the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

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

(sry for spoilers)

These little things look so apologetic:

http://socialmoms.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Disney-StrangeMagic-EditorialFeatureImage-20150430-FINAL-634x380.jpg

Strange Magic was horribly marketed, and by all accounts it was also a horrible movie. I sincerely wonder what the heck Lucas has in mind when he thinks "I've got an experimental film in me, waiting to be made."

Star Wars was pretty experimental, in the strictest sense of the word.

"American Graffiti"s nonstop rock 'n roll soundtrack was pretty radical in '73 too

the miniature/special effects shots in Star Wars were pretty out there for the time

to the point where a ton of other films used Industrial Light and Magic for their films, including Star Trek

then there's the diverging branch where ILM continued into the computer animation era but also managed to spin off Pixar

THX, too.

None of which of course is a reason why he should take up the reins again.

that strange magic rabbit is creepy as fuck

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-lucas-on-why-he-is-done-directing-star-wars/

oh, OTHER people don't get why the movies are entertaining

tbh it's pretty funny that he framed it as a drama about family problems when his editor for the films people actually liked was his ex-wife

Is his ex-wife, was his wife.

"When you break up with somebody, the first rule is no phone calls. The second rule, you don't go over to their house and drive by to see what they're doing," he said laughing. "The third one is you don't show up at their coffee shop and say you are going to burn it... You just say 'Nope, gone, history, I'm moving forward.'"

I feel like there's a story George wants to tell here. But like the rest of his stories, we're better off without.

That's a meme that really needs to die. Marcia Lucas was one of three credited editors on Star Wars, and wasn't even the primary editor; Paul Hirsch was. She wasn't credited at all on Empire; Hirsch was the only credited editor. And on Jedi she was again one of three credited editors.

In fact Hirsch and Richard Chew edited the great majority of Star Wars, aided by an uncredited George Lucas; Marcia worked mostly on the Death Star battle which, admittedly, she turned from an incoherent mess into something great.

Nonetheless, it's another brick in a very, very stupid wall which is supposed to support the idea that Lucas had nothing to do with the success of the OT.

Perhaps by editor I mean to say "she told George his ideas were bad over dinner"

Your familiarity with the word 'credited' leads me to suspect you are familiar with its dark side 'uncredited'?

More seriously have you seen the article upthread about her contributions? It seems fairly convincing that she was working on Empire.

Bah iPhone-caused xp

Someone who could share opinions with him versus a room full of people who can't tell him to his face that "Darth Icky" is a bad idea

Since I used the word "uncredited," yes, I'm fairly obviously familiar with it. Which is why I said Marcia wasn't credited on Empire, not that she didn't work on it.

we can be pedants, or we can meditate on the pure badness of "Darth Icky"

Yeah, that's the iPhone - Safari doesn't show you what's been posted since you started writing a response.

It's a pretty small wall though - out of a thousand people, would you reckon there'd be even one who could put together a coherent argument that George Lucas was incidental to Star Wars? I'd be surprised if you got fifty who know who Marcia Lucas is.

Maybe Michael Kaminski is largely overstating her role, and maybe the only reason for that is to diminish George's role (though I don't think the book does that). But I'm not sure that the owner of one of the largest franchises in history as the rebels and someone who's given one interview in 32 years as the Empire really works :)

But we can all agree on Icky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBzJF_-cBA

http://upl.stack.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ickey-shuffle-o-2.gif

GEORGE NOOOOO

I'm sure there will be nothing about family or any family-related drama in this movie. All spaceships shooting at stuff.