zombie84

I'm curious how this has turned out so far. You guys should post it on a public file-sharing site for feedback.

Also, this confused me a bit reading the previous page: is this being made from the e-book PDF from way-back or the actual published version? They are quite different.

reave said:

0 points of articulation. Pass  :|

When have you seen a 14-foot 700-pound sculpt that moved and wasn't located in a theme park or movie set? You know those things cost about a million dollars right? High expectations much?

The thing you have to remember is that it kind of was always the way it is now. I am always surprised that people have such short memories. I mean if you really think about it, the merchandizing should have devalued the first film more than a couple of crappy sequels. Look at Rocky! Rocky would have been seen differently without sequels but people still separate them and the original and call the original a classic. And right from day one, Star Wars had all the junk attached to it.

In the 1970s you had:

-Toys! Everywhere! Toys for characters you hardly even remembered! Except at first there were no toys. There were toy boxes. Lucasfilm came up with the greatest scam any company ever devised: THEY SOLD KIDS FUCKING EMPTY BOXES. FOR CHRISTMAS.

-R2D2 cookie jars. Yeah, they are charming and cool. But it kind of shows that every conceivable product was Star Wars-ized. There was princess Leia shampoo. Wookie underwear. THE SELLOUTS!

-Maeco Star Wars disco remix. On vinyl single, or as part of a greater SW-themed disco album. I have both, but sadly no disco ball or bellbottom pants. When this was new it was at least hip, now its both pathetic AND uncool. Star Wars disco music. Just say that again to yourself. There was Star Wars disco music. And people danced to it.

-TV specials! Back when there was only four channels and you were practically forced to watch this crap. R2D2 and C3P0 having boring banter while they address the audience on how Star Wars was made? So, are they in the movie or are they acknowledging that they are actors who made a movie? Or are they supposing that it's a movie that used two real robots? You get about 10 minutes of worthwhile content in this one-hour snoozefest that has only become valuable because of nostalgia.

-THE HOLIDAY SPECIAL. No commentary is required here. FUCKING. HOLIDAY. SPECIAL.

-"Pay money to join the Star Wars fanclub! You get a two-page promotional 'newsletter' and an iron-on patch all for the equivalent of $40 dollars today!"

So, you see, it has always been like this. And that was just 1977-1978. All that happened in the first two years. The reason being?

Star Wars was meant as a light-hearted fun romp for kids and kids-at-heart. It was fun having a princess Leia shampoo. Then a decade later it become mythologized and everyone forgot what it was like in 1977 and all the crap they put out. Then they proceed to complain endlessly each time there is a new Star Wars pencil set instead of just ignoring it because it will be forgotten in another twenty years. I know that's not the focus here. But my point is that the "devaluation" of the series has been there from the beginning. And if the Holiday Special and wookie underwear can't devalue Star Wars then Jar Jar Binks certainly can't. In the long run, I mean.

It's a vicious cycle. :p

Wait...I'm confusing Total Recall and making it awesomer than it was. It has midgets and three-breasted women, but unfortunately they are separate characters. The remake has hope!

Mars also has three-breasted midgets, so don't be hatin'. Also, with that avatar, I hear everything you say in the voice of Jeffery 'Dude' Lebowski, and none of it seems out of place, which is weird.

Hey, so when I disappeared from the site for like a year, this kind of went with it. I'm back full-gear now, so hopefully I can get this out really soon, since it is 90% done already.

Note: this will NOT have surround sound. Simply because it is a lot of work for a project where it makes little sense. 75% of the film is from stereo sources. The colouring will be tweaked, which is the big thing holding it up now. And in response to pretty consistent complaints, I will be tweaking the Zhora scene so that it makes more sense to people.

For all those who come back after vast periods of inactivity.

So hey guys, I've been on mars for a straight year. I'm back now! More endless discussion! More endless arguments! More articles for secrethistoryofstarwars.com! And maybe savestarwars.com too. I've updated Secret History of Star Wars for the first time in a year, plus I made a facebook page. Consider me back.

So what did I miss?

Sup guys. Yeah, I've pretty much been busy being an OT.com hermit the last 9 months. Long story short, other things have been more important uses of my time. I'll probably be jumping back into the game in the next month or so.

