New Star Wars documentary on Vice

[Galvatron]

Part 1:



Spoiler

I thought it was interesting that, according Victoria Bennett @ the 19-minute mark, about eighty-percent of the final draft was written by Gloria Katz and Willard Hyuck. I'm not surprised though.

[Darth Yan]

Lucas is by no means terrible; he has a great scope and his views of general ideas and outlines is second to none. He does however need someone to tell him no or push back on occasion.

[Elfdart]

Apparently there's been yet another "special edition" of Star Wars, where roughly 50% of the dialogue has been changed.
Spoiler

Victoria Bennett claims Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote 80% of the dialogue. Which is interesting since the late Gloria Katz said it was around 30%.

Lucas is by no means terrible; he has a great scope and his views of general ideas and outlines is second to none. He does however need someone to tell him no or push back on occasion.

Tell him "no" to what, exactly?

[Formless]

Things like lines of dialogue that sound patently silly? Its well known that in the original trilogy he not only had other writers come in and edit his dialogue because he understood how bad he was at making dialogue sound natural, he even let the actors improv if they thought they could do even better. From my understanding, he either had no such editor on the Prequels, or they found Lucas's fame so intimidating they didn't understand that he needed an editor to become famous in the first place. So effectively, they felt like they couldn't tell him his dialogue sucked, even though back in the day he knew. They didn't do their job, which is how we got lines like "I don't like sand", and the whole rant that follows. The point of it makes sense; the delivery isn't even bad. But the rant itself needed another pass by an editor to make the conversation sound... natural.

[Elfdart]

Things like lines of dialogue that sound patently silly? Its well known that in the original trilogy he not only had other writers come in and edit his dialogue because he understood how bad he was at making dialogue sound natural, he even let the actors improv if they thought they could do even better. From my understanding, he either had no such editor on the Prequels, or they found Lucas's fame so intimidating they didn't understand that he needed an editor to become famous in the first place. So effectively, they felt like they couldn't tell him his dialogue sucked, even though back in the day he knew. They didn't do their job, which is how we got lines like "I don't like sand", and the whole rant that follows. The point of it makes sense; the delivery isn't even bad. But the rant itself needed another pass by an editor to make the conversation sound... natural.

Lucas had Jonathan Hales co-write the screenplay for AOTC. He got Carrie Fisher to polish TPM and Tom Stoppard to do likewise for ROTS. I don't know much about Hales (there isn't much on his IMDB page), but Fisher was a very much in-demand script doctor and Tom Stoppard is a screenwriting legend. So it's not like he didn't invite others to fine-tune his scripts. And quite frankly, I'd take Stoppard or Fisher over Kasdan or the Huycks anytime. I dare you to watch Best Defense, and don't get me started on Solo.

I saw AOTC the night it opened 20 years ago with a theater mostly full of normies (no 30-somethings with toy lightsabers in the crowd), and most of the audience laughed out loud at the "sand" scene because it was supposed to be cringeworthy, as teenagers usually are. The amount of butt-hurt over that scene two decades later is almost as funny as the scene itself. It's like the Tolkien fanboys being all bent out of shape over Orlando Bloom surfing on a shield. It's a silly scene and if you find it upsetting, that's on you.

[Formless]

You know no one cares, right? About the intent? About realism? The fact of the matter is that the Sand RantTM and many other lines of dialogue besides it in AotC makes people cringe, and not all of it is Anakin's. That line wouldn't have become legendary if it wasn't emblematic of a problem with the movie's dialogue in general. It passes a threshold where many people can no longer take the character or the film seriously, or alternatively, cease finding Anakin a compelling character and start seeing him only as a cringy teen. But he's supposed to be Darth Vader before the man fell from grace, so its important for the audience to see a version of the man we can look up to in order to intensify our reaction to his fall. And such a version of the character exists-- on the small screen, directed not by George Lucas, but by Dave Filoni. Funny how it took someone else without George's vision to really figure out where this character should have been before RotS.

