You may have noticed that I’m not always the world’s cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:
If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you’ll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn’t see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now… maybe it’s just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol’ grin every time I watch it… and I’ve watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I’m ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go…
This is more of your domain than mine, but has the Indy movie perhaps proven that the difference between the Lucas you love and the Lucas you hate is one Steven Speilberg?
I say this because the biggest criticism of the second SW trilogy seems to be the storytelling, and Speilberg seems to excel at just that.
I’d generally agree with that, Brian, although I don’t think Spielberg by himself is the only critical factor. His touch is definitely a big part of the charm of the Indiana Jones series, but looking at Lucas’ overall canon, I think it’s the writing — and more significantly, who’s doing the writing — that makes the difference.
For my money, Lucas’ talent — and I do think he’s a talented man, in spite of my frequent frustration with him — is in coming up with the big ideas. He’s good at dreaming up settings, characters, and the general outlines of a plot, but fails at the nitty-gritty details of screenwriting: the dialog and the little finesses that turn an outline into a smooth-running story. He’s essentially admitted as much in a number of (mostly older) interviews.
As evidence, just consult IMDB: Lucas shares a co-writing credit on American Graffiti; the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were all written by Lawrence Kasdan based on Lucas’ stories; Temple of Doom and Last Crusade were handled in a similar fashion, with George providing the outline and someone else completing the screenplay.
(The original Star Wars, which I think is a very well-told story, is either the exception to this pattern, or — depending on which sources you choose to believe — he had a lot of uncredited input from his then-wife Marcia.)
On The Phantom Menace, which I think most people believe is the weakest of the second trilogy, George has solo writing credit. And even though Clones and Sith revert to the “story by George, screenplay by someone else” pattern, there’s a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that George did most of the screenwriting and the “someone elses” were just smoothing the roughest of the rough edges. Basically, I think G. has reached a point where no one dares to tell him “that’s not very good,” and he won’t allow anyone else to have very much creative input over “his” babies.
At least that’s what I think happened on the SW prequels. My hope is that things have been different on Crystal Skull. Once again, the story is George’s (although he shares story credit with another guy — interesting…), but the screenplay is credited to David Koepp, and on this particular project the director and star no doubt had a lot of input over the story as well.
We’ll see what the final product is like, of course, but based on the available evidence, I’m pretty optimistic.
There are so many GOOD books in the expanded SW universe. While I understand that writing a book is not the same as writing a script, why didn’t George use some of the writers for the story’s scripts? These are the people that were ACCEPTED by the majority of the fans.
The prequels were the most dissapointing movies of all time. IMHO.
Well, I’m a bit more positive on the prequels than many people, but there’s no question they weren’t what the fans were hoping for, and certainly not what they could’ve been.
As to why the background info revealed in the Expanded Universe stuff wasn’t incorporated into the movies or the EU authors recruited to write some screenplays, your guess is as good as mine. However, my hunch is that George probably has little to do with the Expanded Universe — it’s a function of Lucasfilm’s licensing division, just like toys and video games — and he doesn’t necessarily know what’s in those books and comics, storywise, or maybe even who has written under the SW flag. The fans may accept the EU as “canon,” but he probably does not. Add to that the fact that most novelists aren’t screenwriters and that the story of Anakin’s fall is 100% George‘s story — i.e., he’s the one who conceived the backstory for the original SW and has been carrying it around in his head for 30 years — plus a generous helping of ego, and I’d imagine it simply never occurred to him to bring any of the EU writers on board for the prequels.
Of course, the idea of bringing on EU novelists is problematic, too. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t liked all of the novels or all of the writers, so I’ve kind of picked-and-chosen which to accept for my own “personal SW canon” and which to ignore, and I’d imagine other fans have done the same. So which would you have recruited? And do you think including a particular author might have alienated some fans who don’t like that person’s work? Would that have opened up yet another front in the never-ending Fanboy Wars? Just a little food for thought, you understand…