George Lucas says Han never shot first, you were just confused

Bottom line is this - Lucas was NEVER the "creative genius" he was cracked up to be.

The success of Star Wars was a mix of luck, and a pool of talent from across all disciplines of the film-maknig process. This is because it germinated at a time when GL had to rely more heavily on others...

Preaching to the choir here, but we all know that the more independent he got, the worse his films were.

But even in the beginning, he was not a creative genius - more like a creative LUNATIC. His ideas leading into SW was voluminous, eecentric, unfilmable, chaotic - I could go on...

Were it not for those around him who corraled his creative lunacy (and at the same time offered their own input) SW would have been a stinking pile of you-know-what, and B-Movie fare at best.

Key elements where GL got lucky, or indirectly relied on - or direclty benefitted from - others:
--Williams ponying up to score the film
--The Huyck's salvaging of the script (at least dialogue) via their script doctoring
--Kurtz's push-back
--The quality of work (eventually) turned in by the nascent ILM
--The rich production design executed into reality by the British film crews
--That Jones agreed to voice Vader

The list goes on... Imagine SW if you took away just ONE of these elements.

Do it now.

Imagine the opening withOUT the most efffective film score of all time, and/or without the stunning effect of the SD coming overhead. What IF Jones passed on doing Vader? Just another deep voice would not have been the same...


Film is a collaborative effort. ALL good films are generally the result of a combination of key ingredients, as described above. I suppose at the time Star Wars was no different.

The difference was that there WAS an ecclectic combination of talent. A good and diverse "gene-pool" of talent that has since dwindled away as GL has taken more and more control over his work.

I give Lucas credit for the film in the same way we give Hitch or any other fine director credit for their movies. Lucas asked for all the elements you mention, controlled them and channelled them into a clear but extremely difficult-to-achieve aim - a return to old-time Hollywood romance. This goal was set by him and him alone. And his chosen method was to go for an unprecedented blending of myth with a whole melting pot of classic film genres - a fascinating innovation, and for me, the reason why Star Wars is his best film in film terms. This course was set by him and he deserves full credit for it.

Remember that most of the crew didn't have a clue what he was trying to do, and he fought many battles to get his ideas over, encountering obstruction and even mockery from the British crew (some of whom took the **** out of Chewbacca and Vader onset). Other accounts speak of John Barry being Lucas' only real supporter through the Tunisian shoot.

As for the Huycks, it was Lucas who hated his own dialogue so he brought them in. How many films did Hitchcock attempt to do dialogue for? None I think, but we still call him a great director, even an auteur. The point is Lucas saw it needed polishing, and had it polished, thus executing perfectly his directorial duty.

As for ILM, you might as well say Kubrick was nowhere without his FX men too, but we never hear that said much. And Lucas stood over those guys. Tons of DS battle shots were cut to specific WW2 footage assembled by Lucas. The moves, the speed of the ships, timings, shot lengths, were all largely pre-ordained by Lucas in his WW2 reel. Lucas possibly also put more into the actual design of his ships than Kubrick, coming up with the initial basic configurations of the TIE, the X-wing, the Falcon, the Death Star etc.

As for Williams, Lucas asked for a big romantic orchestral score, and the result bears many resemblances to the stuff he'd been using for temp tracks - Stravinsky in the desert scene with the robots for instance. You might as well say Spielberg's clunking shark would've been dead in the water without Williams' famous see-sawing string figure to give it life, but we never hear this said either.

Lucas had also directed two fine films previously. So I kind of object to this characterisation of the director of SW as a confused loon who got lucky. The sheer amount of elements he had to design, work out and budget for in just 3 years is just staggering - as well as writing the script! This was no ordinary movie, and obviously he needed more than a producer's usual level of input and support, hence Kurtz's massive logistical and advisory input. It's an absolute miracle the thing got made at all. But ultimately Lucas was captain of the ship and he steered it home.

Finally, there are loads of artists - musicians, painters, writers - who didn't have a great team around them, who had a good couple of years then started producing crap. I think Lucas' case is similar. He had an exceptional talent for a few years, then went off.
 
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The inventor of the Cirrus X3 was a young artist previously thought to have frozen to death after the sinking of the Titanic.
 
The inventor of the Cirrus X3 was a young artist previously thought to have frozen to death after the sinking of the Titanic.

Wasn't he also mistaken as the twin brother of King Louis XIV, that guy in the iron mask? How is that even possible? WORMHOLES.
 
Look, GL is the ultimate Fanboy with a huge playground at his disposal. I knew a kid in HS, he wrote these great stories, he was one of the few he'd let read the first drafts. The first drafts were almost always great. Then he'd change them, rewrite them, add stuff, take away stuff, until his final story was usually Crap, and read like if Phillip K. Dick were to rewrite HP Lovecraft. I asked him finally "WHY?" His response - 'Because they're my stories, My ideas, and I can".

The main rankling thing at this point, is his looking at the fans like they're all idiots. Look at THX 1138, when he makes it to the outer shell, in the original, he's attacked by the "Shell Dwellers", these are Dwarfed, Humans, mutated by all the waste dumped by that society. Last time I saw it, he was attacked by some sort of bad CGI Monkey Creature. To his POV, he's afraid that he will get accused of hating Little People because Robert Duvall beat the crap out of a bunch of Munchkins. Ooooh George Lucas, you evil evil man, THX hurt the Oompaloomps...Booooooo. Because we're ALL that stupid.
 
