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Lack of Technology Puts Star Wars Series On Hold
adeelarshad82 writes "It was back in 2007 when we first heard about George Lucas making a live-action TV series focusing on characters from Star Wars. Almost four years later, it seems the idea of ever seeing this live-action show is still living in a galaxy far, far away. In a recent interview, George Lucas mentioned that the technology to produce the show in a cost-effective way doesn't exist yet, and that the cost of producing an episode is about ten times of what it should be."
Funny how other Science Fiction series manage to incorporate all the special effects they need to tell a story without blowing the bank's budget. Apparently George wants movie-grade FX on a TV budget.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Thank God for that.
I'm guessing the holdup is that there still has to be people involved in the production at some step and he was hoping to do it all with robots. Simply treating actors like robots didn't work out in the prequels.
I read the internet for the articles.
Ok, let's think for a second here: back when the only Star Wars movies/media that were any good at all were produced, visual effects were both vastly cruder and more expensive(per unit bang, I'm sure the ceiling price has continued to climb...).
Therefore, if they are "too expensive" now, either Lucas has wandered off the ranch, so to speak, and is insisting that it be shot in 100053459348p 512Hz 3HD or and vastly more likely the plan was to shovel a bunch of straight-to-TV/DVD kiddie-schlock and they aren't sure that they can recoup the cost of visual effects that wouldn't be laughed at.
It sounds like the world is on track to be spared an atrocity here.
Gee, I didn't know that the cost of flogging a dead horse is still that expensive. I'd think that Lucas could command a hefty discount, based only on volume.
And nothing of value was lost!
We're very, very disappointed that this isn't going to happen.
Use more midgets, I hear they work for peanuts...... Oh wait.. maybe elephants.. Yeah that's it.. Hire more elephants!!!!
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For me, whenever I read "Star Wars" in articles, I always think, "ongoing re-tread/re-write/re-cast of the 1970s movie." It seems Star Trek has same trend. Cmon' these guys got lotsa bux or is it the issue of $50 million for special effects, $5K for writers?
Consider if same was done for Gunsmoke and Bonanza, there's only seven plots to a western.
Before I'm dead of old age, I'd like to see some new material (and a new manned spacecraft flown from USA but that's for another thread). I guess I'll have to get off my butt and do it myself.
mfwright@batnet.com
You know what would be really cool - a show all about han solo, where he and his rag-tag crew jet about the galaxy in their decrepit but well loved ship, taking on any smuggling job, facing danger together, serving out home-style justice when it serves their pocketbooks, wooing space-ladies.
Oh wait, they already made that show, it's called firefly, and it got cancelled.
Sorry to get your hopes up george
He's afraid that it would ruin the Star Wars legacy... Wait, shit.
...didn't stop the first movies from happening.
Are all directors this INCREDIBLY LAZY and uncreative?
what makes it so expensive? seems like a really intense 3d modeling software would be expensive, but a one time cost. is it just a lack of man power? I even understand that the process requires a good deal of processing power, but what is stopping the software from doing some rough rendering while tweaking scenes and leaving the really CPU intense stuff for the evening.
I'd still watch new episodes of the original 60's Star Trek, as long as the writing/acting was a good as some of the better ones they made then, and the special effects were all but missing in action then.
By contrast, I just saw Tron Legacy again, and it is nearly unwatchable for me. It was distractingly inappropriate as a sequel to the original. Great special effects married with poor writing and poor actor direction.
Why does he need it to be economically viable?
If he really wanted to do it for some valid artistic reason or even because he needed something to do: he can spare a billion or two and get it done.
He isn't getting any younger. I mean how many yachts do you need, anyways?
He still doesn't get it. For whatever reason, he continues to equate incredible special effects with incredible results. Even if he were to spend that massive budget for each episode, I strongly doubt the result would be anywhere near as good as something like Battlestar Galatica, Babylon 5, etc.
If you somehow haven't seen them, I recommend Red Letter Media's review of the Star Wars: Episodes 1-3, which does a better job of explaining why those films are miserable piles of crap than I could ever hope to do myself. Also relevant clip from an episode of South Park.
If the kind of technology that George Lucas uses was 1/10th the cost then it would be used by good storytellers and he still wouldn't be able to film a TV series.
and that the cost of producing an episode is about ten times of what it should be."
Most things cost around what they should cost. I think what he meant to say was that it would cost 10 times what it would be worth.
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How 'cost effective' does it need to be when it's got a guaranteed audience of male tweens, teens, 20s ... plus all the geek girls. And the nostalgia audience too (that's my demographic, btw.).
