DavidBrennan

(For the record, a commenter here threatened me with a lethal physical attack for not liking Dave Filoni.  Then the mods prance in and give me a warning.  Political incorrectness's wrongness > death threats.  Awesome.)

zombie84 said:

But I should mention that Making of Revenge of the Sith by J.W. Rinzler summarizes and has some lengthy excerpts from all the Episode III drafts. It's also a pretty good book. Episode II's early scripts are pretty much a mystery.

Yeah, I have that book.  (And there were SO MANY leaks about ROTS during production that I think I knew virtually every development along the way.)

But what about TPM in particular?  That's the one I'd like most of all, since it seems to be the most different from the finished movie and also because I think an early draft of that, since it was on a largely blank canvas, could reveal completely alternate routes that the PT could've taken.

zombie84 said:

Filoni and the Clone Wars [....] the best Star Wars stuff since 1980.

Different strokes for different folks.  I think it's idiotic.

:: Rest of post deleted. Last warning - take your Filoni crap to off-topic or get banned.

 - M

nightstalkerpoet said:

The strange thing is... I think that the negative feelings about Star Wars are beginning to spread to the general public. Sitting through TPM in a theater again really showed how bad of a film it was... I've never seen so many people sleeping through a midnight premier or a 3D film.

I think that, combined with such offensive changes as "Nooooo!" have forced even casual Star Wars fans to be on guard. I would assume more and more people are going to be against large scale experiences like Theater viewings, simply to avoid overshadowing their fond memories of watching the films in the Theater, while they were still pure and great.

Yeah, I agree that there the trajectory of the general public regarding Star Wars is now to just shut it off and relegate it to something from the past. 

With the uneven PT, the embarrassing TCW, the shoddiness of so much of the EU, and more, there's just a sense that Star Wars is no longer this true cultural centerpiece, but just this quirky thing in some odd cultural corner of bizarre relics.  The OT has been largely exempt from that, but with LFL's continued retconning and alterations, I think that this stigma is bleeding over to that, too. 

I mean, whoever's responsible for the TCW movie and the 3D release should be outright canned.  Pink slip in their mailbox, gone.  Those are monumental failures and true embarrassments to the Star Wars brand name.

It's funny, because I was listening to the ForceCast episode about the very solid EU book, Darth Plagueis.  And even there the host was openly lamenting to the head of the LFL/Random House partnership that the EU was becoming way too self-referential and that he had just turned off from it (except Darth Plagueis, which he praised effusively).  That is a hard core Star Wars fan getting a chance to talk to the head of the EU....and he openly says that he hasn't been an interested customer in years. 

Why is the Random House EU guy still employed there or does he have any power?  Wasn't that series of Jedi Outcast books a marketing catastrophe?  Weren't the TCW movie, the cartoon on TNT, and all these other things also huge failures?  Why are these people still employed at LFL and controlling the Star Wars brand?  Fire those incompetent fuckers.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

David, you're mistaking lack of sympathy for outrage.  After reading your description, I didn't have much sympathy (if any) for your situation, but I wasn't outraged.  We have people here who post much wilder stuff.

Sometimes mods delete posts and ban users because they don't want a significant base of their readers to start leaving, or for the discussion to degenerate and cause new readers to shy away.  Sometimes it is to keep a few people from getting offended and leaving.  I delete some feedback posts from my YouTube videos precisely because I don't post those videos so that my friends can be insulted.  Freedom of speech doesn't apply to private sites on the internet.

Everybody understands the difference between censorship (government-enforced silence) versus simple suppression of ideas.  The reason that the U.S. Founding Fathers mandated freedom of speech (and assembly, etc.) was because they understood this to be a Natural right.  So even though media PC police or power-tripping internet moderators are clearly not breaking that right itself, they are breaking with the underlying idea.

The lesson for me here is that Star Wars fans are rabidly politically correct (by 2012 standards) as a group.  Hey, maybe this is just normal nowadays, but I've been spending too much time in the world of MMA where they're mostly devoid of pretense and phoniness, and so I just project that kind of social innocence onto others.  I don't know. 

