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George Lucas article
There wasn't a log-in required when I read it, but it changed when I went to grab the link to post here (but it's free and easy, and NY Times never
emails you anything). Interesting article that discusses some of his plans with Clone Wars, other movies, and how he works.
http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/200...
I'm guessing Honus & DaveMoral (whenever he makes it to Oregon) will enjoy it.
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Either nobody felt like creating an account with NY Times or nobody gave a shit about my post (which seems to happen pretty often, when I actually
post  ) but they lifted the registration. Here's the article... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/movies/29itzk.html?_r=1&or...
=====================================
June 29, 2008
Film
Free to Follow His Heart Right Back to ‘Star Wars’
By DAVE ITZKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO
FUTURE generations will never need to establish a George Lucas museum, because George Lucas has already built one for himself. On either side of the
Golden Gate Bridge he has constructed himself two temples where “Star Wars” is made and worshiped: at his Skywalker Ranch in Marin County and his
newer office complex, the Letterman Digital Arts Center at the Presidio, he has gathered all manner of relics honoring his six-film saga, from the
imposing (life-size replicas of the villains Darth Vader and Boba Fett) to the self-congratulatory (a Yoda fountain) to the self-deprecating (a
carbonite block encasing the much loathed Jar Jar Binks).
Like religious shrines, these buildings both consecrate and confine the man for whom they were built.
Using the freedom and the fortune he has amassed largely on the astronomical success of “Star Wars,” Mr. Lucas has accumulated unparalleled creative
resources; his next film could be anything from a sweeping epic to one of the intimate personal narratives he has often said he would like to make.
Instead his next two ventures will be “Star Wars” projects, no less ambitious than his previous films yet potentially less commercial. And they come
at a time when even the “Star Wars” faithful wonder if Mr. Lucas’s continued mining of this fantasy world has anything more to yield.
A few weeks ago Mr. Lucas, who is 64 with a full white beard, was visiting his Presidio offices somewhat reluctantly, on a layover between the
European and Japanese premieres of his latest “Indiana Jones” movie. “I love making movies; I’m not the biggest fan of selling them,” he said, seated
in the librarylike Lucasfilm boardroom, stocked with books about real-world military history and novels like “Quo Vadis.” “But since I’m in the
selling mood, that’s what you’re here for. I’m doing all my selling for two more weeks. Then I’m sold out.”
He was pitching a computer-generated animated movie called “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which Warner Brothers will release on Aug. 15 and which will
introduce an animated television series with the same title that will have its debut on the Cartoon Network this fall.
Despite his vows to the contrary Mr. Lucas did not conclude his “Star Wars” epic with his 2005 film “Revenge of the Sith,” the third in a trilogy of
prequel movies that grossed more than $1 billion in the United States alone. As far back as 2002 he was contemplating an animated series that would
take place between Episodes II and III of his prequels, fleshing out the adventures of the Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (who is
doomed to become the evil Darth Vader), and explore heroes, villains and planets glossed over in the prequel films.
For Mr. Lucas this was an opportunity to revisit imaginary turf that gives him great personal satisfaction. “Star Wars,” he said, is “a sandbox I love
to play in.”
“It’s not a matter of trying to prove anything to anybody,” he added. “I don’t have to.”
But his enduring interest in “Star Wars” hints at a lesson that his filmmaking peers have already learned: that it is sometimes easier for them to
make big movies than small ones. As his longtime friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg wrote in an e-mail message: “All of us would like to make
these little personal films that sneak into theaters under the radar. Sadly, for George and myself, and others who have enjoyed and endured great
success — ‘under the radar’ has become a no-fly zone.”
Mr. Lucas began pursuing his “Clone Wars” projects about three years ago when he summoned the technological might of his company’s research and
development division to start building Lucasfilm Animation, now a pair of studios at Big Rock Ranch — part of Skywalker — and in Singapore. (Lucasfilm
declined to discuss budgets, but Mr. Lucas said that building a similar operation in the 1980s — the era when he sold a start-up computer-animation
business called Pixar to Steven P. Jobs — would have cost him $60 million to $100 million.)
Next he hired a team of young “Star Wars”-obsessed artists who revere Mr. Lucas as if he were Yoda himself.