Because we want to replace all the non-human characters with CG ones?
I'd rather take my Jim Henson puppets from Farscape, Dark Crystal and Yoda thanks.
Funny, but the technology existed in the early 70's to make the greatest space fantasy film of all time on a mere nine million dollar budget.
I think what's really got him is that his computer-based word processor can't write a decent script by itself. It's lacking the AI that his typewriter had in college. It's lacking the imagination to create anything substantial.
Please George, find a garage sale, and buy a used, beat-up Royal Typewriter, and sit down and write a real script with characters, using nothing but the imagination inside you. Whatever spark of creativity you once had must still exist down there inside you, you've just lost touch with how to access it.
Maybe you need to THROW AWAY all that technology that's got you so befuddled, and go back to something more genuine. You've forgotten that it's the humans in the story the audience is concerned with, not how glitzy you can make the spaceships look.
Story first, then figure out how to film it. It's the most basic rule in all of film-making, and you've forgotten it.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This is coming from a man who put together A New Hope on a shoestring budget fighting against all the odds. Now he can't put together a decent TV show at a decent budget? Come on. People don't watch Star Wars for the insane production values.
CGI these days is mostly labour based. A render farm is costly upfront but all the players have massive ones sitting waiting for jobs. The thing that costs money is paying good artists for the huge amounts of work you need. Creating fully CGI characters and sets (like George probably wants because he is an idiot) is a lot different from doing some touching up like removing wires from stuntmen.
Star Wars TV could be done no more expensive then shows like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. In nearly all the stories the aliens are mostly background characters so who cares if they are just rubber masks? Hell, in the Imperial period you could just set the show in a particularly xenophobic part of Imperial space and barely have to worry about aliens.
The problem is a film producer/director trying to work in TV. TV is a world of compromise and spreading your money really thin. A big budget movie producer/director doesn't have the skill set or correct mindset (Spielbergs mini-series are hellishly expensive).
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If this is what is keeping him from producing more of that crap, then I'm all for it.
Although he clearly means he just needs cheaper animators in to throw annoying effects on the screen. If he just made the shows the way he made A New Hope, he wouldn't have this problem (or in our case, solution).
I suspect his bland style of pastiche adventure would work fairly well as a 60-minute limited series of, say, 15 episodes, but 100 hours? Good lord, Lucas should just call it a day and direct cut scenes for any of the Star Wars spinoff video games. I suspect they'd be far better received than his recent ghastly, leaden feature films.
The only man whose fans absolutely hate him. I was really looking forward to this when it was announced as there were suppose to be Mandolorian episodes. But since he turned them into pacifists he destroyed the only thing I liked about star wars.
Judas only betrayed one man. Way to go George.
That's all this is. He can't need the money. He's desperately trying to pretend he has still got something to contribute to the arts.
Pioneer One tells a compelling story with essentially zero FX and a budget that wouldn't pay for nose-candy on most movie sets. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was rendered in the film-maker's kitchen. The Hunt for Gollum manages to produce a digital Gollum (ok, for a few seconds...) that's not too far off the best results of WETA Digital. Give Seth Green a handful of Star Wars figures and a digicam and he could probably come up with something that stayed within canon in about 20 minutes.
But George Lucas, with all his years of experience, skill, contacts and vast gobs of cash can't make a couple of seasons of a watchable TV show because the technology's not there yet? Absolute bollocks.
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When asked about the status of the show, Lucas said that the footage “sits on the shelf.”
Does this mean that the the show has already been recorded? He's just waiting until special effects are cheap enough to add them in? Or is the footage "figuratively" sitting on the shelf?
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I mean, the models and puppets Lucasfilm comes up with are heads and tails better than any of the 3D stuff we've been seeing. You can watch stuff like Star Wars Ep 4-6 and see how much better the models look compared to the Ep 1-3 3D effects. You can look at episodes of Star Trek TNG and see how well those models worked in conjunction with 3D effects. Yeah, on the older stuff you can see the model frame splice edges, but today it is trivial to get rid of that and make it all look seamless. GO BACK TO USING MODELS.
Exactly. Babylon 5 didn't have the technology to do the FX cheaply (models used by Star Trek, etc. were expensive), so they created their own as they went along.
Sometimes the Babylon 5 SFX team completed the rendering of a scene hours before it was to be uploaded to the studio for broadcasting (rendering scenes on Amigas originally, taking days to complete a simple scene). They even recycled some of the footage (e.g. launching ships) between episodes.
Groundbreaking stuff that showed you could do quality effects (for the time) on a budget.
