Saga George Lucas retiring from SW films (What does this mean for the future of SW?)

^^^ This.


As for the daughter/Katie Lucas thing, from my perspective, I've not seen anyone "attacking" her on-line. What I've seen is their reaction to HER claim that "Han NEVER shot first!" , and what that statement implies about her (lack of) knowledge concerning SW and it's history. It only takes a little deductive reasoning to show that in high probability, she was never exposed to the pre-SE versions of SW (or at least, not enough for it to have made a lasting impression). Yes, it's wrong to personally attack her or her dad ...the thing is, though, on the subject of the SE/OOT/saga changes, she is not well-qualified to defend her dad, on this particular score (lest anyone shed any more crocodile-tears for her mistreatment by mean fan-boys).

 

A poster in the TV/Live Action series forum (see the parallel thread) suggested that one so-called "fan" twittered her that her father "raped his childhood". Apparently she responded and tried to defend her dad. Another poster suggested in the same thread she and her father should make use of the retirement to go on a diet instead of turning into Jabba the Hutt. That's the kind of comments I'm talking about.

 

Just so you know, mandragora, I've since edited that post.

I wouldn't deny that those things above were said on the net...however, I think that those things are ultimately irrelevant to the topic anyhow. I think her statement that "Han NEVER shot first!" is more cogent to a discussion about SW fans, the franchise itself, and Lucas' treatment of the old films, much more than insults directed at her or her dad.

 

The reason I brought this up was because in my opinion, attacks at his daughter like these may well have been the reason (or one important reason) behind Lucas' "terrible person" quote, more so than insults directed at himself directly.

 

I agree. But to me, it's the fact that she even said it at all - no doubt in response to some 'pesky' fan(s) on the net. Her statement itself is the point of 'contention': she's either never really seen the OOT or doesn't remember it. Kind of troubling when one considers that she might one day become the 'keeper' of the SW legacy...

 

Now you're making grand assumptions about the uninformed judgments I've made about you.

Come to think of it, the opposing arguments of "your expectations ruined the prequels" and "you'd like anything with the Star Wars logo" are actually pretty universal, and that when we're making hypotheses about people whose opinions on the prequels differ from our own, we're not being insecure or making assumptions, we're being introspective. It's actually an attempt to understand the other side, of ourselves even.

The "films not fans" rule is completely stupid. It turns statements like "My friends and I dislike the prequels" into "The prequels are bad" statements. And then we wonder why the haters speak objectively about a subjective matter.

Reading your posts is still rather Twilight Zone to me.
When people make the statement "Han shot first" they're stating an opinion about a fictional sequence of events, they're not making a historical statement about the making of a movie. At least I hope not!

 

re: Katie Lucas

I'm sure this will strike some of you as horribly callous, but I think it's worth noting that we're talking about the twitter account of a grown woman in the entertainment industry. Twitter is by default a very public forum, and she uses her account for professional/promotional as well as personal messaging. There's not much essential difference between Katie Lucas's twitter account and Snooki's. Actually, I think people were MUCH kinder to Katie over "Han NEVER shot first" than they would have been had Snooki posted the same.

The reason I point this out is because much of the discussion has been in terms of "attacking Lucas's daughter" as if this were the case where people were harassing Palin's underaged, non-politician daughter on her private Facebook account. I have zero respect for Sarah Palin, but children are off-limits.

Here, the important distinction is that we're not dealing with George Lucas's daughter, who is named Katie. We're dealing with Katie Lucas, who is George's daughter.

I don't say this to mitigate or excuse any of the truly horrible things people (of ALL opinions) unfortunately say all too often on the internet. My point is simply that when an adult woman makes an incredibly ignorant public comment about a contentious issue, her father's notoriety shouldn't earn her extra aggression OR kid-gloves treatment. In large, I don't think she got either, and the few exceptions balance each other out, IMO.

 

So, twittering her "your father raped my childhood" and suggesting in an internet forum she should go on an diet before she turns into Jabba the Hutt isn't a truly horribly thing?

 

This is a load of b.s.! "an incredibly ignorant public comment about a contentious issue" Gimme a f'n break. She didn't deny the holocaust or suggest that the president is a Communist spy. It's a minor tweak to a 30 year old movie that a handful of vocal hyper-fans can't let go of. They should've walked away a long time ago, at least when they got the original cuts on DVD. Get over it, bub.

 

Well, not really. It's pretty tame for the internet, isn't it?

I can't get over the idea that people take a statement like "Han never shot first" and assume its based in ignorance of the history of the theatrical cuts, and not the fictional character in-universe. Have we no sense of humor?

