ST Disney, Star Wars and the "Industry".

I agree... However I think we should aknowledge that we don't watch films, listen to music, look at fine art in a vacuum. There are numerous internal and external factors that colour our interpretation (besides the empirical filmmaking reasons). When I was a child I used to think Star Wars was just about the most amazing and perfect thing ever... as an adult I can now regard them within context, and with a more critical eye, but I find I'm much more accepting and foregiving of them.

 

As long as they don't reboot it every other day like marvel/DC do

 

Everything you need to know about Star Wars, from D23

 

They hardly reboot those movies "every other day." Simple fact of the matter is that movies take a long time to make, and unlike in the comics, actors don't get any younger. Actors, producers and directors want new challenges, not the same old roles. Tobey Maguire is pushing 40. Pretty tough to play a fresh-faced, mixed up, just-out-of-high-school kid.

 

Ya, im sorry you took that literally. Does spider man never grow up or something? The reboot was the same movie with the lizard instead of goblin.

 

I think we can all agree that having Disney own SW is a mixed bag. The plus is the enormous resources the corporation has, but downside is that when suits are in control all they care about is money. And yes, Kathleen Kennedy is the boss here, but she answers to Disney and they have the money. I find it ironic that the type of people making ultimately making the decisions here are the corporate types that Lucas always hated messing with his early movies (e.g. American Graffiti). Disney wants lighting to strike twice here and its probably not going to happen. At least the movies will likely look good.

 

This sense of irony rests on a misunderstanding; it rests on the notion that Lucas was somehow different or removed from those corporate types, when in fact he wasn't. It also rests on the completely misinformed notion that people who work inside the corporate structure are evil because all they care about is money, and those who do not are good, when in fact that isn't the case either.

It's not so much that all they care about is money, as it is that they care deeply (as they should) about their responsibilities to their shareholders; and frankly, if Lucas had been guided by such a sense of responsibility, he might have been able to avoid a number of crucial missteps. Those suits he hated for messing with his films were doing so for a reason, and if he had been a little more respectful of them and their job, and not been so precious about work that, frankly, needed the suits' touch in some places, he might have turned into a proper film director and artist.

Or have we suddenly all agreed that THX-1138, for instance, was a perfect film that wasn't at all boring, incomprehensible, or unengaging? Yeah, right. Sorry, but that film deserved cuts from the suits, and Lucas' sour grapes are unwarranted. He has neither the right nor the cause to be mad at them for seeing the obvious flaws in his film when he couldn't see them himself (sound familiar?).

 

About Star Wars no longer being owned/run by Lucas.

I have made this remark in other threads but take the example of Star Trek/Gene Roddenberry.

Yes Gene never had the influence/power/money that Lucas has and yes Star Trek isn't as big as Star Wars.
But it can function as a situation where a "creator" no longer is in total control of a series/franchise and we can what happened afterwards.

NOTE, this is just my opinion and I am a casual fan of Star Trek but I certainly haven't seen all of it.
The bits of Star Trek where Gene had the most influence was TOS, where he was doing a lot of the writing, and the first film, ST:TMP and the first seasons of TNG.
TOS mostly worked well, the third season was less good but as I understand it, Gene was less involved here.
I find TMP to be a rather flawed film that suffers primarily from being too slow and the effects kills the pace. The first two seasons of TNG I regard as the weakest of the whole series. There are many reasons for this, Stewart wasn't used well in the role of Picard. All humans had to be prefect so there was no conflict among the crew. They were so perfect they didn't even have headache anymore.
Much of the problem, to me, came from the "Roddenberry Box" as the TNG writers called it. Gene had declared that future humans were perfect, so they never felt any grief, they never got jealous or envious. They were never greedy, bigoted or aggressive.
This made it very hard to write compelling drama and I think early TNG suffered from it. Even later the "Roddenberry Box" would limit what writers could do but sometimes they went outside of it.

After TMP, Gene lost some of his influence over the films and so ST2, TWoK was made. Had Gene remained in power, it would probably never have been made. He objected to many things in it, the militarism of Star Fleet esp.

With the TV series, after season two of TNG, Gene's influence decreased and the series, to me, got a lot better.

Now it looks like I am dumping on Gene here but I have a lot of respect of what he created and many episodes that he wrote in TOS are among my favorites.
But I also see that some of his ideas for the future of humanity stood in the way of creating good and compelling drama. And he sometimes did not have the best ideas for Star Trek.
Under Gene, ST2 would probably not have been made, ST6, would certainly not have been made. TNG's "Chain of Command" would not have been made. Most of STS9 would not have been made, esp "In the Pale Moon Light" which is a great episode to me.
And to me, Star Trek would have been lesser for it.

