* THE OFFICIAL * GEORGE LUCAS THREAD

I've heard that he did SW because he tried to do a feature length remake of Flash Gordon but it was too expensive.

 

That's why I was asking what George thought of the movie. Though I thought they just refused to sell him the rights to Flash Gordon, but I suppose the refusal could have been based on what George was willing/able to pay. I'm not too familiar with the details on how/why that fell through, just glad it did.

 

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/plans-revealed-george-lucas-los-angeles-museum-950219

 

I want more movies from George.

Low budget like THX (awesome) and AG (cult classic)
The dude still has it, I think hes just really scared to release something because of critics possibly ripping it apart.

You can really see how much the fans/critics response to indy 4 and the prequels changed his behavior in interviews.
If you dont believe me watch interviews from 1999 or 2002 and compare it to now.


its crazy....

 

May 14th is filled with birthday's of many important movie personalities. Not only George Lucas has his birthday today, but also Cate Blanchett, Tim Roth, Robert Zemeckis and Sofia Coppola.

 

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May our maker have a god one.

 

George screwed the pooch with the PT. Big Time. He also screwed the pooch with the "special edition". Blah Blah, Blah.. he should just listen to the masses.

 

From what I have been told *these are rumors from people who've worked with him* it was a combination of that and his pitch to reinvent the fracnshise at a time when studio execs didnt want to reinvent anything but rather revamp the system altogether, but money did play a big factor. It was a huge letdown for him but it did lead to star wars and a sithton of innovation for the film industry.

 

http://www.etonline.com/features/218289_george_lucas_on_his_star_wars_legacy_and_hollywood_risks/
http://za.ign.com/joseph-fiennes/10...h-fiennes-on-how-george-lucas-daughter-cost-h

 

[mylife]
As a french person, who "naturally" speaks a quite bad english (thanks to google translate to help me when I write) and understands even more badly a spoken english, George is one of the most difficult persons to undersand. If I had to write down what I ear from him, it would be like "owl growl bowl glowl niom gnom grom lightsaber won gnon own storworzz growl bowl owl bom gnom grown".

For my pain, the second person right after him is Andy Gutierrez (the Star Wars Show) who roughly tells the same but twice faster.
[/mylife]

 

http://www.christianpost.com/news/s...rld-of-luke-skywalker-and-darth-vader-185191/

 

I agree 100%

 

I wouldn't really call that "rule breaking"

 

Great documentary, thanks for sharing it here.

 

Lucas is both one of the most mediocre moviemakers in Hollywood and one of the most important persons in contemporary history of cinema. This dualism is what made him great.

 

I would argue Lucas committed an "original sin" when writing Star Wars in 1975.

He'd wanted to demonstrate the Empire's cruelty by showing the graphic aftermath of Leia's torture in Vader's prison. But by the end of 1975, with budget cuts pressing on him and the management at Fox doubtful about the prospects of his little space-opera film, Lucas began to panic: he'd already started thinking of SW as a story spread over multiple films, and he didn't want it derailed at the very first outing. The failure of THX 1138 in the movie theaters still haunted his mind.

So he decided he needed to maximize the revenue from SW to improve the prospects of a sequel. The best way to do this was by avoiding an R rating, keeping Star Wars open to all ages. The stark realities of Imperial torture, meant as a commentary on Vietnam and the US military-industrial complex, were tidied off-screen in the name of family-friendly moviegoing. It paid off: Star Wars was a massive hit at the box office.

But there were consequences. In-universe, Lucas struggled to come up with alternative ways to depict the Empire as a credible threat to the heroes. His solution, worked out during filming, was to kill off Obi-Wan on the Death Star. This in turn led to the problem of who Luke's Jedi mentor would be in future films. And if Obi-Wan could show up as a ghost, why couldn't Luke's father do the same? Wouldn't having two ghost mentors be a little crowded? This problem of story-crafting, the result of hasty alterations to the first film, ultimately led to the merging of Darth Vader and Luke's father, who had previously been two separate characters.

And in the real world, the politics of Star Wars became so anodyne, so essentially unthreatening, that anyone could identify with the Rebels fighting against the evil Empire. Most famously, Ronald Reagan adopted this rhetoric in spades, so much so that his SDI missile defense system quickly was dubbed "Star Wars" by the press. The sort of Goldwaterite conservatism that Lucas had railed against in the early 1970s had now co-opted his film franchise in the public mind.

And no one, outside of a very small coterie, ever expected that George Lucas would make another R-rated film.