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GundarkHunter

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Join date
10-Mar-2003
Last activity
9-Apr-2017
Posts
4,720

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Post
#93418
Topic
Ratings creep and the rhodian who flunked out of the stormtrooper academy.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/93418/action/topic#93418
Time
Quote
Originally posted by: MeBeJedi
"GL had THX-1138 re-rated and got an R for his director's cut."

But this is a completely different film, and you presume he wanted the R rating.. It was never intended for children to begin with. Many adults don't even get it. It's a niche film, so why should Lucas care about the rating?

Because he knows that many parents today use the DVD player as a babysitter, and would assume that a George Lucas movie is in the same vein as Star Wars or American Graffiti. He needed to make it clear that this particular film was not a kids movie.
Anticipating your next question, Steven Spielberg doesn't suffer from the same stereotyping because he has had a greater and more varied output.

Quote
"The 1997 board was definitely more conservative than the 1977 board, and GL may have done it as a pre-emptive strike."

Films aren't going to be re-rated unless they are re-submitted to the review board. Films with the term "Unrated version" simply weren't reviewed - that's it. This is why most DVDs have thei extra content labelled "unrated". Besides, Lucas doesn't say anything about changing Greedo in order to keep its rating, and McCallum just recently stated that they won't change ROTS if it receives a PG-13 rating, so there's really no basis to this argument.

It may not have been about changing the rating, but every film submitted to the MPAA has the option of being released unrated, altered or not. Going unrated is usually about avoiding the MPAA on thorny issues, like the male frontal nudity in A Room With a View.

Quote
"As for Spielberg and the guns vs. walkie talkies, terrorist vs. hippie, etc., none of those changes would have changed the rating."

Neither would Greedo shooting first, or burning bodies. I'm still wondering where this belief that "he showed the burning bodies of Owen and Beru Lars in 77 to get a PG rating" reasoning is coming from. Seems someone is ignoring the fact that there are many other troubling scenes in ANH, such as Vader choking Antilles, Luke fighting the Tusken (a rather intense scene, even for '77), Alderaan being destroyed, Vader striking down Obi-wan, various pilots being killed face-to-face with the audience or crashing spectacularly, etc. All of which would have blown any chances of a G rating out of the water. Don't tell me that all of these were added simply to avoid a G rating as well...

I never said that; I merely said that skyman's argument is not entirely without merit; I didn't say I agreed with him completely.

Post
#93320
Topic
What if someone else had played Obi-Wan instead of Alec Guinness?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/93320/action/topic#93320
Time
Actually, I would have welcomed a Lynch-directed ROTJ. When Lynch is a hired gun (as was the case with The Elephant Man and The Straight Story), he shows himself to be a very capable and talented director; the Lynch-isms we know and love him for come largely from his own personal works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, etc.). I still believe there's a good movie hidden somewhere within Dune.