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George Lucas

BladeRunner391

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In the 60's and 70's Lucas was an outstanding storyteller who had a true passion for filmmaking. Now, however, he seems to be a businessman first and a filmmaker second. What happened?
 

Q2

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He got divorced. From what I've read his editor wife was the one to really push him to make hard choices. Now there is no one so the is no one to tell him his choices stink.
 

leeroy

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george lucas is no different to anyone in the entertainment business whether your a musician, actor, writer or director once you've made a shit load of money and are comfortable for the rest of your life the drive and determination that you had when you first started is no longer there.
 

TMBTM

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Easy: Star Wars happened

then:

- He divorced Marcia Lucas in 1983 (co editor on the original trilogy, and also known to change the dialogue parts a bit)
- He built an Empire (of dreams)
- He took the bad decision to direct all of the new prequels after not having really directed a movie since 1977 (even tough he was VERY present on the set of ESB and ROTJ) and could not handle the criticism that followed.
- Steven Spielberg did not has the guts to say "no" to Indy 4 even knowing the script was bad. When even your best budy can't tell you the truth it's always a bad sign.
- He got old. But again, we all did. Not his fault.
 

bondukkevin

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Weird thing is I remember that in 1999 he did an interview saying that he would return to more personal projects and he has a stack of ideas and that the rest of his life is not enough to tell these. So...where are they...? All we have had is Indy 4, Red Tails and The Clone Wars.

He definately has talent to come up with ideas, but IMO that is all he is an "ideas man", once he has ideas he should allow other film makers to take these ideas and make great stories like Empire, Jedi and Indy Trilogy.
 

BladeRunner391

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bondukkevin said:
Weird thing is I remember that in 1999 he did an interview saying that he would return to more personal projects and he has a stack of ideas and that the rest of his life is not enough to tell these. So...where are they...? All we have had is Indy 4, Red Tails and The Clone Wars.

He definately has talent to come up with ideas, but IMO that is all he is an "ideas man", once he has ideas he should allow other film makers to take these ideas and make great stories like Empire, Jedi and Indy Trilogy.

He did announce that he would be moving away from big hollywood blockbusters, but this remains to be seen,
 

TMBTM

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bondukkevin said:
Weird thing is I remember that in 1999 he did an interview saying that he would return to more personal projects

Yeah, he said that even in the late 80's if I remember well, this had become a private joke between Star Wars fans those "small experimental projects" that never happened (except if one is cynical enough to say that they were the prequels...!)
 

Kal-El

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He also blew loads of money on his Skywalker ranch. He's more socially awkward now too.
Except for the divorce, most of it was pretty much his own undoing though.
 

BladeRunner391

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Kal-El said:
He also blew loads of money on his Skywalker ranch. He's more socially awkward now too.
Except for the divorce, most of it was pretty much his own undoing though.


Charles-Foster-Kane.jpg
george-lucas.jpg
 

Waslah

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The problem really is very simple. He forced everybody who ever had the guts to say "no" or argue with him out of his life and company. People like Gary Kurtz were forced out in favor of sniveling yes men like Rick McCallum. The rest is history.
 

WyndorfDave

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I simply believe that he is a visionary first and a writer LAST. I LOVE the OT and have so many fond memories of it, but watching it now, 25 years later I realize how awful some of the dialogue is. I never held anything against him until I realized that he doesn't care about the OT's legacy OR what it meant to the fans that allowed him its success. I don't hate him for it, I just simply don't respect him anymore. Oh well, we still have the gold bikini.
 

white43

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George had the ability to come up with some decent stories, but George has never been a very good director. In the old days, he never had full control - which was a good thing. Had he gotten his way, we would have seen the likes of the prequel trilogy. When others had control of scripts and directorship, we got good films. The second George was big and powerful enough to control everything, we see the result. In actuality, he's only a skip and jump away from Roland Emmerich in the amount of crap he piles onto the screen and he seems obsessed with creating cringeworthy humour. Very, very unfocussed.
 

