Goldman helped a little - not enough for a writing credit.
He suggested dropping the “secret agent” side plot and suggested a different ending. Obviously those were both excellent ideas and probably saved the film from being a dud. But it was still Damon and Affleck’s script.
That’s overstating things. Lucas isn’t a great auteur. He needs others to keep him in check. That doesn’t mean he’s a hack, though. Very few people are good enough to be great auteurs. So what if he’s not Kubrick?
I don’t see how the names are worse than A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi (which was almost Revenge of the Jedi). It’s supposed to sound like an old pulp serial.
I don’t hate Jar Jar the way lots of fans do.
The movies are still a bit of a mess. Why have Anakin be from Tatooine? Why have a child build C-3PO, and why have his builder be Anakin? Why make sufficient Force-sensitivity to be a Jedi an inherited trait, and then make the Jedi a celibate community? Why suddenly only two Sith at a time? Why “midi-chlorians”? Why treat the Expanded Universe that way?
I don’t see the connection with pulp serials. Star Wars wasn’t a pulpy name. Do you mean Indiana Jones?
“The Phantom Menace” as a title says “I just gave up thinking here. I know kids are going to go anyway” Even pulps have better titles than that. For starters it’s almost a redundant phrase. It was an opportunity to make a great title for the ages completely squandered. In the end it just reminded me of why I don’t participate in Star Wars.
The other reason is I read and collected all the Jack Kirby comics that Lucas got his ideas from for this mythos, and it was much better there.
I would not say that. In conferences with Lucas, she came up with the idea of having the Rebels directly go against the Empire and the Emperor himself. She came up with Yoda and made him a hermit and a “frog-like creature,” and made him the mentor type. They came up with the idea that Luke had to fight Vader at the end. Together they wrote the broad strokes of the first three-quarters of the final movie.
It’s just that, after Lucas himself wrote the second draft and combined the characters of Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker, a lot of the details had to be redone.
And, yes, the biggest revelation was all Lucas. Maybe that’s why he thought he could write the prequels by himself. He forgot that he needed someone else to write the dialog.
You suspect wrong.
Problems with the prequels that had nothing to do with Jar Jar Binks:
Wooden acting. I blame this on Lucas’ direction because we’ve seen many of these same actors perform quite well in other movies. But even if the actors somehow lost their skills during the filming of the prequels, it stills falls on Lucas for choosing such a poor cast.
Poor plot. The story was overly complicated without all the complications adding anything to the movie. It was just a whole bunch of parts that didn’t add up to a greater whole.
Poor pacing. Some scenes just dragged. Usually it was when Lucas wanted to showcase some special effects.
Poor continuity. Lucas introduced a bunch of stuff that conflicted with things he had already said in the original movies. And apparently, despite the fact that this was a prequel story, none of the characters in the original trilogy remembered events that happened in the prequels.
Stereotyping. Okay, Jar Jar Binks was a part of this. But it happened with plenty of other characters like Boss Nass, Watto, and the Trade Federation. Apparently Lucas felt it was okay to use ethnic stereotypes as long as he slapped them on an alien.
These are just broad outlines. If you want details, you can find a couple of hundred here.
Star Wars is pulpy. More specifically, space opera pulp. Interstellar wars are virtually the definition of space opera.
But I was actually referring to the subtitles. I really don’t see how any of these are out of place among the rest:
The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
They all have that over-dramatic pulp sound to them.
Yeah, taking Jar Jar out of Phantom Menace would have been an improvement, but it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to rescue the film. Lucas removed him almost entirely from Attack of the Clones, and that movie was even worse.
To me they’re all warmed over and lazy. Not ideas worthy of a world wide hubbub. I didn’t note how bad the titles were until the second set of three.
The pulp thing was in response to the success of the raiders retro idea. Then everything was pulp because it was what meant “blockbuster” in the marketplace. Isn’t “A New Hope” the title they retroactively gave to Star Wars?
If you think they’re all bad, there’s nothing wrong with that–I only dispute the idea that the subtitles of the prequels are bad in comparison to the original trilogy. The movies are bad for other reasons, but I don’t think the subtitles were one of those.
