Leave George Lucas Alone
Rogue One is the latest installment in the, let me see if I’ve got this right: Star… War(s?) series. Its garnered mostly favorable reviews but director Gareth Edwards recently stated there was one opinion about which he really cared, that of Star Wars creator George Lucas. (He liked it)
There are those who may scoff. Who cares about his opinion? Pretty sure George Lucas hasn’t cared what we think of Star Wars for 20 years! I, on the other hand, can’t help but feel some remorse about the way we treat Lucas. He has become a Puxatony Phil groundhog we drag in front of cameras once a year to see if he’s still pissed off about the direction Disney is taking Star Wars. This of course follows a feature length documentary about how disappointed fans are in him and the unanimous rejoicing when his greatest creation was no longer in his control. He has been painted as selfish and completely out of touch with his fan-base but interviews since the sale of Lucasfilm show us that he is lucid enough to realize the world just kind of hates him.
Well the world is a dick. In one of the most extreme forget-for-a-moment exercises ever, let’s forget for a moment that George Lucas gave the world some of the most universally beloved films of all time and take a look at some of his other wondrous, lasting contributions to the film industry! It is very likely that much of what is mentioned below would exist very differently, if at all, were it not for the input of George Lucas.
Oh but he changed Darth Vader’s “No” to the other “NOO” that I don’t like, so screw him forever.
That’s you.
ILM
When Lucas set out to make Star Wars he found himself in a film-making landscape completely devoid of dedicated special effects houses. Television was king and movie attendance was in serious decline. Studios just weren’t making the kind of movies that needed visual effects. Even 20th Century fox didn’t have the facilities required to meet Lucas’ needs.
So he created his own special effects company from scratch, The now legendary Industrial Light and Magic. The man deserves acclaim for coming up with that name alone. I mean hot-damn. INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC!
Obviously the up and coming artists and tech whizzes George hired went on to create the stunning-for-the-time and astoundingly still-pretty-good VFX for Star Wars, but by not keeping the technology for himself George and his company breathed new life into the dying effects industry. ILM developed solutions for an impressive array of effects challenges in films outside of Lucasfilm such as ‘Star Trek: Wrath of Khan’ and an insane sequence in 1985's ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ featuring a stained-glass knight come to life.
Today there are plenty of special effects companies with impressive bodies of work but ILM was the first, and still the best modern effects house.
PIXAR
Believe it or not, Pixar was not always a society of artists and computer engineers researching and implementing devastatingly efficient ways to make adults shed hot tears at the movie theater. In 1979 The Graphics Group, a third of Lucasfilm’s computer division was created. It’s mission: to develop and sell the Pixar Image Computer system. Computer animation just wasn’t a viable option for film-making yet, and the Pixar was meant to remedy that while also being sold as hardware geared towards meeting the visualization needs in the fields of medicine, geophysics and meteorology.
The Graphics Group gained popularity (and paid the bills) with it’s advertising work. You may recall the old Tropicana commercial with the CGI straw trying to dive into an orange? That was them. They also got a lot of attention for their short film Luxo Jr (The one with the lamp bouncing on the ball) which was made by John Lasseter as a tech demo to show off the capabilities of the computer.
The Graphics Group became much more known for their shorts than for their ability to sell hardware and their fully animated short ‘Adventures of Andre and Wally B’ laid the groundwork for the first ever CGI animated feature film. This was not a direction Lucasfilm was interested in heading and so The Graphics Group spun out as it’s own corporation and was purchased as PIXAR from Lucas by Steve Jobs for $5mil in 1986. Abandoning hardware sales, Pixar continued to sell animation software. In 1991 a movie deal was made with their biggest customer, Disney, and work on Toy Story Began.
PHOTOSHOP
The so-famous-we-use-it’s-name-as-a-verb image editing application began as a simple image display application called display (that word was already being used as a verb so, not as big a deal) Display’s creator Thomas Knoll showed the work in progress to his brother John, an employee of the graphics department of ILM. Photoshop was completed and sold by Adobe in 1989 but John Knoll posits that without ILM as a testing ground, the Photoshop we know and love to use to make models thinner may never have existed.
Thomas Knoll claims “ILM was the first place I went to that had a computer graphics department. So in a way George had kind of fostered the creation of photoshop”
END CREDITS
Watch the first 5 minutes of any pre-1977 movie and you’ll notice they all have something in common.
Every
Single
Credit
It was standard practice to have the credits show in their entirety before a film and Lucas had to fight to start Star Wars without them. When he did it again for Empire Strikes Back, the Directors Guild fined him $250,000 for not crediting…himself, at the beginning of the film. Lucas paid the fine and ultimately decided to leave the guild.
His decision to nix the opening credit and jump right into the film is widely recognized as the catalyst for the now pretty much standard end-credits.
DIGITAL CINEMA
Attack of the Clones was the first major film to suck as bad as it did despite such a promising trailer. It was also the first major film to be shot completely on HD digital cameras. The viability of digital video as a replacement for film is still hotly debated today and was outright rejected in 2002. At it’s release critics largely disagreed with Lucas’ claim that digital video could replace film with Roger Ebert claiming that the video had “a certain fuzziness, an indistinctness” when he saw it.