ImperialFighter

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I've always thought that George's directing abilities and visual sense has been absolutely terrific in many of his movie sequences. Unfortunately, some of his script efforts and plotline ideas have been sadly lacking along the way.

Ironically, I reckon one of his weakest abilities is in one of the areas he claims to like doing the best: EDITING! He's definately an ideas guy, but sometimes he could have done with getting input from someone who would have looked at some of his footage with a critical eye before release...and then been willing to edit certain ridiculous things out altogether when it came to the final product.

And the 'aliens'/'son of Jones' plot aside, it turns out that *he* was fully responsible for the overblown 'Nuking the fridge' idea in Indy 4 after all, although Spielberg initially tried to take the blame for it... (Of course, Spielberg's got a lot to answer for on that movie, in other ways!)
 

Vultural

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Q2 said:

Yeah, the low income housing projects. What will he do, provide bus routes and soup kitchens?
I actually have relatives who live in the aptly named Lucas Valley, so I hear frequent reports. That section of Marin is packed with attorneys and the ultra affluent. They can stall Lucas indefinitely if he is stubborn or insane enough to try. He would be better off trying to push in a Wal-Mart.
Yeah ... he got old.
Scorsese is older. Ridley Scott is older. Eastwood is older. Woody Allen is older.
Age is a poor excuse for Mr Lucas.
 

TomH1138

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To my mind, George Lucas is like Walt Disney. Walt was an idea man who knew how to bring the right people together to make a project work. He didn't try to write and direct and edit everything himself. He didn't even animate Mickey Mouse; Ub Iwerks did that. But when Iwerks went off on his own, he wasn't successful. Meanwhile, Walt gave us Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, and Disneyland, among other things. He knew his strengths and he played to them.

At some point, Lucas became so successful and acclaimed that nobody was willing to tell him "no" on anything. And that's how you end up with unfunny alien rabbit-fish and immaculately conceived whiny little brats.

To Lucas' credit, he didn't set out with the goal of doing everything himself on the prequels. According to the book The Cinema of George Lucas, George asked Ron Howard to direct the first of the new Star Wars films. Howard turned him down, saying, "Star Wars is your baby." (I'm sure Howard was still a bit stung by the negative critical and box office reaction to Willow, a film that ironically is better than any of the prequels, in retrospect.)

Similarly, in 2000, Lawrence Kasdan revealed to Star Wars Insider that George asked him to script the new movies, but he turned Lucas down for pretty much the same stated reasons: Star Wars is Lucas's baby.

I wonder if they had a chance to do it again, if Kasdan and Howard would re-think their choices.

Other names that were bandied about in the '90s as potentially being involved in the prequels were Frank Darabont, Joe Johnston and Carrie Fisher (who said in Star Wars Insider that she'd be happy to do script doctoring on the new movies). Lucas never did use any of them. I don't know why.

As for Gary Kurtz, IIRC, he said in an interview once that he disliked the direction that Jedi was going, so he voluntarily left the project. Lucas didn't fire him. Kurtz went on to produce The Dark Crystal, and after that tanked at the box office, he didn't work in the industry again for 25 years. What a shame. He should have had a better career, and he could have been invaluable to Lucas on some of his later work.

As for the divorce with Marcia: Yes, that was part of the problem, but we shouldn't forget Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, who had previously edited The Godfather and were brought in after a disastrous first screening of the 1977 film. In the Empire of Dreams documentary, they said that when they looked at the footage as it was assembled at that point, everything was playing out in master shots and there was no excitement to the footage. In the review of Revenge of the Sith, Red Letter Media followed the interview footage of Chew and Hirsch with footage from the prequels - and it's exactly the same problem. Everything playing out in master shots; no excitement to the footage.

I don't know why Chew and Hirsch didn't work on the new films, but they also probably could have solved a lot of problems. And, ironically, we would still be praising George today, not having realized how important they were.

