George Lucas: The Rolling Stone Interview of Lies - Page 2

Haven't read the article yet. Is this the one where he says he always intended Darth Vader to mean"dark father"? Which is obvious bullshit since Vader was a nobody in those first drafts of Star wars. A meaningless dignitary or General or something. It was just a cool sounding name that he bandied about through draft after draft like most of the names and concepts he has reused throughout the years.

From The Rolling Stone interview:


From Anakin Skywalker: The Story of Darth Vader:


Here's how I see it. George develops stories with the aid of his designers. He throws out vague descriptions for his artists to develop and then he picks up on certain concepts he likes and writes a story around them. Then a few years down the road he spins it that he always had theses stories and concepts planned out from the very beginning which obviously is not not the case. These stories have been crafted through collaboration with others from the very beginning.

Didn't 'Dark Shape' pretty much end this discussion with the quote from the article in 1978? Seems to me to be pretty conclusive evidence that the powers that be had it all lined out as of then.

They just want to fight you for arguements sake.

This is stupid (as are most of these rants). How can you not understand that perhaps George had the two scenarios which were publicly reported on in 1978 at least outlined while making ANH? But keep going on this. It's worth the effort.

The bottom line is: "So fucking what?"

Since we are the audience, does the creative process make any difference to our appreciation of the end result?

Does it make any difference to us if a film was over or under budget, if all the details were thought out years ago or made up on the spot and if the stars got along with each other? I think that the answer is no. The only thing that we should judge should be the movies we ended up watching.


By the way, its fantastically post-modern that Devin (rightfully) complained about the huge number of threads on Star Wars and ended up generating quite a lot of content himself.

Fixed.

Given that this is a filmmaker who suddenly turned the hero's love interest into his sister in the final reel, let's not get too carried away praising his narrative planning.

Guys Im afriad to say Devins right. What he said in his first post was that Lucas states in the interview (and he does ive read it) that he knew Vader was Lukes father from the beginning. The article later quoted is rumour AFTER the release of SW and before Empire.

Its been reported several times that he never knew if he was going to be able to make more than one film, thats why Star Wars has an ending but leaves some room for a sequal. The most logical conculsion based on the facts is that he didnt come up with the Vader/Luke connection until Empire. Watch the film again, Vader and Luke never actually meet or fight in any meaningfull way.

anyone believing that a single person deserves all the credit for a motion picture has no idea of how movies are made. It's a collaborative businees. Lucas is the driving force behind Star Wars but Star Wars is what it is because poeple like Ralph McQuarie, Larry Casdan, John Williams, Ben Burtt and the ILM crew contributed to it.

Star Wars is starting to become your real unhealthy obsession.

Devin is Don Murphy's doppleganger, except, of course, without all that cash.

The question is one of historical fact. When did George Lucas think this up? Answer (a) who cares, (b) no one knows for certain but sometime prior to 1978 as it was then reported in Future Magazine, (c) during ANH when George said he thought it up, (d) all of the above. I guess this analysis is an integral part of anyone's argument that Lucas was just making it up as he went along. To this I say, "whatever."

Read the rough drafts of Star Wars. They are easy to find online. My favorite bit from one of them is when Luke or Annikin Starkiller or whatever he was calling the young protaganist at the time is caught fucking a handmaiden in a closet. It's a kids movie!!!

For more on Lucas' "narrative planning", folks should head down to the local library and check out "The Making of Revenge of the Sith" book. I'm only 22 pages in, and already it's an amazing look at a very backwards process. McCallum even says outright that George's method for making a movie is completely backwards from anyone else--that he takes the ideas, goes out and shoots things, then tries to assemble a story in the editing room a la a documentary film.

Lucas throws fuel on his own pyre in the book too, talking about how he lets the narrative come together late in the game, and how it's all very flexible, and his artists and designers are given marching orders up front, then those designs have to be used to make the story come together later.

Seriously, the guy has really no solid idea of where he's going with the stories, and seemingly hasn't since... ever. I don't doubt that if he says he thought of the saga as a story of Luke and his father from the beginning that he did, but it's clear that he can abandon ideas at will, and add new ones in the editing room to serve whatever frankenstory he's putting together.