Anyway, as far as any permissions go, personally I think it's cool people care enough to do this, although on the flip side I don't think audio-books are suited to anything like this (e.g. academic books). My publisher might not be as nice about this, but I can pretty much guarantee you that my publisher would never even consider an audio book, so it's not like any business would be lost. I guess the only concern would be over the quality. That would be my main concern too, because it's hard for to envision an audio version of this book that isn't boring, but maybe I lack imagination.

I think the main thing though is that I am knee-deep into the second edition of the book. The core of the book would be the same, but I imagine about 15% would be altered or changed. I don't know if this would actually end up changing the project timeline here, or if it would get me into trouble if I were to hand out the updated manuscript to anyone involved (probably it would), but it may be worth mentioning. Off the record, the second edition manuscript is due from me at the end of July for a print date for February 2013.

Otherwise, hey, if we asked permission for anything we did here we might as well not have this forum at all. The world of fandom will do what it wants.

I think the biggest confusion about that 70s-80s transition is that the films were more glitzy than gritty, and those sort of low-budget made-in-the-streets films were made in less quantities and by less superstar directors.

Really, the notion of the 80s being the birth of high-concept is wrong, because you can apply that to a lot of the 70s films too. "Three guys hunting a shark," "a bunch of people survive an earthquake", "a girl is possessed by the devil" "a bunch of kids in a small town drive around on graduation night."

And the notion of blockbusters being born in the 80s is inaccurate too. The 70s was full of star-studded disaster movies in the first half of the decade, and fantasy epics in the second half. Airport, Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure, Airport 77, King Kong, Jaws, Superman, Star Wars, Alien, even The Exorcist which had an enormous budget. And then you had the films that had blockbuster business, if not in content, like Godfather. The transition into the early 80s is pretty seamless.

I think the biggest difference, and what gives us that 80s=commercialism feeling is the merchandising. It began with pop soundtracks, like Top Gun, and then you had video game tie-ins, cartoon shows, toys, stickers and stuff. That started in the 70s too, but other than Star Wars it was relatively few except for the odd Earthquake lunchbox or poster or stuff like that. It finally pushed the high-concept, big-budget blockbusters that you had in the 70s into new areas of commercialism, and that laid the business strategy groundwork for todays films. Especially since the movies were in generally more slick-looking, and there weren't many made-in-the-streets films, it highlights this aspect even more.

Güngas?

I believe that is a photoshop job. I'm pretty sure I've seen that picture of George in Tunisia before and I don't remember Jango Fett being there. Why would they bring the Fett costume to the desert anyway?

It's on those web featurettes. I think it might have been called We Didn't Go to the Desert for a Suntan, or something like that.

You must not see many films.

The 80s had as many classics as any decade. I would say the 1950s has the least, personally, 80s films were awesome though, and film has ALWAYS been corporate, these studios have been multi-million-dollar monopolies since the 20's. In fact it was the corprorate takeovers of 1969, mainly at Warner Brothers, that allowed people like Dennis Hopper to make Easy Rider and George Lucas to make THX1138, and then all the great early-70s films that followed.

DavidBrennan said:

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.

That was the range I was expecting too. I'm surprised TPM3D did so badly, but I can't say I am disappointed.l

Filoni and the Clone Wars are the only thing keeping the franchise alive. It's the best Star Wars stuff since 1980, and it's all because of Filoni--and I hate the EU. Calling the Clone War show EU is almost disrespectful to it, because its mostly pretty great.

The film was awful though. Truely, one of the worst things I have ever seen, without exaggeration. How could you have such a contrast between the show and the film? Two words.

George Lucas.

He basically was the man behind the film, and Filoni is the man behind the show.

The more bewildering question is how did I ever watch the show when I didn't even want to watch the film and it turned out to be worse than I feared? Word of mouth, I guess. That show certainly has to work AGAINST the Star Wars brand--"no really, I know it's star wars, but this one is GOOD."

Although, I think the prequels make it look better than it is. If the prequels were awesome, people would not appreciate it as much.

