Hero Complex interview with Lucas aged 39

The Hero Complex blog has pulled a 1983 interview with George Lucas out of the LA Times's archives. From the article:

Fans today can’t get enough of the imaginative universe George Lucas created, but in May of 1983, with “Jedi” finished and in theaters, a reflective Lucas seemed eager to put “Star Wars” behind him.

“There hasn’t really been one day in the last 10 years that I haven’t had to wake up in the morning and say, ‘God, I’ve got to worry about this movie,’ ” Lucas said in a 1983 story by Los Angeles Times reporter Dale Pollock, who interviewed  the filmmaker at his Marin County office. “Now I feel as if this huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders …. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have to think about it, especially if I knew what I was going to have to give up in order to get it.”

In the interview, pulled from Times archives, Lucas compared his “Star Wars” success (which amounted to some $70 million at the time) to being stuck on a speeder bike for 15 years, and he longed to touch ground, his films “finished and perfect,” and take some time off.

“The movie sort of grabbed me and threw me down and stomped on me,” said Lucas, then 39 (he turns 68 this month). “It’s like walking into the ring with Muhammad Ali without realizing what you’re doing. ‘Boxing? Sure, I punched around in college.’ But suddenly Ali is up against you. ‘Star Wars’ was the first punch — it knocked me across the ring and out the door and into the next field. I was stunned and knocked out cold and I still had to go 15 rounds. Well, now those 15 rounds are over, and I feel great. It’s like ‘Rocky’ — I survived it, but Muhammad is still the champion.”

LA Times Hero Complex: Star Wars Day memory: When George Lucas wasn't feeling the Force

Lucas confirms we were all greatly mistaken: Han *never* shot first

From an interview in The Hollywood Reporter:

THR: People can get fanatical about the movies — how does that make you feel? The puppet vs. CGI Yoda ruckus, and the who-shot-first, Han Solo or Greedo furor come to mind.

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Well, our mistake. Everyone who saw the movie, i.e. most people living in the free world in 1977, understood that Han had shot Greedo without provocation. But we were confused. In fact, though the film Lucas made showed us one thing that we all saw and understood the same way, something else altogether actually happened.

What Lucas seems to be saying is that a film is not the images and sound presented by the filmmaker to the public. Rather, a film is what the filmmaker later claims to have intended to have shown the public, whether he did in fact show it to the public or not. That is to say that the film has no independent existence; it lives only in George Lucas's mind.

The Hollywood Reporter: 5 Questions with George Lucas

Lucas letdown: southern Oregon's news source calls out the Phantom Menance

Perusing my copy of the Mail Tribune this morning ("Southern Oregon's News Source", in case you haven't heard), I came across Chris Conrad's take on the retirement of George Lucas and the re-release of the Phantom Menace. While it does not in any way qualify as news, it's nevertheless worth sharing:

I don't remember much about "Phantom Menace" the film. My recollections of that night veer toward the tactile experience of sitting in that packed theater with hundreds of "Star Wars" fans who were about to get their hearts burned right out of their chests, as if shot point-blank by a Clone Trooper's blaster.

I remember my heart soaring as the traditional "Star Wars" plot crawl began inching its way up the screen and into the firmament.

"Oh, man, this is gonna be good," I thought. "It's just how I remembered it as a kid."

My mouth broke into a dopey smile as John Williams' bombastic score pounded our ears.

That smile started its long, slow fade, and the initial rush subsided as I read the crawl, which included such information as:

"The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.

"Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.

"While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events ... "

Trade Federation? Taxation? Congressional debates? When the hell did "Star Wars" take plot cues from C-SPAN, I thought?

I remember that moment so well: opening night, first showing, queued up for an hour to get in, waiting forever for the trailers to run and the show to start. Then the crash of Williams' score, the howl of joy from the crowd. The Star Wars logo appears again, for the first time in sixteen years. Excitement could not be higher. And then...the opening crawl. Trade routes? Taxes? I began to sink in my chair. Or was the chair sinking? It occurs to me, not for the first time but in a profound, unsettling way, that this film could be horrible.

Follow the link for Conrad's full piece.

MailTribune.com: 'Star Wars' prequels are a Lucas letdown

Long NY Times piece on George Lucas

Head over to the New York Times for a long article on George Lucas. Mostly the story focuses on his new film, Red Tails, but there are some interesting comments from Lucas about Star Wars:

In the last decade and a half, Lucas has given “Star Wars” several “final” cuts. For the 1997 special edition, he made Greedo, a green-skinned alien, fire his blaster at Han Solo because Han’s murdering Greedo in cold blood — as the 1977 version had it — struck him as a violation of his own naïve style. For the new Blu-ray version of “Return of the Jedi,” Lucas added Darth Vader shouting, “Nooo!” as he seizes the evil emperor in the movie’s climactic scene. Lucas made the Ewoks blink. And so forth.

When fanboys wailed, Lucas did not just hear the scream of young Jedis; he heard something like the voice of the studio. The dumb, uncomprehending voice in his Socratic dialogues — a voice telling him how to make a blockbuster. “On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie,” Lucas says, referring to fans who, like the dreaded studios, have done their own forcible re-edits. “I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ ”

Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

New York Times: George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits

Unreality asks, Do you want more Star Wars movies from George Lucas?

Lucas: "I screwed up everything so you can have red stormtroopers."Unreality's Debate of the Day for 28 December 2011 continues to rage: "Would you want George Lucas to keep making Star Wars movies?"

As you would expect, the posts are expletive-laden and largely uninterested in basic principles of English grammar. But there are some gems nevertheless. I especially liked Diablo's response to Diva D's breathtakingly insane comment, "I could write an essay or two on the merits of the prequel trilogy".

