Lucas: "I sold Star Wars to White Slavers"

[Kor]

Mister Lucas would have more credibility on the creative approach to the Star Wars films if he hadn’t subjected us to the heinous artistic crimes known as Episodes I - III and completely suppressed the theatrical OT in favor of unwatchable "special edition" travesties chopped up and crammed with pointless shoehorned CGI gobbledygook.

Kor

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I think most critics secretly wish for the kind of movies they like to become popular. That's why their tone shifts to hyperbole whenever anything they like achieves any commercial success. The way people on critical music websites talk about freaking Kanye makes your head explode.

There's really no reason a film can't be both smart and action packed. If George Miller can do it, so can JJ Abrams especially with the source material he's been blessed with.

Award season isn't the best time to see smart, challenging films anyway. Awards usually go to the melodramatic, topical films. I'd take dumb well characterized films over that. The actual challenging films trickle out through arthouse cinemas in the spring and summer.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

As much as I enjoyed The Force Awakens - and as much as I like nuTrek - this writer nails most of what's going on and what the shortcomings of modern franchise film production are.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hil...the-force-awakens-stinks-20151226-column.html

I don't think he nailed anything, other than being able to state his own opinion in a major publication. Not that I completely disagree with the piece, despite the overabundance of weasel words ("some say that...", "it is said that...") and overly patronizing tone ("bless your heart"), but his clearly subjective conclusions are no more enlightening than the hundreds of others I've read here.

I don't think Disney was playing it safe in having an entirely new group of writers and producers with no past experience in Star Wars continue the franchise. Yes, Abrams has a decent track record in motion pictures, but the majority of his television shows have been mediocre, or cancelled right away.

If Disney wanted to play it safe, they would have stuck with what worked in the past - and despite the negative opinions of the prequels among many hardcore fans, they were a huge success - and kept Lucas on board. This writer, who calls TFA "professionally mass produced" seems to have forgotten how the prequels felt like a lengthy commercial for toy light-sabers. Did he forget how closely TPM followed the formula of the original films, shoehorning R2 and C3P0 into the story, or how Clones desperately wanted to be Empire? Did he forget how flat these films felt, shuffling characters from one set-piece to the next like an assembly line?

No, he probably didn't. More likely he knows that a controversial article with a clickbait headline means more views.

A safe move for Disney would have been to keep Lucas on board, and push out new movies in a similar manner to the prequels. Maybe bringing on new writers, or a fresh director, but giving Lucas a good amount of control, keeping his name attached to the project.

Regarding Lucas' sellers remorse, I have little sympathy. If he had run his company differently, giving fans a steady dose of new Star Wars material while bringing in younger, newer writers and directors with the vision to create new properties, Lucasfilm could have been in a position to rival Disney. His decision to limit the amount of Star Wars material, not explore new properties beyond the 80's, with Labyrinth, Willow, and Howard the Duck (ugh), and his decision to keep such a tight leash over the company is what ultimately led to Lucasfilm being purchased for the Disney equivalent of pocket change.

 

[Mach5]

There's really no reason a film can't be both smart and action packed. If George Miller can do it

I hope you're talking about Happy Feet.

 

[davejames]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/george-lucas-says-he-sold-%e2%80%98star-wars%e2%80%99-to-%e2%80%98white-slavers%e2%80%99/ar-BBo3Y9h?ocid=spartanntp

Jeez, all these articles today are really starting to get on my nerves. Having actually watched the full Charlie Rose interview, Lucas doesn't sound nearly as nasty or negative as these writers are making him out to be.

The comment about TFA being "retro" was said more like "Yeah they wanted to go more retro with the movie than I did, but whatever, that's ok, it's their thing now." It was not some harsh criticism of the movie or JJ like they're portraying it as.

And the comment about "white slavers" was said much more in jest as well, and it was clear it wasn't meant to be some kind of attack on Disney.

 

[USS KG5]

I enjoyed the Force Awakens overall, It's like Abrams Star Trek Films, It has it's way with you in the theater, but then the next day, You realize that it wasn't as amazing as you thought it was.

That's the horrible fate watching a sequel to anything, even a really good one can never have the cultural impact of the original.

Star Wars was the Beatles of blockbuster event cinema. It didn't do anything spectacularly original as a part, but as a sum of its parts it was utterly unique and defined its whole industry.

