Any thoughts?

Sellers regret.

Lucas just can't stand the idea that Star Wars was not great exclusively because of him.

wat

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/star-wars-george-lucas-disney-white-slavers-1201669959/

George Lucas is super duper racist. Like, at least half of Episode 1 was casual racism. Not surprised that he's making that sort of comparison.

There are two things I love about this:

1. George Lucas appears to staunchly refuse to give the movie any kind of praise on even the most basic level. When asked what he thought of the movie, he says "I think the fans are going to love it." No matter how many times he's pressed for an opinion, he refuses to say anything positive about it.
2. He's approaching Donald Trump levels of personal contradiction. First he says that the thing about Star Wars is with each movie you have to give the viewer a bunch of new planets and spaceships and stuff, because that's why people like Star Wars. Then he says that people don't get what makes Star Wars good, because it's about family drama and all the movies that came out after Star Wars were crappy because it's more than just a bunch of spaceships and stuff. Like it or not, the further Lucas is away from being able to execute his "artistic vision," the better the movie is going to be.

My personal favorite part of this whole thing is that he honestly seems to be somewhat surprised about all of this. Like, it seriously comes off as though he must have thought that he was going to pretty much still be in charge. I feel like the dude has been surrounded by people who only ever said "yes" for so long that he legitimately thinks he has nothing but good ideas. It's a weird thing about more or less personally financing a bunch of mediocre massive-budget science fiction movies that still make a lot of money off of the fact that they're a part of the most popular brand on the planet. Lucas is one of those guys who doesn't care what the critics think, because to him the only thing that matters is the bottom line. Did it make money? Yes, it did, so that means it's good and people like it. So, he sells the brand to Disney, and it really seems like he thought he was going to give them his treatments for the trilogy and they would treat it like some kind of religious experience where "Oh my god, these are the last three Star Wars stories by George Lucas. We could have never done anything like these," is the reaction. Well, it wasn't. They looked at them and said "Eh, this kinda sucks. We're going to do a different thing."

This is the first time in about 35 years that anyone has ever said anything like that to George Lucas. To Lucas, it's absurd that these people bought Star Wars from him, and they don't care about his input on the whole thing. He stands back like "Wait, so you don't want my story treatments? You don't want my advice? You don't want me to help you make this good?" while Disney just says "No, George. It belongs to us now. Go away."

I can understand him being angry about it, but it's pretty sad that we have yet another petulant billionaire going on TV trashing everyone despite having done nothing of merit in decades. It's like he doesn't realize that when you sell something it isn't yours anymore. What you're seeing play out with every interview George Lucas participates in, is a man's ego being torn to shreds. No matter what anyone said, he still thought his prequels were good because they made lots of money, and the first Star Wars movie that he had absolutely nothing to do with is going to set the all-time domestic box office record in less than a month.

tl;dr:

Oh yeah. He mad.

I was actually really worried when Disney leaked their X-Wing and TIE/ln variants, but it turns out they just wanted to change things enough to sell some more Lego sets.

The prequels had so many new ships that none of them became iconic and you could never tell which one was on what side. It is one of the worst things about those movies so it's really no surprise that Lucas thought it was important.

I wanted to give George Lucas the benefit of the doubt for this, but the interview and his responses were ....hard to listen to. Had to force myself to keep listening to this. Especially the first segment about art and artists and stuff that seemed more like filler and idle chat (where the quote I wrote down came from) than elaboration on some interesting points or ideas worth discussing.

His focus on talking about technology achievements and the economics of filmmaking didn't do favors for ol' George in this interview. He goes on discussing the imposed narrow scope of films due commercialism and laments how American filmmakers had less freedom than their Soviet counterparts back then and still now. Probably true to a degree, but Charlie Rose's point must have been a punch in his gut: now that he has 'Star Wars money,' George was free to follow through his visions without fear or retribution of executives or studio-heads. He now has the opportunities to present films wide in topics and subject matter (surrounded by ever-so encouraging yes-men), but he chose to do the Prequels and allowed his vision to be molded by the very commercial influences that he spoke against here. You can see George stumble after that point, redirecting his further talk about something "pragmatism" or whatever.

Him brushing off of the significance of American Graffiti was surprisingly disheartening for me. I liked that movie. It was clear he didn't want to talk about it too much. It's like if Scorsese broadly dismissed the importance of Mean Streets or Taxi Driver in a stroke. The big difference being of course Scorsese still makes good stuff, yet George talks on and on about being still a "Sixties-guy" who wants to make art films and such. But... where is that guy? Okay, he mentions projects that he shows to his friends. Rattling the status quo in the 70s may have been great but what now? He came across like the cliche of a 50-something-year-old in a dead-end reminiscing about his college football days; it's kinda sad.

I dunno, the whole thing felt off, probably in part because of the interview's raison d'etre was to get juicy opinions of Lucas regarding the The Force Awakens. I couldn't make it to those TFA parts, but I probably could accurately predict how those segments went given the lead-up. Still, it was strangely disjointed. There were vague, broad statements about the movie industry as whole (made by George in the comfort of his nice home) and various tidbits of his personal "vision" contributions ('I did this, I did that') with little middle-ground. Granted he hadn't made something in awhile, but there was little I could remember about the art of filmmaking, just things about ... art.