I wish more people would stand up to these bullies.  But I understand the instinct to just shrug your shoulders and move on.  It's like Tom Wolfe wrote once, he asked students in some useless college course why they all submitted to their teacher's command that they spell women "womyn".  He said that they all agreed it was stupid, but better to just get through things than make waves and risk your grade, reputation, or sparking the name-calling wrath of their bullying professor.  That same shoulder-shrugging acquiescence to all the phonies has continued, and they and their bullying ways have obviously just grown.  Now, the word "effeminate" to describe a dude is the latest word on the blacklist.  Okay, duly noted.

It's funny, I like the Joe Rogan podcast, and he always complains about this sort of shit and how they're prohibiting more and more words and ideas, working for NBC and UFC (although the latter is obviously very lenient).  He just substitutes "cunty" for "faggy" nowadays, but he always fears that you people are gonna throw your hysterics about "cunty" pretty soon, too, and muzzle him still more.  You'll just keep demanding more words to the censored list until there's just the word, "The" in the vocabulary.

What hilarious phoniness.  I don't want to talk about it anymore, either.  What they did to me was wrong, as is their secrecy about it and their lies, and their refusal to punish people who called me names.

I’m as big a fan of James Cameron’s movies as I am of Star Wars, and a few years ago, and I use to have a James Cameron fan blog and fan podcast.  At that time, I was also writing a fan biography of him - more focused on his works than his life.

Well, I think I did an okay job - just okay - but my main problem was a lack of planning and, probably, my work ethic.  I did finish about 500 pages, but I only got through ‘The Abyss’. I initially sold it on Lulu.com, but only about 15 people bought it, despite my persistent attempts at promoting it on my blog, podcast, and JamesCameronOnline.com, amongst other sites.

So, because of that and other reasons (personal boredom with it all and a little bit of disillusionment by the fact that, with select few exceptions, everybody I contacted from Hollywood never bothered to contact me again and those who did lied or were rude), I just gave up entirely.  But I did post the book and some unfinished sections on Scribd.com:

Here’s a link to all the entries: http://www.scribd.com/TactilePortraits

And here’s the main book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/81340120/James-Cameron-Biography-The-Coming-Storm-by-David-Brennan

The hope was that it would be comparable to ‘The Secret History of Star Wars’, but I’m sure most of you will agree that it’s just not that good.  Still, I think there are good parts to it, especially the chapters devoted to Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss.

If anybody has any questions or comments, I’ll be happy to hear them.

Zombie did a good job in this article of summarizing the Episode 1 first draft based off of notes that were included in some CD-Rom.

Since that time, has the first draft of TPM been made public?  Or has the text on that CD-Rom been made available on the internet?  StarWarz.com (I think formerly the Jedi-Bendu script site) has only the final drafts of all the PT movies. 

I would like the early drafts of the movies, particularly TPM, since (a) the summary from Zombie actually seems cool and (b) it seems based on what I know that the early drafts of AOTC and ROTS were probably much more sparse than that.  But I'd be happy for any data about this at all.

(Side note: Zombie probably knows this, but SecretHistoryOfStarWars.com is being flagged as an "Attack Site" by Firefox and Google in my browser.)

CatBus said:

It's weird how random unrelated people all over the world can all get the exact same totally off-base ideas about you.  The odds of having that happening without the slightest hint of bigotry from you...

And it's weird that the one person who stood up for me here had to apologize and retreat soon after doing so.  It's the same reason that you believe that you have everybody on your side: because you people bully good people into silence because they're afraid that you'll then call THEM "bigots" or "loons" or "anti-semitic".

You're a bully and you're a phony and most people know this, but they won't say anything because they know that you'll call them names and possibly damage their reputation or even their job status. 

All because you have no real emotions and so you have to fake outrage.

