George Lucas: The Rolling Stone Interview of Lies - Page 5

In one of the earlier posts someone mentions Luke remembering his father, as he knew him, therefore invalidating the whole plan thing. Lucas has been known to clean up his story after the fact, which the whole 12, 9 six movie thing kinda proves.

Of course this whole debate asks two truly important questions:

1) Why does George feel that he must have had the whole thing planned out beforehand?
2) Why do his fans feel the need to believe that?

I think the answer to the first question is that when you're cinema's greatest mythmaker (c) it helps your own mythology to believe that everything is as according to plan. Or, to paraphase Liberty Valance, it's better for him and the fanbase to "Print the legend."

The second is more tricky. Perhaps it's that fans have to believe Lucas has a plan because then it invalidates the possibility of weakness in the films. It opens doors to what could have been. Had people enterted this thread and gone "That's George" that'd be one thing.

I think it's partially that with movies like this that were so significant in our childhood, we can't help but want them to have some sort of foundation to them. We want to believe that they're for the ages and have always existed, as it seems the Arthuriad or the Odyssey have always existed.

We don't want to believe that these stories we've come to know and love are not concrete and are subject entirely to Lucas' whims. I think this also plays into the idea that he "owes" us the original trilogy in its original form on DVD - as if he's just a provider of this stuff, rather than the creator of it. It's that weird sense of shared ownership that I think comes from believing this is some sort of shared phenomenon rather than the work of a guy who made a lot of it up as he went along - as most artists do, to some degree.

This concept occurred to me a couple weeks ago when this fellow I met said that he liked ROTS because it stuck pretty close to the book. He wasn't kidding, either. This guy was interested enough in Star Wars to read the novelization before seeing ROTS, but not interested enough to discover that these movies were not based on a series of books. Perhaps this plays into the idea that some of us consciously or subconsciously want these movies to be more than they are.

He's a journalist???

The only thing that matters there is that it was written way before Jedi, when we see alien Jabba. Why else would he be an alien in the comic book but not in the movie, just coincidence? What's the most likely explination?

[quote]When were the Lucas interviews that the page cites conducted? It seems pretty unlikely to me that they'd deck this guy out in a costume if the intent was to somehow replace him later.

What costume? The fur? It seems more likely that if they planned for him to be some weird alien and didn't have the movie to do it, they put a fat guy with some fur on him, film him and then later replaced him. What's so weird about that?

The alien Jabba in the comics and the quote from the script suggest otherwise.

Your "logic" is, since Lucas has exageratted items related to his movies, everything he says is suspect so anything that doesn't square with your view of things requires DNA evidence. Yeah, makes sense.

BTW when was this drawing done?

For my I own good (and your collective scrutiny), I have worked out a recapitulation of the thread up to this point (I admit that something is lost in the condensing, but there would be no need to condense if that were not the case):

• "George Lucas is a LIAR (from a certain point of view)!"
• "No he's not (from a certain point of view)!"
• "I can prove it!"
• "No you can't!"
• I can prove it with this BOOK, which you will have to purchase if you wish to prove that I have proven nothing (from a certain point of view)!
• "I'm not buying a book just to prove you wrong (from a certain point of view)!"
• "Then The Emperor (who is, I say, standing naked before us) has already won."
• "Fine, I'll buy the stupid BOOK!"
• "Fine!"
• "I finally bought and read the BOOK which you said I would have to buy if I wished to prove that you have proven nothing (from a certain point of view)."
• "And?"
• "You have proven nothing. I can prove it with this BOOK!"
• "No you can't."
• "Can, too."
• "Prove it."
• "I just did."
• "You call that proof?"
• "I do (from a certain point of view)."
• "I don't (from a certain point of view)."
• "Why you hatin'?"
• "I'm not hatin'. Why you hatin' my hatin'?"
• "A ha! So you admit to hatin'!"
• "I do not!"
• "If you're not gonna own up to hatin', then, surely, the probity of your claim that George Lucas is a LIAR is questionable, indeed."
• "What false math figured that sum, Curr?"
• "Who you callin' Curr, Whoreson?"
• "I'm callin' you a curr. I'm callin' you a curr and a LIAR!"
• "So now I'm a curr and George Lucas?"
• "Only if you admit to being a LIAR, Curr!"
• "Why should I admit to so faulty a logical construction? Just because you think all George Lucases are LIARS does not mean that all LIARS are George Lucas."
• "So you admit that all George Lucases are LIARS?"
• "I said 'just because you think.'"
• "I know what you said. It's right there--plain as purple crayon! You said 'I'm a curr and George Lucas.'"
• "That's taking what I said out of context."
• "Like you've never taken anything out of context? I'd like to remind you that you did as much when you cited the source that I said you would have to purchase if you wished to prove that I had proven nothing."
• "There! You just said you had proven nothing!"
• "Regardless of what I had proven, I have just proven something."
• "Oh yeah? What's that?"
• "George Lucas is a LIAR (from a certain point of view)!"
• "No he's not (from a certain point of view)!"

