Slashdot Mirror


George Lucas: "I'm Done With Star Wars"

HughPickens.com writes: Entertainment Weekly reports that George Lucas has compared his retirement from Star Wars to a break-up – a mutual one, maybe, but one that nonetheless comes with hard feelings and although Lucas came up with story treatments for a new trilogy, those materials, to put it bluntly, were discarded. "They decided they didn't want to use those stories, they decided they were gonna go do their own thing," says Lucas. "They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway. But at the same time, I said if I get in there I'm just going to cause trouble. Because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. So I said, 'Okay, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.'" Lucas says he was going to tell a story about the grandchildren of figures from the original trilogy. "The issue was, ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans,'" says Lucas. "So, I said, all I want to do is tell a story of what happened – it started here and went there. It's all about generations, and issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers. It's a family soap opera."

Although the team behind The Force Awakens acknowledges they're taking the story in a different direction from what Lucas intended, they maintain affection for his original creations and the man himself. "Before I showed up, it was already something that Disney had decided they wanted to go a different way with," says J. J. Abrams. "But the spirit of what he wrote, both in those pages and prior, is everything that this movie is built upon." Some fans question why there was no "Based on" credit for Lucas in the poster for The Force Awakens. "I don't know why it isn't on the poster, but it's a valid point. I'm sure that that will be a credit in the film," says Abrams. "We are standing on the shoulders of Episodes I through VI."

18 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just more Cheez-wiz American cinema. Lucas ruined the first three movies when made the last three.

    1. Re:Surprised? by kwardroid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If we only could get a HD release of the original theatrical releases of the first ones (S.W., the Empre Strikes back and just to complete it Returnâ¦)

    2. Re:Surprised? by roc97007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "and just to complete it" -- I know the feeling. Lucas was starting to go off the rails with RotJ. Then with TPM he went off the bridge, tumbled down the mountain, careened into the chasm and plunged into the magma.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    3. Re:Surprised? by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He also ruined the first three movies when he shamelessly screwed with them.

      Han shot Greedo first. End of story.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    4. Re:Surprised? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The official original versions as put on the re-release of the SE DVDs as bonus features (known as the GOUT, for George's Original Unaltered Trilogy) came from the Laserdisc masters. They're poor quality by today's standards, but better than any Laserdisc rip.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    5. Re:Surprised? by PRMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And it's not just a preference. Han Solo can't be redeemed if he's not a cold-blooded killer to begin with. He has nothing to be redeemed from...

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    6. Re:Surprised? by Nogami_Saeko · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are absolutely, 100% correct. It was painfully obvious watching the behind the scenes footage that Lucas had been surrounded by a platoon of "Yes Men", rather than people who would give him honest feedback.

      And here's the thing, I think that Lucas did have some really great ideas, but he also had some terrible ones. And without the filter to remove the terrible ones, you got a mashed-up mess.

      --
      "Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
    7. Re:Surprised? by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, if Disney does well enough with 7-9, maybe they will go back and remake eps 1-3. I'd like to see the look on Lucas's face...

      I haven't used this phrase in a long time, but That Would Be So Cool. Just make the prequels non-canon, completely forget they ever existed, and just do new prequels.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  2. Lucas not having control to do what he wanted by pauljlucas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Lucas is complaining about not having control, then why did he sell Star Wars to Disney? (No, I'm not related to George, to my knowledge.)

    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
    1. Re:Lucas not having control to do what he wanted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're discussing economic "utility". To you there is no difference between $10M and $1B but in truth there is a huge difference in economic utility. What $1B can do $10M can not and that includes some really expensive passion projects.

      I don't know about Lucas specifically but just because someone is "rich enough" for you doesn't mean they're "rich enough" for their goals.