Finally got around to watching the interview. It got better once Rose stopped being so combative and "shocked" that Lucas doesn't really give a **** about awards. Speaking of awards, George, you've won them all. Oscars, Pulitzer's, Nobel's... Um, no, a couple Ebony's but no Oscars.

So when I first heard the comment about white slavers my initial thought was wouldn't that make him like the African slavers that dealt with the white slavers? Well, god dammit, if that isn't practically exactly how he used the line. I was distracted for a second and had to rewind a bit to catch the throw away comment. He said he sold his children to the white slave traders. It was a self-disparaging comment and all this phony controversy ends up pretty hilarious to me in the end.

He was complaining in some interview recently that people didn't get that Star Wars was a story about a family not just space ships and explosions.

Everyone understands that. They've understood that since Empire Strikes Back. The reason people dislike the prequels is not that it has too much story and not enough explosions, but that the story and the writing suck.

No, the story was fine. The plot (and the execution of the plot) sucked, but the reason the prequels turned out the way they did is simply because George doesn't accept criticism. He doesn't allow others to challenge him and let his ideas / stories / plots / etc be molded into better versions. Instead, the first thing he pens on his notepads becomes gospel.

shut up.

Except he does, criticism is why Jar-Jar got mostly cut from the sequels.

The truth is that George Lucas was probably never that great at making movies to begin with. His earlier works were saved by technical limitations and fantastic editing, two things he no longer suffers. I started writing an effortpost to explain exactly how and why he's bad, but that topic has been done to death. It's not even controversial anymore.

He still has good hair.

No chin though.

As made clear by the novelizations, which from my understanding are all seen as being vastly superior to the films (The Episode III novel I've heard only good things about).

I think it was more about not losing money.

that is still exactly accepting criticism

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk7RN3t2v14

IIRC, in the Charlie Rose interview, George Lucas said he was interested in making 'artsy', unconventional films based on the techniques of the early masters of cinema. It's pretty sad: he said the same thing in an interview more than ten years ago! I wonder what's been stopping him for the past decade...

(Also, the interview is painful to watch at times, given the weird flirtiness between Lucas and Christensen).

I actually like Hayden Christensen.

That's been a confusion to me too ever since he started talking about doing smaller projects after Revenge of the Sith was done. Since then all I know that he's done is he was the executive producer on Red Tails, which was awful, and some animated movie this past year called Strange Magic that appears to have bombed.

Knowing nothing of me or my writing skill- could I have made a better prequel trilogy?

Well that's pretty impossible to say, isn't it Tibby? Even if you're a good writer, while the script is crucial, so much goes into making a movie that we couldn't really predict the outcome. Now, if we knew you were a good writer and we knew the rest of the crew were top professionals, there would seem to be a high likelihood of something good coming out of that even though it still wouldn't be guaranteed.

Eh, writing something halfway decent takes a lot of time, effort and commitment. I hope Koobie realized this ugly truth at some point. George Lucas may have been bad at it, but it's not as easy as it looks to make something that isn't equally as bad.

"Ten thousand hours" and stuff like that.

Careful. Someone threw a bloody public **** fit the last time I said that.

This is interesting actually I'm glad you brought this up. George Lucas is very racist but he has no self awareness. Half of his diverse cast of alien species are just racist stereotypes: Jar Jar is black, Watto is jewish/semetic, Diner owner was italian, Neimoidians were Japanese, Tusken Raiders are arabs....we all know this as fans.

However, Lucas is an ultra-leftist and has been called by Tom Carson the most "goyish director". This is humorous because while JJ pushes for honest diversity in his movies, Lucas honestly thought he was doing the same but his own inner racist came out. He is incapable of shining any light on himself whatsoever to realize every criticism in that interview he made could have been applied to him and the prequels. It's actually disturbing from a psychological perspective how self deceptive this man is.

Star Wars has gone from one extreme to the other, where you have movies with different human races being portrayed as ugly annoying creatures to a movie where a very diverse cast unites to defeat a bunch of "evil white people". Now he says he sold it to white slavers. He is equivalent to the type of person everyone knew back in liberal arts college that was an "anti racist" because he had one black friend but at the same time dropped racial slurs every other sentence but that one friend was his justification he wasn't a racist.

I will admit however I believe Boyega was only brought in at the request of JJ for the sole purpose that he was black. This is evident from the concept art where he was shown to be a white male with blonde hair. I think Boyega is a fine man and the character was good but I feel Disney fought JJ on this and I have a feeling his role will be diminished in the sequels. His toys aren't selling, I look in every store I am in and others have noticed this too. He was also not received well in China. Disney will not risk profit to satisfy JJ's desire for social justice.

You're Donald Trump, aren't you?

I called George Lucas a closet racist and stated the other facts that are already in the other thread. Nothing new here. Go to your local Wal-mart or Target or Toys R Us. LITERALLY every action figure was sold out but the entire row of Finns was still there when I went to Wal-mart and Target. Am I a racist for reporting what I saw? Am I a racist for pointing out George gave Watto a long hooked nose with a little hat on his bald head?

Grow up Bernie Jr the world is not the place you think it is, hate me if you want for pointing that out to you.

What are you so mad at, and where do you think it's going to get you?

Who was it that sent that email out? Is it too late to recall it?

The Sarlacc Pit was a vagina. The addition of the beak in the special editions has always made me think he had a regretful rendezvous with a hooker hiding a lightsaber.

It's more of an a$$hole, tbh.

Got some of that good `ol sand Tatooine sand in your Couchhole, mmrph?