the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

oh HELLO

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=41928

xxp yeah no baby boomers definitely were never a target market for having their own childhoods sold back to them, that is a thing that never happened.

As io9.com pointed out the other day, all this talk of unaltered Original Trilogy Blu-Rays is just talk, since Fox owns the worldwide distribution rights to Star Wars in perpetuity, and to the other five movies through 2020.

Yeah, but as also pointed out elsewhere, Fox could stand to strike a deal that would make them bucketloads of money. I think it'll still happen sooner rather than later, there is way too much money to be made for it not to.

yeah with Lucas' petty ego out of the way the $$$ will win out

i really hope osmeone writes a good article or oral history or wahtever about g-luc's decision to sell off star wars

that would def be good reading, but surely it all comes down to '$$$$ + tired of being yelled at by nerds'

afaik he'd said that if his black WWII fighter squadron movie failed he was done w movies. (It failed).

TBF, he did not try to make it good, so he was clearly looking for a way out the whole time.

yeah there could v well have been some subconscious self-sabotage there, it is kind of his overall m.o.

such a massively insecure dude

all of his terrible ideas were just cries for help

darth booger or whatever from the cartoons et al

i wanna know the moment he went from i am the mastermind and god of this complex universe and i will be overseeing it and all its technical innovatiosn for decades to come to "ah fuck it"

I mean, $4 billion

Bob Iger probably gave him a call and was like "our stock is up ever since we started this Marvel thing and we're looking for more bankable franchises, how's $4 billion for the whole kit and caboodle sound to you"

s1ocki otm

i know it was a lot of money but dude was already loaded, there had to be some sort of large shift in his consciousness

"Those ILX guys sure are mean to me. I'm getting off this boat."

(PS frogbs is George Lucas)

maybe he realized this stuff was just kinda fucking stupid?

you guys know i wasnt specifically asking YOU for your insights on this matter

Well Lucas should be along any minute

it was four billion dollars s1ocki, how can you not comprehend that

he really wanted that ivory backscratcher

maybe he was like hey kids, when i die, do you want four billion dollars or responsibility for star wars

think he's gonna philanthropize so they won't get all 4 bil

I, George Lucas, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath all of my worldly belongs to the Sarlacc, where they will learn a new definition of pain as they are slowly digested over a thousand years.

so boba fett probably died of old age, i just realized

Not partic relevant but the talk upthread about ridiculously huge toys, do you think it wd be interesting to do a thread about that - consumer products so extremely expensive that (I assume) almost no-one ever owned them?

xp iirc from when i was 12 or so the expanded universe take is that boba fett somehow managed to crawl out

"this will be your last chance to own the original masterpiece"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKr5R1VNPjI

hillarious how they flogged them on video before the 97 special versions.

"this will be your last chance to own the original masterpiece"

Not partic relevant but the talk upthread about ridiculously huge toys, do you think it wd be interesting to do a thread about that - consumer products so extremely expensive that (I assume) almost no-one ever owned them?

would def read this thread

i wanna know the moment he went from i am the mastermind and god of this complex universe and i will be overseeing it and all its technical innovatiosn for decades to come to "ah fuck it"

― socki (s1ocki), Tuesday, August 19, 2014 10:42 AM (Yesterday)

george lucas alone at 3:00 am in his vast and darkened imax chamber, peaking on 4 hits of good acid, watching attack of the clones and sobbing uncontrollably

There's a pleasant 'toys your parents wouldn't buy you' thread, don't recall specificslly, but more of a list / pics thing than a look into the economics and curious product development lives of toys designed for the Gekko tots but hyped indiscriminately to all.

This looks pretty rad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHfLX_TMduY

http://www.whatthefett.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dinsey_Lucas.jpg

I remember when I saw him without the beard in photos for Captain Eo and I was all 'whuh?'

Back when he had a neck.

Galaxy far far away

the "from the mind of george lucas!" tag on the "strange magic" trailer is kind of the equivalent of those photos of diseased lungs they put on cartons of cigarettes in some places

http://babysimpson.co.uk/info/stationary/7f09.jpg

he's doing a sitdown interview w/ Colbert at the Tribeca film fest

still really pissed about that utility data. unbelievable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3_VZC8VE5U

michael jackson wanted to play jar jar binks, says ahmed best

That's what George told me. Me, Natalie Portman, and George's kids—we were at Wembley arena at Michael Jackson's concert. We were taken backstage and we met Michael. There was Michael and Lisa Marie Presley. George introduced me as "Jar Jar" and I was like, That's kind of weird. Michael was like, "Oh. OK." I thought, What is going on? After Michael had driven off, we all go back up to a big afterparty. I'm having a drink with George and I said, "Why did you introduce me as Jar Jar?" He said, "Well, Michael wanted to do the part but he wanted to do it in prosthetics and makeup like 'Thriller.'" George wanted to do it in CGI. My guess is ultimately Michael Jackson would have been bigger than the movie, and I don't think he wanted that.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MLyz7GUWgU0/hqdefault.jpg

Rejoice!

https://scontent.fsnc1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/11254700_10156239974985604_6867695534067385105_n.jpg?oh=37c430aafebed5d66d9e8d7f23fa7c76&oe=56D15ABF

we don't really have an 80s crimes thread but i didn't want to even further spam up the Star Wars 7 thread with this after i realized how much i'd typed up. anyway maybe relevant here as a foreshadowing of 90s/00s crimes. these are quotes from cinefex #13 (july 1983). as a preliminary let me just note that richard marquand, the director of return of the jedi is mentioned by one interviewee on the second page ("George has a lot of chips riding on this one. He's over in England now working with Richard Marquand, and will probably stay there until the picture is finished shooting") whereas "George" comes up a lot. a lot.. highlights:

Richard Edlund, 10 November 1982: A recent development is that George has decided that there are too many effects shots - which is tending to slow the picture down. So he's in the process of restructuring a few of the sequences, and there's a possibility that we're going to get a cutback in the number of shots we have to do. After all, a lot of the ILM material - especially with the spaceships - is really environmental establishment. Granted, you're seeing events take place that are necessary to the story - but a lot of them are not and, really, your attention should be focused on the actors. That's what George has in mind. I don't think he'll be cutting any sequences outright - just paring them down a bit and getting rid of some of the extraneous shots that are slowing things down. frankly, we're not unhappy to see that he's making fewer shots for us to do.