"Lemme ask you something?  At the internet forums you post at, do you claim to be outraged and offended when some dude mentions somebody is effeminate?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guv5LUT1AFw&t=6s"

CatBus said:

DavidBrennan said:

Mercifully, though, the word "effeminate" can safely be used at my MMA, paleo diet, and other forums without triggering howls of fake emotion.

You forgot to mention stormfront.

Just looked up stormfront and that appears to be a whites only site? You hang out at some unorthodox places.

Anyway, it's actually funny because, after noting Dave Filonis is effeminate, one of the people there at TFN said I was "anti-semitic" and a "conspiracy loon".  He then linked to a couple of crazy sites with URLs that I didn't even click on because I was scared of where they'd take me. Needless to say, TFN didn't punish this person for calling me those names - nor any of the other people who called me names.  This is obvious because I checked the boards and they were still posting right after I was banned.

So calling total strangers "anti-semitic" and "loons" for no reason is cool at TFN.  Observing that a dude is effeminate, meanwhile, gets you banned.

But apparently people full of fake emotion are obsessed with projecting white supremacy on others?  I don't know.  My emotions are honest, and so I can't empathize with phonies all that well.

SilverWook said:

In any event, this site is like Casablanca. We don't pry into where you came from, or what you did before you fled here. Just pay your bar tab once in a while, and never ask the piano guy to play a certain song when Rick's around. ;)

That's the way it should always be.  Who wouldn't want to hang out at Casablanca, after all?  Better than this place, which is the way people apparently want it.

The point I was trying to make was that I definitely think that, whatever the precise agreement and mechanisms in place are, TFN is now, for all practical intents and purposes, just a branch of LFL and you'll be treated there like any large corporation would treat somebody who's either critical of the company or politically incorrect.  This should be noted and, I guess in a best-case scenario, we'd find out exactly what any agreements between them are.

I was seeking sympathy for my specific incident(s) because it was hurtful to me and I assumed nobody outside of TFN would be outraged, so I had zero expectation that I'd get similar responses here.  But apparently fake indignation and acute political correctness is common across all Star Wars message boards.  Mercifully, though, the word "effeminate" can safely be used at my MMA, paleo diet, and other forums without triggering howls of fake emotion.

bkev said:

Guys not to backseat mod or anything, but I'm not sure this is worth the trouble.  I don't think Filoni happens to be a transgender, and Brennan's remakr about one happened to deal with someone on TFN getting upset because they were transvestite and the word effeminate was offensive to them.  Which is a little silly, really.

I can't compare the real context but I think you guys are on a witch hunt.  Conversely, David, your over-justification really isn't helping.

Gotta get this backseat mod bug outta me...

Thanks, dude.  The "witch hunt" and the "a little silly" comments were exactly what I was hoping for (and expecting here). 

It was as much surreal as anything else, I guess.  It really is crazy that (a) any grown-ups claim to be "offended" at harmless comments and expect others to believe them, and (b) that this is obviously being used as pretext to silence people who don't conform to other molds (in this case, ban somebody who pointed out that TPM 3D was a flop at the unofficial LFL message boards).

I guess this is just more "over-justification", though.

asterisk8 said:

You have some serious issues with masculinity. Note, this is not outrage, just an observation made with my eyes.

Are you a stalker?  How could you see me?

Anyway, considering that this incident is about observing that Dave Filoni is, ya know, he likes other dudes (that's his business and there's nothing wrong with that) and that he's effeminate (ditto), I think that masculinity is, like, the crux of the matter.

So you're indignant that somebody is identified as effeminate....which kinda would mean that you have issues with masculinity?

CatBus said:

Man, you really are the tragic, misunderstood hero of this piece, aren't you?

BTW, I've heard mockery is often misinterpreted as outrage, here and elsewhere.

Frankly I don't know what's more precious: that you might think your mastery of words can dig you out of this hole, or that you might not think you're in a hole at all.  Either way it's adorable as all get out.  Please keep it up.

Ummm, okay. So I observed that Dave Filoni is feminine, and now you're offended and outraged (or so outraged that you mock people or whatever you were trying to imply there).

