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Pakka

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Join date
5-Sep-2005
Last activity
18-Feb-2024
Posts
29

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Post
#284178
Topic
Making of Star Wars (New Book) Discussion
Time
I broke down and ordered the hardcover from B&N today - I bought a B&N membership to take advantage of a ridiculous coupon on the "Sculpting a Galaxy" boxed edition with all the extras, and member price is ~$47, but there's a 25% off coupon out there (Google "Barnes and Noble Coupon", you'll find it), which brought it down to just over $35 with tax, and free shipping. That's over 50% off the cover price, and less than I'd pay locally for the paperback.
Post
#284177
Topic
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - review and thoughts.
Time
Anchorhead - seeing as you liked SOTME and are enjoying the Radio Drama, you should probably give the original "Han Solo" trilogy a shot. It only features Han and Chewie from the "known" characters, all three books came out before ESB hit theaters and, like the Radio Drama, was written by Brian Daley. I think he really captures Han's voice and the feel of the "Big Galaxy" era that ended with Vader's revelation at the end of ESB.
Post
#282742
Topic
Anyone else totally disregard Leia being Luke's sister?
Time
It's funny - this whole discussion, along with Zombie's outstanding work on the book, has really changed some of my perceptions of the first few years of Star Wars and SW fandom.

I'm one of those "saw Star Wars in a theater when I was 10" fans - turning 40 tomorrow (yikes!) - and had long believed there was really just one "split" among fans: OT vs PT. While there was usually some debate among OT fans about the relative merits of each movie, with ROTJ usually seen as a lesser work (unless the fan was quite young when they saw it and/or it was the first of the trilogy that they saw in a theater), I had long assumed that everybody that liked "Star Wars" loved "Empire", without reservation.

As I've read this discussion, along with Anchorhead's "first step into a larger world" thread, I've realized it isn't that simple and, more surprisingly, that my own feelings about the movies are more complicated than I had believed. The points that really hit home for me were:

1) While it's considered a classic now, "Empire" was not universally-loved when it came out; in fact, I think David Gerrold wrote a very luke-warm review for Starlog back in 1980, primarily complaining that too much is handed to Luke in his training and that, in the end, he basically proves that Yoda was right about him being too impatient and angry.

2) Following on from the above, there has always been a group of people who felt that everything after the original film changed/perverted the original feel/story - it's only because there was no internet back then for like-minded people to find each other and realize that they weren't alone that we forget that whole body of opinion existed.

After realizing the above, it dawned on me that, while I'm not quite the "absolutist" that Anchorhead is, I definitely know where he's coming from, and I agree with him in a lot of ways.

The quality of ESB seems to be the real problem - I think it's clear that it's the movie that appeals to us the most as we get older, and it occupies the "golden era" when Lucas had enough money to really "swing for the seats", but it wasn't yet clear that Star Wars was a license to print money, regardless of the quality of the movies. As Zombie points out in his book, Lucas believed, very strongly, that Empire was better than it needed to be for his purposes - he believed that the extra headaches of the schedule/cost overruns weren't worth the incremental increase in box office receipts. I think a lot of us have held out the hope for 25+ years, that Lucas would somehow make another movie as good as "Empire", while, in his mind, he would never allow another movie like "Empire" to be made - it was too painful an experience for him.

So, we have an absolutely fantastic movie, with everybody - the cast, the director, the writer, the composer, the SPFX crew, everybody - doing their absolute best work, and it's all up there on the screen. There's just no getting around how technically and artistically rich "Empire" is, and I just love it. However, I now realize that I only love it up to a point - specifically, the point when Vader utters four of the most famous words in movie history: "I am your father."

Now, I've been complaining for years about "The Incredible Shrinking Star Wars Galaxy" - that the place depicted in the original movie felt big enough for any fan to find room for his/her own ideas to fit into the larger whole. With Vader's famous utterance, that changes, and we never get it back - in fact, the rest of the "Saga" is an exercise in taking a place that felt like it could hold almost limitless stories, and turning it into a place that can barely sustain the one story Lucas decided to tell.

So, I now consider myself a "Star Wars and 90% of Empire" fan, to cover the parts of ESB that expand the SW galaxy, rather than limiting it. After that, as Zombie makes clear, it literally becomes a different universe, one that I don't find nearly as compelling.
Post
#136621
Topic
Lucas's filmmaking rut
Time
I think you're pretty close to the mark in most things.