      All that said I think the real problem for Lucas was that once you're successful you no longer fully own the property that made you successful. You share co-ownership of it with various middlemen, investors, and worse yet the consumers (aka fans). I think Lucas largely feels trapped by that success and the knowledge that he can't do anything knew or weird with Star Wars because too many people are too emotionally invested or eating at the Star Wars trough to continue the co-ownership with him if he does. The good news for everyone else is he'll likely just mess it up in his desire to control it and make it new so him being done with it is a good thing for all those co-owners, including the die-hard fans.

  3. Jar Jar Binks by rbrandis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He lost all credibility with Jar Jar Binks

    1. Re:Jar Jar Binks by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, that's not the problem. The problem was the re-edits of the old movies where things like the sarlacc was changed for no useful reason, the original Darth Vader actor was edited out and Hayden Christensen was edited in instead of finding a Darth Vader actor that did resemble the original Darth Vader actor in the death scene in Return of the Jedi. (Anakin in first episode was not a problem) But the transition from a kid with rounded features to the thin Hayden and then to the more rounded features of the face that Darth Vader had in the death scene annoys me more.

      Smaller changes that aren't obvious to the watcher - they don't make things worse or better, at least when it comes to background items or pure graphical enhancements of stuff that weren't good in the original movies due to the fact that special effects weren't good at that time.

      You may be annoyed with Jar Jar Binks, but in the first movie C3PO was an annoyance. But his character actually got better over time. Initially the way Yoda talked was also an annoyance. So forget about Jar Jar and figure out that there are worse problems.

      What's possible to be more annoyed about is the story incoherences between the original movies (Episode 4 to 6) and the newer movies (Episode 1 to 3) where some things went on in a way didn't make sense to someone that had seen the original movies. Luke was a teenager and considered to be "too old", Anakin was a lot younger and still considered to be "too old".

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:Jar Jar Binks by RobinH · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Natalie Portman is an award winning actor and quite good in other movies. Hayden Christensen might be terrible, but you can't come to that conclusion solely on his performance in episodes 2 and 3 because clearly even a really good actor couldn't act well in that situation. The blame has to fall on Lucas. He thought he was inventing a new form of film-making where he could fix everything in post production so he didn't push for good performances. He was wrong.

      --
      "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
    3. Re:Jar Jar Binks by captjc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree, the problem wasn't so much Hayden as it was Lucas' poor writing and lack of direction. The fact that the sets were just giant blue screens didn't help. In the prequels, Ewan McGreggor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, and Samuel L Muthafucking Jackson are all giving lackluster performances. If Sam Jackson comes off as wooden, what chance does a novice like Hayden Christensen stand?

      I really don't care for the guy, and I couldn't stand the character of Anakin but I think he just gets too much of the blame for the prequels.

      --
      Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
  4. Re:The real reason by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The last few Tarantino films have been pretty big budget, so I think whatever Tarantino wants, Tarantino gets. Despite the apparent excesses of Tarantino's films, you can tell they're very tightly plotted, edited to near perfection, and most importantly, Tarantino has a gift for a dialogue that Lucas never had.

    Lucas was a great filmmaker, and there was a time when the technology was at just the right level of development that he couldn't go hog wild. The real problem with the prequels, to my mind, were that he didn't in fact have nearly enough story for 360+ minutes of film. I swear you can edit all three prequels into a reasonably watchable 150-180 minute film. You could get rid of most of the Phantom Menace, and Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith could be married together by turfing most of the romance (which was just awful anyways).

    And yeah, edit down the final battle between Obiwan and Anakin to about two minutes. We've known it was coming since 1977, so no need to overplay it.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  5. Now he gets it by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All I would do is muck everything up.

    Interesting avoidance of past tense, there.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  6. Re:What a coincidence! by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's just a shame Lucas wasn't done with Star Wars decades ago.

  7. Re:Best part of the summary by grimmjeeper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The difference is that Star Wars started out as an action movie. Trek did not. Turning Trek into an action movie was a "questionable" move at best. Keeping Wars an action movie is staying with it's roots. Still, I'm hedging my expectations so as to not be completely disappointed.