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Lucas Restricts Fan-Made Films To Documentaries, Parodies
garagekubrick writes: "A great piece at the Houston Chronicle discusses how the community of fan made Star Wars films received a boon in December when Lucasfilm loaned their sponsorship to the event, and George Lucas himself would be a judge. Unfortunately, they've limited the contest to parodies and documentaries, thereby shutting out hundreds of entries. As a Lucas rep says, 'if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.' Pretty rich coming from the filmmaker who constantly cites greed as being the root of the dark side, and who keeps discussing the liberating values of digital filmmaking. Guess as long as it doesn't hurt his Empire..."
Check out Lucas' opinion of critics in this Salon piece
... They certainly don't know anything about history; they don't know anything about film. They don't know anything about politics. They don't know anything about sociology or psychology or anything. I mean, it's like, you get into a conversation with them and it's hard to find a subject that they can actually converse on."
An excerpt: "I mean, they aren't like the rest of us. They don't have any knowledge of anything. They're not successful in any world that I've
What can I add? Not exaclty Mr. Open-Mind. I don't like the idea of him as a judge.
Yeah, the many, many similarities between Star Wars and the Lensman series, or Akira Kurosawa movies were total coincidences, hm? (early drafts are pratically identical to "The Hidden Fortress")
There's nothing wrong with changing an existing story. Disney does it all the time. So did Shakespeare. In fact, that was the predominant sort of writing throughout history; continual refinement of stories using stock characters and situations.
Original works are nice too -- within reason. Total originality is hard to come by and not very useful if carried to extremes.
Take a look at how useful the revision of preexisting works has been to the arts in the past. It's not something to be ignored.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Does anyone honestly think that Lucas would be so protective just because of money? Because quite frankly I strongly doubt "money" is a factor in the creation of fan-made films. The odds of any of these films making any money is about 0%; money is simply not the real issue.
George lucas has just always been protective of his story. If he doesn't anway anyone else taking over where he leaves off, just respect it.