McQuarrie that were approved by Lucas (and in my opinion, the most aestheitcally pleasing designs, despite some of the other designs by those same artists having irisis and pupils) looked like the versions that ended up in the film. Surely the old Fabulouso stamp can't have been  brandished accidentally?

pittrek said:

I have a question about the "Luke's ghost" scene. "Somewhere" I have seen a screenshot from a similar or the same angle, but Luke was running up the staircase. I think it could be from the same scene. Does anybody know what I'm talking about ? images.google.com is not very helpful :-(

Hi, just signed up here after a long time lurking - consider me another fan for whom these new Blu-Ray changes represent the proverbial donkey back breaking straw...

Anyway - I believe this is the still you are refering to...

http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/3019/starwars5b.jpg