Now there has been a lot of bad Star Trek made after Gene as well. And I think "Voyager", "Enterprise" and ST9-10 are rather weak and show a lack of creativity and vision and more about making a product. So it is no wonder that Star Trek went into hibernation after that. The well had run dry.

J.J. breathed new life into it again. And yes I know how some ST fans feel about the recent film but that is for another topic.

In short, what I want to say is that it is possible that a series can live on and even thrive even without the main creator being in charge. In some cases good things came out of it.
Will it work with Star Wars? I don't know but I am willing to give the powers that be the benefit of a doubt.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

While I partially agree with you, I don't know who claimed the suits were evil. Tampering with a movie can hardly be called an evil deed. Maybe stupid, maybe unnecessary, but not evil.

 

Perhaps I should revise and refine my remarks to "suits are considered a negative stereotype." I used the good-ol' Manichean moral polarities of good/evil as a kind of shorthand. Regardless, I can't read what he's saying about suits as anything other than a slight: when they are in control, all they care about is money; Lucas always hated corporate types for messing with his early movies. It all adds up to nothing but a stereotype of greed and ignorance that is false, and it indicates to me that people have painted, and others have accepted, a simplistic and completely inaccurate picture of what an executive in this kind of business is and does.

Part of this, I believe, is because a generation of film enthusiasts have bought into the equally false stereotype of the auteur theory, and are therefore predisposed to believe that the creator alone has a legitimate right to make decisions about their work, and no one else - not even when their perfectly legitimate financial interests are tied into it. The big elephant in the room here is this fundamental assumption that directors in general - and Lucas in particular - are always right about their work, and that studio executives are at best a nuisance, at worst ruinous to art and are therefore always wrong about a director's work. In most narratives built on this framework, the hero is always the director with his "bold vision," and the villains always the suits who "don't get it."

But I could tell you about Erich von Stroheim's Greed and point to it as proof that directors DON'T always know what they're doing. The man wanted his film to be somewhere between EIGHT AND TEN HOURS LONG. That may be fine for the Criterion DVD crowd, but who was going to sit in a theater for that, in 1924 or now? Irving Thalberg could point to screenings of even the six-hour version of the film and see what audiences were telling him: that the decision to adapt the source material in its entirety was having a negative effect on the film itself; it was perfectly reasonable to ask for a two-and-a-half-hour cut for an adaptation of a novel barely anyone remembers now. But when Louis Mayer asked him for just that, the discussion got so heated that Stroheim began calling all women whores for some reason (and can I even type that here?), and Mayer ended up having to punch him in the face.

Sometimes directors need to be roped back in. Sometimes it's they who "don't get it."

Need a more modern example? Showgirls. 'Nuff said.

 

Yes, it's quite a different scenario. Not better or worse, but strange for sure. My thoughts when I posted that a few days ago where along the line of the continuity in leadership and vision. We could have a completely new and fresh team for each movie, or maybe KK will lead everything and have the same people involved throughout the ST. No one knows really.

 

Isn't this where the "story group" we've all been hearing about comes into play? I'm going to assume that they spent a considerable amount of time pumping George for everything he knows in order to make sensible story decisions, which is just common sense; even if you DON'T go the way GL wants, it's smart to KNOW what he wants beforehand, right? I certainly would have in their shoes. And I don't know if the group was a Kennedy decision or not, but it's a smart move. If that's an indicator of how she works, it speaks to a good and sensible division of labor: Kennedy provides the leadership, the story group provides the vision. And in a universe where people in her shoes make story decisions when they know damn well they shouldn't, that's encouraging right there: many people probably wouldn't be humble enough to know they can't make story decisions, and would never be able to delegate that to someone else, let alone a group.

And frankly, no one's talking about the advantages of this decision-making format over having a single man decide everything. Even with the whole galaxy in their head (perhaps even because of that), a single person can forget things, or make a mistep that would be caught easily by someone else with equal knowledge. Now we're talking about an entire council of people who live with this galaxy in their head and are able to back up or refute decisions to prevent errors in a way that never existed before. That's a system that's worked relatively well with TCW: GL established a group of writers with experience, skills, and great knowledge of the franchise, overseen by someone of his own thinking. How is that very different from what we're going to get now? And how has that format resulted in a lesser product? I'd argue that TCW was better than the PT for that very reason; it can only mean good things for the ST.

 

Excellent post. I wish I could like it 10 times. In particular, I liked your comparisons with Roddenberry. It's telling that things he was against in Star Trek often ended up being for the better of the franchise.