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've been meaning to get that sorted out, but it's been Saint Paddy's weekend and I haven't sobered up yet. :p

In other news, no, no prequel scripts have ever been leaked. There are "shooting scripts" but I'm not even sure if they are authentic since they don't have all the material that was deleted (although they have some of the material...so they could be early versions. "Shooting scripts" have like 50 versions).

Well, to be fair, the reaction of a few months banning is a bit extreme. I can see how some people would be a little...I'm not sure if "offended" is even the right word, but put off maybe. Basically, you don't like David Filoni and you call him effeminate in a way that is entirely not neutral, let's be honest. Even here, it was intended as an insult, or something to knock him with. So, why is being effeminate so bad? No, really, why is it? Does that mean being gay is bad?  The two are strongly associated; most people's idea of a gay guy is someone who is effeminate. So why is being effeminate something to be mocked? And whatever the reason, that would open up the majority of gays to being mocked, wouldn't it? You see the slippery slope you are on? I realize you were just trying to undermine his masculinity, and on the surface that may seem like not so terrible, but that train of thought has other implications, and it also says a lot about what is respectable or not respectable in men. You value more traditional masculinity qualities, and that's fine because so do I and many other guys, but not everyone does, and mocking someone for lacking those qualities marginalizes a lot of people, including many who have been historically persecuted--killed even--for having them, and that continues to this day. It promotes an atmosphere of homophobia, and that's really all it comes down to. It may sound oversensitive, but it's different if you are on the receiving end of that. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal, but people are persecuted for acting that way in very real ways, so it has other implications and basically promotes that, even if you weren't intending to, so it shouldn't be so surprising that some people have issues with that.

I worked on a gay television show on a gay network for two years so I know that some of the gayest dudes you will ever meet are also the most sterotypically macho, the kind of guys that listen to heavy metal, work out everyday, practice tae kwon do, and enjoy a round of pints at the pub. A lot of naive women mistake them as super-straight (until you look a little closer that is), and I enjoy hanging out with guys like that because I'm kind of like that. But the stereotype, and lets face it the more visible, are the kind of guys that are the sort one may characterize as "effeminate", at least by your standards if all you need is the hint of a lisp (I would not have characterized him as effeminate, personally). So, you see how there is the connection. Making fun of someone for having a hint of a lisp, and just barely any other vague qualities, like a gesture or something they do? Why does it matter if they have a lisp, or speak effemenately? I get it though, you are just looking for something to nail him on because you don't like him, whatever is outside of social norms. But if you are a person like me who has gay friends that have been threatened with death, who have been picked on, even beaten up, who have been genuinely hated (which is something few have actually experienced), and whom to this day even in one of the gayest, most open cities in the world (Toronto) , there is still an undefined stigma to just being born gay in certain parts with certain folks...well, that's total bullshit isn't it? You are right, life is filled with bullies and assholes and people who are offended by shit that they have abolsutely no reason to be offended by. And increasingly people have been standing up against these fuckwits. So, you can maybe understand, if Dave Filoni is someone you respect (e.g. a SW forum...and even if he is not someone you respect it wouldn't change either), when someone comes bashing him and makes fun of the fact that he strikes that person as effeminate...that basically IS gay bashing. Who cares if he is effeminate? Why is that bad? It would be like saying you don't like Sam Jackson, but include a reference to his skin colour. It's like, what? Was that racism? Maybe you didn't even mean it to be, but you can't be so stupid as to not see how that comes across. It would seem that way to me, and I'm pretty chill about PC stuff.

The other thing is that, you are right, TFN is very PC, too PC, and I suspect that has to do with the business side, because it's not just a fan-run forum, it makes money for the people at the top and it makes LFL look bad as a corporation if they allow certain things, so I'm pretty sure they have a finger in the pie there. But also, because TFN is so over-policed, whenever someone does something a little un-PC it seems more shocking and outrageous. So, you have an issue that is one of contrast too, and that's not your fault.

