- Post
- #642780
- Topic
- I'm a feminist!
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/642780/action/topic#642780
- Time
Gaffer wins at everything forever.
Gaffer wins at everything forever.
Those are some interesting articles. With that Fall of the Republic one, you can definitely tell that it's very Empire Strikes Back centric.
I think we're all on the same page in that we all want to preserve the reveals in the OT. Like Darth Lucas, I would like to structure the story in a way that looks like a pre-77 production, with a simple story that perhaps is tinged with WWII, Cold War, and Vietnam War thematic elements.
The biggest problem with this take on a story is that nobody has the correct point of view to write a story about this. Even people who saw only the original trilogy would have a massively skewed point of view, such as the fan who wrote Fall of the Republic. After several years of this type of thinking, the best solution I can come up with is to take the OT as canon and write a story that is only tangentially related to the OT.
Whether or not the Lucas Prequels ever existed or not is a moot point for me. The story of the OT stands perfectly well on its own. There is no need to explore the backstory of characters like Anakin and Obi-wan, as part of the fun is imagining what they were like "back then". Thus making a story set during the clone wars and avoiding the OT characters would serve the dual purpose of avoiding the specific plots of the Prequels. In the end, the galaxy is big enough for the two of us: the Lucas Prequels, and our rewritten prequels. Because like it or not, we are all influenced by them. Might as well make our story fit into those, so that we respect the creator of this world.
Yeah, it's not a rewrite in the strictest sense, but it would be cool to make our story look like the "original" Star Wars movies, and then have it appear that the OT was made as a sequel to them, and then 20 years later Lucas made some movies exploring the backstory of characters we already knew, and that didn't interfere with the originals, as an interesting side note.
How much of the EU would we keep? Or would it be just the OT? I assume by mentioning the prototype Death Star and Darth Bane that these would keep most all of the EU, but simply present newly filmed prequels with tweaked stories.
Regularjoe gave me an idea. It would be pretty easy to remove all mention of Leia as Luke's sister from the movie, starting with the Ben scene:
"the other he spoke of is your twin sister."
"But I have no sister."
"To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the reason that your sister remains safely anonymous."
Ben does not continue, and Luke processes this new information, then looks at Ben (from the final shot in the scene).
Ben continues: "Bury your feelings deep down, Luke. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor."
Ben could be fading out throughout this scene, and his last line is only a voice in Luke's mind.
Then of course the talk of Leia as his sister is taken out of the Ewok village dialogue, and the throne room scene can stay as is. Leia's talk with Han goes somewhat differently:
"You love him. Don't you?"
"It's not like that at all!"
This would require some careful cutting to feel genuine.
Or, it could be made to seem like Luke doesn't know who his sister is, and during the Ewok Village dialogue, he suspects that Leia may be his sister. However, he omits telling Leia about his suspicions.
It goes as in the movie until:
"He's my father."
"Your father?"
"There's more. The only hope for the Alliance, if I don't make it back..."
"Luke, don't talk that way."
"It won't be easy for you to hear it, but you must. The Force is strong in my family. My father has it. I have it. My sister has it. In time, my sister'll learn to use that power as I have."
"Then Luke, run away, far away. If he can feel your presence, then leave this place! I wish I could go with you."
"No you don't. You've always been strong."
"But why must you confront him?"
"Because there is good in him, I've felt it. He won't turn me over to the Emperor, I can save him. I can turn him back...(Leia stares at him)...I have to try."
But how can anyone fully commit to something that is guaranteed to make no money, to inspire the ire of Disney, and to piggyback on the original idea of another?
Of course, collaboration is important, but Lucas already had the Star Wars screenplay completed before he began collaborating with the film crew. Even when he was asking his friends for advice on the story, it was his story. To do this right, we would need one dedicated individual with a good screenplay that everyone could agree was acceptable before even beginning the next step in the process. And unless the script blew everyone away with its divine brilliance, there would be no agreement on the script level. At least, not unless we rounded up everyone who was interested in contributing to the project and setting a time limit on every aspect of the production.
This is what needs to happen in my eyes before such a movie could work:
1. Find a director. Someone with the time, experience, and resources to manage an entire production.
2. Have this director set up a private blog like Team Negative1 to coordinate the production.
3. Accept script submissions, to be terminated at a definite date and voted upon by members of the forum.
4. Begin a kickstarter campaign on the blog for donations, with reasonable estimates for every aspect of production.
5. Assemble a team from the blog members, including the actors, artists, technicians, etc.
6. Set a timeline for completion, and hold all members accountable to it.
From there I could see a movie getting made.