And I still love the movies, I'm just sayin'...

Devin, I don't doubt that Lucas pretty much made it all up as he went along. The thing is that I don't care, since this makes no difference to the movies. It neither enhances nor does it diminish my enjoyment of the films. As a member of the audience, I simply don't give a damn.

The topic of the thread is absolutely valid and you are pretty much right, but what sours the deal is that your basic conclusion is that Lucas is an asshole, which is very fanboyish of you and below the standards of debate that you've displayed in the past. It seems that you've become obsessed with dissing Star Wars and Star wars fans, which frankly has become condescending and is ultimately a waste of your time.

his methods are only coming into question because he's bringing them up. nobody cares when, of even if he came up with all these ideas. what we care about is that the proper credit is given and (perhaps more importantly) that we're not constantly being given contradictory information. hell, if lucas had at least created a consistent fiction that'd be something-- but he's constantly changing and revising his statements in interviews. and, far from the ridiculous notion that some have tossed out there in the past that he perhaps just doesn't remember, it's all the worse because he's spinning these things to suit his purposes. is there any doubt that if he made another trilogy down the line that covered luke as an old guy he would be saying; "ultimately the whole thing is about luke and how he blah blah blah..." or "it was 9 films all along. I just, uh... well I was keeping it a secret, you know?"

The real qustion is why do you feel you need that information ?

There are two (maybe more, but I'll talk about two) levels on which you can talk about/think about these movies. On the one hand, you can take what's on the screen and discuss it, enjoy it, hate it, whatever. That's done all over the place (see Anakin shoulda cut Obi-Wan discussions ad infinitum.) The other level is talking about the films as the endeavor of making the saga what it is, or isn't. People obviously don't care about most films this way, but they do care enough about Star Wars to wonder about the hows and whys and whos that have gone into making the thing tick (or not tick). There's no reason people can't talk about all of that, even very critically, and still like the films at face value.

The long and short of it is, Star Wars isn't just what's on the screen for a lot of folks. If it were, this thread would be down there with the "didn't Chronicles of Riddick suck? Yeah, it kinda did." threads. It's obvious that a lot of people feel somewhat betrayed by the newer films and they are trying to look for reasons why the legacy has been tarnished for them. Millions of people don't give a flying shit, don't post here on anywhere else about this, and just go on with their lives and say "yeah, it was alright," but for the few who want to peel back the curtains, why try to tell them not to?

Lucas was the one who framed his pulp sci-fi serial in the guise of A Great Mythology, and went to great pains to make connections and juxtapositions between the films, the imagery and the character arcs.

It's hardly out of the blue, now that it's all over, to take a long hard look at how the pieces fit (or don't fit) together and the process used to get there.

Then why dont you start a thread about it instead of derailing this one to make it fit your arguments?

I don't. he would have every right not to talk about it. the thing is he does talk about it when he's using the history of the creation of star wars as a promotional device. which I expect-- I don't think he's doing the interviews for his health. but with that comes some responsibility not to treat his public like mindless drones who will lap up everything he says. given the length of time and number of people involved in star wars I expect some contradictions to come up. often on film commentaries, for example, I'll hear a story about production that's in conflict with something I read in a magazine. doesn't bother me because I realize things get lost in translation, and people have different accounts of what happened or whatever. this is different. this is one guy changing his stories from year to year and expecting the public to buy it. it might not be vital to our lives, but as film fans it's annoying and insulting.

Because I want to study the mind of a man who goes from being the creative force behind many of my childhood influences to unleashing "Jedi Rocks" upon an unsuspecting fanbase. It's for scientific research.

These books on early SW development sound interesting. I'll have to pick it up for cheap one of these days.

Derail what? "Lucas lied, it's disgusting"? Are you serious?

There are (IMO) two ways to look at what Lucas has said and why he's saying it.

The Jedi side: Lucas loves the fanbase so much that those who see it as six films put together would be upset to realize that he was making it up as he went along. For the faithful, who love these films as a definitive statement on whatever, it's more important that they be seen as careful plotted, and that everything fits together as it should, while perhaps *wink wink* in the art of books it's allowed to be suggested that the game plan isn't totally as rigid.