Not caring to read the thread, it sounds like some people may have been a bit harsh, probably because of the above reason. But its not some PC-police thing. Like a lot of dickhead right-wing radio hosts who are in denial about their prejudices and fight imaginary enemies of freedom of speech you have to consider what you are REALLY saying. Because what ARE you REALLY saying? That acting "effeminate" is something to be made fun of? I guess that means 75% of all gays should be made fun of too? So you haven't really thought about the implications of what you are saying, and it reflects really, really badly on you. Obviously, you don't go around oppressing gays as far as I know, or even straight men who have qualities in sync with gay stereotypes like being "effeminate" (personally I never thought Filoni was gay at all so I'm putting him here), but yeah, if that's something mockable I would agree that you have masculinity issues. I mean, I get it, I realize people don't mean anything bad, but it does reflect the way that gays, or people with qualities associated with being gay, are thought of as second class citizens, the way women were fifty years ago, because you would never mock his brown hair, right? Yes, "womyn" and shit like that is idiotic, it's easy to point to that and say "this is feminism?" and laugh. But it's not as hard to point to the 18-year-old girl I trained on a film set who left the industry because a cinematographer said to her that girls can't work in the camera department because it's a guy thing, and maybe she should find work somewhere else. So, if you realize bullshit like that actually happens, and you make a comment about women not being qualified for something because of their gender--it's not just a joke. It's real. I mean, yes, all guys and all women make fun of the opposite gender, I think it's in our DNA or something. But that's between friends, unless it's really clever and you may get away. But in a public forum with strangers, I don't see how you can be surprised that out of the hundreds of people reading it, a dozen will be rubbed the wrong way enough to comment. Part of the reason people act sexist is because people talk sexist, it endorses it and makes it seem a social norm.

I would agree, you are naive, because when you spend the day sparring with guys in MMA, you get the right to be candid and people won't be as offended because you have an intimate relationship, like when you make a sexist joke with your guy friends, which probably every single straight male who has ever lived has done on a semi-regular basis. But that only works if you are all in the same boat--by that I mean the (erroneous) assumption that you all are straight guys, so it's no big deal to make a joke or comment that may come across as gay-bashing to the PC police. But if one of that group was black, how far would you take a criticism about a guy that included his black skin colour as part of the criticism when it had no relation to the job you were mocking? And while the black guy in the room most likely won't say anything, would he not say anything if he was just an anonymous guy on the internet, and he had never met you? So you see how the trust and self-censorship of real-life does not apply online, or even in the general public. I do know where you are coming from about just stating observations--some people are so uncomfortable if you describe a black guy as being black, or a gay guy as being gay. Why? He's black and gay. It's not a bad thing--it's just a description. You don't bristle at being descibed as white and straight. But this is not really one of those cases, because you applied a judgement. That's the difference.

In many ways, it would be better if Filoni was really flaming--then, most people could agree, he IS effeminiate. But he's not, not really. I certainly don't see it--at most I would say he may have a mild speech impediment. So a large part of the problem comes down to the second anyone has any sort vague, super-mild, highly debatable "effeminate" quality, they get made fun of for it. That's probably a big part of it. Like, unless you fit right into traditional stereotypes of masculinity, you get mocked. If he was super-gay it would be okay to say he was effeminate as a description--although again, the bottom line is that you applied a judgement to that.

Basically, I guess what I am getting at is that you are conflating the over-moded TFN policies with any personal criticism of you. You're getting criticized here, and we basically have absolutely no mods here, we're all self-policed, and VERY un-PC, very un-family-friendly. It's not about PC police, it's about making a comment that is, essentially, a slur against anyone that does not act according to stereotypes of masculinity, and that includes a heck of a lot of straight and non-straight guys.

I still don't think they should have banned someone for months just for that. But it's probably because you had built up a rep by that point. Let it be a lesson, I guess. You're not one man up against the world, standing up for what's right, and saying that just makes you look stupid. You're one man, like many other people in the world, who make slurs against persecuted groups without meaning to or realizing it. It's not about freedom of speech or any nonesense like that. In fact, in places where freedom of speech is restricted, comments like that have traditionally been common and accepted. You're right about bullies in small things being too tolerated by society because we are too polite to say anything against them, but I hope you can take away a bit of a lesson here that you were on the other side of the fence this time. Because that's how easy it is, and that's why there are so many--most bullies don't realize what they are doing and don't think they are in the wrong, because they haven't examined what other people's lives are like.

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.

Hey, that film is no exception either. Basically, Kershner started making one movie, but Faye Dunaway had another movie in mind. Kershner seems to regard the film with some regret, which is probably why it's so uneven.