The Wordplay articles are very illuminating on the subject of screenwriting:
http://www.wordplayer.com/welcome.html
Also Truby's articles and interviews on Youtube. In this one he attacks the idea of the three act structure of movies:
Absolutely right.
I've got probably hundreds of pages of notes on my computer for possible stories for a prequel rewrite. Everything from going Flash Gordon with Obi-wan as a Hans Zarkov character to Anakin's wife being a Joan of Arc character having visions of the good side of an extremely schizophrenic Anakin/Vader inspiring her to begin the Rebellion. Then there are the more reasonable stories, the ones that cleave close to what the audience would expect from watching the OT.
The problem with making a story about Anakin Skywalker is that the OT played off of the fact that Luke's father was a mystery to Luke to make him fearful. If an audience knows exactly how Anakin was seduced to the Dark Side, no matter how it happened, it would lessen the impact of the OT. For you only fear what you don't understand, and Luke must travel the path to becoming a Jedi not knowing if his actions are a mirror of his father's actions before he fell. In a way, Anakin's story is already told through Luke's journey in the OT. So making Anakin's story the focus of the Prequels is frivolous.
Obi-wan's story is also unfitting as the focus of the prequels, for we already know exactly where he ends up at the end. Also, telling his story requires knowing Yoda and a lot about the Force, making the films not work if they were to be watched before the the OT, or in proper numerical order.
In the end, I think that the prequels can't be about the Jedi or the Force, because to do so would simply repeat a lot of the OT. It would have to be a smaller story, with a main character whom we don't know, with a goal that doesn't have to do with doing something we already know the fate of. For example, having a story about someone fighting for either the Republic or the Separatists will inevitably end in tragedy, so if you want an uplifting tale, that's out.
I'll probably be altering my Stars of War thread soon, so you can read there what I have in mind for a "rewrite" of the prequels. I say rewrite because there are way too many ways to rewrite the prequels, and with a focus on entirely new characters and situations during the same period of the Clone Wars, the existing prequels and EU need not be discarded to have a compelling origin story for the Star Wars universe.
Orci: "I only want to be on Star Trek as long as I’m useful and helpful to what Star Trek is. The minute that I’m a burden on it, then I should not be here. I want the best idea to win. Hopefully, if this movie works, Paramount will be thinking about a third movie and, if I have the best idea, I should win. If I don’t, someone else should win. That’s how much I love Star Trek. The best idea should win, period."
Did he ask anyone besides Lindelof? He could have asked me...
I came up with a Star Trek 09 sequel where the Enterprise uses Spock Prime's knowledge of the future to preemptively meet V'ger thousands of light years from Earth. The Enterprise is seen as an infested organism like in the original, but in this timeline the ship is transported by V'ger to the machine planet that originally accepted Voyager, and Enterprise is given sentience to fulfill the mission that its crew is so unwilling to accomplish:
"To explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before."
Therefore the crew is forced to deal with a ship that will go anywhere in the universe except for Earth and the planets of the Federation.
I think that it's a better story than KHAN! again.
Yes to the Matrix being the heir to Star Wars. It came out the same year as TPM, and soon everyone was pretending to be Neo in their backyard, not baby Anakin.
I think that the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings film series were all trying to be the same story in different costumes.
Nobody has mentioned John Carter yet. After listening to the director's commentary and hearing about how everything in it was designed to simply begin an epic series of movies, It's really sad that they won't be making any more.
Thanks, unfortunately due to the computer problems, I haven't had the time to transfer anything but the final few scenes to the other machine. I'd really like to see what these settings do to the whole movie though, so perhaps I'll get to more scenes later.
Though I used the same color changes here, the gamma has been boosted while the contrast has been lowered compared to the final shot of the movie. This is because the final shot is darker than the previous scene, and I didn't want to blow out any highlights. Looking at these again, I could probably bring the brightness down a bit without crushing the blacks.
I'm still not entirely happy with the color here, I think that it should probably be slightly more red. However this is really difficult to do without it bleeding into other parts of the image, or giving the entire movie a reddish cast.
JEDIT: Here's an updated frame:
I've probably crushed some blacks again, and I'm still using the old source for lack of a better method and the aforementioned technical difficulties, but I'm more interested in getting the colors right at this point rather than the black and white points. Though if anything stands out, feel free to point it out.