The Sith side: Lucas is such a company man that he lies about his artistic process to give the impression that A) Everything's in it's right place and B) maybe make you rethink why the hell The Phantom Menace doesn't really evolve the plot at all. Instead of talking honestly about his SW process (which all evidence points to much of it being thrown at a wall to see what sticks, and changes, pretty much episode to episode), he continues to suggest the master plan, evoking The Wizard of Oz, or a different emperor and his new clothes.

Here's the thing for people like myself, who are not as pleased with the PT, if Lucas said "You know, sometimes I just try things out and it works or it doesn't" then that at least would be honest, and I'd feel like "Well, he's trying."

Devin actually hit it right on the head once in saying that the longer you've been attached to these films, the worse your sense of disillusionment and betrayal will be.

The problem is the people who want to allay that sense of betrayal can't come up with anything beyond "Quit being an asshole."

Frankly, if you can back up your shit with facts (as Devin has, repeatedly), I have no problem with it. Hate if you wanna hate, if it keeps you safe, if it makes you brave, so the song goes.

If you wanna battle back, don't ignore the facts that are right in front of you, no matter how much snark it's covered in.

And if you can't do that, then take comfort in the fact that you got something worth loving out of these films, nobody's overanalytical bullshit is going to change that, and walk away. That appreciation is far more valuable in the long run than trying to fight facts with opinion. Especially if the facts in question supposedly don't affect you.

What betrayal? Is it that difficult to stop and think that some people might actually enjoy the films and that your personal opinion is not gospel?

The lengths that some people will go to show that they are "superior" and "mature" are ridiculous.

As are the lengths to which some people will go to defend these films and their creator. If you think "haterz" run the monopoly on delusional superiority complexes, you're sorely mistaken. Or, to respectfully paraphrase you, "Is it really that difficult to stop and think that some people might have valid reasons for being upset about these films and your personal opinion is not gospel?"

It's a two-way street. Just sayin'.

And to address your comments on the supposed unimportance of the creative process in evaluating a person's like or dislike of these films, well, trying to uncover the reasons behind our dislike of the direction STAR WARS has taken really says more about our love of these films than our hatred. If a loved one suddenly turns to a life of violent crime, do you sit back and just say, "Who cares?" Maybe you do. I don't know. But because I've cared dearly about STAR WARS for nearly three decades, and it's served as such an inspiration in my creative life, I'm interested in exploring the reasons why I've lost the faith. And that search begins and continues with Lucas, since he created the whole thing...and continues to re-create it.

And that's where the saga starts to go downhill. The first movie and Empire are terrific pulp space opera pastiches. Once Lucas began to impose a grand mythopoeic structure on the storyline --i.e., having every other major character in the series be related to each other-- the movies began to suffer.

I've always wondered what motivated his change of attitudes. In the '77 Rolling Stone interview, he seems pretty knowledgeable about and affectionate for classic SF writers. (After all, he hired Leigh Brackett to write the Empire screenplay.) But by the '80s, Lucas was insisting that his real influences were world mythology, and that his use of genre imagery was simply a veneer to make it look new and exciting. It's like he was embarassed, as a former experimental filmmaker, to have earned so much money from making movies with goofy-looking robots and spaceships in them. Either that, or he was afraid of being sued for plagiarism by impoverished science fiction writers.

Please read the post above mine and tell me it's not idiotic. It pretty much says that if you like the films you are deluded.

Well, if anything...this thread reinforces what I've known for a long time, and good for a few laughs.

Thank you Chud.

Btw...who gives a care what Lucas does?

This crazy train just keeps picking up steam.

Actually, I don't like director commentaries.

Concerning Lucas, he's a spin-master, there's no doubt about that. He lied about Episodes VII-IX never being a part of the plan and when he developed Episode IV, he had no idea that Vader would be Luke's father. He didn't even know if he would be human or an alien, actually.

However, I can't understand how this affects the films we got. If Lucas had all six scripts written in 1976, would this make the end product any better or worse?