 

Not where I live. Where I live people don't twitter you stuff like that, and since insult is a criminal offence, people are somewhat more careful with respect to insults on the internet.

I COULDN'T agree more. I'm over 40 and I've been a Star Wars fan from the start. But I NEVER got the outrage over the issue who in that one scene shot first.

 

In my view, the whole "Han short first" meme, as it now exists, is both fascinating and ridiculous. At this point, I think the phrase has, effectively, taken on some unfortunate "additional" meanings, shall we say (?), and I can't help but read it in some weirdly hyper-masculine "pornographic" context, if you catch my drift. This, in fact, seems to express the full measure of infantilism that seems to course through a certain segment of the SW fanbase, if not pretty much all of it. Han's the "bigger" man, and he cannot lose out in a basic shooting contest to a spindly-fingered alien of lesser virility. Never underestimate the "phallic" overtones in a macho-power fantasy (in some reductive, but true sense) like Star Wars. Then there is the whole matter of accuracy: the basic assertion, "Han shot first", is actually wrong, since in the original version, Han merely shot. Without knowing all the details surrounding Katie Lucas and what she allegedly said or did not say, she would have been factually correct to say that "Han NEVER shot first", because he didn't.

I've never had a problem with the scene as it was re-engineered in 1997, 2004 or 2011. It is what it is: two rival bounter hunters with a mutual enmity, one threatening the other, and each getting off a thinly-justified shot; one survives, one doesn't. Blaster fire is notoriously unreliable in SW, and there is also the matter of warning shots, plus precognitive abilities bestowed on these mortal players in dribs and drabs by the Force (note: the Jedi and the Sith do not have a total monopoly on who gets to (unconsciously) use the Force and who doesn't). Further, after the shots have gone off, the film cuts to alien patrons looking, at first, totally clueless, then wary, then (the white-ish, fuzzy-looking guy) showing (human-like) signs of actual confusion over what just happened. It's a terrific gag. Well, in my opinion, anyway. And despite loud protestations to the contrary, it really doesn't alter Han's character. Tellingly, the moments immediately before and after the shots being fired are unchanged, and these emphasize Han's crafty forward-thinking (cocking the gun under the table) and his callous indifference (rising from the table, cool as ice, and flipping the bar tender payment). Han is a sort of personable "Darth Vader": the sort of cunning man Anakin could have turned into (and, in some abstract sense, HAS turned into, since Han resumes where Anakin left off, as a kind of morally-grey "dashing" protagonist and series focal-point: a cynical, past-catching-up-with-him type who Luke shows a better path to). Yeah, he might appear to give the other guy half a chance, but he'll still come out alive when push comes to shove. What's to dislike? From my POV, nothing.

 

Let this be his retirement party

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=redtails.htm

If anyone else on earth released a $60 million dollar independently financed, independently produced, independently distributed WW2 epic, with an all black cast, that got barraged with ridiculously negative reviews, and still managed to pull in $20 million in January and score an A+ in audience response polls, it would be headline news.

If George Lucas does this -- at the age of 67, after inventing modern cinema & most of its technology -- it gets lots of internet hate. Even the BOM analysis manages to dismiss the movie, comparing it to 2004's "Sky Captain"...wtf?!?!

No wonder he's quitting the mainstream movie business.

Anyway, congratulations to GL & his Red Tails crew. The movie's really excellent & different. I hope it makes a mint worldwide. This is one film the powers-that-be don't want you to see, therefore I say: go out of your way to see it!

 

In short, Cryo is right. Technically Han never did shoot first. That is pure fabrication made up by fanboys, who of course want everything in the saga their way.

In the original you basically see a cloud of smoke go up too thick to tell who actually shot first and from which way the first laser came from right after the sound of a blaster go off, and then you see Greedo flop dead on the table. The claim that Han shot first is an ASSUMPTION.

 

Neehhhh... there's only one blaster sound in the audio of the original. It's not an assumption.

 

Heh.

You've turned into a right little fan of this movie, haven't you?

I dunno. I see some Lucasian elements there, to be sure, but I'm still in not-really-liking-what-I-see-and-hear territory at the mo.

It has a good title, a good tagline, a good cast; and interesting subject matter. With the right "X factor", it should be a winner. But until I see it, it's probably going to stay looking a little too safe, to me.

Your words are encouraging, though, so, I guess I'll see. I don't watch nearly enough new films these days. That's what comes of having, like, one functioning cinema within about thirty miles of where I live.