* * *

I guess we're just going to have to confront George about this the next time he comes over for scones. That, or you could just take my great uncle's napkin's word for it.

Filmmakers exhibiting human fallibilities: who’d have thunk it?

You know i dont think that is a goiter. I think an alien creature killed George Lucas years ago and settled into his body. Look at it, its all weird. Its wearing George's face as a head damn it! Thats explains EVERYTHING. SOmeone go check Spielberg.....

I looked it up and I made a mistake on my publication date. I said it was published in 1978. The first issue was actually published in July of 1977 (http://www.wheelon.com/comics/marvel...ssues_1-10.htm). Given that publication dates for periodicals are usually a month or two ahead of time this means that it was on newstands by May or June, coinciding with the release of the movie. I tried to find some information on how far in advance the artists began working on the adaptation, but came up short. What I do know is that the adaptation for The Empire Strikes Back is more consistent with the October 24, 1978 Fourth Draft Shooting script than the finished film as both versions feature such dialogue as "son of a jumping" and
And the depiction of Yoda is more like the older production art than the finished puppet.

I couldn't quite figure that one out myself. The oldest source that I could find offhand was the 1983 documentary From Star Wars to Jedi. It's unclear if it was done at the time of the first movie or during the pre-production phase of Return of the Jedi. If you take a closer look at it Salacious Crumb is sitting on Jabba's tail in the drawing which leads me to believe that it was done later.

But let's just assume that initially during production, Lucas had not intended to matte in a stop motion creature over Declan Mulholland. For all intents and purposes this was supposed to be Jabba the Hutt in his final form, an Irish version of Norm from Cheers wearing a furry vest. This would mean that Lucas would have considered the scene finished at that time. Why would he have then decided to cut the scene out only to immediately give interviews saying that he had wanted the scene there, but had to abandon it due to budget and scheduling limitations?

Because he decided mid-production that the scene sucked? Because the scene was fairly unnecessary since it's more-or-less a rehash of the Greedo scene? Because he decided, after filming that scene, that Jabba shouldn't just be a fat guy?

I think it's entirely possible that the artist on the comic was working off the script, came to the Jabba scene, called Lucas after he'd decided to excise the scene, and asked "what does Jabba look like?" Lucas, not necessarily thinking that we'd eventually see Jabba onscreen, says, "Oh, he's an alien. Use one of the designs from the cantina. Whatever."

Why to cut? The scene is dramatically redundant. We've already learned everything we need to know from the Greedo scene. (as noted above)

Why admit the scene existed? When interviewers and fans ask "What about Jabba?", how great to be able to say "Oh, we got more. Stay tuned."

Why put the scene back in, despite the fact that it was clearly not conceived or shot with a huge, immobile, slow-talking slug in mind? Because Harrison Ford got all famous-- how great to be able to say "Psst. More Ford. And he's still young and all. Pay up."

I'm not saying he could have planned it that way. He was just making use of available resources.

This "explination" reminds me of the old Marvel "no-prizes" Stan Lee used to write about, anybody remember those?

I do. A writer or artist would goof up a scene, and after they caught the mistake, the reader who came up with the best explanation for why it worked got the "No-Prize". They published a whole comic of famous Marvel goofs. My favorite was a Captain America line:

"Only one of us is leaving this room under his own steam...AND IT WON'T BE ME!!!"

Common civility - ignored by Devin.

The redundant parts of the scenes are very specifically this exchange:
Which is very similar to the exchange between Han and Greedo a few minutes earlier.
To say that the Jabba scene was cut because of this redundancy assumes that the Greedo scene in the final film was not rewritten and reshot. Parts of the Greedo scene were in fact reshot late in the production primarily because Lucas wasn't happy with the Greedo mask the first time and also very likely to use the dialogue that was going to be lost with the deletion of the Jabba scene.