More likely George discovered too late that there was already a really successful "Star____" television series out there and realized he didn't want to play second fiddle to that other guy.
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They can't pay anyone enough to actually talk like that on camera. That's part of the reason they Jar Jar was CGI.
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Why is George worried? The show may cost 10 times more than it's worth to produce, but it's Star Wars, he'll be able to sell it for 100 times what it's worth to the networks.
It would cost 10 times because Lucas has this weird idea that cramming in 10 times the amount of useless background detail into every scene is what makes a good movie
And into the foreground would be crammed the childhood versions of every character who ever appeared in Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi.
Why is the cost so prohibitive? "Firefly" looked as good as the prequels did... "Battlestar Galactica" pulled off amazing FX... Heck, even "Babylon 5" was able to do big space opera on a shoestring budget years ago... But Lucas can't figure out how to do it?
He would do it on time, under budget and make a better story to boot.
You can't take the sky from me
No, I'm pretty sure "lack of technology" is LucasSpeak for "No network in their right mind wants to pick up this piece of shit show."
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TK-421 Why aren't you at your post
Why did you make Episode 4 before Episode 1, 2 and 3?
George Lucas: When I began writing the story for Star Wars, it became so big that I couldn’t fit all my ideas into one film. I started to break the story up into trilogies. The first trilogy told the story of Anakin Skywalker’s descent into darkness. The second trilogy gave us the story of how Luke Skywalker defeated the Sith. The third trilogy gives us the time when the Jedi finally find a way to destroy the dark side. I also came up with a fourth trilogy, but it was unrelated to the first three trilogies.
It became clear that I was looking at nine separate movies. I had to decide which trilogy to begin with. At the time, sci-fi movies didn’t do well at the box office. I thought that Star Wars might be a one shot deal in that Star Wars might not make enough money to warrant the creation of sequels. I decided my best bet was to start with the most exciting trilogy and hope that it struck a chord with audiences.
I decided to make the middle trilogy first because I thought it was the most exciting of the trilogies and gave me the best chance to hit it out of the park with the people. Fortunately, my genius was right about it all. It makes me look so gifted in hind sight because there has never been a film bigger than Star Wars back in 1977.
When in reality -- Mr. Lucas started at "Episode 4" and jumped right into the middle of a story arc in order to give the feel of the good 'ol Sci-Fi serials he had enjoyed watching himself... No other scripts or films were planned at that time, hence the lack of a rising action at the end of the movie (that nearly all movies with planned sequels have) -- Indeed Sci-Fi flicks didn't do so well at the time, not many had the production value that StarWars had.
Princess Leia was not planned to be Luke's sister, hence their French kiss...
Vader was never planned to be Luke's father until a hasty plot change for Return of the Jedi -- Hence why in A New Hope Obi-wan says Vader killed Luke's father -- The working title of the "6th" episode was Revenge of the Jedi, but this didn't fit with the Jedi ideals (which were also constantly evolving in George's Mind).
Sequels rarely do better than the original they continue. Claiming yourself a "genius" after the fact is ever so self serving.
Search around, you'll find out for yourself... Oh, screw it; Here.
Do I believe this professional liar (read: story-teller)? No. What I believe is that the general public doesn't go much for these types of stories as they once did. Interests are cyclic. Remember the 80s and its love of all things robotic? Now we're seeing the passing of the interest in Wizards/witchcraft. The fluctuation of zombies and comic-book movies will continue to underscore a few quick popularities of themes such as Vampire movies. Many of the recent film trends are part of a larger passing trend of making protagonists out of the traditional antagonists. Sci-Fi may pick up again if we ever put men on mars...
My bet is that someone did Market research and discovered: It's simply not the right time for more sci-fi series on TV -- Esp. with their core audience migrating to other forms of entertainment and other distribution channels as well. Perhaps also, Mr. Lucas is just out of ideas (or good plots for them) for a while -- it's not unheard of among writers... How many stories can you tell in the same fictional universe before you get bored or use up all the compelling plots?
Damn right. I'm convinced Eps 4-6 were only made good by accident. The chances of George Lucas accidentally making something that is not utter shit again are quite slim.
No, it wasn't accident, and what prompts me to say that are the number of other good movies and entire series that he fostered. I think there are a number of factors. One is that the technology available during his best years (Star Wars 4-6, Indiana Jones Trilogy, American Graffiti, etc) was such that it limited him and kept him more focused on other aspects of movie making that he is good at. When he would say "Let's show this doing that in this way" and the FX people would say "No way that's simply impossible, but we can try doing something different this way - we'll figure it out and get back to you" then that made other parts of the movie matter more to Lucus that he could actually control. When it came to Episodes 1-3, and Lucas described a CGI alien clown, the FX people said - "yeah, we like a good challenge and there's nothing we can't do visually in this day and age, so let's make JarJar!"