It doesn't matter how skilled a co-writer is in theory, what matters is if they turn in their best work, and there are many reasons some of them may not have (like Carrie Fisher being one of Lucas's friends, and therefore one of those very people who would have difficulty saying "no" to him). Sometimes a good editor will argue against your intent for a specific scene or detail because in the larger scheme of things, that little detail can sabotage your larger vision. The Sand RantTM is mostly just an example of something silly and unnecessary, but a good example of something that to me actually works against the film in a larger way is Anakin's confession about slaughtering the sand people on Tatooine. The problem there being the relatively non-plussed reaction Padme has to it, when you compare it to her confrontation with him in the next movie in particular. The movie needs to make her into his confidante, but it also needs her to be shocked when she learns about his dark side in the next movie. Slaughtering the sand people works fine as a part of the movie. But in that moment when he gets home, instead of having him deliver lines about what just happened, it probably should have been a quieter scene where he's keeping what he did secret from her, and only confiding about his failure to save his mother, as that actually ties into his fatal flaw as a hero. But somehow, that never occurred to either Lucas or his co-writer.

[Darth Yan]

Apparently there's been yet another "special edition" of Star Wars, where roughly 50% of the dialogue has been changed.
Spoiler

Victoria Bennett claims Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote 80% of the dialogue. Which is interesting since the late Gloria Katz said it was around 30%.

Lucas is by no means terrible; he has a great scope and his views of general ideas and outlines is second to none. He does however need someone to tell him no or push back on occasion.

Tell him "no" to what, exactly?

Having him massacre the Sand People in general was a mistake. It makes it look like Anakin was ALWAYS a villain (heroes don't kill children, and Anakin is still supposed to be a hero at this point). A gang of thugs would have been better, since you get the same outcome (anakin starts down the dark path) without the "killing children" part. Hell you can easily have Sebulba as the leader of the thugs, with the kidnapping being his twisted form of revenge (what little we see of the guy is that he's a vicious bully, and those guys HATE loosing. He might hold Anakin's victory against him even years later.)

Tidying up the structure in general would have also helped. The whole thing with the poison worms was needlessly convoluted and silly.

[Mange]

N/M.

[Elfdart]

I've just finished the first four episodes and overall, it's pretty good and unlike most of the other documentaries on the subject (like Empire of Dreams, which is little more than a Lucasfilm infomercial), actually reveals some new information. That said, much of what's presented was described in detail in Rinzler's "Making Of" books, as well as in Howard Kazanjian, A Producer's Life, and too much time is wasted on a Film Historian and some twit from Den of Geek -neither of whom know any more than any reader of Rinzler's books would know. In fact, their comments are almost word-for-word what Kazanjian, Marcia Lucas and others with real inside knowledge have said elsewhere. The Twit is especially annoying, pretending to be a mind-reader as well as an expert on the production.

Some revelations:
Spoiler

Anthony Daniels is afflicted with the same bug that crawled up George Takei's ass. He's so sore at not getting top billing or higher pay that he... ...came back to play C-3PO nine more times -and won't stop bitching about it.

Richard Marquand gets a real pasting not just for being in way over his head but turning into a bully, pretending to be more and more in charge even as George Lucas and Roger Christian took over more and more directorial duties on ROTJ. Which in turn shot Marquand's confidence all to hell and made him press that much more. One constant theme -though one the series doesn't mention outright- is that Geoge Lucas won't fire someone, no matter how badly they screw up.

Gary Kurtz didn't just overspend on TESB, he tried to bullshit Lucasfilm and Bank of America by claiming to be on budget even as the production fell days then weeks behind schedule. Banks have ways of finding this sort of thing out and called in the loan. Only a last-minute deal with the First National Bank of Boston allowed the film to be completed, but only on one condition: Kurtz had to go. He was replaced by Howard Kazanjian, who the bank decided was acceptable, since he had a track record of salvaging runaway productions, like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

The rest is the writer's attempt to peddle RocketJump's discredited "How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit", which Nerdonymous debunked chapter and verse, and some rather personal issues between Marcia Lucas and her ex-husband.

Still, it's an informative series. As Joe Bob Briggs would say: "Check it out".