Disney Turned Down George Lucas's Star Wars Scripts

ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas's writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren't interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, "The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]." After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7's plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams.

Comments

Good news

[slapout]

As long as the plot's NOT in Lucas's hands, I'm happy.

Re:Good news

[bluefoxlucid]

It obviously won't really be Star Wars; it won't be the story Lucas wants to tell, and will instead be some sort of mass Hollywood shoveled shit designed to appeal to the modal average and draw in dollars.

Lucas did an okay job with the prequels. Arguably, he did too good of a job: the players are all too human, and Jar-Jar is too fluid and well-executed for the movie. It clashes with expectations: people want textbook epic heroes and villains played the way modern, bland actors portray them, not complex human characters thrust into an epic fantasy.

Re:Good news

[JeffAtl]

George, no amount of astroturfing is going to convince anyone that the prequels were good or even tolerable. You should have at least hired someone who knew who to write passable dialog.

You were good when you first started off, but now you've been blinded by your own success.

Re:Good news

[jedidiah]

Bullsh*t.

I remember the original release of Star Wars. It had a wide appeal even to non-child audiences. While it was a somewhat "childish" concept, Lucas did not treat it in childish manner.

I knew adults that liked Star Wars as much as I did. One couple I knew even had some of the original action figures on display in their living room.

That's in stark contrast to the prequels that managed to bomb with my own kid.

Pandering to kids is ultimately selling them short. It's also likely to annoy adults in the audience. Trying to pretend you understand the mind of kids is likely folly. Just having fun yourself is probably a lot easier and more effective.

Re:Good news

[Anonymous Coward]

But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.

Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds. We all know this. How many of us are convinced that fat bastard from New Zealand raped Valinor and made off with the Silmarils?

Then you have Khan. Perfectly good movie. And you had nerds raging because herpaderpawhiteguynamedKhanNoonienSingh.

While ignoring it's the distant future, and we've got white guys named Singh now. And black guys with Jewish last names. And Asians named Smith.

And people whining about hurrspacejumping while having no problems with rerouting power from the asplody console to the shields numbah one.

Abrams will do fine. He probably won't do Empire-level excellence, but I have no doubt it won't be the complete clusterfuck that was sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and IT GETS EVERYWHERE. DO NOT WANT.

Re:Good news

[iluvcapra]

His plots aren't all that bad.

Ah, I'd direct you to the writings of Harry Plinkett on that question. It's not just the plot holes, but really fundamental aspects of the prequel films: what is the Trade Federation, why are the blockading, what is the Republic exactly (The queen of Naboo is elected, but the senator of Naboo is appointed?), what is the fundamental cause of the rebellion, what exactly are the Jedi... These reflect on Lucas's really fundamental cynicism, and his inability to write characters as if they're intelligent agents that know what's going on, and his lack of faith in the audience to think about any of this stuff critically.

The first trilogy managed to keep all these balls in the air, but he didn't write those. George's writing work isn't really represented in any of the original Star Wars films. Larry Kasdan wrote V and VI, and though George's name is on the first one, he had a ton of help from Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Will Huyck, Gloria Katz, Alec Guinness, de Palma, Spielberg and many, many others, who he failed to credit.

I dunno, he had a great original concept -- Flash Gordon meets World War II genre films -- and he saw it through to the conclusion, and he was the central person in those early films, but all the good stuff happened when he got out of the way and let the actors, Gary Kurtz, John Dykstra, John Williams and his wife Marcia do their magic. At some point in the 80s, after he banished Marcia and Gary and surrounded himself with sycophants, George must have thoroughly convinced himself that he did everything himself.

He doesn't give the actors feedback or direction - he expects them to bring the characters to life and flush out the nuances on his own.

Note that Michael Bay is known for this as well, and the results are very different. Not good, but different.

I strongly believe that Jake Lloyd was awful in Phantom Menace because of Lucas' directing style.

Jake Lloyd was terrible because George Lucas, himself, didn't know what Anakin was supposed to be or represent, what it was like to be him, what it meant to be a slave on Tatooine, or any of that. The character has no purpose in the movie but to establish that Anakin exists. Even if George were a "hands on" director, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea what to tell him. "Just sit in the cockpit while the battle happens."

Re:Good news

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. And he had a lot of other help; I read somewhere that his (now ex-)wife helped edit the script for ANH to keep it from having the same shit dialog that the Prequels had. And of course ESB and RotJ had other writers and directors. Lucas had a few good ideas for an overall story, then other people came in and cleaned it all up and gave us Episodes 4-6. The Prequels are what you get when Lucas has full control of everything, and the result is crap, some nice ideas, but overall crap.

Re:Good news

[omnichad]

JJ is a fan of Star Wars, not Star Trek. He was even quoted as saying he didn't want to direct Star Wars because "I’d rather be in the audience not knowing what was coming, rather than being involved in the minutiae of making them.”

Then again, M. Night Shyamalan was a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and we all know how that turned out.

Re:Good news

[sexconker]

The first Transformers movie sucked badly. Really badly.

The Transformers: The Movie is fucking awesome. It has a great story, an amazing soundtrack, and the most amazing voice cast of any movie ever:

Peter Cullen
Frank Welker
Judd Nelson
Kasey Kasem
Eric Idle
Scatman Crothers
Lionel Stander
Leonard Nimoy
Robert Stack
Orson Welles

And you get to top that list off with a song by Weird Al Yankovic.

