George Lucas

RuggieBear

There's an interesting article in the Guardian about George Lucas.

Among my fav parts are when he decries about how commercialised society is today and bemoans sequels :rolleyes: .......the man is either serioulsly deluded or has balls he needs a wheelbarrow to haul around....


http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1305563,00.html

ixoy

Gah! I always find reasons to want to slap the man lately... what about his take on merchandising:

Isn't there an irony in the director of the Star Wars trilogy and the founder of LucasArtsLicencing, which earned a fortune from merchandising, lecturing us on the perils of consumerism? "Well, probably," Lucas cheerily replies. According to him, all those Darth Vader toys weren't just about making money but about sparking children's imaginations. "Toys give children the chance to extend the experience from the movie theatre into reality. They could take those toys, play and tell different stories. They could build fantasy worlds."

It's only okay for him to engage in mass consumerism? Star Wars is the biggest consumer franchise ever spawned from a movie series. He gives out about sequels despite delivering a set of prequels that have been heavily derided. Pot-kettle-black if ever I heard it.

RuggieBear

ixoy wrote:

Pot-kettle-black if ever I heard it.

LOL...so true!!! I just read it and couldn't stop myself laughing!!!!

lodgepole

It's very easy to jump on his statement about sequels but then to ignore the fact that he mentions Peter Jackson as someone who has escaped the traditional Hollywood sequel syndrome (he mentions his location as being a reason for that). Perhaps he should have made it clear that he was talking about bad sequels (discussion of the merit of the Starwar prequels has been done to death...let's assume he considers them good) that are based on money and commercialism and not on furthering a story.

Even now, Coppola and Lucas still seem to see themselves as outsiders in Hollywood.

This is very true, certainly in Lucas's case.

"It started out with Francis giving me that freedom [on THX]. I got successful enough so that I could do it myself. Now I have reached a point where I've got enough money and can do whatever I want, whether it's right, wrong or indifferent. It's my money that's at stake."

A lot of people don't know that Lucas paid for the three prequels himself, and that 20th Century Fox were merely the distributors. He also gets the "money grabber" tag thrown on him. I read something today which said that he was releasing Star Wars on DVD now because it was his last oppurtunity to cash in on the DVD format with the impending release of Hidh Definition DVDs. This is quite clearly a load of bollocks considering (a) his enormous amounts of cash and (b) the fact that he could have released probably up to three seperate DVD releases of the films by now, had he wanted to.


And I think while there is a certain irony to what he said about consumerism, I don't think that consumerism as Coppolla was describing it and consumerism in the way the author applies it to Lucas are quite the same thing.

mycroft

I tend to agree with Lodgepole.

Lucas kept many of the piffling rights at the start of star wars (like y'know the toy rights) that the studio's didn't think were worth much.

..................

Boy bet they're kicking themselves now.

Lucas can and has done pretty much anything he wants for the past thirty years. He's independently wealthy to the degree of a small nation He has spent the last 30 years funding the creation of some of the industry standard equipment, in visual effects, audio, digitial filmaking.

Suggesting he's doing anything for the money is just kind of odd.

Skipping aside prequel bashing and several other bizarre choices Lucas has made, he has always considered himself to be an outsider in hollywood. And rightly so

according to both Lucas' and Coppolla long time colaberator Walter Murch, Star Wars was Lucas's interpration of the Vietnam war (and no I'm not having a "whats a nubian" moment) Lucas then became a sort of victim of his own success trapped inside a phenominal franchise with expectations from studios to make them millions.

The article suggests a nice alternative reality, and has me thinking, did anyone ever read film critic Kim Newman's short story "And the Pierce Arrow Stalled"?

PS Though no matter what I say I couldn't help but laugh when he talked about "over commericalisation"