Another thing is it is easy to start from scratch and just make things up, which is what he did with Star Wars. Did he honestly give any real thought to a backstory and how everything tied in together with the very first movie? Nah. He wasn't even looking at sequels, let alone prequels, when he invented the Star Wars universe. Star Wars was a single stand-alone movie all unto itself. Period. It did not need to be anything more than that. Empire Strikes Back was merely the same cast of characters in the same universe doing a whole new set of things that really had nothing to do with the first movie at all as far as plot lines and story arcs go. With the first 3 movies he had to go back and follow FACTS he had already created. He had to shoehorn a plot to fit who was where in first Star Wars and how they got there. That is a WHOLE lot harder than just making something up and leaving lots of pre-story elements simply up to the viewer's imagination. And speaking of that imagination, everyone already had at least some degree of preconceived notion as to what happened before Star Wars, and that is NEVER going to exactly match what Lucas himself imagined when he started writing the prequels. Thus some degree of disappointment was built in.
I think Lucas is (was) best at fostering entirely new projects from scratch, then more or less providing resources, bringing in good screenplay authors and directors, and then letting others run with those ideas (Indiana Jones, for example). I think his problem is when he micromanages things, and tries to get into lots of details with really complex plot lines which is best left to others more gifted in those areas.
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Come on, who is George trying to kid? His last 3 movies were a suckfest compared to SW and TESB. He needs to stop directing and writing, and let talented people do the work with his oversight.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I don't know why Lucas feels the need to break the bank, though. He could crap pretty much any special effects into a show and the kids won't know the difference. Pair up his shows with some sugary cereal and Star-Wars toy commercials and he's pretty much set to ride that money train for another generation.
He's almost acting as if he expects the rest of us to watch it. Ain't gonna happen, judging form the hate pouring out in this article. Personally, I'd rather curl up with some old Twilight Zone videos. Most of the episodes I've seen have almost no special effects and are mostly psychological. That's some good writing right there. I doubt Lucas would recognize it if someone hit him upside the head with them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We're finding out just how little his "vision" had to do with the success of the original trilogy.
If he can't find a way to take this vast array of characters and make a compelling TV series, something thousands of production companies have done in the past, without some super-whizzy effect he's insisting on, then he's about as intelligent and artistic as a cantaloupe tossed from a roof on 53rd Street.
Technology saves the day again!
Though really people, if you know you are going to hate something how about just not watching it and finding something else to do with the time?
He needs to stop directing and writing, and let talented people do the work.
FTFY.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
George Lucas showed us previously just how awesome special effects can be on TV, back when he did the Star Wars Holiday Special. We all want more of that, for sure!
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Exactly. Anyone who believes his nonsense about having written 9 stories, etc and then choosing to jump in at the middle are fucking braindead fanbois. You can even watch the documentary for Episode I to notice how he talks about not even thinking up the stories for the prequels until the 90s.
The technology he is referring to is a time machine that would allow him to go back in the past and make us forget how much he has fucked up Star Wars in the time since 1997.
I read a while back that something like 80% of all movie tickets are bought by males between 15 and 22. (These guys will go see a movie they like 3, 4 or more times, which skews the data quite a bit.) That demographic doesn't care much about plot, acting, character development, or other fooferah. Basically the purpose of all those things is just to carry the movie to the next car crash or explosion - preferably with at least one awesome never-seen-before special effect. So to make a lot of money, you only need enough plot string the action along between explosions. Lucas, Cameron, various other blockbuster directors and producers, use that formula to make a $crapton. It's worth noting that Lucas spent many hours watching 'B-movies' from the 1940s and 1950s, especially the WWII fighter-pilot scenes, to inform the script and the flight choreography. Those movies were mostly the same way - simple plots (written in one week, shot the next, no time for complex dialog and character development).
I went and saw 'Avatar' at Imax 3D - minimal plot, cardboard characters, impossible science, and really cool effects - and I enjoyed it, knowing what to expect. I like 3D a lot. If I wanted complex characters I could go see 'Wuthering Heights' or something - and I haven't seen the 16-22 demographic for a long time - my daughter is almost old enough to have kids that age.
I seriously irritated my wife when I described 'Titanic' as 'Terminator for girls' - which it was. :D Same formula, except you add some relational tearjerking.