Id struggle to name any film or trilogy of films that has been both so important to the history of film and so popular. Without Star Wars we likely would not have had multiplex cinemas!

So while in our lifetimes there will probably be another Beatles (simutaneously both incredibly popular and incredibly good) we will also never have another original Star wars trilogy. All we can hope for is a trilogy of damn good films, and Force Awakens, IMHO, is a great start!

 

[Set Harth]

Having actually watched the full Charlie Rose interview, Lucas doesn't sound nearly as nasty or negative as these writers are making him out to be.

At one point he said something nice about the film; the hate brigade spun it as a passive-aggressive attack. At least they're consistent.

I could swear I heard sighs from the audience when Ken Leung started talking about that oscillator on the Starkiller base.

Some of that was probably just because it was Ken Leung.

 

[davejames]

Seller's remorse (in that Mr. Lucas now thinks he sold it to Disney for too low a price)?

IDK - For me, had Mr. Lucas fully written, produced and directed this film; I probably would have waited to see the thing on cable. This film made money because we finally had what made "The Empire Strikes Back" a good film - a Director that wasn't George Lucas and who did script rewrites of lines that didn't fit the characters and who actually knew how to work and collaborate with said actors.

Yeah, as much as I might wish TFA were more daring and original, in the end I'm still glad it was Abrams who made this movie instead of Lucas.

Because while Lucas might have given us a newer story with more original ideas, it almost certainly would have been lacking in what is the most essential thing in my book, which is having real heart and emotion and compelling characters that you actually care about as they go on their journey.

And frankly what little we heard about Lucas's treatment never sounded that great or inspired to me anyway, with it being much more of a "next generation" type thing or soap opera about everyone's kids, with Han, Luke and Leia seemingly just hovering in the background as mentor figures (and probably not being used in nearly as interesting a way as Abrams used them in TFA).

 

[Set Harth]

And frankly what little we heard about Lucas's treatment never sounded that great or inspired to me anyway, with it being much more of a "next generation" type thing or soap opera about everyone's kids, with Han, Luke and Leia seemingly just hovering in the background as mentor figures

Actually, that sounds pretty close to what we got.

 

[davejames]

Maybe, but I get the impression Lucas would have been much more straightforward with the idea, with no mystery surrounding a missing Luke, or Han and Leia's son turning out to be the big villain who betrayed everyone, causing Han to run away and return to smuggling, etc.

And there would also be no mystery surrounding Rey's parentage, and Finn would just straight up be Lando's son probably.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

I suppose I can forgive the lack of originality in the plot because the characters were so great, the movie was very entertaining, the visuals really good and I just expect the next movie to be different.
If the next movie ends up being a remake of TESB I'm going to start getting annoyed I guess.

It's like poetry. It rhymes...

 

[Kor]

I think that TFA is the "A Beautiful Mind" of the Star Wars franchise.

(for better or worse )

Kor

 

[theenglish]

Seller's remorse (in that Mr. Lucas now thinks he sold it to Disney for too low a price)?

IDK - For me, had Mr. Lucas fully written, produced and directed this film; I probably would have waited to see the thing on cable. This film made money because we finally had what made "The Empire Strikes Back" a good film - a Director that wasn't George Lucas and who did script rewrites of lines that didn't fit the characters and who actually knew how to work and collaborate with said actors.

Yeah, as much as I might wish TFA were more daring and original, in the end I'm still glad it was Abrams who made this movie instead of Lucas.

Because while Lucas might have given us a newer story with more original ideas, it almost certainly would have been lacking in what is the most essential thing in my book, which is having real heart and emotion and compelling characters that you actually care about as they go on their journey.

And frankly what little we heard about Lucas's treatment never sounded that great or inspired to me anyway, with it being much more of a "next generation" type thing or soap opera about everyone's kids, with Han, Luke and Leia seemingly just hovering in the background as mentor figures (and probably not being used in nearly as interesting a way as Abrams used them in TFA).

I agree completely. TPM is my favorite prequel film because it was most successful in making its characters interesting. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Padme were all well acted, fleshed out characters. Anakin could have been played by a better actor, but maybe the fault lies in the editing room.

If Anakin in Clones was portrayed with a personality and a spark similar to what he had in TPM, and he and Padme's story had been one of on the run from bounty hunters rather than riding CGI creatures and giggling on Naboo the film would have been much better.