And if you think that somebody being insulted as politically incorrect by some "transgendered" people is "in a hole" or whatever, then I guess you've had an easy life.  To me, this is just entertainment, food-for-thought, and sad but funny illustrations of still more fake emotion from modern Western men.  So if you have a point to make, please just make it instead of writing veiled insults and dumb babble.

Mielr said:

 

Some may have interpreted your characterization as gay-bashing, which might explain why they decided to ban you, (regardless of their explanation). That's a big PC no-no, especially if he really is gay or transgendered.

Personally, I can't stand TFN or the attitude of most there, so as a female, I wouldn't refer to the behavior by those at TFN as "girly" (especially when the word is used as a pejorative) mainly because I'm fairly sure most of the posters there are male, and DO act like adolescent and pre-adolescent boys tend to act on occasion.

Besides, you're giving them a lot of credit, assuming that there's a whole lot of "grown men" there! ;-)

 

I think that "gay bashing" was what they were, like, coyly hoping I was going to do so that they could wag their little fingers and act even more indignant and self-righteous. 

My basic worldview is that you're allowed to make observations; that observing things, stating observations, and being curious in general is a good thing.  So, like, I don't know why everybody is supposed to silent about the fact that, ya know, Dave Filoni is effeminate.  I mean, everybody has eyes and ears and so they've observed it, too.  We observe that George Lucas has gotten fat and kind of Jabba-ish in the past decade and nobody has issues making digs about that.  I guess that people are supposed to lie about dudes being effeminate.  I don't know.

Thanks for exuding at least a bit of sympathy, though.  It was kind of weird to tell the story here and just read still more, "Oh no he di'int!" fake outrage from people.  I guess Western men don't have any real emotion anymore, so faking feeling is the only way to project humanity to others.

(As far as the age of the dudes at TFN goes, they're usually listed at the people's profiles there.  I definitely haven't done a full survey or anything, but the average does seem to be a male well past 20, for sure.)

This doesn't really count as a Star Wars font, but I made George Lucas's signature on his handwritten Star Wars script into a .SVG for a project I'm working on.  (Well, really, I didn't need it anymore, but I like giving myself arbitrary tasks to become more comfortable with Inkscape, the free andopen-source vector art program.)

So the signature is in .SVG format so, if I were still going to use it, I could have extruded it out into 3D and also scaled it up infinitely.

zombie84 said:

This may sound like typical non-PT-fan cynicsm, but I do honestly believe they shut down the forums because they essentially took over TF.N. That site did lots of business with the official site and had lots of cross-talk and business dealings. TF.N was always better respected and more popular for their forums, so I have this suspicion that they just decided to jump into TFN for the fan-oriented extensions of the site like blogs and forums. Of course, I have nothing to prove any of this, but I know they do business together and it would certainly explain the "direction" both sites have been moving towards in the last two years.

I absolutely agree.  I have no relationship - personal, e-mail, or anything else - with anybody at TFN and so I'm only speaking from my own casual observations, but what I have observed appears stark and indisputable: TFN has been slowly bullying away anybody who is either critical of LFL or just altogether not politically correct/corporate polished in their posting and behavior.

There has recently been an influx of....well....girly shills at TFN who literally come across as LFL employees masquerading as fans.  They can be identified by their boundless enthusiasm and posts which are 100% complimentary toward LFL and refusal to say anything bad or even give acknowledgement to posters who do share critical observations.  What's more, they're always very politically correct and the site has had more of the fake, "Oh no he di'int!" outrage of people who say things which are politically incorrect than any message board I've ever been at.  Bar none. 

I literally called Dave Filoni "effeminate".  That was all.  They SWARMED on me.  I absolutely refuse to believe that any honest sampling of grown-ups are that hysterically politically correct to be so outraged.  One guy there was apparently being too sincere about it, he was talking about how he is "transgendered" (don't know or want to know what that even means) and so calling somebody "effeminate" was "offensive". 

