ST George Lucas and the Mystery of the Treatment

It's actually a cyborg that is pretending to be female!

 

did you just assume her gender?

 

Of course.

 

*triggered*

 

Why is this thread being bumped with crap?

 

Regarding Lucas and his undeveloped treatment for the ST, I get the feeling that hiring Kennedy was a bit of a coup for the Spielberg faction when you think about all the people involved in STAR WARS belong to that faction....Rick Carter, Trevorrow, Abrams and on and on. Lucas never developed a network of associates. Closest thing was The Clone Wars crew. He relied on Spielberg for that network, evidenced by the hiring of Kennedy, not McCallum or Filoni. Neither of which have the chops of KK. So it was business. As a result Lucas really had no recourse to alter or steer a vision within Lucasfilm, which seemed to be his intention, although looking back, that was fairly naive. Lucas is less of a collaborative artist that Spielberg. Interesting, Rian Johnson is a bit of an outsider, brought into that network. I give a bit of credit to KK for going outside, whereas Abrams, Kasdan and Trevorrow are clearly within.

 

If you look at the interrelationships between Lucasfilm and Amblin, the nexus is Raiders. Kasdan was hired initially for Raiders, Kennedy became Spielberg's assistant on Raiders, and Ford's then-girlfriend (Melissa Mathison) wrote E.T. based on conversations with Spielberg on the set of Raiders. (E.T. was Kennedy's first producing gig for Spielberg.)

Everything was heading towards Spielberg directing Jedi. It'd be the logical conclusion. However, the DGA dispute put an end to that, and, in hindsight, threw Star Wars off-course for three decades. Only by Lucas vacating LFL in 2012 were things able to return to equilibrium.

In the interim, Lucas had assembled a new team who were responsible for making The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. When that show was cancelled, he made plans for the PT, bringing key people (McCallum, Tattersall, Bocquett and, later, Hales) along for the new production. If you look at their filmographies prior to Young Indy, it's pretty sparse, and certainly nothing close to the scale of TPM. I personally think it was a mistake to expect a team assembled for a TV series to be able to make a large-scale film trilogy, and if you think of the PT as a set of elaborate TV movies, it all seems to make sense.

So the DGA dispute kind of bifurcated the strong synergy of the Lucas-Spielberg team, resulting in the Kennedy-Marshall camp and the McCallum camp. But the McCallum camp were never going to be able to produce a string of cinema releases without Lucas--they just didn't have the necessary skillset. And so that's how we've ended up here.

Interestingly, Johnson recently name-checked Raiders as an influence on VIII. So the trend continues.

 

Interesting. Any proof? You say GL is not a very collaborative artist? Really? How many people dos he consult for help on ANH? And he radically re-edited ANH and ROTS based in the advice of friends. ROTS may be the only wrote solo--maybe.

Memes and speculation aren't facts.

 

So first one post is GL doesn't collaborate, now he brings in inexperienced people. Only speculation. The reason why Disney didn't make his version is they felt the characters were too young. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, you're only speculating.

 

Where's the evidence for Disney saying that GL's characters were too young, and that this was the reason that they didn't make his version? Ravens and crows and all that.

 

I'm willing to bet that Lucas probably envisioned a child of Han and Leia turning to the dark side, given his fascination with the themes of history repeating itself.

 

http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/9/8577579/lucas-star-wars-teenagers

 

No. Sloppiness. I'll be more attentive.

 

But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.” http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/star-wars-the-force-awakens-vanity-fair-cover

 

Which is pretty much opposite what GL himself said. If you've seen the original ROTJ treatment, you'd recognize the basic plot but hardly the whole execution

 

Someone posted on Twitter. From Starlog, issue 120, July 1987.

 

This is what Lucas himself said, like some kind to that Phantom Menace part of that article.

 

That's quite a nice bit of historical analysis on your part, especially when you consider Amblin was founded in 1981, the year Raiders came out. Imagine if Spielberg had directed Return of the Jedi. It's one of those great "what if's" in entertainment history: The blending of both Lucasfilm and Amblin in the early to mid eighties when it seemed Lucas and Spielberg, along with Williams, could do no wrong. All because of the DGA!
Still I might quibble with your "off course for three decades" though, and Lucas's retiring restoring equilibrium. But nobody's perfect.

 

Well, by that I just mean that things went in a very different direction compared to the way they were naturally headed around the time of Empire and Raiders.

 

Weren't the cast of characters around 18-19? They weren't even close to young especially if you look at Ardnt's storyboards.

 

No idea, but I guess for some people this is "pretty young".

 

Are you suggesting that Return of the Jedi went in a different direction?

 

Not story-wise necessarily, just in terms of collaborations.

 

No. Luke and Leia were 19, werent they? But weren't Arndt's storyboards after GL left?