Try watching Return of a Man Called Horse, Flim-Flam Man, Raid on Entebbe or The Luck of Ginger Coffey for Kershner at his best. To be honest, I always liked Never Say Never Again, it was a fun movie and a generally entertaining throwback to the Connery days. Granted it wasn't great or anything, but I never understoood the criticism. It was the best Bond film in the 80s and better than anything that had been done since the mid-70s IMO.

Yeah, some of the dailies are in bad shape, although many are in better shape than some shots in the deleted scenes. There are one or two that stand out from the rest of the footage, but the shots are cool to see anyway so I'm just leaving them in. And the main movie footage I am using is the DC. The FC is too slick and the colouring is too altered.

Probably. There is a section where Robocop is programmed to only do good deeds or something like that. Honestly this film is a mess, and the only thing good is the really cool stop-motion effects by Phil Tippet. The last 20 minutes are worth watching the film, but only barely. I know Robocop 3 got lots of criticism, and to be fair I haven't watched either of these in like ten years, but from my memory I (surprisingly, because I heard it was awful) enjoyed the third film more than the second. Prior to that my only exposure to Robocop 3 was the Genesis/SNES game, which was not that good (the Robocop arcade game was cool from what I remember, but it never got ported). I remember Robocop 2 came out the same time as Terminator 2 and there were lots of knock offs too, so you had all these pseudo-heroic robot-killers sequels that vaguely appealed to children despite their R-rating from about 1989-1991.

Yes, overseas markets factor in, but they don't come free. Marketing, distribution and other costs like subtitles mean that it's not pure profit. The rule of thumb is usually that a movie only breaks even domestically when its gross doubles its budget because of marketing and distribution costs, and those ratios increase in foreign territories because of the extra export work. And even with that, the film hasn't been popular overseas. In fact, as someone pointed out, only something like 5000 people in the entire country of Finland went to see it. In Turkey it made $350,000, in Iceland $30,000, in Hong Kong $200,000, in Portugal $130,000. It's done okay in the usual countries like UK, Germany, France and Australia, so they will see maybe an additional 5 or 6 million in combined profit there, but otherwise when you factor the export costs it doesn't look like there is much money being made, and it's definitiely lost money in many smaller territories. Like I said, a small profit has been made overall, but only a small one. Lucas said they were going to cancel the sequels if this "doesn't work", and it hasn't worked, it may not be a flop if you measure that term by loss or gain, but whatever gains it's made have been rather small, and that's a shocking disappointment for something in the Star Wars brand. That brand was once thought of as golden, untouchable, on a pedestal few if any other brands had, and now it's a struggle to just make money off of it.

There was a rumour a couple weeks ago that the disappointing performance of TPM is making them consider releasing AOTC and ROTS a month apart, like they did in 1997. Just a rumour though.

TPM is not really a flop, because it stands to make a small profit, if flop equates to losing money. But AOTC has historically made less money than Episode I, even when it was regarded as better than TPM. Today, it is more often considered the worst of the bunch. So, it may stand have even less attendence than its original gross would suggest. That means that, if TPM walks away with $43 million or something, AOTC will probably pull in $35 million. I don't know if there is even any profit in that figure--it's likely a break-even.

Would that be enough to axe all of this? Normally, you look at the six films as a whole: yes, Episodes I and II may just break even, but Episode III will make decent money, and whatever losses you took up front on the first two will be made up for by Star Wars alone, and then Empire and Jedi are pure gravy. So in the end, you walk away ahead, because you shouldn't be measuring any film on its own if this is part of a series re-release. But Lucas is making veiled threats about not releasing the rest if TPM "doesn't work." While the term flop may be debated, TPM's release clearly has not worked. But I call bullshit. It's just an empty threat to goad people into seeing things they would rather not. And people called it. If anything, they will skip right to Star Wars. The reason being, by 2011 Lucas had already invested more money into converting ANH into 3D than the entire cost of the original film. I don't know how much of it has been converted, but they've been working on it since around 2007 and they've probably run up a $15 million bill by now. Lucas is too cheap to throw that down the toilet because no one showed up to see Jar Jar Binks.

It will also work equally well as part of a Bane or Shredder costume.