It was insane.  You can go to 1,000 other message boards and never again see apparently grown men behaving with such girlish hysteria.  Ever.  So I just don't believe that that was just run-of-the-mill phoniness, I believe that several of them (enough to dictate the thread norms) were there with an agenda.

Then, there are many users there who have just vanished.  Plo Koon, DRG4, and many others have just vanished.  I'm not saying that all these people were banned like I was, but I do suspect that many of them were bullied away by the LFL shills.  You get ostracized there if you don't submit to the shills, and it's just....just boring, really. 

Finally, I have been banned there (for calling Filoni "effeminate".  And, okay, when they swarmed on me I did double-down and observe that, in videos, Filoni also has a lisp and a womanly gait.  But those are honest observations, still.)  Now, I'll admit to having been banned before.  Like many people, I start stupid s--- at internet message boards and sometimes I look back at these stupid, heated arguments and I'm like, "What the f--- was I thinking?"  But this has been different, lately.  They, (a) ban you for ANYTHING, (b) ban you in secret - they don't tell other members that they banned you, even if you plead with them to do so, (c) have little to no response in requests for why you were banned.  I received one short e-mail saying little more than, "We think you were flaming".   They have no criteria other than the subjective opinion of whoever banned you - meaning that if the mod or whoever just has a random opinion that you're "flaming", that's it.  No objective standards or fail-safes to make sure they're not power-tripping or anything else.  Just, banned in secret with no notice or explanation.

I'll also note that, when I got in fights in past years (I've been a member since '04) and was banned for a week here, three days there.  I usually soon admitted that I was starting s--- or breaking rules.  But now, it's different. They have now banned me twice in the past six months - for two months, each - and I honestly cannot grasp why. Both times, I was shocked when I went to log on and saw the "BANNED" screen.  The only explanations that make sense are some combination of (a) power-tripping mods, (b) being LFL shills, (c) having orders from TFN heads to keep everything PC and LFL friendly, (d) having LFL plants at the site issue fake complaints.

But they're a bunch of girly, ignorant (you would be amazed at the rank stupidity in the average post mixed in with all the, "Ahsoka is the best Star Wars character ev-ah!!!" quotes from 30 year old dudes), catty, stooges. 

TFN used to be great.  But just like everything great - whether it's eBay or the US government - it's started by great creative people, but then the great men soon bore of their creation and the bureaucrats come in to maintain the system, and pretty soon it's just crap.

Below is the "explanation" I got from TFN for my ban, followed by my response:

TFN: You were banned after very recently receiving a warning for your posts in the 3D Saga, and for some reason decided not to heed said warning. I lost count of the number of times you breached the "post, not poster" rule and despite antagonising people, you decided to carry on, inflaming the situation. This is textbook baiting. Your ban stands at 2 months. I will not be posting that you are banned as it is a long standing rule that banned users are not discussed. - Mod

DAVIDBRENNAN: You said that I violated a "post not poster" rule, which presumably means that I attacked other posters. This is an abject lie. I insulted nobody. On the flip side, I was actually called names by others, repeatedly. I calmly ignored them, as always. So if this supposed "post, not poster" rule was the real reason for my banning, then you would obviously be banning others. But I'm positive you didn't, because I know that your motive wasn't actually to enforce any "post, not posters" rule. You then said I was "antagonizing" and "baiting" people. That can mean whatever you want it to mean (which is probably the point). My posts were short and productive, always leading to a point and a new line of discussion. This is the precise opposite of antagonizing, this is cumulative dialogue. The point of not discussing banned users is presumably to prevent insults toward them. Please note that I wholly waive and discard any concerns about that, and request that you please note to other users that I was banned so that they can contact me. It is not regarding the contact of the specific thread, but rather my relations with the other members. Please just let them know that they can contact me outside of TFN. They have no means of doing so, since you've kept my ban a secret. Please just let them know that I'm banned, and they have to contact me elsewhere. Please. Thank you.