In reply, Lucas insisted that a film shot digitally also needed to be projected digitally. Ebert later gave the film another viewing at a digital cinema. (of which there were only about 20 at the time)
“I was able to see the digital version, and Lucas is right: “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones” is sharper, crisper, brighter and punchier on digital than on film.”
Theater owners eventually came around and saw the advantages not only in film quality, as Lucas suggested but also in efficiency and economy. Today the vast majority of cinemas are exclusively digital.
DIGITAL FILM EDITING
Even before leading the film industry by the nose to digital film-making and exhibition, Lucas saw the benefits of working on movies digitally. Lucasfilm developed the EditDroid nonlinear editing system that allowed for the cutting of a movie on computer instead of with actual physical film frames.
The EditDroid system evolved to become the Avid editing software which has been one of only two or three industry standard editing software to this day and did away with frame-by-frame linear editing.
SOUND QUALITY
If you’ve ever had your mom yell at you from the next room to turn that damn movie down before said damn movie even started, you probably remember THX.
During post production for Return of The Jedi, Lucas held a screening for the editors and sound designers at a local theater. There they noticed something wrong with the sound. The filmmakers bounced theories around as to how the audio could be so off. Had it been mastered wrong? Were there entire tracks missing?
Turns out the theater just sucked. With the release of the Star Wars films and their groundbreaking sound design, theater owners were now faced with a need to upgrade their sound systems. But progress was slow and Lucas didn’t want his films experienced with an ancient mono-sourced speaker system.
The Lucasfilm company THX (named after one of his short films, and later his first feature) was co-founded by Lucas in an effort to establish a standard of film presentation across all theaters to ensure that films, starting with Return of the Jedi could be experienced in its highest quality and take advantage of surround sound. The standard soon spread to home entertainment, car stereos and headphones.
IMPACT ON SCI FI
George Lucas has done more to make science fiction a marketable genre in Hollywood than any other filmmaker.
The most easily traceable influence on sci fi is the 1979 classic, Alien. Head of Fox, Alan Ladd Jr was prompted by the runaway success of the studios earlier film Star Wars (despite little faith in the project or it’s director) to give Alien a bigger budget. Thus pulling it out of danger of becoming another cheap B-movie and launching an adult sci fi franchise.
The success of Star Wars also brought on the relaunch of the Star Trek films, not to mention countless low-budget imitators. One such Star Wars rip-off was Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars, which began the career of it’s special effects producer, James Cameron.
THE FILM FRANCHISE
When Fox execs were breathing down his neck about the behind schedule and over budget Star Wars, Lucas placated them by forfeiting his directing fees. He opted instead to retain licensing rights for the film which, for all anyone could tell, were worthless.
In reality it wasn’t long before merchandising rights alone netted hundreds of millions of dollars for Lucasfilm. Critics often blame him for forever linking the film industry to toy sales but merchandise money wasn’t the end-game for Lucas. He was looking out for his franchise.
Having written Star Wars with the potential for more films to follow (or precede) and after feeling smothered by FOX, he wanted control over where the story went from there. He maintained strict authority over all Star Wars properties from then until the the purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion by Disney in 2012.
Today the film industry feels like it is made up almost entirely of shared universes, spin-offs, sequels, requels, reboots… franchises.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, The Fast and whatever series, Planet of the Apes, James Bond, Transformers, Despicable Me, X-men, DC Cinematic Universe, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost-busters, Mission Impossible, Toy Story, Ice Age, Indiana Jones, Kung-Fu Panda, Terminator, Star Trek, Alien, Jason Borne, Rocky, Die Hard, Ocean’s however many and of whichever gender.
You probably won’t live to see the last of any of these film franchises. Don’t believe me?
THE NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY
In 1988 several studios sought to colorize classic films to make a definitive, updated version. But several filmmakers stepped forward to stop them, even going so far as to speak before congress on the importance of preserving the original cuts of films for historical reasons. One of those filmmakers…
no way
…was none other than…
gtfo
…George (special edition) Lucas. He gave an impassioned speech to congress imploring them to facilitate the preservation of historically significant films.
“ People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians” -George (beak on the sarlacc) Lucas
Lucas and several other filmmakers scored a major victory on behalf of classic cinema as their speeches to congress prompted the creation of the National Film Registry, which continues to ensure the survival, conservation, and increased public availability of America’s film heritage.
Yes they have been given a 35mm copy of Star Wars from Lucas.
It’s the Special Edition cut.
INDEFENSIBLE
I’ve suddenly found it hard to stick up for the man.
But the fact remains: he is the father of modern cinema. As we look at the groundbreaking changes he ushered in the movie-making process one thing is clear, that filmmakers and, even more so, audiences owe him their gratitude if not their affection.
One last bit of trivia:
The Special Additions were actually made to the original trilogy as a way for Lucas to test out CGI characters and location augmentation before he committed to making the prequel trilogy.