If the first act of Revenge had been Obi-Wan and Anakin tracking down Grievous WHILE the politics played out on Coruscant the movie would have been much better balanced.

None of the problems with the prequels were in the actual story, but in its execution.

I was much happier to have interesting and fun characters whose journeys I could buy into than with any of my experiences watching the prequels.

 

[Relayer1]

George knows he wouldn't have made the same bad decisions, poor calls, plot revisits and stupid story choices.

He's also blissfully oblivious to the fact that he'd make a lot of different bad decisions including writing the dialogue and casting actors with all the charisma and acting chops of the average tree stump.

JJ made all the same feckups he made on his other movies (he always will - it's inbuilt), but still delivered a more enjoyable movie than any of the prequel triligy.

 

[ConRefit79]

As much as I enjoyed The Force Awakens - and as much as I like nuTrek - this writer nails most of what's going on and what the shortcomings of modern franchise film production are.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hil...the-force-awakens-stinks-20151226-column.html

I agreed with the writer to. I'm not a big fan of the nu trek because they focus more on bigger, faster and formulas than story. Question is, when will everyone else get tired of it to?

 

[TRON JA307020]

Seller's remorse (in that Mr. Lucas now thinks he sold it to Disney for too low a price)?

IDK - For me, had Mr. Lucas fully written, produced and directed this film; I probably would have waited to see the thing on cable. This film made money because we finally had what made "The Empire Strikes Back" a good film - a Director that wasn't George Lucas and who did script rewrites of lines that didn't fit the characters and who actually knew how to work and collaborate with said actors.

Uh actually Lucas kind of did make the new film. Story wise anyway. Its pretty much a remake of ANH. He is seeing his ideas repeating and getting none of the credit and all of the criticism for trying something new with the prequels. I don't blame him in some ways.

 

[JRoss]

This film was fantastic. Superior to all the Prequel films, as well as better than RotJ. It was nice because it was basically Lawrence Kasdan redoing ANH in his own image. It also managed to hit just a few of the beats of the old EU and introduce some fantastic characters. Perfect? No, but then neither was the OT.

As a young child I was watching ESB on TV and found myself so engrossed with it that I actually thought Yoda was talking to me. Never happened before. Watching Rey onscreen, I was transfixed. She's my new favorite cinematic character from probably any film made since 2000. Outstanding writing, direction and acting.

 

[TRON JA307020]

George knows he wouldn't have made the same bad decisions, poor calls, plot revisits and stupid story choices.

He's also blissfully oblivious to the fact that he'd make a lot of different bad decisions including writing the dialogue and casting actors with all the charisma and acting chops of the average tree stump.

JJ made all the same feckups he made on his other movies (he always will - it's inbuilt), but still delivered a more enjoyable movie than any of the prequel triligy.

Well ROTS was pretty damn good. We can't say that anymore though because many fans got what they really wanted all along old style retro Star Wars with a similar story to ANH. They will never admit to that though.

 

[Kor]

Watching Rey onscreen, I was transfixed.

Oh yeah, me too. I think I'm smitten.

Kor

 

[TremblingBluStar]

Star Wars was the Beatles of blockbuster event cinema. It didn't do anything spectacularly original as a part, but as a sum of its parts it was utterly unique and defined its whole industry.

As much as I love Star Wars, I'm continually amazed at the exaggeration fans place on it's overall impact on society, or film making in general.

Id struggle to name any film or trilogy of films that has been both so important to the history of film and so popular. Without Star Wars we likely would not have had multiplex cinemas!

Multiplex cinemas became a thing in the 1960's, and greatly expanded in the early 1980's due in large part to competition with other forms of media growing, and consolidation in the industry.

So while in our lifetimes there will probably be another Beatles (simutaneously both incredibly popular and incredibly good) we will also never have another original Star wars trilogy.

Maybe not in our lifetime, but eventually. I'd personally say the early Pixar films (like Toy Story) did more to change the industry than Star Wars. Sure, we had a flash of cheap, Star Wars knock off films in the 80's, but how many animated films in the last 20 years have tried to be the next Toy Story?

In other words, Star Wars is not the be-all of cinema. It did not single handedly change film making as we know it. What it did was further evolve things that were already evolving, such as special effects technology, and the public's growing demand for merchandise.