Personally, I think the success of ESB was more critical that "Raiders", as ESB was the movie that funded Lucas' break from Hollywood and allowed him to move the whole operation up to Marin County. He was absolutely obsessed with the budget on ESB, and hated that it ran over budget and forced him to go to a bank to get the money he needed to get it finished (and thereby diminished his profits). Remember, this was a time when "sequel" meant "hastily-produced follow-up designed to cash in", not "continuation of a larger story", so there was no certainty that ESB would even approach the success of "Star Wars".

When ESB actually succeeded, it did nothing so much as tell the budding marketing genius (and former visionary film director) George Lucas that he had a franchise, a license to print money, and his primary goal seemed to shift from producing great films to making sure that he maximised the marketing possibilities of his properties. Lucas hated the "Hollywood system" so much, he wanted nothing more than to gain independence from it. In an irony so obvious we should all have seen it coming, he then became exactly like the Hollywood he hated - risk-averse, self-referential, massively egotistical - while pointing the way to the future for the entire movie business (blockbuster franchise pictures directed at teenagers).

With the "new" Lucas' primary objective shifting to running and growing his new "empire", we were first offered the vaguely dissatisfying ROTJ, then (eventually) the massively disappointing PT. I think we really need to treat ROTJ and the prequels as a unit of sorts, as the shortcomings of the 1983 chapter pointed the way to the failures of the entire prequel trilogy. Lucas, unhappy with Kershner's independence, hired Marquand in large part because he knew he could control the production through him without having to sit in the director's chair himself. ROTJ was, in essence, the condensation of four chapters of the earlier 9-chapter saga into one two-hour movie, and it suffered for it, with loose ends tying themselves up at a frantic pace with no regard for logic, need or pacing. It was Lucas' insistence on going down this path that led to the split with Gary Kurtz, an event that has loomed ever-larger as time has passed - it was this condensation of story elements and characters that increasingly "boxed-in" the PT as Lucas was writing it, forcing him to invent new loopholes in order to stretch the PT story out over 3 movies.

So, the prequels then offered the inverse of ROTJ - a thin skeleton of a story, spun out and expanded to cover too much time, too many eventualities, too many themes. On top of this, they were saddled with a director/writer/storyteller who insisted on complete control (there's that word again) of all aspects of the movies, and who surrounded himself with yes-men and artists who had grown up on the original movies and were (understandably) ecstatic to be working on real, live "Star Wars" movies. These were hardly people who were going to point out flaws along the way. Nothing about the prequels, and their inherent storytelling weakness, is as instructive as reading "The Art of ROTS" and noticing that very little of the actual story was firm in Lucas' mind even deep into pre-production - he was literally developing the storyline based on preproduction artwork. Astonishingly, though, Lucas will still insist that the story in its current form "always existed", it was "THE story" and it "had to be told this way" or he would be somehow "disloyal" to his original ideas.

Deep down, there's a pretty strong case to be made that the prequels should never have been made - Lucas has actually told us exactly WHY they should never have been made himself, in interviews leading up the release of ROTS. While he insists that the "whole story" has always existed, the fact is that, by his own admission, the prequel story existed only insofar as it supported the OT with the bare skeleton of a background, a shadowy pre-history that the OT characters could refer back to, a set of events meant only to tell the audience that they had come in in the middle of a larger story, a serial that they hadn't seen the earlier episodes of. Part of the charm of the OT is that it leaves so much unexplained, and this lack of explanation allowed viewers to fill in the background themselves, to invest something of their own imagination, combine it with what was on screen, and have a fun fictional universe to play in. That's why we're all still here talking about these movies and trying to preserve them in their original state.

So, in a way, it's true that we would probably have been unhappy, in some way, with just about anything that Lucas had chosen to throw up on the screen and call "Star Wars" after all these years. However, that's a situation of his own making - that shadowy, sketchy pre-history was an essential element of the success of the OT, and explicity filling in the blanks was always going to be problematic. That's in no way meant to excuse that the choices Lucas did make once he decided to go ahead with the PT resulted in about 7 hours of absolutely joyless, charm-less, corporate moviemaking, inside which is buried a pretty impressive ILM demo reel.

In the end, I'm simply thankful that Lucas was once young and idealistic enough to make "Star Wars", and brave enough to follow it with ESB. Honestly, it's all I can do to not let the disasters that followed effect my love for those two masterpieces.