Maybe. But Lucas seemed to like the pulp serials in their own right. Flash Gordon being an especially obvious inspiration due to the opening crawl.
It’s true that it was retitled after the initial release. I’m not 100% certain of this, but I think that was always intended to be the name, but it wasn’t used because it was uncertain whether the movie would be a success, and being called “Episode IV: A New Hope” might have confused moviegoers. After it was an obvious smash hit, no one worried about that problem and they were able to rename it.
Somehow I think you’re being a little too kind. Nothing against a good business model but “pulp” isn’t just campy fun, the whole idea of sequel oriented filmmaking that goes with the pulp idea is to make bundles of money by churning out movie after movie and selling the merchandise to little kids. That is a model that came about after Star Wars became a phenomenon. For a while there it was like Lucas was our cultural fuhrer. Every time he and spielberg did something society needed to cough up a billion dollars for their account.
Have you gotten proof that he really had this mapped out in 1976?
For me I find a big diff in the titles between the first three and the second.
Sometimes a very particular business model translates into an art form of its own.
“Pulp” is (or was) a derogatory term, referring to the material being barely worth more than the low-quality paper it was printed on, and likely with the author paid by the page. And yet now it has a certain campy charm that Lucas and others have sought to emulate.
Serials were by their nature intended to hook the reader with cliffhangers and the promise that they would be resolved in the next installment. Of course they were about making money. But it’s a perfectly respectable art form, even if a lot of it was actually garbage. Much of Dickens’ work was serial.
I doubt Lucas had everything planned out in advance; my speculation is that he had some very rough sketches in his head but wasn’t thinking too hard about them until Star Wars proved a runaway success. But he had definitely left enough openings that it could be made a serial. And the influence is indisputable.
Kasdan and Lucas fell out when all the set up they had planned and executed in Empire Strikes Back was undermined by Lucas’s mercurial plot changes in Return of the Jedi. Most of what Kasdan was excited about was changed or excised, and he just left. These included things like who was “the other” that Yoda referred to (it was never intended to be Leia) and the fate of Han Solo. He probably also didn’t like the idea of ewoks and a second Death Star but I’m not sure.
Anyway, when Lucas got around to making the Prequels, he struggled with the script. He knew the story, but hated writing the screenplay, so offered the opportunity to multiple people, writers, directors, and they all turned him down. Some for fear of the heavy burden of expectation, some because they thought Lucas would be on their backs at every turn. So he was left to do it on his own, where he proceeded to prove what he had feared in himself, that he’s a bad screenwriter and director. A good storyteller and a marvel at editing action scenes, but otherwise… so disappointing.
That’s my assessment of what I’ve read over the years, anyway.
Just to back up the Dr. on this, but the term “pulp” doesn’t refer to “sequel oriented filmmaking,” it refers to cheap, low-brow magazine fiction printed of low quality (“pulp”) paper, primarily in the '30s and '40s. The movie Pulp Fiction was based on the lurid crime dramas that were one popular form of pulp media. Raiders of the Lost Ark drew from the adventure stories like Doc Savage. And Star Wars drew directly on old Republic movie serials, but those serials were themselves inspired by pulp sf magazines like Amazing Stories. This wasn’t some after-the-fact branding, either - contemporary reviews of the movie noted this connection right off the bat.
I’m also curious about your claim that Lucas drew heavily on Jack Kirby. I’ve read a lot about the influences on the creation of Star Wars, and I’d never heard of a strong Kirby connection before. For that matter, I’ve read a lot of criticism about Kirby (probably more than I’ve read his actual work, although I’m working on that) and don’t recall anyone ever mentioning Star Wars as a derivative work. Whats your argument for Kirby being a major influence here?
My work has a small theater on site, and they screen movies there once a week. Last week, it was ESB, and watching it on the big screen forth he first time in years (as opposed to playing it on TV while I play a video game or something) it really struck me how heavily the film was playing up Luke’s sense of betrayal over Obi-Wan and Yoda lying to him about Vader. Which, of course, was completely dropped into he next film, which couldn’t have made Kasdan too happy.