As for the side projects - the "experimental" stuff that Lucas supposedly never made: Are you saying that you don't remember Radioland Murders, or the Maniac Mansion sitcom, or Defenders of Dynatron City? . . . Okay. To be honest, nobody remembers those. :D

ImperialFighter said:
And the 'aliens'/'son of Jones' plot aside, it turns out that *he* was fully responsible for the overblown 'Nuking the fridge' idea in Indy 4 after all, although Spielberg initially tried to take the blame for it... (Of course, Spielberg's got a lot to answer for on that movie, in other ways!)

Actually, George said that to cover for Steven. Steven actually got the idea from, all people, Robert Zemeckis.

In the 1981 first draft of Back to the Future, Zemeckis and Gale had Marty getting back to the 1980s by going to a nuclear test site and locking himself in a refrigerator. When the blast hit, it supposedly was strong enough to send Marty forward in time. Even when I read that draft, I knew it was a terrible idea.

When I saw Indy IV and Indy eyed the refrigerator, I said, "No. Oh, no. Don't even tell me Spielberg is going to pull that lame idea out for this movie!" Sure enough, he did.

Since Spielberg produced BTTF, I can't imagine that he didn't read that first draft. It's much more likely to me that Spielberg simply remembered that goofy idea than that Lucas coincidentally came up with the same idea on his own.

If you want to see for yourself, here's a link to that awful first draft (for a movie that, in its final form, became one of my favorites of all time): http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/back_to_the_future_original_draft.html
 

L8wrtr

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First, I love the low-income housing story. My respect for Lucas has risen several notches on that alone. There may be some lawyers in Marin, but Lucas OWNS lawyers, and has enough money that he can lawyer them to death. Whether anything ever gets built, he's going to exact his revenge on them regardless because all he has to do is tell his lawyers, "keep at it, and I'll keep signing the checks." The rich folks there, they're not as rich, and they will have to proactively continue to fight him. This is exactly the type of battle Lucas should love, even though he's rich and has his own empire in his own right, he's still an underdog in this battle fighting against elitist who have told him for the past 30 years he can't fulfill his dream of creating the anti-Hollywood, the people he's fighting against are likely in his eyes an extension of the studios he fought against in the 70s and 80s.

Second, I think that Lucas, like everyone is human, strengths and weaknesses good points and bad points and ultimately is a product of the unique circumstances of his life experience. A shy, kind of awkward kid with big dreams, a fractured relationship with his father and a predisposition against authority - while not a psychologist, I wouldn't be shocked if he could be diagnosed as ODD ;).

The shy, awkward kid dreamt big, and like any kid, he dreamed bigger than he realized he had any sense doing, and before he realized it, he'd achieved monster success thanks to a perfect storm of circumstances in going to USC, meeting people like Coppola, his wife, Steven Spielberg, Gary Kurtz and a host of other talented people whom he recognized value where others lacked vision.

Like the Beatles, the unique combination of creativity, pressures and strong personalities created something far greater than the sum of the individual parts, and was fueled by the pressure of peers whom Lucas respected but also at that time had to listen to, be it Coppola demanding he re-write the script and then re-write it again. The results during this period are undeniable, THX1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars, the 3 initial projects which are the most intimate, most directly Lucas' ideas married with his oversight but still under pressures of studios and peers. The second wave of his creative work is no less astounding, Raiders and Empire where they are largely his ideas, his involvement remained high, but as part of a creative team which still required he answer to his peers. Depending on your tastes, his efforts after that are variously successful, Jedi, Temple of Doom, Howard the Duck, Willow, Radioland, and Tucker. Of those, only one is a bonafide bomb/stinker, the rest have varying degrees of success/merit (I've always been an unapologetic fan of Willow and Tucker).