“He’s the guy,” said Dave Filoni, director of the “Clone Wars” show and movie. “Chewbacca exists because he named him, thought him up, put him in the
cockpit.”
The two men worked closely together (Mr. Filoni is a former director of the Nickelodeon action cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender”) to hone the
anime-inspired look of “The Clone Wars” and develop scripts, often drawing upon unused ideas Mr. Lucas had been stockpiling since the original “Star
Wars” was released in 1977.
Then Mr. Lucas took the unusual step of waiting until the first 22-episode season of “The Clone Wars” was nearly finished before pitching it to
television networks in late 2007. There were no immediate takers. Fox Broadcasting, the sister company of 20th Century Fox, which released the
live-action “Star Wars” movies, passed. And the Cartoon Network, which had broadcast a series of traditional 2-D animated shorts called “Star Wars:
Clone Wars” from 2003 to 2005, was lukewarm about the project.
That tepidness may have stemmed from some viewers’ dissatisfaction with the “Star Wars” prequels, with their stilted dialogue and baffling politics.
Or it may have indicated that “Clone Wars” wasn’t compatible with a prime-time network schedule. “It didn’t fit any of the molds that everybody had,”
Mr. Lucas said. “It’s not ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ but at the same time it’s also not ‘Family Guy.’ ”
Mr. Lucas said that Warner Brothers became interested only after he decided to produce a theatrical “Clone Wars” film (having been encouraged by the
animation results he saw), and the film studio convinced its corporate siblings at the Cartoon Network to give the television series another look.
(Executives at Warner Brothers and the Cartoon Network, both divisions of Time Warner, gave slightly different chronologies but did not dispute this
element of Mr. Lucas’s account.)
For Time Warner the “Clone Wars” collaboration is more than a one-time opportunity to share in the money-minting “Star Wars” franchise. “It’s the
relationship with Lucasfilm that we’re very excited about,” said Dan Fellman, president for domestic distribution of Warner Brothers Pictures. “Not
just on the Cartoon Network but possibly for live-action television down the road.”
Sure enough, Mr. Lucas is already developing a live-action “Star Wars” television series, and Time Warner would love to demonstrate that one of its
cable channels (like TBS, TNT or HBO) could give it a good home.
But the question remains: Just because new “Star Wars” can be made, should new “Star Wars” be made?
Some “Star Wars” aficionados — even those who have worked with Mr. Lucas on “Star Wars” projects — are ambivalent about his continued plundering of a
science-fiction property that has already spawned numerous comic books, video games and novels, not to mention six movies.
“I think it’s the easiest thing to do, because he doesn’t need to come up with a whole new thing; everything’s established,” said Genndy Tartakovsky,
the animator who directed Mr. Lucas’s previous “Clone Wars” shorts for the Cartoon Network. Speaking as a fan, Mr. Tartakovsky said, “I appreciate
that, but there’s so much more that he could explore.”
Mr. Lucas said he had no urgent or compelling reasons for returning to his most popular characters and mythologies, except that he can and enjoys
doing so. As an illustration he pointed to his work with Mr. Spielberg on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
“I mean, why do we have to make another ‘Indiana Jones’?” Mr. Lucas said. “There was no point to it, other than, gee, this might be fun.”
But to the extent that “Star Wars” had kept him from fulfilling his promise to return to making more personal, smaller-scale films, Mr. Lucas lamented
this distraction. “You get sidetracked easily,” he said with a chuckle. “I do, anyway.”
And he was deeply pessimistic about the marketplace he will face when he someday releases a movie that is not set in a galaxy far, far away. “Maybe it
ends up in a festival somewhere,” he said. “Maybe it ends up in half a dozen theaters around the country for a couple weeks.”
As he so often does, Mr. Lucas took a lesson from the experience of his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola, whose most recent film, “Youth Without
Youth,” received a small independent release that was hardly on the scale of his “Godfather” movies. (In the United States the film played in just 18
theaters and grossed less than $250,000.)
“Did you see it?” Mr. Lucas asked rhetorically. “Uh, no. Did you even know it came out?”
Responding to questions sent via e-mail Mr. Coppola agreed that the films he now makes, and that Mr. Lucas says he intends to make, had little chance
at achieving blockbuster status. “We make films for ourselves,” he wrote. “If no one wants to see them, what can we do?” (With a parenthetical shrug,
Mr. Coppola added: “Emotion does much better at the box office than philosophy.”)
