ST George Lucas and the Mystery of the Treatment

Seems like you just have a beef with PT fans and are generalising in an attempt to make them look bad.

How about actually contributing to the topic at hand instead of just calling it irrelevant and insulting others (whoever they might be)?

 

Are you George Lucas?

Where does all this 'George's excellent ideas' stuff come from? You can't possibly know whether his ideas were good, bad or indifferent. Hey, I love GL's work on the OT, and I love Indy, too, but beyond that...

Why are you so defensive of GL? Why does it matter whether he's involved at all? After the PT, Indy 4, Red Tails and that fairy/magic/pop music one, much as I love the guy, I don't think he's all that when it comes to major motion pictures in 2015.

 

No, I just have a beef against people with blind devotion to a thing who are essentially either deluding themselves or being dishonest. As should anyone really, it's not healthy thinking. If that's you then be insulted, but most people who like the PT recognise that there are flaws and enjoy them anyway.

As for contributing, it's a valid question given the posts here. Why does one person's possible involvement in a piece of entertainment affect how you feel about it before you have even seen it? Why does 1% involvement from GL influence how you feel about TFA vs 0%? It's not like the only good Star Wars out there is from GL himself.

 

I'm starting to think it's a possibility that the GL treatments Arndt was working on were thrown out to accommodate more Han Solo. Arndt refused to bow down to the mighty Harrison Ford and left the project instead. LK and JJ then re-write to ensure HF's participation (the Disney exec's insisted on his participation?). Changed some characters, changed some interactions and had to re-write the dialogue to fit.

The public have been told other reasons, because let's face it - do you think they'd want the backlash that would come from a statement like "We had to re-write the script from scratch, and change billing and screen time for Harrison Ford, otherwise he wasn't going to do it."?

I'm not so sure they have thrown the GL story completely out the window.
Yes, I'm well aware of the official lines, but I can still wonder, right?

All of this is based on nothing but my own thoughts.

 

Interesting idea, but honestly, I think it's because in the end Arndt wasn't able to turn George's outlines into a shootable script. The word is that Arndt didn't even have a coherent draft. He just had snippets and vignettes without all the linking material that makes a movie work. That's not necessarily a diss on GL's outlines, but at some point, you might say that some elements of a treatment aren't working if you can't build a good script out of them.

Now I will diss GL just a tad.... George might have just forced it through anyway. I have a feeling that's how we ended up with the romance dialogue of AOTC. How anyone thought that worked, I don't know. Maybe Arndt wouldn't have been able to save that either!

 

This hypothesis is exactly in line with what George has implied; Disney wanted to make something for the fans (aka, fanservice), while he just wanted to tell the story of what happened after RotJ.

 

What we have to remember is for the first time Lucas was spending someone elses money on a SW film. I'm sure it was easy for him to say "it should be this way" & then watch Disney pour hundreds of millions of their cash into his ideas. It was a no lose situation for George. Perhaps this was quite freeing for him & led him to come up with some kooky & out there ideas. Can hardly blame Disney for wanting to make a movie that a majority of SW fans would love & enjoy. Especially after they shelled out $4bn.

 

You know, your comment was not directed at me, but I still feel like I need to speak up here. As a massive Lucas/PT supporter, I find it annoying to no end when someone pulls the "hey George, is that you?" card when defending his ideas and decisions from the last 16 years as if George himself is the only possible human being who could think his ideas were good.

To some of us, he has actually proved that he knows what he is doing when it comes to Star Wars. So we can obviously give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his ST treatments. I am sure they were great and had tons of potential.

Sent from my SM-N910P using Tapatalk

 

After the last interviews i think:

I think that GL should be angry.And from what we can tell from interviews he clearly is.I will take a GL story over anything JJ and co could come up with!
Even if TFA is a great movie it's pretty obvious Disney JJ and KK stabbed him in the back and lied to him when he sold it.But that's corporate for you.
Funny enough GL is still the richest person in Hollywood and could make big blockbuster movies on his own with making a new company if he wanted too.

 

Make a film Star Wars fans will like!? The very thought of it!

We all know it's pandering if you make a film fans actually LIKE.

IMO, George was guilty of the WORST kind of fan service.... Anakin made C-3PO? Chewbacca was an important Wookie and knew Yoda? Please.

And we ARE getting the story of what happened after ROTJ.

It's fair enough that some folks think the PT was brilliant. Others of us are less satisfied. I personally think there is room for both positions. But I am a Star Wars fan first, and a George Lucas fan second. IMO, it was time for George to move on. Star Wars had become a soap opera to George, and I'd really prefer a return to space opera. That's just a personal opinion, of course.

 

Completely untrue! The Forbes article regarding the sale made clear that Iger told Lucas before the sale that Disney would have final say on all creative decisions. Lucas accepted this & went ahead with the sale.

As for Abrams maybe you should trust Lucas' opinion:

“Yeah, I’m excited. J.J.’s a great director and we’re friends. I think he understands the whole thing and how it works"
http://www.accesshollywood.com/arti...rstands-the-story-133957/#CRWyd8KF7BGbxlcQ.99

“I’ve consistently been impressed with J.J. as a filmmaker and storyteller. He’s an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn’t be in better hands.”
http://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-is-being-kick-started-with-dynamite

 

Strongbow and Seeker Of The Whills

My little bit of theorizing above had nothing to do with fanservice. It was more about Disney execs believing in star power to draw an audience. It was more about HF using his star status to try to relive the glory days of his career. It was more about HF throwing his star power weight around. Possibly - it was just a thought.
I want to make it clear I'm not dissing HF with any of this. Han is my favourite character and HF is one of my favourite actors.