I also agree about the Auteur Theory. It's an inherently absurd school of thought. Especially when talking about Star Wars. In general I find creator worship to be creepy, no matter which creator. Too many minds went into creating something like Star Wars to give credit to one man. Star Wars is just as much Kershner's, Kurtz's, Marcia Lucas', Williams', Burt's, Daniels', Ford's, Hamill's, Kasadan's, etc. as it is Lucas'. Star Wars is bigger than one man and it's time to accept that fact. Because it's not a bad thing.

 

Very well put, sir. That's a good take on the situation, an advantage, a positive view.

I think the way things are going, even though we don't know much, are evidence of "smart moves". Getting Arndt out of the picture was a bit of a let down to me personally but Larry Kasdan is a master in his own right . .I digress.

Since we don't know much, my own curiosity takes the best of me and I can become a bit too skeptic and even pessimistic. If these "smart moves" are in the context of a trilogy plan, I'm all for it. If you want to have small geeky connections between the spin offs and the films in the ST, bring it on. I would actually work in that environment for free (you would too probably).

I hope what you describe in the highlighted paragraph holds water and that decisions are being made with Star Wars as a whole in mind.

 

I didn't take it literally, but the point behind what you were saying just isn't true.

Well there's really only so much you can do without fundamentally changing the character and no matter what they do, someone's gonna whine about it.

 

Disney is going to milk this franchise for every last drop of blood it can squeeze out, and then it'll still try and cull out the sweat and tears. That was apparent to me the moment the announcement hit.

At this point I am excited and hopeful about the new trilogy. All other plans for spin-offs and future trilogies are of no concern to me, fan wise. As long as 7-9 is incredible I'll feel like Disney and company delivered what I hoped for. The rest is just gravy, good, bad, or ugly.

 

Sorry but I don't agree... that's like saying John Williams' scores are not his, but are instead the work of hundreds of people... from exec types, to violinists, to mixing/editors etc. Star Wars is as much about the vision and direction of one man (both for good and bad) than anything of that magnitude could be. Of course there's a collaborative process too that's required... there's a much larger team working to make it right and get it out... be it on the creation of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pet Sounds, a Mozart opera, The Lord of the Rings (book), ET or Star Wars... but these aren't generally works by committee (Mozart was commissioned in many cases), these are works where the writers vision is front and centre. They are not simply the writers or 'brains', but they are also heavily involved in the interpretation of those ideas and are responsible for the manifestation of them on screen, on stage, on disc etc.

 

Um... I'd argue William's film scores aren't completely his. That's not me minimizing his impact or creativity, but his score for Star Wars wasn't his sole vision. He created it to be a part of the greater whole. A major part, but a part none the less. It's a compliment to the film itself. Now, you'll likely try to retort that all of these contributions to the whole all filter back to GL, and you're not exactly WRONG. However, it's an established fact that Lucas had an incredibly tough time getting Star Wars greenlighted. Back then, he was backed by his horridly written treatments, pure Lucas, "vision." It wasn't until Ralph MacQuarre came into the picture with commissioned art to show people what this movie would look like that GL got the go ahead. Those paintings pretty much defined the look of the film.

So, who's responsible for Star Wars existing? Clearly not just Lucas. Can Star Wars sustain without Lucas, "vision?" Since it wasn't what got the greenlight in the first place and that he didn't even direct or write a third of his saga... I'd say yes.

 

On the whole Disney-milking-Star Wars-to-death meme that I've seen a lot of people saying since the deal was announced:

First, I have to wonder is it even possible for them to milk it more than George Lucas/LucasFilm already does?

Second, and I guess this is more wishful thinking on my part than anything else because I'm not knowledgeable enough about how Disney handles their huge properties (like their massive Princess toy and merchandise business, for instance), but for some reason I like to think that Disney will really clamp down on any and all Star Wars merchandise and it'll all be tightly controlled.

What I'm saying, and this of course is just my personal opinion (and naturally this has been the case since 1978; and even more so and seemingly non-stop since 1999), but I felt there's always been a ton of junk when it comes to Star Wars merchandise. Some of it I like, most of it I don't, but a ton of junk nonetheless.

When I think of Disney, and again, I acknowledge that I don't follow and am nowhere near as knowledgeable about Disney's properties as I am with Star Wars, but when I think of Disney merchandise "a ton of junk" never comes to mind. It's always a well-manicured, tightly controlled, selection of products; even something as big as their Princess franchise.

I never think of garbage when I think of Disney like I do when I think of Star Wars.