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Why wouldn't they? You can't tell me that there's not a single network that wouldn't at least give it a try. I would think that there would be plenty of story material from the Old Republic alone. Just look at the success of the Knights of the Old Republic games. You could even go further than that. With time spans in the tens of thousands of years (the Republic is over twenty thousand years old!), imagine learning how hyperdrive was invented or how humans first reacted to extraterrestrial life. Star Wars is a gold mind of potential stories.
I think this show will prove you can make a good SF TV show on a reasonable budget with excellent special effects...
The only thing related to SW worth watching are Red Letter Media's reviews of episodes 1-3. http://redlettermedia.com/ If you haven't seen them yet, I can't recommend them enough.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
I heard the same thing a dozen years ago from another major director. He'd produced several successful films which had live actors and CGI characters interacting, but the cost was high and the staff was too large. He spent most of his time managing the huge animation staff rather than directing.
He liked "Reboot", the TV show, which was produced on a weekly basis by a staff of about 30. That was the first completely computer-animated TV series. His hope was that the production quality you could get operating on that scale would improve to the level needed for a feature film. He wanted technology that would get the cost of a major feature film down to $20 million or so. He'd have more artistic freedom then. The $100 million pictures are so preplanned that, by the end of preproduction, all the creative work is done. Then it's just a manufacturing job.
So far, nobody has had a breakthrough on costs. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" tried, but that came in around $70 million. In "Sky Captain", if nobody touches it, it's CGI. That didn't cut costs as much as expected. CGI seems to have replaced the old army of set carpenters, painters, and modelmakers with an army of CGI set designers, texture artists, and animators.
At the low end, there's been progress. See New Media Animation, out of Taiwan. Fastest animation house in the world - finished animations in an hour and 30 minutes. For Slashdot readers, I recommend NMA's version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
I think Lucas is frequently full of shit, but his use of "genius" was actually humble. He's using it in the original sense of a personal minor deity (daemon in Greek, genius in Latin). He's basically saying he got lucky, as the sentence following that one makes clear.
Maybe George is waiting for a time when he can outdo the Star Wars Holiday Special
Perhaps he should use material from the extensive library of Star Wars fan fiction. Many of those books certainly contain better stories than the prequels, and in the same spirit of the originals.
Some of the authors are (IMHO) pretty good, such as Timothy Zahn. Also, the fan fiction authors fit their fiction in with existing fan fiction to reduce conflicts. That's something that really bugged me with the prequels, as the prequels completely ignored all the existing fan fiction out there.
In my view George Lucas needs to make use of what he already has, decent stories. But I guess he's never bothered reading the fiction of his own fans.
I'd quite like to see this series, on condition that its potential is realised, because it does have alot of potential. Can you tell that I'm a Star Wars fan? ;)
And no matter how much money the Old Republic stuff made, no matter how much fans love that era and those stories, no matter how much they might make (at least internal) consistency and sense... Lucas will overwrite all of it in favor of what he cobbles together.
Lucas is a control freak -- that's not a bad thing when you're aiming for quality storytelling and you really are a top notch storyteller. It's a definite bad thing when you're a mediocre or moderate storyteller, and you don't trust anyone else with your creative work or ideas. He cannot at all stand anyone else playing in his sandbox, because they don't share his unique vision of the sandbox. So when a bunch of folks make a pretty keen sandcastle that's got flying buttresses and towers and complicated and exciting architecture, Lucas will kick it all down and replace it with his... adequate, technically good but nothing-to-write-home-about sand towers he makes from buckets. (Let's break the metaphor: He has good basic filmmaking skills, but not much more than that; I think he bought into the Joseph Campbell interview a bit too much. If he stuck with space opera instead of trying to make them deep mythological passion plays, his films would be a lot better. This of course is IMHO.) There's a reason why Empire Strikes Back is considered the best film of the franchise.
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I've got a bad feeling about this...
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I think that somewhere deep Lucas has created a magnificent, rich and unique world, but he should basically sit down with some screenwriters, a director, tell them the story he envisions like our grandparents used to tell us fairy tales, and then get out of their way an let them turn it into a movie.
Millions of voices cried out in fear, and were suddenly silenced...
(in relief)
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They are cut because they don't bring in enough money - surplus money depends on how much it costs to make a show - if its a cheap ass show it can continue with a lot lower ratings. If its very expensive it needs a lot higher ratings.
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Why wouldn't they?
Because it costs a lot of money to produce and promote a show. And no one wants to invest in a show if they know it's going to be despised by critics and fans alike. Would YOU like to be the poor bastard who greenlit the "Star Wars Holiday Special"?
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