Diva D…please explain to me the merits of Episode 1. That entire film is just an excuse to sell toys and video games. Space Alien Chinese people, who base their entire civilization on interspace trade, are isolating a planet filled with humans and minstrel show characterizations of black people, of which most of the story involves CSPAN inspired debates and the Jedi approval of slavery. Oh and of course the evil slave owner is a hooked nose flying Jew who’s own magical Jew powers protect him from the good powers of the white folks…er I mean Jedi. Oh and a small child, living in a situation that looks like he and the rest of the planet shits in buckets, managed to design and build a droid that would become the inter-galactic standard diplomatic robot, but apparently the child was too retarded to get him and his mom out of bondage…or point out to the Jedi that “rescued” him that leaving his mother in slavery is really fucked up and lazy.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Star Wars was in the title, it would have bombed. No one left the theaters after episode 1 thinking “WOW THAT WAS WORTH IT!”

Here's a snippet from another post I liked by Diablo:

Oh Hell NO! Who in their right mind would want Lucas to continue? ... The whole “who shot first” debate shows that George has zero concept of character development. He basically neuters the development of Han because George thinks his audience are idiots. Further along those lines, the single greatest scene in the films, where Lea is finally forced to express her love for Han, knowing this could be the last moment of his life, and Han utters that fantastic, sort of dickish, but perfectly for the character line “I know”…George hated that line. He fought like crazy to have the original dialogue he wrote put back in there.

Just watch episode 2. Hayden Christensen gets a lot of flack for his portrayal of Skywalker but no one…I mean no one at all, could have made that hackneyed dialogue that George wrote work. If you really watch Skywalker and Padtai hang out together, Skywalker comes off like Ed Gein. It makes NO SENSE that any woman would stick around with that dude.

(If you're wondering, as I was, who Ed Gein is, Wikipedia advises that he "was an American murderer and body snatcher" who "exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin". A somewhat unflattering comparison, then.)

By the way, there will be more Star Wars movies, no question. I doubt Lucas will make them, but when he's gone his business empire will be desperate to continue and will produce more films. They will even remake the original trilogy, some time around my 70th birthday. You heard it here first.

Unreality: Debate of the Day: Would You Want George Lucas to Keep Making Star Wars Movies?

David Fincher talks Star Wars

Collider.com has excerpts from an interview with David Fincher (director of Fight Club, The Social Network) in which he discusses his admiration of Empire and Star Wars generally. The article also features a rant (by the interviewer, not Fincher) against George Lucas's refusal to make the original cinematic release versions of his films available. 

Collider.com: David Fincher Talks Favorite STAR WARS Movie and Explains Why He Won’t Alter His Previous Films

Yoda now shilling instant soup in Japan

George Lucas's willingness to sell off his intellectual properties--and my boyhood's heroes--to the highest bidder, no matter how tawdry, continues apace. Hot on the heals of the Currys PC World deal and Volkswagen's Darth Vader For All sale event comes this ad for a Japanese instant soup called Nissin Cup Noodle.

In the commercial Yoda, the Jedi master and noodle-fancier, applies his powers to cause a giant kettle to float over his head, apparently to boil water for his soup. He then blesses his viewers with, "May the Force be with Japan", whatever that means.

If more proof was needed that George Lucas does not give a damn about his former fans, here it is.

Blastr.com: Yoda makes a big cup o' noodles with the Force in odd Japanese ad

The man who made Star Wars: 1979 Atlantic Magazine article

The Atlantic Magazine has put its archive online. What a terrific resource! Have a look at this article on George Lucas by Lynda Miles and Michael Pye.

Lucas rushed through his undergraduate work because he expected to be drafted for the war in Vietnam, but when his turn came he was classified 4F and exempted from service. For a time, he worked as a cameraman for Saul Bass, the designer of movie titles and director of animated films. He made a living cutting documentaries for the United States Information Agency. "That," he says, "was when I decided that I really wanted to be a director." He went back to USC graduate school for a single semester-January to June in 1968. He was a teaching assistant; he trained Navy photographers; and he assembled a formidable crew to make a science fiction short called Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138: 4EB. It was a simple, stark picture of some future authoritarian society. Computers and electronic codes are set against a man running the length of a blind white corridor. Every move is watched; reality is monitored by cameras and screens. It is powerful but simplistic, a metaphor rather than a narrative.

The Atlantic: The Man Who Made Star Wars

Nice piece on the Making of Star Wars

FlickeringMyth.com has an article on JW Rinzler's book, The Making of Star Wars. From the article (and the book):

The native of California was inspired by the works of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. “Originally, the film was a good concept in search of a story. Then I thought of Hidden Fortress [1958]… and so the first plots were very much like it.” George Lucas explained, “The princess and the general were going to a neutral planet which made it more of an escape movie, with them trapped in enemy territory and trying to get to safety. But I decided that didn’t work and that it would be much better to have it be a rescue movie.” Over the course of the second and third drafts the main protagonist continued to evolve. “I came up with the idea that Luke and the princess were twins. I simply divided the character in two,” stated Lucas. “The princess is everything Luke wants to be. She is socially conscious, whereas he is thrown into things; intellectually, she is a strong leader and he’s just a kid.” The research for the script, which was originally titled The Star Wars, altered the story. “I spent about a year reading lots of fairy tales and that’s when it started to move away from Kurosawa and toward Joe Campbell. About the time I was doing the third draft I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and I started to realize I was following those rules unconsciously. So I said, ‘I’ll make it fit more into that classic mold.’”

FlickeringMyth.com: Universal Appeal: The Making of Star Wars

From Star Wars to Jedi: the Making of a Saga

I'm often amazed by what you can find on YouTube. Here is a full length VHS transfer of this classic Star Wars documentary, narrated by Mark Hamill. I vaguely remember seeing it on the nearby PBS affiliate during pledge drives.