OK besides this below and DEVO coming out of the Kent State massacre, what are other facts you have about the evolution of art / music /etc that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know but, retroactively, explain and/or illuminate a LOT ?
Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.
George Lucas REALLY wanted to impress Spielberg, Coppola, et al, but the first time he showed them Star Wars they laughed him out of their little boys’ club. He then gave it to his ex-wife to edit, and she is the only reason it became a hit.
She did not work on the prequels. Take it as you will.
I don’t believe this is true for EMPIRE. It’s said she worked on the prequels, which is why she’s on the commentary tracks for them. Regardless, she was a prolific and well-compensated script doctor, back when that was a thing, and almost never credited for her work due to the nature of that biz.
There was a viral online post a few years back professing to show her handwritten rewrites on an ESB script and I don’t believe that panned out, it was Kershner’s notes or something.
Hmm. I’m seeing several different versions. I do like, regardless of the circumstances, the writer telling Lucas “you can type this shit but you can’t say it”. If only more people told him that.
The legend is that Harrison Ford told him such on the ANH set. Which has layers to it because he was brought in to read the early scripts against the ACTUAL actor hopefuls 😂
Hey here’s one for the OP: CARRIE and STAR WARS had a shared casting call for the leads!
Legend goes he was building something expensive (carpentry) at the studio and he asked to read, and Lucas was like hey, why not?
And now Harrison Ford sneezes fame and oozes grumpy old man charisma
Version I heard was it was Hamill. If I recall, Hamill's said they all complained about it to one another, so it's plausible more than one of them said it. (If that experience inspired Carrie to be a screenwriter, it's a win.)
Of course, at the time she wasn’t his *ex* wife. Also she didn’t want to do it initially because she had just finished editing “Taxi Driver” for Scorsese and also suffered a miscarriage. But yes, Marcia Lucas saved Star Wars, and then she got an Oscar for it.
Oh not even financially! He took complete credit for the Star Wars zeitgeist when his version made his contemporaries LAUGH.
I mean, I was shown the opening star destroyer scene as a textbook example of continuity in film class and not one person mentioned that that was HER doing, not George’s.
I mean, she was not the *sole* editor on Star Wars, in fact she left before the editing was finished because Scorcese wanted her back for "New York, New York" and, well, that was a *paid* gig.
She did the opening up until the droids land on Tattooine and she completely recut the Battle of Yavin (which took two months), but Richard Chew & Paul Hirsch finished it, and they shared the Oscar. (Hirsch was later the primary editor of The Empire Strikes Back, and Marcia did Return of the Jedi.)
It’s not unlike Stan Lee. Both these universes are massively successful because of the contributions of many. Our culture likes to mythologize the single genius creator.
Also George Lucas wrote Star Wars because he desperately wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie and he couldn’t get the rights. If you watch the Flash Gordon movie that was eventually made, you can definitely see the influences.
That's also how DARKMAN got made; Sam Raimi wanted to make a Shadow movie but couldn't get the rights, so created his own vengeful lunatic in a long black coat.
George Lucas created Indiana Jones.
Obviously Spielberg & Harrison Ford made serious contributions to the legendary character, but the idea began with Lucas.
Pretty much all of the 1970's geniuses worked with female editors. A lot of them didn't look so great when they stopped working with them. Worth thinking about! Editing is an underrated part of the process.
Most of the reports I've read of that screening have said that Spielberg was the only one that saw the potential in the film, basically telling Lucas that it was going to be a blockbuster. Besides the editing, the other vital element that was missing was John Williams' score.
It'd be pretty tough to film-edit out JarJar and the kid's pod racing contest. Those needed to be ripped out at script-writing, even before it's complete enough to edit.
there's a fan edit that only removes like 10 minutes from the Phantom Menace (a lot of the underwater stuff) and ALL Gungan dialogue is replaced by over dubbed alien voices with subtitles
it's actually pretty good
"we have to basically remove or completely rewrite all the dialogue for this one character" is actually possible because the problem character is an alien
Marcia Lucas won the Oscar, not George. And I always thought that the prequels were what they were because George had a need to prove that he didn't need her.
That issue goes further. There's a direct correlation between Lucas ignoring the brilliant people he brought together to make the movies to go his own way and decline in quality of the franchise. The pattern was evident in the original trilogy, long before the prequels.