We all know the story of how that dynamic changed over time, and we can see how the success of his projects mapped accordingly. Lucas grew-up and became successful, no longer needing Coppola's mentorship/protection, no longer needing the studios, and his success elevated him above his peers and one-by-one those he once challenged, and challenged him fell the wayside, becoming acquaintances and friends, but no longer peers. At the same time he became more and more isolated in his Victorian-clad Ivory tower. Focused on family (something he lacked growing up) and tired of the stress of film-making he ran his businesses and lost touch with the process and process and purpose of film-making.

Also, I don't think you can underestimate the impact of his relationship with his father. As a young man they fought, and Lucas disappointed his dad to no-end when he refused to take on the family business and opted to go to college and explore some useless artistic degree. Lucas' earliest successes are all driven by that opposition to authority and fractured father/son relationship. With age and success it is a natural part of the human cycle to re-evaluate our childhood choices and motivations as well as our relationship with our parents. Reconciliation with his father I think became a bigger issue for him as he got older (those of us who are a little older will perhaps understand this a bit more), and I think that his business endeavors are a direct effort to honor his father and heal that relationship in his heart, while simultaneously focusing on raising his children, being the father that he never really had.

He's not evil, he isn't intent on 'raping' people's childhoods. He is the product of his life, his choices, and the people around him (both present and absent) and the evolution of circumstances and his journey, just as we all are.

The citizen Kane reference is interesting except I don't think he has the malice in his heart that Charles had. At George's core is a person who cares about right and wrong, good vs evil, dreams conquering nightmares. Sadly he developed more power than is probably good for a person, and has isolated himself from (creatively) those who brought out the best in him so that by the time he chose to return to what started it all, film-making, the sum of his life experience was drastically different, his values no longer driven by the same raw, sore-points. He still hates authority, but not with the same fire, and for reasons which have evolved over time based on newer experiences (including the fans with whom he is in some regards, a slave to).

Scorsese, Eastwood, Scott and Allen, yes they are all older and have a far more consistent body of work and in some regards (particularly Eastwood) have improved with age. But that group have also been film-makers their entire lives. They've never left it, and they never fought against it the system in the same way Lucas has his entire life. Their careers weren't defined by a single-focus of fighting the establishment, and and also, not one of them ever achieved the level of success that allowed them to be above the system. Lastly making studio movies is in their blood, they couldn't leave it. Lucas stumbled into film-making just as much on accident as it was on purpose. Serendipity. But being a film-maker was never his dream, and never what he wanted to define himself as. His own interviews reveal that growing up he was not a film-buff by any means outside of serials. He was more a fan of comics. The others on that list, being part of the movie industry has been their focus their entire lives.

For me, when I think of Lucas, this is what I try to remember, as has been said before, a film-maker should be judged by their best work, not their worst. EVERY director lays an egg, most lay several. Every film maker makes bad choices, produces things that were probably best-left an idea only. Because few film-makers have even approached his level of success or created things that became such an imbedded part of the social fabric as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, few have had to try and meet those expectations over and over, and so their failures are not nearly as notable.

Clint Eastwood: Space Cowboys
Woody Allen: Melinda and Melinda
Martin Scorses: Bringing out the Dead
Ridley Scott: 1492: Conquest of Paradise,
Steven Spielberg: A.I.
Michael Bay (all releases)


I would rather be strapped down and watch the PT ala Alex in Clockwork than watch any of those movies again.

I'm not saying Lucas is flawless, or without good reason to be criticized (I've done my fair share of critiquing the PT) but the vilification of Lucas is downright idiotic. The PT's disappointment is largely in part a function of the wild success of the OT. Fact is, minus the OT, my kids still love the PT. They work. They may not work the way we like, but they work.

* after-note* looks like Tom wrote a spectacular response while I drafted this.. and I have to agree with everything he said, and think our two posts blend nicely addressing two sides of the same coin :)
 

TMBTM

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All good speech, L8, but...
Space Cowboys and AI are very good! :p
 
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