ST George Lucas and the Mystery of the Treatment

You can't have discussion without dis and cuss.

 

George and his treatments? Does anyone else believe that the Lucas/Arndt drafts had a female lead. I think it's probable that the protagonist's gender was a Lucas idea. Now I wonder which legacy, if any, did Lucas tag it as....Luke or Han? I wonder if Kasdan/Abrams switched it.

Also, when you look at ANH it follows the monomyth fairly faithfully until the point of 'atonement'. Atonement is there, but it's Obi-Wan's. I guess Luke does atone in RoTJ when he apologizes to Yoda for prematurely ending his training. Although, I wonder if Luke will atone in the same manner as Obi-Wan at some point. Is Luke somehow responsible for Kylo Ren's problems? I don't want this to happen necessarily, it's just an interesting question. If he does not atone, what will be Luke's role going forward. What happened offscreen between VI and VII. These are the most important and pressing questions to date.

 

I think that a female protagonist in 2015 is pretty much a given for anyone living in the real world - not some stroke of far-out genius.

 

Tone down the empty rhetoric for a second. We're talking about Lucas and what was in his treatments. Others mentioned that the search for Luke angle may have been from Lucas. What else might be? That's all my last post was attempting. That, and a will to get back on topic. See, we get the knee jerk reaction from both sides.

 

I don't know that "empty rhetoric" is an accurate description of that response, though.

You're also asking questions nobody can answer because we haven't seen Lucas' abandoned notes.

 

I wonder if they'll ever be released?

 

When Lucas dies, they'll release a scribble on a napkin and say "See? That's all he gave us. It's not our fault." Or they'll leak little bits of it that slightly correspond to whatever people didn't like, blaming him for their own choices. But they'll never risk letting people compare Lucas' treatment to the final product by releasing it.

 

I'm hoping they'll be in the Rinzler book, or at least the broad strokes of what they contained. Might be hoping for too much though.

 

Regardless of whether a female protagonist was in Lucas' notes for TFA, we know that a female version of Luke was considered for ANH. So one could argue that a female protagonist was something originally inspired by Lucas. Given the visuals associated with Rey, I'd say that's not an unreasonable suggestion.

 

Lucas will never die. He'll become CGI.

 

Well it makes sense re. the female lead given that Lucas wanted Mutt Williams (Crystal Skull) to be Indy's daughter... but Spielberg insisted it had to be a 'son' (apparently).

 

Is that right, PJ? I love it when we learn a little development nugget like that.

 

Yep indeed... apparently. And I personally think the film would have been better for not pushing the Henry Jones succession plan.

 

Yeah, me too. An Indy daughter would have been really cool.

 

Great point. It's from the original notes. It's great that they are going back to Lucas' and McQuarrie's early conceptions for inspiration.

Thanks for adding to the discussion thoughtfully. Anytime anyone mentions Lucas it's like a lightening rod for criticism and rebuke. Knee jerks on both sides.

What would be accurate for '- not some stroke of far out genius'? Given the Lucas is or is not a genius debate yesterday, I took that as an insincere and empty attempt at persuasion.

We're in a speculation thread. I'm not asking for facts, just thoughts. I'm also attempting to move the discussion away from tedious debate. You know, like this one.

 

Once it was decided he would be a son, Lucas had him as a bonafide 50s pocket protector wearing nerd with a white shirt and glasses. That would have been funny. That was in the draft by Jeff Nathanson. But I do like Mutt, and I like Shia Labeouf. He is a mischievous rascal. I have the action figure. He and Harrison did such a great job during the quicksand/snake scene.

[Edit: actually it was Koepp's idea: from Wikipedia]
Koepp wanted to depict the character of Mutt as a nerd, but Lucas refused, explaining he had to resemble Marlon Brando in The Wild One; "he needs to be what Indiana Jones' father thought of [him] – the curse returns in the form of his own son – he's everything a father can't stand".[11] Koepp collaborated with Lawrence Kasdan on the film's "love dialogue".[22]

I wonder how much Kasdan and Lucas worked on the Episode VII story together before Lucas left.

 

Not CGI. He'll have a Force ghost.

 

He will have his consciousness downloaded into a supercomputer. Said computer will be wheeled on to the set, and he will finally make his small, experimental films. Very avant garde film making.

 

Nope. It'll be like My Mother The Car, and he'll be a Volvo parked in front of JJ Abrams house.

 

Actually it really is. It is no one else's. The audience can choose to interact with it or not but they can't shape anything that happens. They can adjust it in their owns minds of course.

The fact of the matter is that 99.99999% of the audience went along with everything he did. It's that 0.000001% that can't accept that the others did.

Not a problem for Star Wars then.

Ever.

 

Aside from other criticisms about Lucas, the man always seems to have had a progressive vision for Star Wars

 

But he hasn't redeemed himself.




*runs out of thread quickly*

 

Really?
The fact is that AotC had a drop in tickets sales of about 30%, both domestic and world wide.
And several other movie series at that time, either did not drop or their drop was smaller than this.
So the fact of the matter is that some that saw TPM did not return for AotC.
Why is that? Either is was because of TPM or because of AotC.
Either they didn't like TPM and never bothered with AotC. Or they liked TPM but didn't see AotC because of bad word of mouth, reviews, friends or something.
There were probably some that saw TPM several times in theaters but only saw AotC once.

I we go by first release, the drop from ANH to ESB was;
ANH 220 M
ESB 180 M
A drop of about 18%

[/QUOTE]

Really?
The Clone wars movie didn't get that much money in theaters.
Yes it was just three episodes of a TV series made into a movie.
It had a decent opening but then dropped hard and was out of the top ten after two weeks.

Why then did the 3D re-release of TPM not do better?
And why were the plans to release the other films in 3D put on hold?
If that release was such a huge hit, why hold the others back?

Bye for now.
The Guarding Dark

 

Do we really have to get into all that **** again? Feckin boring man. Feckin boring.

 

I had one of those days yesterday, PJ.