Yeah, I think that it is mostly in the way that the story is told that makes the PT unwatchable. At its core it has many strengths, and if Abrams were to restructure them, it would go a long way to making them stand on their own. But if you can simply change the past, that destroys creativity. Restrictions breed it, and the PT is one heck of a restriction to a great saga. Better to select the story of the ST in a way that makes the PT and the OT better.
My venerable Premiere Elements crashed on me, and despite reinstalling the software, starting my XP 64bit in safe mode, and rolling back my video driver, it seems to be dead. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to fix
"The exception unknown software exception (0xc0000005) occurred in the application at location 0xOc7f10e3."
please let me know. In the meantime, I got the program to run in compatibility mode on a windows 7 machine, and cranked out this sample tonight:
Here's the original 2004 DVD frame for comparison:
Enjoy!
I don't get it. Why would someone who loves the movies as they are want to change them?
Also, the two trilogies we have now are far too connected as it is. The OT (or rather what's left of it) is the only thing holding up the PT.
'disRegards!
The Force is a mystical energy field that all living things have, and can tap into. However, the Force can choose a particular person or family, and those individuals are destined to change the galaxy.
I believe that anyone could be trained to use the Force, but the Force obeys its own rules, so if that person was not chosen by the Force, progress would be more difficult.
Midichlorians are believed by the Jedi to be a good indication of whether a person is chosen by the Force, but even they are unsure of what a high midichlorian count actually means, and if a teacher of the Force is in tune with a person, they can better determine the person's potential than any blood reading.
Alien was horror, Aliens was action, so what're you planning for this one? It sounds like a disaster movie in your "billions" comment.
Just got back from the movie.
Overall, I'm very conflicted about this movie. On the one hand, it has good action, reasonably good characters, and some genuinely engaging scenarios.
On the other hand, it really retreads the Wrath of Kahn, to the point where it begins to ruin WOK and this movie. So despite it being really fun and engaging as a sequel to the first movie, as a Star Trek fan I would rather not have even seen it.
One quibble: When Kirk says that Spock threw him under the bus, it took me out of the movie a bit. Anachronisms bug me.
"I have been known to make mistakes...from time to time."
Have a picture of Chewie strangling Lando:
"...just trying to help!"
*Dons Orson Welles voice*
"Pinky, what are you doing on that infantile Star Wars forum?"
Saw the movie yesterday. It was a solid entry, definitely better than 2.
Kind of spoilerish below...
It would be crazy, but I'd really like them to stick to the idea that Tony Stark was done with the Iron Man suit. After all, the point of the movie was that the suit was a "cocoon", and that it was his mechanic's mind that was important. So the next movie could prove it by having him build something that is a quantum leap beyond the suit in terms of coolness.
The best part of Iron Man 1 for me was that apart from the arc reactor, you could kind of believe that building a suit like that may be possible. With this movie, there are aspects that are entirely unbelievable. But I guess the cat's out of the bag as of the Avengers.
CatBus said:
The worst thing about Star Wars being so very, very overrated? The worst thing about the monolithic presence of this franchise, whose each entry devalues the whole? There’s one truly magnificent movie and one very good movie that are being swallowed up by cancerous growth of the larger entity. They’re two flowers, choked out in a lot full of weeds. And there’s some guy named JJ Abrams bringing in a backhoe and a whole bunch of new weeds.This statement has some truth in it, but it doesn't go nearly far enough because it completely sidesteps the impact of the rampant revisionism in the Star Wars filmography.
If you look at the complete saga as it exists in 2011 with all revisions, you're down to one good movie (ESB:SE), one middling movie (ANH:SE), and crap. The "flowers" he thinks are still in the garden are just dandelions like the rest at this point.
I often wonder about which versions people refer to when talking about the movies. He says that Empire is far better than A New Hope, which is true if he has only seen the SEs.
imperialscum said:
Oh please, not the film critics and their crap. If anyone, I despise the film critics. They consider themselves as an "experts" of film and are presenting their subjective opinions as something objective. Films are an art and art is purely subjective. There is no science it and certainly no objective measure.
Gotta disagree. There is such a thing as bad art. If you intend to make an enjoyable piece of entertainment and the result is The Star Wars Holiday Special, well I don't think that anyone would consider that enjoyable. It fails in its purpose, and does so objectively. The fact that we've been using the same formula for good storytelling for almost two thousand years means that there are some objective measures of good storytelling.
Thanks!