I'm given to wonder if these things -- propounded over and over, as they are -- are a sort of crucible merely because the films, themselves, are really short in comparison to all the hoo-harr-ing.

Y'know, the original movie, deeply loved, is basically a two-hour, low-budget entertainment. That's it. That's yer lot. It's the kind of thing that accrues charm and is revered so dearly, in some ways, I think, because it's so neat and compact; and, incidentally, it's the only one of the Star Wars movies made in the clear light of failure (even the behind-the-scenes tumult of TESB can't compare).

People then become hyper-defensive about little things. How could they not? Each and every little thing is not merely little, but precious: the incandescent, triumphal outcome of a film that almost never made it. Of course, little things are the sort and size of things that really do, in a sense, make a film what it is, but that doesn't mean they're set in stone. An artist can re-think and re-do some aspects of their work, complementing existing themes and ideas, without undermining the fundaments of anything; subjectively speaking, anyway.

So, in a way, it's like these little things HAVE to be fiercely shouted about into the heavens, because, in one neat little movie, every moment is at stake, and every moment means the world. And if people stopped crowing about these things, they'd soon run out of things to crow about, and their dilated detraction would thin to its edges and completely dry up.

Really, to put it another way, "things are not about what they're about". Things are about other things. I can get some of the frustration on both sides -- O-OTers: Greedo never shoots and that's the end of it! / Those who don't care: He does and that's final! -- because each thinks the other is missing the underlying point (the little kernel of emotional truth embedded within layers of silt-y defiance or shoulder-shrugging), but honestly, it i

 

Yeah. I do think that the original version of the scene works better, but primarily because you initially have that "who shot who?" reaction. Han could've shot Greedo, but until the smoke clears, it could've gone the other way, too.

That's why I never understood all of the overreaction over Greedo's shot being added. Unnecessary, yeah, but it's just as unnecessary to get all hot and bothered about it. Han shooting after Greedo doesn't make him any less of a cold-blooded bad-ass anti-hero, because Han shooting before Greedo never made him any of those things, in the first place. In each version of the scene, Han is shooting a guy who was pointing a loaded weapon at him, and made his intention clear of using it.

Greedo's killing was always a matter of self-defense-- everything else is just quibling over timing. The original's editing (especially with the lack of a long-shot-- that's the key) may be superior, but morally, they're exactly the same. If you want to see a real "Han Shot First" moment, watch Dr. No. "You've had your six".

 

No...Katie, in response to posters, is denying that SW ever had Han shooting before Greedo ever got off a shot.

Read what J_K_H said again....


Sword_Of_Goliath, LuukeSkywalker, Cryogenic, et al:

The shooting script of the film had Han Solo as the only one who got off a blaster shot. Please keep that in mind when dissembling on this point (which the three of you and others have been doing of late). Arguing over 'technicalities' doesn't either help your case or Katie Lucas'. Making US the issue, accusations of 'quibbling' are just sorry attempts to paper-over the fact that Lucas has disingenuously spun the issue, and that his daughter claims that it was never changed (without qualification). Though perhaps, in her case at least, she probably didn't know any better.

If you say so...(backs away, slowly )

 

And the shooting script of Tim Burton's "Batman", IIRC, had Batman slipping in his grip as he tried to hoist Jack Napier above that vat of chemicals; but in the finished version, he's kinda glaring at him for a moment, and it's left ambiguous as to whether or not he has a change of heart -- a glimmer of recognition, even (given what is later revealed) -- and lets him fall. In any case, I consider that one of the film's finest moments (and I'm quite fond of it in general). Also, you don't wanna see what was meant as the "shooting script" for my favourite film, "Lost In Translation". All I'll say is, thank God for Bill Murray. Furthermore, where the exact shooting script that you're talking about is concerned, would you like to let it go and acknowledge that Luke Skywalker is actually Luke Starkiller in that same document, or is your tacit acceptance of Lucas' last-minute revising in that area the kind of "dissembling" you go in for?

 

Also I have heard, but cannot confirm, that the original scene was shot that way with just a percieved shot by Han because of a pyrotechnics problem the day of the shoot, and that Lucas had (yet again) to compromise to fit the schedule. Can anyone confirm this?

By the way, to those that have seen Red Tails, how's Daniela Ruah? Since she's one of the few portuguese actors making it big abroad, it's cool to have her in a George Lucas' movie (or associated with it at least), specially for such a modest and small country like Portugal.

 

You might be thinking of the wrong script:

There's no "Luke Starkiller" in that script, and there was no last-minute revision of Han shooting first. Unless you count changing the scene 20 years after the fact as a last-minute revision.