I read the book of annotated scripts Cal mentioned (our library has it) and this gives a very good view of what he was thinking of pre-77. ESB and RotJ didn’t change nearly as much. I had always thought that he had a much clearer view of his universe.
As for Luke and Leia, Skywalking, the first biography of Lucas, which came out about the time of ESB I think, had some stories he wrote as a kids, many of which involved the hero rescuing his sister. So, I think that plot point was in his head from the start.
But that’s not the claim you made originally. The STORY part of Star Wars is not necessarily hugely original. Perhaps not original at all, although there is still art in choosing precisely the right nonoriginal elements. The FILKMMAKING part of Star Wars, however, is incredibly original, and there’s no reason to restrict our discussion of an art form as complex as filmmaking solely to the originality of the storyline.
But Star Wars is not simply a right place right time phenomenon. There are plenty of things that have hit the cultural zeitgeist at precisely the right moment, made bucketloads of cash, and then been forgotten. Who’s going to be talking about Who Wants to be a Millionaire 20 years from now? Star Wars is also a damn good movie, and I think people forget and dismiss that, particular now that the glamour has kind of rubbed off of Lucas himself.
I wasn’t talking about successful movies but about impact on the way films are made. Spielberg is a better director, no doubt, but Lucas pioneered (or was the champion behind) many more innovations:
To compare, Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, quite likely wouldn’t exist if not for Pixar, which traces its genesis back to Lucas.
If it wasn’t for a teacher I had in high school when this movie was released, I’d agree with you. But it was apparently in the first movie.
Shortly after the film was released, we studied the symbolism in it (it was for a Symbolism in Writing class taught by the school’s resident New Age-flaky-hippy-in-residence liberal-arts-major teacher.) She said that by watching the movie, she knew that in any later story/movie/discussion with George Lucas we would find out:
1.) Luke and Leia were brother and sister;
2.) Darth Vader was their father;
3.) and if you gave the wrong answer for these on her test, you’d get the answer wrong no matter how well you argued the opposite.
This was in the fall after the movie had been released, so I don’t think that the sequel even started filming yet, and there was no internet where one could fine all these leaked secrets.
Well, since it was 30 years ago, I don’t really remember. And I thought she was nuts across the board anyway (I would always argue with her during class, but got a high grade in her class because on the test I’d put the answers she wanted.)
I wish I could remember what she pointed out, but I can’t. I do remember that she referenced story points in other, more classic movies along with old stories and fables.
But as I pointed out before, Lucas didn’t invent most of the technology he used in makiing Star Wars. He saw what other people had invented and used it well. But he couldn’t have made Star Wars without their inventions. And with the technology out there, somebody else (like Spielberg perhaps) would have used it around that same time.
I’m not dismissing it. Star Wars was a great movie. But it’s not so great that it makes Revenge of the Sith great thirty years later.
If technological innovation alone made great movies, we’d all still be talking about how great Tron was. The technology used to make a movie is only as good as the filmmaker makes it. People like Griffith, Eisenstein, and Welles are called geniuses not simply because they used new film techniques but rather because of how they used them.
Tolkien started his middle-earth backstory in the trenches in WWI, 20 years before the Hobbit, and almost 40 before LOTR. In his case, it was the “front story” that needed to be fleshed out – hobbits, the Ring, etc were made up as he went along.
Nonetheless, Star Wars ended up being a movie experience which just blew everyone away when it came out. Just read Rick’s post. Why was it that people saw it and were like “oh my God!”, not “ahh, this is merely the next in a long series of incremental improvements”?
I’m not sure I could point to any one thing in Star Wars that had 100% never been done before (although I strongly suspect there are many). Nonetheless, the filmgoing experience of the audience was stunningly fresh. Who made the movie? George Lucas. I guess that’s what it comes down to for me.
Who said it was? Are you assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is some blithering fanboy who can’t stomach criticism of anything Lucas?
Which allowed motion in three dimensions, unlike 2001 where motion was basically linear. When I saw it originally, that made the space battles realistic, which was something I had never seen in the movies before. I found it more than incremental.
I’m not sure how the crapitude of Sith invalidates the greatness of ANH. It does demonstrate that technology and story telling have to work together. In 1977, for this old sf fan at least, SW not only showed us a really good space opera, in the style of the ones I loved, but did it without taking you out of the story like the cruddy Flash Gordon rockets. If you want an example of a good scene with nothing new technology-wise, I give you the Cantina scene. That was good monster work, but nothing earth-shattering, but it was still a great scene.
Well, not really Dark Star was, but that movie got miserable promotion and wasn’t intended to be a blockbuster. I suspect Lucas saw it, though.
What “made” Star Wars, in my mind, wasn’t the motrion control or any technical feat. I remember when I saw it the first time that much of this could have been done in the 1960s, if not quite as convincingly.
What Lucas did was to boldly go out and create a visual science fiction universe (although he populated it with a science fantasy story), paying attention to detail, showing things that we’d wanted to see, but nobody ever did before. What blew SF fans away was the number and variety of science fiction scenes and tropes we’d READ about, and sometimes saw in graphic novels and illustrations, but which hadn’t appeared on screen before. The cantina scene? It’s in Babel-17 and in scores of other books, but you never saw a concatenation of different alien races in a bar in a movie before (Star Trek gave you something like it on TV, but that’s not the same thing). Scores of robots as everyday things. Twin suns at dusk. fast-paced space battles (we’d seen space battles in the movies before, but they were slow-paced things. Wach This Island Earth sometime). Humans and aliens talking in alien speech. Holographic communications (just a couple of years earlier, Logan’s Run made a big deal over using a hologram in it. They did use a real hologram, but it was a lifeless and a dull thing, and had nothing to do with the plot. Star Wars’ faked hologram of Princess Leia looked better and had a point)
Before Star Wars, moviemakers would grudgingly give you some science fiction, but they’re a conservative bunch, and they didn’t want to freak out the Muggles, so it couldn’t be TOO weird. You can show some weird stuff, but not too much. Everything had a reluctant, restrained, unconvincing air about it. So you got Damnation Alley and Moon Zero Two and Zardoz and the like. But Lucas just plowed in and gave you full-bore science fiction wonderfulness, and it wasn;t scary like The Andromeda Strain or The Terminal Man or Westworld – it had swingin’ music and robots you could program and nifty zer-grav cars and things you wanted to play with. There were tough guys in the bars and an evil government, but you had that outside of science fiction, too. It was an unusual but interesting universe, and Lucas proved the suits wrong, Then everyone wanted to jump on the nahdwagon, and that long-delayed Star Trek movie could finally be made. And Cose Encounters, and plenty of other science fictiony stuff.
Maybe. It all sounded strange but consistent when she explained it. I really do wish I could remeber her points now. It’s been prying away at my subconscious all night.