Ken Ralston, 22 November 1982: Basically what George wants is mayhem - cutting back and forth between the space battle and the ground battle and what's going on in the Deathstar. And he's building the pace throughout the whole thing by cutting from action to action. It never stops. George has just finished a major restructuring of the effects sequences - cutting some things, adding others - so we're in kind of an upheaval at the moment. He wants areal feeling of grandeur and awe, and he's trying to get a much bigger sense to the size of these things. So the complexity of the shots is far greater than anything I've ever done. (...)

In the latest purge, I had thirty-six shots cut - which sounds like a lot, but then I had some other miscellaneous space stuff added. Unfortunately, some of the shots George cut were about ninety percent completed, which hurts. He also cut some others that I was just in love with - and I'm now fighting to get a couple of them back in, just because they're really neat shots and I'd like to see them in the show. one is an A-wing being chased by a TIE-ship. (...) It's one of those shots that even when you first see it storyboarded, you know it'll probably be a real beauty. And it was coming along real nicely. As you watched it, you'd get a real feeling of upward motion. Everybody liked it. But it got tossed. So now I'm pleading with George to put it back in. Of course, George works from a different point of view. He wants to keep the story from getting so convoluted and confusing that by the end of the film you don't know what you've seen. And I have a feeling he cut that particular shot because the one right after it is of Admiral Ackbar - who's kind of a squid-head creature that Phil designed - and he said a line that was totally pointless. So George was trying to cut back and tossed them both.

Richard Edlund, 16 December 1982: The rebel attack on the Deathstar is coming along (...) The workload is enormous. (...) It turns out that all the cuts and changes George was making didn't turn out to be much of an advantage to us in terms of time. A lot of shots were cut, but about a hundred more were added, so the overall number didn't really go down. The current tally on the whole picture, I think, is more than five hundred shots. I don't know how we're goign to do it, but I'm sure we'll manage somehow.

Ken Ralston, 17 January 1983: This place is a nuthouse. It never stops. (...) We're also doing a lot of changing around on some of the shots, which is partially a result of George's recut and also of the way the whole project was approached. In the very beginning, George decided to turn Joe Johnston [yes, that Joe Johnston] and George Jenson and all the storyboard guys loose and just have them come up with all kinds of ideas. He didn't want any sequences - no specifics. He wanted big extravaganza shots and small shots. He wanted spaceships doing all kinds of things. Then he took all of this unrelated stuff and made sequences out of it, even though there was no inherent continuity and each board was different from the next. Then the storyboard artists went back to work and began refining the sequences. The problem was that we had to start working with those original storyboards, and unfortunately, there wasn't enough information then to really do the shots right - which is coming back to haunt us now.

Whent he sequences got changed around, it affected a lot of what we'd already begun shooting. A shot that was twentieth in the space battle sequence might now be in the fiftieth position, so the shot that came before it - maybe a TIE-ship flying around and blowing up - is now a cruiser with an X-wing. So George would say: "Okay, then, drop the TIE-ship elementa nd wahtever other elements don't make sense anymore, and we'll stick in these ships." So we're constantly finding ourselves going back adn replacing certain elemetns in a shot with other elements in order to maintain continuity from shot to shot. (...)

George is asking for some incredible stuff - a lot of which involves adding things to scenes that, from an effects standpoint, weren't shot right in the first place. (...) George wanted to put a chickenwalker into this one hand-held shot that was moving all around - which meant hand-drawn roto mattes and plotting the camera moves so that the background elements and foreground elements would all lock into that plate. Horrendous stuff! There'll be a bunch of stormtroopers lying dead on the ground and he'll want all but two of them painted out. Then, over on the side, we'll put in some trees to hide this prop that doesn't make sense anymore. Some bikers are sitting in the scene; but you can see the supports on their bikes, so you have to paint the supports out and maybe add some other bikers flying around. It's just unbelievable some of the things George is asking for. And what's even more unbelievable is we're doing it - at least in a lot of cases. We're trying anyway. But even George Lucas can't always have everything.

you can exactly why lucas greeted CGI with such enthusiasm (uncritical enthuasiasm, you might say)

Richard Edlund, 10 November 1982: A recent development is that George has decided that there are too many effects shots - which is tending to slow the picture down. So he's in the process of restructuring a few of the sequences, and there's a possibility that we're going to get a cutback in the number of shots we have to do. After all, a lot of the ILM material - especially with the spaceships - is really environmental establishment. Granted, you're seeing events take place that are necessary to the story - but a lot of them are not and, really, your attention should be focused on the actors. That's what George has in mind. I don't think he'll be cutting any sequences outright - just paring them down a bit and getting rid of some of the extraneous shots that are slowing things down. frankly, we're not unhappy to see that he's making fewer shots for us to do.

you also might say that lucas "fixed" this issue in the "special editions"--by including all the effects that were too time-consuming to incorporate into the original versions (and then some)