Re:Good news

[luis_a_espinal]

I agree. IMO the complaints about the prequels were fueled primarily by nostalgia about the original movies, remembering the delight of seeing them as a child.

Bro. Phantom Menace. Jar Jar Binks. Droids controlled from a single point of failure (even my non-technically inclined friends were like "wtf is that?"). You can't explain the hate of that away just by mere childhood nostalgia. That crap was awful in an absolute sense.

I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult and wasn't nearly so enchanted.

And neither was I (sans RoTJ).

That shouldn't be surprising. These are all children's movies; we grew up. Lucas' movies didn't change so much as we did.

Sorry, no. Phantom Menace can't be explained away. The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith were watchable as they portrayed Anakin's fall (sans the lingering doopey-doopey romance between emo-Anakin and hot-Amigdala and a whole bunch of other crap.)

But Phanton Menace was some utter crap that stained the other two, and Jar Jar Binks is like the dog turd that stains the sole of your shoe that doesn't come out no matter how much you scrape it on the grass.

You can't explain the utter fail of that to mere childhood nostalgia. You are crazy.

Re:Good news

[quantaman]

But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.

Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds.

It was also terrible because it was terrible.

Well not quite terrible but completely forgettable in the way that generic sci-fi action flicks are.

Then you have Khan. Perfectly good movie. And you had nerds raging because herpaderpawhiteguynamedKhanNoonienSingh.

I didn't hear that, though in retrospect it would have been cool to have a non-standard ethnicity in the role.

Either way I just re-watched the new Khan movie a few days ago, it was better, but still a fairly generic and forgettable action flick.

Abrams will do fine. He probably won't do Empire-level excellence, but I have no doubt it won't be the complete clusterfuck that was sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and IT GETS EVERYWHERE. DO NOT WANT.

He'll do fine in the sense that it will be another generic and forgettable action flick.

I don't really understand why Abrams is getting all these franchises, he did some good TV series but I haven't found his film work to be particularly exceptional.

That being said I think he's a far better choice for Star Wars than he was for Star Trek. Star Trek was always about exploring the philosophy, something Abrams has never really shown any particular talent for.

Star Wars on the other hand is more about the myth, which is really the strong point of his best work. Maybe he will make something great with this one.

Re:Good news

[Yunzil]

Plot holes? In Star Trek?????

Say it ain't so.

Re:Good news

[quantaman]

Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.

TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"

The thing that comes closest to a philosophical masterpiece of Trek is probably the snoozefest that is TMP. Trek's answer to 2001, only not really.

Kirk punched people out and had sex with green slave girls. The only thing that the new Trek got wrong about all that is that their portrayal of sex was presented stylistically as fan service, and they made Kirk into a frat boy instead of a red-blooded macho hero-type.

I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.

Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.

Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.

In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.

Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.

A wise decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for Disney. Star Wars was always overrated anyway.

Yay!!

[Lunix Nutcase]

Good on Disney. Lucas may be ok at imagining a story but he sucks at things like writing dialogue. That they dumped his scripts gives me hope these movies may be decent.

Star Wars is over

[JohnFen]

The one-two punch of Disney and Abrams being involved with Star Wars basically kills any desire I have to see new Star Wars movies. Especially Abrams. After what Abrams did to Star Trek, I don't trust him.

Re:Star Wars is over

[Lunix Nutcase]

How could they possibly do worse than Lucas?

Re:Lucas has lost it.

[halivar]

Given that Star Wars was in any case not "cerebral" to start with

Oh, but it wanted to be. The places where it tried were solipsistic, cosmic-humanistic dreck, and the weakest dialogue in the original trilogy.

Not a good sign.

[the_skywise]

While I'm happy to see that Lucas wouldn't be directing the new movies and think Jar-Jar Binks must die - I'm disappointed that they completely ignored his scripts.

Like him or love him he still kept a good eye on the overall mythos of the Star Wars universe. While JJ Abrams can certainly do sci-fi action I highly HIGHLY doubt his sci-fi story telling skills which, while interesting, never seem to actually have a point (cloverfield, 8mm, ST:2009... LOST!)

I think Rebels is a decent entry for Star Wars, I don't think it's surpassed Clone Wars but with Lucas setting the bar so low with the Holiday Special it's hard to go wrong. Disney has shown with Marvel that they can do good stories too.

But this isn't Lucas' story - So bringing back the original cast plus Hollywood's current penchant for rehashing old plots that worked AND JJ's blatant cribbing of Wrath of Khan into STID doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings.

I'd like to be pleasantly surprised...

I am say, 68% excited

[jacks smirking reven]

Couple things for the naysayers to consider though, and why I believe Episode 7 will be good (but not near the hype):

- Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.

- Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.

- Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.

- Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.

And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.

Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.

what prequels?

[megalomaniacs4u]

There are no prequels, and this follow on trilogy won't exist either.

Just like the matrix sequels don't exist...

They cured my acme, the cancer patient said.....

[TiggertheMad]

But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.

Some people have this opinion, but I think if you took a survey, most would agree with the statement that Episode 1-3 was much worse than The ST reboot. I'll take whatever JJ has in store after more of Lucas's awful writing.

Lawrence Kasdan gets only a quick mention?

[VValdo]

I don't understand. A hundred comments and you're the only one I see who even mentions, let's alone puts due faith in co-writer Lawrence Kasdan.

Kasdan co-wrote "The Empire Strikes Back", co-wrote a movie called "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and wrote other, ehem, minor movies like "The Big Chill", and "The Bodyguard" and "Silverado".

He's co-writing this thing.