Look, GL is the ultimate Fanboy with a huge playground at his disposal. I knew a kid in HS, he wrote these great stories, he was one of the few he'd let read the first drafts. The first drafts were almost always great. Then he'd change them, rewrite them, add stuff, take away stuff, until his final story was usually Crap, and read like if Phillip K. Dick were to rewrite HP Lovecraft. I asked him finally "WHY?" His response - 'Because they're my stories, My ideas, and I can".

For me, as a writer, I'm actually not like that. Thank god I'm one of the few people who believes the first draft is the story I want to tell. For me, as a writer, I can tell you that I see a story a certain way, even if its a way that people may not like. For example, I came up with this story called Human Collision, and I had this situation where this 1971 Plymouth Roadrunner is portrayed in a way where someone reading the story could either see it as either the main character having gone nuts or that the car is alive (ala Stephen King's Christine). The first two drafts have the same outcome, where you're not giving a conclusive answer and its up to the reader to decide which was really happening. Mark Winegardner, my teacher for Fiction Workshop and author of The Godfather Returns, told me I needed to change the ending and that I had no choice but to give a definitive answer. I hated doing that, as I felt my way worked precisely because the entire story was purposefully designed so that you had to fill in the blank with what you believe. But, for my "final draft", I created a ending just for his copy alone where I chose that the car was indeed alive through supernatural means and takes off from the planet earth and rockets out into the unknown universe (drawing influence from the movie Repo Man). But, for whatever competition I've submitted the story to, I've always used the original ending, as I designed it.

For me, I also plan out my stuff. I don't make my story one way and decide to change it a different way unless the story doesn't work in the context that i want it to. I often have gaps in story ideas that I can later fill in, but never do those gaps nor the stories that fill them ever conflict with what I pre-established with canon. Everything I design, I design from the beginning. If I have an idea for one story, and a follow-up/sequel, I design the first story in a way where a sequel logically fits. For one of my stories, I've got a character who has a major character arch that goes through three feature-length stories to complete and has some minor stories that fill in the gaps between those feature-length stories and do not conflict what's established. And if I ever made them into films, I'd never retcon anything because I designed them to be a certain way.

George Lucas designed the first Star Wars film a certain way. After it became successful, he followed it up with Empire and Jedi. And then he decided to go back on the timeline and create a trilogy that doesn't logically fit the original trilogy in context. And now, he tells us that Han never shot first and that we were mistaken. If he wanted to have Greedo shoot first, he should have had it done with the original release (he had the option to then, but chose to have Han kill Greedo first). George Lucas and the changes he's made to the original Trilogy now is like Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa and then coming back two years later and deciding that she looks better with this smiley as her face, and telling us the first version never existed: :love.
 
What did Dylan say?
'I don't believe you.'
And nor do I believe George. The tech was there back then to shoot it the way he says today he wanted it.
Confusion?
Yeah, right.
This is another attempt (which always works) at getting us guys talking about SW and creating a buzz. LFL must be feeling the pinch as much as everyone else.
 
Yep, I was going to post about this as well. Especially coming after Han's line "Over my dead body". Gee, how confused am I that I wouldn't think Greedo was going to shoot Han. :rolleyes

And it goes further. With Han now letting Greedo get off a shot he becomes a dull-witted, slow-on-the-draw fool who survives only by chance.
 
:rolleyes:rolleyes:rolleyes


My comment alluded to the fact that they are both billionaires who became/are becomming isloated from the World (and can easily do so because of their wealth), with what appears to be a degenerating mind.

But I'm glad you're passionate about this enough to shake your head in disgust; shows that you care.


Kevin
 
What’s really sad is that if George is serious and he originally meant to have them shoot at the same time then he couldn’t have directed it any worse then he did. The entire shot is setup to focus on the fact that Han is covertly removing his gun from the holster and getting ready to shoot Greedo before Greedo shoots him. There is no muzzle flash from Greedo’s gun and if there was they would both be dead. I don’t care how much CGI you use to try to make it look like Han moved quickly or that Greedo shot the wall slightly to the upper left of Han. Greedo’s gun was two feet away from Han for Jobu’s sake! Greedo is employed by Jabba the Hutt and I doubt he would have been if he couldn’t hit a target at that close range. The whole argument and revision of the scene is simply asinine
 
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As it turns out, Han never really shot. Greedo shot and it was reflected by Han's gleaming smile right back at poor Greedo.
 
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He was talking about....oh just forget it.:facepalm

Oh, and Howard the Duck has just about ZERO, ZILCH to do with Lucas - he lent his then very bankable name as executive producer late into the actual production and principal photography to help some friends out and get the thing finished. He didn't write, direct, plan, or advise on HtD and those who continue to claim HtD as proof that he's a talentless loon are just plain ignorant sheep following a BS meme from decades ago.

The guy is also not a recluse, despite what a great many of you seem to think. I used to see him grabbing Burger King in San Rafael at the mall when we lived there, actually saw him around far more than any other of the famous people who lived in the area. He has a family and social life, where he stops working on Star Wars crap, leaves his basement/workshop and spends time with friends outside. He's made some bad, BAD, BAD choices about his early movies, and doesn't pay much attention to what fanboys say they want. However not immediately cow-towing to your every demand about ****ing Star Wars does not make him some insane shut-in. He also is clearly not isolated from what people think of those choices, as he's commented on them numerous times. Jeesus, I can't believe I'm starting to understand Mic's view on all of this nonsense. Thanks a million...


That all said, yeah, thanks, George, but you DID mean it to play the way it did to begin with. If you changed your mind, at least have the courage of your convictions and say "I changed my mind", not, "Everyone else is hallucinating".
 
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