But what really struck me is that, if you keep the prequel events in mind while watching it, Vader experiences a similar betrayal when he learns that the Emperor has been lying to him about his family being dead. It doesn’t go anywhere, because Luke’s story doesn’t follow that plot, and of course the prequel stuff was still decades from being written, but it still comes off as a missed dramatic opportunity. Had all six movies been conceived and written as a whole, thus would have been a fantastic way to establish a commonality between the two characters, and both better establish Vader as a redeemable character, and Luke as someone who could plausibly turn evil himself.
I thought it was commonly known. Maybe not.
Darkseid’s son Orion was left on New Genesis as a newborn in a pact that sent Scott Free, highfathers son, to Apokolips etc. This is from the DC “4th World” Series: New Gods, Mr Miracle, Forever People, and Jimmy Olsen. They were cancelled in 74 or so and Kirby went back to Marvel.
Anti-life, Mother box etc. vs Light sabre, the force, etc. Darth Vader seems to be a Darkseid knockoff, and so on…The visuals, themes and plot points are unmistakable, to me anyway.
I did a little Googling myself, and it appears to be a pretty fringe theory, at best. It’s not something I’m seeing advanced by anyone who’s got any sort of reputation as a serious comic or film critic. Mostly it’s message board conversations like the one you linked to, and a couple of poorly written and completely unsourced essays.
Right, I’m familiar with the Fourth World stuff. I’ve not read most of the original comics where Kirby created this stuff, but I’ve seen them used by plenty of later writers - and, like I said, I’ve read a lot of criticism of Kirby, so I’ve got a pretty good broad idea of the story and themes he was using. But, again, I haven’t read them personally, so I can’t really speak for or against a connection there.
That being said, you haven’t exactly given me an argument there, so much as a list of nouns. I know who Darkseid is, and Scott Free, Orion, and the whole hostage switch thing. I’m not seeing even the most tenuous ties to Star Wars there. The idea of Darth Vader as a Darkseid knock off seems a particular stretch. The similarity here seems to largely be that they’re both physically imposing villains who prefer darker color schemes. And… that’s about it. The significant visual design elements of Darth Vader are the mask and helmet, the armor, the cape, and the laser sword. Darkseid’s got a helmet. But his face is exposed. He’s also not armored - instead, he rocks a pretty mean mini-skirt. No cape, no weapons at all, generally speaking. I’m sure he’s picked one up on occasion, but he doesn’t really have a signature weapon like Vader’s red lightsaber.
Story-wise, well, again, not having read many of Kirby’s original comics, I’m speaking a bit out of my ass here, but based on how Darkseid has been portrayed by other writers, there seems to be a pretty stark difference there, too. They’ve got different personalities - Vader is ultimately a minion, while Darkseid is the ultimate egoist. They’ve got different power sets. The central character conflict in Star Wars in essentially dyadic - Luke and Vader - where as the conflict in Kirby’s Fourth World is more triangular: Darkseid versus both his natural son, Orion, and his “adopted” son Mr. Miracle. (I’m not sure what the relationship is like between Orion and Scott, but I’m guessing it’s not too similar to Luke and Leia’s relationship. Almost certainly less tongue kissing, if nothing else.)
I could go on for a while like that, and that’s just from a pretty superficial knowledge of the original story. What similarities I do see, such as the Force/Source thing, seem pretty broad, and are probably better explained by Kirby and Lucas both drawing on the same sources for inspiration.
This, this and three times this.
Watching behind the scenes footage of the prequels being made is depressing as everyone just stands around nodding to whatever Lucas says. It appears nothing was ever questioned.
That’s the way I see it. A young rebel who represents good challenges an established power figure who represents evil. They have similar powers to make the fight balanced and dramatic. And then it’s revealed the reason they have similar powers is because they are an estranged father and son, which adds complication to their struggle. It’s a fairly obvious plot. Kirby and Lucas both just happened to use it.