And I keep questioning Devin's timing and choice of threads he started and articles he's written lately. They all share one common theme: Star Wars is bad. Things got worse after the overall critical reaction and word of mouth for Sith came out as positive. And I don't get it, because Devin has been the catalyst for a lot of great discussions in the past and what I get now is that he's entered a "how dare they disagree with me" mode.

Devin,

Read the early drafts of Star Wars. Everything in the original trilogy is in Lucas' early versions in some form.

There were always children, twins, of destiny. In one of them Kane Starkiller was a slowly losing his body parts in the war and was becoming a cyborg. He was the father of the twins.

Of course when you watch A New Hope, there is no sign of these ideas. I understand that. I think he sort of abandoned them out of fear that A New Hope wouldn't make any money, but went BACK to them once an entire trilogy became a reality. So he did know, even though it may not have always been planned.

Get off Lucas' case and do some research.

http://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/scripts.htm

-bradius

This thread is the Ultimate Trainwreck.

Aaaaaaaall aboard!

I hate fanfic.

You don't understand how telling a grand interlinking mythic story, starting in the middle, inventing father/son and brother/sister bonds between major characters and then going back to the beginning to try and make it all fit together retrospectively by making up - or altering - things as you go could affect the end result?

I'd say the core reason many people feel - let's be generous - dissatisfied with the prequels is because they've been sold as a coherent and cohesive "full circle", the missing half of a pop myth that many of us grew up with, and what we actually got was a tonally confused and dramatically hollow freestyle ramble all the way back to the starting point.

The Star Wars mythology used to be a thing of mystery and wonder. Now it makes only a little more sense than the cock-handed mire that The X-Files became.

If you like the prequels, then why should any of this bother you? Why do you care what other people think of these films?

Maybe someone should go back in time and make sure they get hit by old man Baines' car instead of Lucas Sr.

I love the original trilogy, but I also think that Lucas is full of BS at times talking about his films..but I think you can say that about just about every film maker in Hollywood.
And I agree with Dan that the biggest BS of all was making a enomously fun tribute to the Sci Fi of the 30's into some mythology with alleged deep meanings a la Campbell.
You can find deep hidden meanings in a beer commercial if you have enough of a vivid imagination.
I have to admit one reason I soured on the whole "archtypes" thing is when the fanboys begun using "but they are archtypes" as an excuse for the badly written characters in the first two prequels.
And it started the whole thing of fanboys trying to pass themselves off as intellectuals,which has become a plague on the internet.
The "Matrix" fans might be the worst offenders here,but the SW extreme fans are not far behind.
Having said that, it is always fun to watch Devin get the die hard SW fans worked up, though....and he damn well knew that would happen when he posted this.
For my money I think that the final form any of the SW films took bears only a slight resembelance to what Lucas had in mind when he started..but that is not unusual in film making, and is not in itself a fault.
I just wish Lucas would be more honest about it.
For Instance, instead of denying there were never a pt 7,8, and 9, he should just say that he has decided not to make them...a perfectly legitimate move.

With a very few exceptions, Amen, brother.
Almost all of it a bunch of fans who think they have writing ability but could not come within a thousand miles of actually doing something good enough to get published in the real world.
The only fanfic I have really enjoyed in the humorous stuff, which is more of a parody then real fan fic.

Funny how Devin gets all the flak about being a Star Wars hater but no one seems to pick up on Nick changing is view of ROTS to negative.

A New Hope, as a standalone movie works just fine as a fairly slavish fairy tale using Campbell as a guide. Everything since then has been an attempt to stretch that story into something more, without ever really having a clear idea of what that "more" might be.

It's like the Brothers Grimm deciding to write Cinderella 2 and Cinderella 3, then deciding that the Fairy Godmother is to blame for the Wicked Stepsisters evil ways, and having one of them be her mother...

And then going back and writing another three Cinderella stories to set all of that groaning exposition up.

You've been rifling through my unpublished scripts.

Nick is not constantly starting threads or writing articles dishing Star Wars. It's his right to change his mind or hate the movie. Just as it is Devin's right. Becoming obsessed with proving others wrong is the silly part.