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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
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.
10/10 - 1/10 = 9/10.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
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.
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."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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?