Ahh, very good. I see that TheForce.net got its hands on the scoop before MakingStarWars.com, RebelsReport.com and JediNews.co.uk have even posted it.
Star Wars Rebels Season Two (spoilers)
- Thread starter CorporalCaptain
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Ahh, very good. I see that TheForce.net got its hands on the scoop before MakingStarWars.com, RebelsReport.com and JediNews.co.uk have even posted it.
For as much crap as Lucas gets as a screenwriter it's amazing how many lines from those movies are embedded in our consciousness.
The Toshi Station line got laughs from the whole audience who had probably heard it a hundred times at the first SE screening I went to.
Actually, that's largely because Lucas asked his American Grafitti co-writers, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, to do an uncredited dialogue polish on the final draft.
http://dejareviewer.com/2013/06/11/10-unsung-heroes-who-saved-star-wars/
Huyck and Katz would go on to write Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as well as Howard the Duck, which Huyck also directed. So not everything they wrote turned out so well.
^Eight year old me certainly liked 'Howard the Duck'. Present day me....not so much.
Didn't Guinness stipulate in this contract that he had would be allowed to re-write his own lines because he thought the dialogue was bloody awful?
And that's really the key here: Lucas isn't a bad screenwriter so much as bad at writing dialogue. Admittedly that's like a composer who can't write sheet music to save his life, but can still turn out some amazing material.
On the subject of re-writes and polishes, I think I remember reading back when the prequels were under-way that he'd had Carrie Fisher take a run at polishing the romance dialogue in AotC. If true it apparently did bugger all good, or it was somehow worse before she got her hands on it...or he threw out her pass.
Didn't Guinness stipulate in this contract that he had would be allowed to re-write his own lines because he thought the dialogue was bloody awful?
And that's really the key here: Lucas isn't a bad screenwriter so much as bad at writing dialogue. Admittedly that's like a composer who can't write sheet music to save his life, but can still turn out some amazing material.
On the subject of re-writes and polishes, I think I remember reading back when the prequels were under-way that he'd had Carrie Fisher take a run at polishing the romance dialogue in AotC. If true it apparently did bugger all good, or it was somehow worse before she got her hands on it...or he threw out her pass.
Except that all his big ideas are just pastiches of the stories he liked as a kid, or recreations of his own youth experience (American Grafitti). Lucas's entire career, aside from THX 1138, is an exercise in nostalgia. The only real innovations in his work are in filmmaking technique.
Nah, Christopher's right. Just ask him.
I'm not saying Star Wars wasn't a good idea, just that it wasn't a particularly innovative one. Lucas was good at turning homage to the past into effective movies -- at least when he had the good judgment to guide and coordinate the efforts of other talented people toward those ends rather than mistakenly believing he could do it all himself -- but that doesn't change the fact that homage to the past was the basis of most of his work.
Not particularly innovative, compared to what?!?
"Homage to the past" could be used to describe 95% of all popular art in history. That doesn't mean none of it was innovative.
Good grief.
Good grief.
Of course all creativity draws on the past, but there's a difference between drawing on it as a source of ideas and building an entire career on nostalgia. Lucas is good at nostalgia. That's not intrinsically bad; it's just the particular niche where he's specialized.
And I feel much the same about Gene Roddenberry. He was never an innovator, just a popularizer of pre-existing ideas -- the difference being that he drew on ideas from prose science fiction, while Lucas drew on ideas from the movies and serials of his childhood. And both Roddenberry and Lucas were better as collaborators and coordinators of others' talent than as solo creators, but both took far more credit for their creations than they were really entitled to. (And yes, Lucas is still alive, but it's more convenient to use the past tense collectively.)
And I feel much the same about Gene Roddenberry. He was never an innovator, just a popularizer of pre-existing ideas -- the difference being that he drew on ideas from prose science fiction, while Lucas drew on ideas from the movies and serials of his childhood. And both Roddenberry and Lucas were better as collaborators and coordinators of others' talent than as solo creators, but both took far more credit for their creations than they were really entitled to. (And yes, Lucas is still alive, but it's more convenient to use the past tense collectively.)
