the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

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)

yeah. clearly there was some kind of productive friction between what he wanted, and what his effects team could deliver, which (as in most cinefex issues btw) ends up yielding these great sequences as the team has to figure out how the fuck to do something with the time, money, space and equipment they have. "well we could do it this way but then our hands would be tied if we later needed to..." or "with go-motion, there's always a problem getting the lighting to match" or whatever.

there are other control-freak director issues where you get that same push and pull but it sounds a little healthier. the one on the terminator is great. but the thing is that you also get the sense that lucas does understand these effects and how they're done, both from having done star wars and just from how much they relate to basic things a director has to deal with like lighting and lenses and frames per second of film and stuff. and yet he still is already trying to get these people to work like computer-editing. here's another good bit i missed:

Dennis Muren, 1 February 1983: ... Not all of it's real simple, though. We're doing some pretty complex stuff. From the tons of plate material we shot, George is picking shots and saying: "Let's stick a walker back in there." So we'll shoot the walker, and the roto department will make sort of a matte of some ferns or something in the foreground that'll cut off the walker's feet and make it as though it's back in the shot somewhere. Plus we're also putting walkers into a lot of the shots that aren't locked off. Whenever we do that, we have to plot the movement in the plate and then incorporate it into our motion control program for the puppet. We had a couple incredibly long pan shots - like 90 degrees - and we'd look at them and say: "Nobody would do a shot like that. We'd be crazy to try a shot like that." But then we'd project up the plate, plot the thing out a frame at a time through the camera, and then play it back with the motion control on our model move - and it works! That's what makes this work so exciting. (...) But then another one that George picked after that was where it's locked off and you start panning to the left. On that one, he wanted the walker coming right toward the camera - so if it's drifting at all, you'll see it. We did that once; but it still needs to be a little bit tighter, so we're going to redo it. (...) We have another horrendous shot that George insists that he wants. It's right after one of the walkers has been blown up. You see its head flying apart in a high-speed closeup, and then we cut to a shot of it standing there - with its head gone - and some ewoks in the foreground turn around and look back at it. The problem is that the only shot George could find where the ewoks stop running and turn to look back has a tilt on it. The walker's supposedly been hit and blown up, so it can't rock. It just has to stand there, smoking. So our tilt has to match exactly. We can't cover it up by having the walker moving around. We'll be starting on that one within the next couple of days."

cut forward fifteen years and it's behind-the-scenes footage of lucas in a chair, over the shoulder of two people at computers clicking their mice, sipping his starbucks cup and asking of they can make the spaceship more round, and add some things buzzing around in the background, and take out the crowd in the front but add some people walking in from stage left, etc. no problem, mr. lucas.

We have another horrendous shot that George insists that he wants. It's right after one of the walkers has been blown up. You see its head flying apart in a high-speed closeup, and then we cut to a shot of it standing there - with its head gone - and some ewoks in the foreground turn around and look back at it. The problem is that the only shot George could find where the ewoks stop running and turn to look back has a tilt on it. The walker's supposedly been hit and blown up, so it can't rock. It just has to stand there, smoking. So our tilt has to match exactly.

unexpected happy ending: have never forgotten this shot

But then another one that George picked after that was where it's locked off and you start panning to the left. On that one, he wanted the walker coming right toward the camera

or this one i think!

would kill for a reel of whatever the fuck george cut out though. pointless commentary by ackbar, you say??

as opposed to all the ackbar commentary that made it in?

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

Can we change the thread title to 'the dick moves of george lucas'

man there are 3,000 posts in this thread huh

never forget darth icky

lucas on why he didn't return to direct the new movie:

You go to make a movie and all you do is get criticized, and people try to make decisions about what you’re going to do before you do it.

Y’know, it’s not much fun, and you can’t experiment; you can’t do anything. You have to do it a certain way. I don’t like that, I never did. I started out in experimental films, and I want to go back to experimental films, but of course no one wants to see experimental films.

if only this poor multibillionaire, whose star wars features were mostly-self-funded, could find a way to make the films he really wants to make :(

lol at the idea that george lucas wants to make experimental films
bigger lol at the idea that ANY film by george lucas wouldn't draw some interest... red tails aside. marketing for that was so confused.

I wonder, when he says that no one wants to see experimental films, if his complaint is actually that an experimental film, even one made by George Lucas, is unlikely to be widely distributed by a major studio or gross hundreds of millions of dollars.

George Lucas and Michael Bay, just prisoners of an unjust system

I'm thinking he could probably put THX-1139 on YouTube, there might be a deal there.

its almost as if the movie going public has been dumbed down from decades of Star Wars-inspired SFX crap

I think I posted it on another thread, but there was an interview where he made some comments about the corrupt nature of the studio system, racism in casting, and his opting out of different organizations that were fairly on-point, but then he had to keep harping on about how he was above these problems and blamed the lack of success of Red Tails on the system. He couldn't understand why a George Lucas product was not successful.

bigger lol at the idea that ANY film by george lucas wouldn't draw some interest...

Ahem

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Strange_Magic_poster.jpg

oh yeah, did that happen?

Easy, you deserved love.

i honestly never heard of it!

Lucas had been working on developing the project for 15 years before production began. Touchstone Pictures released Strange Magic on January 23, 2015[4] and became a critical and commercial failure. The film's opening weekend box office debut of $5.5 million is one of the worst ever for a film opening at 3,000+ theaters.

On the film's plot, director Gary Rydstrom stated, "We pitched it as a Beauty and the Beast story where the Beast doesn't change."

Shrek is a 2001 American computer-animated fantasy-comedy film produced by PDI/DreamWorks, released by DreamWorks Pictures