So yeah, once Disney gets everything up and running I think it's going to be the opposite of how it is now. In that, I think it's going to be "less quantity" and "higher quality" when it comes to merchandise. And I'm speaking figuratively here more so than literally (even though I still don't feel that Disney will put Star Wars on everything it can like it seems to be the case today). Star Wars will still be huge, no question there, but I don't think it will be as "untidy" as it currently is, that just doesn't strike me as being the Disney way.

As for the movies and TV shows: being an eternal optimist I think that's all going to be fine. I don't think Disney is in this for any kind of quick cash grab or anything, no, they're in it for decades and will handle Star Wars accordingly. And I think everything is going to be tight and well controlled and coordinated; which I think is the Disney way.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this...

 

Of course Lucasfilm milked the Star Wars franchise. It's a business after all.

But do you have any idea how unusual George was as a filmmaker? How much MORE money he could have made if he truly decided to milk Star Wars like typical Hollywood execs would? Star Wars films are all but guaranteed to rake in inordinate amounts of cash upon release, never mind the glut of associated peripheral content. George could have made far more money popping out a never ending stream of Star Wars films over the last 30+ years considering the impact and legacy of his very unique product. Never mind Indiana Jones...

You probably might want to pick up the books Disney Wars. I'm also very surprised that you don't associate "garbage" with Disney, or at least don't seem to realize that many other people now do. They spent over a decade releasing a stream of mostly mediocre animated films, trashy straight-to-video sequels to their most beloved properties, and generally failing to live up to their past standards by a very large margin. Disney has, wisely, regained it's luster over the last few years by acquiring high performing studios like Marvel, Pixar, and now Lucasfilms, and associating their name with these houses.

What I'm talking about in regards to "milking" is purely from a film advantage. It's one thing to keep a franchise alive, and lucrative, with comics, books, video games, and other general merchandizing; I've never had any problem with Lucasfilms, Disney, or any business entity taking full advantage in that realm. As long as there is a consumer for toys, games, etc, then you should sell. Also that material has limited appeal, so the public at large doesn't generally get a chance to fell oversaturated. But if you think Lucasfilm has released a lot of "junk" merchandise, you haven't even begun to see the scope of Disney's very long, lucrative trail of garbage.

But one of the reasons every single major release Star Wars film is a monumental cultural event is largely due in part to how rare George Lucas made them. Star Wars movies do not come along every year, they are not truly serialized, and that rarity has played an enormous role in keeping the public actively involved, even when entries aren't anywhere near universally praised. Regardless of the entry, there remains hitherto a mystique about every single major release Star Wars film. That is extremely rare, especially for a franchise this old and this popular.

Disney, as a business entity, does not do "rare" very often anymore. If they can milk a product cinematically they will. Sure some Star Wars fans might be creaming their pants at the thought of a new Star Wars film every 2 or 3 years into perpetuity, but how long do you honestly think that's going to last before the public wholesale turns on Star Wars and it loses all of it's greater cultural significance?

Bond films, even when they're good, come and go into the public consciousness with ease. I love Star Trek, but are any of those films considered a classic, with the exception of maybe Wrath of Kahn? How many of these latest glut of Avenger pictures will still even be remembered 10 or 20 years from now?

I can't speak for you, or any other fan, but I do not relish the idea of a new trilogy PLUS a new picture every year or two in between the release of those. I don't believe Star Wars is, or should be made to be, a serialized "Avengers" type of film franchise.

We are now set to get up to six or seven Star Wars films between 2015-2030, it not more. With each of those films will come a slew of overwrought marketing, toys, books, games, etc, not to mention potential TV series. Star Wars is about to be saturated to a degree that it never has been.

Just don't be surprised to start seeing people eventually not giving much of a damn anymore. Because even with the bitching over the prequels, one thing we've never collectively seen regarding Star Wars is straight up apathy.

 

I think you're over anaysing it to the extreme (no offence intended)... It's about the concept, the vision, and the ability to translate it to others in order to achieve aformentioned vision. It would be extremely pedantic to look at the finest literary authors out there and argue "what about the publisher?", "what about the editor?", "what about the printers?". What about their contribution? How dare those books state 'By Charles Dickens' or 'By Mark Twain'... How dare they try and con us into thinking that George Gershwin played every single instrument, recorded every single version (with himself as sole producer and editor) and conducted 'Rhapsody in Blue' at every major performance of it.

Re. Your other point - Of course Star Wars can continue without Lucas... (he's sold it) just as they can continue to make new versions of Hamlet or Frankenstein ad infinitum... Star Wars is now a brand... the point is that Star Wars wouldn't exist without Lucas - just as Disney wouldn't have existed without Walt Disney (regardless of who was in his employment).

Are you being serious??? There are more feckin Batman, Tarzan, Alien and Harry Potter films than Star Wars... get a grip...