In re-creating the opening crawl, I had a hillbilly way of trying to emulate the angle of the text from the camera: I screencapped the ROTS opening crawl, then had a dummy rectangle, and tilted that back until the vertical lines were parallel.  It appears that 75 (or 15-degrees raised from the ground) is the proper angle of the text:

If anybody knows of a more precise way to measure this, I'd definitely be happy to hear them (just to refresh my geometry, which has clearly gone soft!) 

One of my favorite sites is run by the great libertarian researcher, Radley Balko.  It's called TheAgitator.com.

Well, today (3-15-12), he posted a YouTube video put together by a pair of Trekkies who were pulled over in Illinois on their way home to Ohio after a Star Trek convention.

The cop who pulled over the Trekkies (who looked like they could've been extras in 'Galaxy Quest' they fit the stereotype of dorky nerds so perfectly) was just this slimy little thug who was desperately trying to find ANYTHING he could arrest them for.  So he just made up probable cause saying that he thought the passenger "looked nervous", and then ruining these two dudes' vacation. 

The Trekkie driver, God bless 'im, learned his mistake later on - NEVER consent to a search for anything because the best case scenario is that the cops will detain you for a day as they impound your car and tear it up (the BEST case scenario) and there's a good chance they'll just make up some shit or plant drugs to bolster their arrest records or seize your property to bolster their coffers.  So, the driver put together this little video.

If you're going to any SW Celebration conventions....watch out for the Empire's agents, dudes. 

http://www.theagitator.com/2012/03/15/breakfast-in-collinsville/#comments

SilverWook said:

That's a cool million or two right there? I doubt we will ever know how much they spent in total on all the advertising though.

The one thing in Lucasfilm's favor is they didn't have to make costly new film prints.

This year Super Bowl ads ran $3.5m each. 

With the exception of some IMAX 70mm prints, I think that all 3D movies are now all digital. 

I would like to know its advertising budget and what LFL's expectations were.  Given the success of the '97 SEs and then TLK and BatB just months before it - neither of which probably had half as much advertising as TPM - I'm betting they were thinking something like 75m, with a floor of 50 and ceiling of 100.  But, really, I'm just making that up, as I have no real clue.

SilverWook said:

It was nigh impossible to not see ads for it on Cartoon Network. Other cable channels were pretty saturated with commercials the last week before release.

That was my sampling, too (although I don't watch the Cartoon Network, so I can't speak to that channel in particular).  It was EVERYWHERE.  I mean, the thing had a Super Bowl commercial, which should pretty much say it all.

Does anybody know what the precise angle the opening crawl is relative to the camera is? 

If not, I'm pretty sure I could figure it out.

SilverWook said:

Your Filoni obsession is starting to worry me though. ;)

Just take digs where I can.  It's not so much him that bothers me - though he does appear to be a phony and, uh,....to not like women, let' say, but that's his business - it's the fact that (a) TCW has taken over SW and changed it in tone and in spirit, and (b) the fact that many of the jackasses at TFN act like they're good buddies with him and really giving him as much reverence as they give Lucas (that's no exaggeration).  So there's a motive of (trying to) slay golden calfs. 

When you get into an argument at TFN, and that whole hivemind there swarms on you - and NOBODY comes to your defense, no matter how well-reasoned your arguments or how polite you are - you really begin to bear down on whatever stance you take.  So, like, back when TCW was released, I got in some big arguments about it with the TFN posters and they just swarmed on me with hate for my heresy and simply observing that it was a flop.  I've kind of been intermittently obsessed with mocking Filoni and TCW since then.

But, in complete objectivity and seriousness, I do think it's very sad what's come of the SW brand, and I think creepy Filoni's dictums are largely (not entirely) to blame.  I thought ROTS was fantastic, and had high hopes for the future.  Instead....well....just look at it now.

SilverWook said:

We tend to call it Creepy Puppet Yoda(tm) around here. ;)

Hey, I like calling it the Don Rickles puppet, more.  Do you guys demand conformity of newbies (although I'm not that much of one, really).