Just wanted to clarify my stance regarding the "fanservice" discussion that has arisen from my theory.

 

I'll just never understand some fans' perspective on things, i guess.

Look, i'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I have been since i was a kid. I adore Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution. Should i think that 'The Yellow Face' is better, just because it was written by Arthur Conan Doyle?

I know that it isn't. TYF is pretty dire. Being written by the guy who originated the characters (or 'franchise', if we must) doesn't change that. Thinking that it must be better just because of who wrote it makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

For me. TAF will live or die on how good it is, not who wrote the script or how much of the originators' fingerprints is all over it - it's that simple.

Maybe i just don't get it. It's like some kind of weird, blind, misguided loyalty. Or a way that people who don't like the new story can say 'Lucas' version would have been better' without knowing whether they would have preferred that version at all.

Don't get it.

 

One could turn the ingredients on a tin of baked beans into a shootable script... I'd imagine it's more to do with them not liking the ideas or just having a preference for their own rather than them not being able to use or develop Arndt's version per se. I can't blame them for that. We shouldn't automatically view Lucas' ideas as better. Nor, on the otherhand, should we automatically view shelved ideas as being inferior.

 

I personally think the best adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, or James Bond for that matter, are the one's that stick closer to the original source. It's why the powers that be invariably return to the source sooner or later...

 

I'd agree with you on adaptations - my favourite Bond film is OHMSS, for being pretty much the only Eon flick to translate Fleming to the screen undiluted. But we're talking about new stories / continuations here, not adaptations. And since pretty much all of the Fleming stuff has been adapted, i can't really judge a new Bond movie on anything other than whether it's a good Bond movie, rather than a good adaptation of Fleming (that said, i'm all up for using some of the unused Fleming stuff, like the stuff from the You Only Love Twice novel...). If a new, original Bond or Holmes novel comes out though, i don't think "This must be rubbish because Fleming / Doyle didn't write it", though.

I think there's a difference.

I have all respect for George Lucas for creating this universe that we all love. I just don't think something has to be a Lucas story to be a good Star Wars story. That's all.

 

- Yes, once COULD do that. See AOTC romance scenes. But a good writer (and Arndt is a good writer, I think) would resist doing so.
- It's possible they didn;t like the ideas from the beginning and were either trying to see if they could massage them into something they DID like, or maybe even just humoring George. Who knows? But the word is Arndt didn't even have a coherent draft, which tells me that either he was slacking (unlikely, IMO), or that he was having trouble turning the treatments into a script he liked. He is still getting a writing credit, so I'm guessing that at least some of the snippets and vignettes he wrote exist in some form or another. Could just be a courtesy credit, I suppose, but I kind of doubt it.

I absolutely agree with your last point. Lucas's ideas should be neither automatically lauded as superior, or dismissed as inferior. We completely agree on that point. I personally doubt they dismissed his ideas out of hand.

 

Well said though I disagree that he didn't "dictate" on all 3 of them. Actually if anything as the making of ROTJ indicates LK had far more importance to shaping that script than for TESB which as you can read from the making of TESB came out of Lucas' story and his first draft (not LB's) basically next to fully formed. Without a doubt the easiest writing experience of Lucas' life. It's rare for a first draft to come out like that and see the movie basically there.

You can both be a dictator but have people help you to realize your dictation which you need in movies.

Obviously the final call was Lucas' but exactly how to play Vader was a huge issue in ROTJ.

Obviously none of the movies are objectively "perfect" because such a thing doesn't exist. For myself I think that all the movies are as "perfect" as they can be on a subjective level. They are all his story that he did for himself and we got to go along for the ride.

Very simply if there is no Lucas then Star Wars doesn't exist. TFA is going to be Star Wars therefore it's going to try to be Lucas without Lucas.

Now to equate to the topic Lucas had his own specific stories for VII-IX. Whatever they were. Whatever they have come up with is almost certainly going to parallel ideas and themes that just naturally flow from the previous 6 movies in some way.

What the overall broad strokes are to start then the final detailing is what the process of movie making is about.

 

So, has the entire interview come out?

 

So anyone who likes George's version of Star Wars and is sad to see that go has a blind and misguided loyalty??

THIS IS WHY SW FANDOM SUCKS !!!

 

I'm very excited for the new movies, I'm sure I will love them. I'm pretty easy to please, my family loves the entire saga, with this one being my daughter's Star Wars (if only in my mind.). Having said that, I would have preferred with these three that they had stayed closer to Lucas's outline. I know that for the rest of my life I will wonder how his story would have ended.... good or bad. Again luckily my wife, 10 year old daughter, and I will be right there in a galaxy far far away come opening day with giant smiles.

 

Here's how George's story ended; with him making the decision to sell the rights to write and tell Star Wars stories. Clearly Lucas didn't prioritise his stories highly enough to make sure they got made.

There's been very little mention of this, but whatever the good or bad aspects of Lucas's stories, it's much, much better that the story be one that all involved are enthusiastic about making; give me JJ and Kasdan rather than a hack director working from a Lucas outline.

 

Oh I agree. And I feel the same way about the notion of untapped Fleming stories/ideas as I do about Lucas'. It goes without saying that it's entirely possible for others to write great stories too, that are based off the original ideas/concepts/characters... but I also think there's a natural draw to the original creators own ideas.