In fact, the original cut of the Greedo scene (which can be downloaded here http://starwarz.com/tbone/cut_scenes...na_lostcut.htm) does not contain this dialogue. I've transcribed it here.
And this could very well be true. On the day of the shoot, Declan Mulholland was supposed to be the face of Jabba the Hutt. But immediately thereafter Lucas decided that the character needed to be more exotic. However nobody's providing any evidence to support that particular conclusion. The greater weight of the evidence supports Lucas' claim that he had always intended for Jabba to be a creature.

At the very least, Occam's Razor requires an analysis of evidence. Start providing some.

The fact that Mulholland is in full costume suggests that he was supposed to be in the final cut. Otherwise, why design the costume at all? Why put him in it? Why use an actor at all, instead of just some random body on the set that Lucas could have overlaid with whatever effect he wanted later? Could Lucas have gotten this far into the production without a solid idea of how an alien could be inserted later, and this only occured to him after wasting time shooting the scene? That doesn't sound too likely to me.

Or are you saying that Lucas always intended Jabba to be an alien, except for that one day of shooting where he said, "Oh, fuck it! Let's just cast some fat character actor to save some cash!" Then, after seeing the footage, he realized it was a terrible idea? Conceivable, but not particularly more likely.

I don't see how more of the evidence supports Lucas' claim, unless you only consider evidence that originated after the release of Star Wars, at which point Lucas may have changed his mind. Since this whole thread is about Lucas' revisionism, I don't think anything he said or information he released after the fact is something to build a case on.

When devin runs out of things to say, he always goes into "spell checker" mode. He never admits he's wrong, and he loves to revert to his childish spell checking mode, what a consistent guy. Great!

It's open for debate how much designing went into the costume. We don't know if John Mollo worked day and night to come up with a costume design he felt worked for the character, submitted it to Lucas who made suggestions for revisions, and so on until a final piece of clothing was finished. Or it could have been something that was just lying around that happened to fit the actor.

This particular bit of evidence in support of the conclusion that Lucas intended for this to be the final version of the Jabba costume is weakened by the evidence that it was not apparently communicated to those doing the adaptations. His "full" costume does not match anything that was in either the Marvel comic or Alan Dean Foster's novelization (which was released in 1976, at least 6 months before the movie's release). The Marvel comic matches pretty closely on just about everything except Jabba, which seems to indicate that the production had sent adequate sketches on everything it was sure about. If they had spent a lot of time on the Jabba costume, why not send it?

Foster's description is fairly vague:
This does not say if Jabba is human or alien. However one thing that was missing from Mulholland's costume was the scar makeup.

Probably because he was looking for someone whose body language and mannerisms could be used as a reference. Twenty years later he would go through the trouble of casting real actors to play Jar Jar Binks and Sebulba, actors whose bodies would not be seen onscreen, not even underneath a costume, but whose performances would instruct the way the animators created their counterparts.

Additionally, Ahmed Best actually wore a full costume on the set of Episode I even though it was known that it would never be seen. I don't understand the methodolgy behind it, but maybe it's for the actor's own psychology. Maybe Mulholland felt better as a performer if he actually had some clothes to put on other than what he wore the day he drove to work.

Well Lucas wasn't 100% sure that any of the effects could be pulled off. For most of the movie he was travelling through uncharted territory. There's a familiar refrain widely known among directors: "We'll fix it in post." This means that sometimes that a director doesn't always know if something is really going to work or not. You just shoot it and hope that you can make it work later. Shooting this scene most likely would not have presented a monumental waste of time. For one, the set was already there for other fairly important scenes. This one scene probably only took about half a day to shoot as it contains only about 5 or 6 setups. If he could make it work in post, then he's got the footage. If not, well cut scenes are a normal part of the process. There isn't a film that doesn't have some.

But this is not to say that he didn't know how to make it work, but that there was simply not enough time or money to do so. This is something about film production a lot of people don't realize. Sometimes scenes that are in the script don't get shot because they run out of time in the schedule and have to move on to other things. In this case the footage was in the can, there just wasn't enough time and resources in the post production process to complete it.

Just so we're all on the same page, nothing about this argument actually matters right?

*confused Obi-Wan-on-Kamino voice, awkwardly misplaced stresses* That's . . . why we're here.