Another George Lucas Star Wars live action TV show thread!
- Thread starter GhostFaceSaint
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He'll have to make it first, and it's anybody's guees as to wiether that's gonna happen.
I don't know. I think the main reason the Young Indy series didn't catch on, despite its virtues, is that, on a fundamental level, it wasn't what people expected from Indiana Jones.
You hear the name "Indiana Jones," you expect the sort of action you got in the movies, not well-produced history lessons about Mata Hari or the Red Baron or whomever.
Ditto for STAR WARS. If the tv show isn't as spectacular and exciting as the movies, people are going to be disappointed and tune out.
No one quite knew what to make of it at the time. If memory serves, the ratings were decent enough, but the money spent is what did it in.
In any event, I suspect that the brand of Star Wars will be more of a ratings smash than Indy would be.
a) It will be a blody success initially easily outdoing anything shown on TV save for the Superbowl maybe but later it will depend on the quality of the show itself to sustain ratings
b) It depends how much George will be involved.. if he takes full reign like with the movies i think it'll be bad. I've said it countless times.. George Lucas is a bad writer and director but one hell of a producer/visual artist. Just keep him away from creative decisions but that's impossible to do with a guy who owns the entire thing
c) Lucas' pockets are very deep.. he could finance this entire thing easily by himself with a level of production unseen before on TV but the question is will he? It would also take ages to produce the CGI for a show such as this so if done like a movie they may quit principal shooting up to a year ahead to give the SFX guys enough time to do it properly.
Personally i've got little hopes for this show.. i'll probably break 40 (which is 5 years away) before i see anything on TV if ever. Personal preference would be something akin to the style of Firelfy. I've always thought that Mal Reynolds would be a very realistic Han Solo and it would make for an awesome show to be set in the dark underbelly of the Star Wars universe with the occasional glamour scenes of upper Coruscant when the characters have to deal with the upper percentage of the population.
b) It depends how much George will be involved.. if he takes full reign like with the movies i think it'll be bad. I've said it countless times.. George Lucas is a bad writer and director but one hell of a producer/visual artist. Just keep him away from creative decisions but that's impossible to do with a guy who owns the entire thing
c) Lucas' pockets are very deep.. he could finance this entire thing easily by himself with a level of production unseen before on TV but the question is will he? It would also take ages to produce the CGI for a show such as this so if done like a movie they may quit principal shooting up to a year ahead to give the SFX guys enough time to do it properly.
Personally i've got little hopes for this show.. i'll probably break 40 (which is 5 years away) before i see anything on TV if ever. Personal preference would be something akin to the style of Firelfy. I've always thought that Mal Reynolds would be a very realistic Han Solo and it would make for an awesome show to be set in the dark underbelly of the Star Wars universe with the occasional glamour scenes of upper Coruscant when the characters have to deal with the upper percentage of the population.
It seems to be absolutely vital that Lucas has some smart, talented collaborator that he respects enough that he'll listen to outside advice. Otherwise, he makes the most amazingly obvious and fundamental writing mistakes. For the cartoon series, he seems to have found that element in Dave Filoni because the writing and characterization for The Clone Wars is everything that the PT should have been, but wasn't. Without that element of adult supervision, Star Wars is a disaster. With it, it can be fantastic!
The danger is, would Filoni also work on the live action series? If he specializes in animation, maybe not. He'd probably be busy anyway (the animation division is so successful, why would a winning team ever be broken up?) Maybe Lucas has learned his lesson and will make sure he has adult supervision on everything he does, but the danger is still there.
I remember hearing rumours George Lucas had this intensive hiring process of a team of seven or eight writers for the TV show... I don't think I ever heard any names but I got the impression he was courting TV professionals at an international level or something like that.
Do we even know who and if Lucas hired anybody and if they wrote any screenplays?
Do we even know who and if Lucas hired anybody and if they wrote any screenplays?
Yeah, I recall that. Here's what Woookiepedia has to say on the matter:
So, if this spiel's to be believed, there's between six and seven writers who have already written a ton of stuff and they remain completely anonymous. I'd find it hard to believe they'd still be anonymous if they were indeed staffers from BSG, Lost or Heroes, but hell, I could be wrong there.
So, if this spiel's to be believed, there's between six and seven writers who have already written a ton of stuff and they remain completely anonymous. I'd find it hard to believe they'd still be anonymous if they were indeed staffers from BSG, Lost or Heroes, but hell, I could be wrong there.
I think I heard Simon Pegg say once he was asked to write an episode or two but turned it down also.
As for the secrecy thing, I think Lucasfilm does a good job with it. I remember an interview with a new writer/producer on Clone Wars a few months back when the first episode he wrote aired, and he said he wrote it like 2-3 years ago and that they already have most of season 4 in the can and that they're in the middle of season 5 production during the broadcast run of season 3.
As for the secrecy thing, I think Lucasfilm does a good job with it. I remember an interview with a new writer/producer on Clone Wars a few months back when the first episode he wrote aired, and he said he wrote it like 2-3 years ago and that they already have most of season 4 in the can and that they're in the middle of season 5 production during the broadcast run of season 3.
Oh, to a point.
My point is if they'd hired any writers we knew about - say Bryan Fuller, or Michael Taylor, that knowledge might have perlocated around the internets. Obviously if Russell T. Davies disappeared off to scribble some Star Wars stuff, that might have been news. It seems far more likely Lucas has hired relatively unknown writers to script this stuff.
Which might not be a bad thing. Plus is would probably make it easier for Lucas to get a piece of the action on the scripts, too.
Alex
It may be dangerous for Lucas to hire known writers who already have their own distinctive style. Star Wars is a very odd duck. It needs to be simplistic in the style of old Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon serials - I always envision "good" Star Wars dialogue as being the kind you could fit on a title card of a silent movie - but as more sophisticated ideas of politics, personality and even metaphysics have been expanded upon, these elements have to be incorporated without upsetting the streamlined style.
The PT is a great example of how easily this can go wrong. Lucas should hire unknown but imaginative writers and assign a showrunner to exert a very strong hand on keeping the style reigned in to a very high degree of consistency, to keep the simplicity from veering into stupidity, or the more sophisticated elements from becoming too dominant and ruining the streamlined style.
The PT is a great example of how easily this can go wrong. Lucas should hire unknown but imaginative writers and assign a showrunner to exert a very strong hand on keeping the style reigned in to a very high degree of consistency, to keep the simplicity from veering into stupidity, or the more sophisticated elements from becoming too dominant and ruining the streamlined style.
Maybe some of the book writers? Granted, not of all of them could work on TV, although there have been a few writers such as Michael Reaves who have done some TV work.
I can actually see RTD working out....he does epic stuff on a TV budget pretty well.
BTW anybody know what happened with the Seth Green project (A comedy Star Wars series of some sort?)
I can actually see RTD working out....he does epic stuff on a TV budget pretty well.
BTW anybody know what happened with the Seth Green project (A comedy Star Wars series of some sort?)
To me it seems like Spielberg and Lucas come from a different time.
Whether it's Indiana Jones or Star Wars they have a level of security that I don't normally hear about with other TV shows/movies.
For "Crystal Skull" everyone signed a confidentiality agreement on discussing the script.
Same time for the Star War's prequels.
It seems like a futile effort since none of those movies were groundbreaking or all that surprising.
I would bet book writers have more distinctive and idiosyncratic styles than movie or TV writers. They're used to playing in their own sandbox rather than having to collaborate on a team, and stick to a pre-defined way of telling a story.
Some of the ANH Tatooine material was shot in America.
Wasn't that just interiors, or did they actually shoot some of the desert stuff in America?
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