Other former colleagues of Mr. Lucas argued that new “Star Wars” projects have provided technological boons for the entire film business, yielding
Industrial Light and Magic, Mr. Lucas’s pioneering special-effects company, and EditDroid, the digital film-editing hardware that was a forerunner to
the Avid editing system.
“He does it in a way that might begin as self-serving and then of course is a bonanza for the whole industry,” said Sid Ganis, the president of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who was a Lucasfilm executive during the 1980s.
Mr. Ganis added that Mr. Lucas possessed “an intuition that he stubbornly sticks by.”
“There’s something in him, when you’re told, ‘No, it’ll never work,’ it’s motivation to keep it going,” he added.
And as Mr. Lucas would be the first to remind you, he has proved his detractors wrong many times in his career, from the film executives who thought
“American Graffiti” would work better as a television movie to the industry colleagues who warned him not to finance “The Empire Strikes Back” with
his profits from “Star Wars.”
When he works on the “Star Wars” properties he owns outright, Mr. Lucas has the freedom to ignore the input of others. In the case of “The Clone Wars”
he is financing the series himself and charging Time Warner licensing fees to distribute the film and broadcast the show. (A person with knowledge of
the company’s animation operations, speaking anonymously to avoid offending Mr. Lucas, said that the earliest episodes of “The Clone Wars” probably
cost $750,000 to $1.5 million each.)
“It’s much easier for me to just do the show I want, say, ‘Here it is, do you wish to license it or not?’ ” Mr. Lucas said. “That’s it. There’s no
notes, no comments. I don’t care what your opinion is. You either put it on the air or you don’t.”
But Mr. Lucas’s creative independence cannot shield him from the larger realities of the film business. He is not planning, at least right away, to go
head to head with more established animation studios like DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar. The mid-August release of the “Clone Wars” movie — an
unusually late date for a new “Star Wars” film — was scheduled in part to avoid competition with recent offerings from these studios.
It is also exceedingly likely that “The Clone Wars” will be the lowest-grossing “Star Wars” movie ever; Mr. Lucas said he would be satisfied if the
film made $100 million domestically. (“Revenge of the Sith,” by comparison, grossed $380 million.)
When he is not, say, testifying before a House subcommittee about classroom technology or appearing at Cannes with his frequent companion, Mellody
Hobson, the president of the investment firm Ariel Capital Management, on his arm, Mr. Lucas has plenty of new projects to keep him busy.
He is already working on the second and third seasons of “The Clone Wars” and forging ahead on his live-action “Star Wars” television show. Then, he
said, he would seek other films and television series for his animation studio and continue to develop “Red Tails,” a long-in-the-works feature film
about the Tuskegee Airmen that he is producing.
And after that, who knows?
Mr. Lucas pointed back to his very first feature film, “THX 1138,” a dystopian work of science fiction released in 1971, one that at the time he
believed would be his one and only shot at directing a movie exactly as he envisioned it. (The movie’s critical and commercial reception very nearly
proved him right.)
All that his wealth has bought him, Mr. Lucas said, is the opportunity to make more films the way he wants to. “I’ve got more shots,” he said. “I can
go and make half a dozen ‘THXes.’ I’ll lose everything I put into them, guaranteed. But I can have a lot of fun doing it.”
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BDx13
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interesting, thanks.
and hey... i read every post!
If I fail math, there goes my chance at a good job and a happy life full of hard work.
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xChino_Martinezx
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I used to watch the Clone Wars animated shorts on cartoon network when I had cable tv, that shit was fucking great, and Gendy Tartakovsky did a really
good jod directing that serie, I've heard he's now director of a company called Orphanage Animation Studios along with other Lucas Films veterans and
they'll try to turn it into something good enough to compete against Pixar.
But I like my cartoons and comics on 2-D... I'm not so thrilled about this up coming 3-D computer Clone Wars, I've been let down by so many "3-D
computer comics"... They'll have to invest way too much for that Clone Wars 3-D animation to be actually good and call my attention and that whole
Coppola attitude on George Lucas of "I make movies for me and people can go see them or not" doesn't convince me (especially because Coppola doesn't
plays with the Godfather's legacy, he makes his projects aside without experimenting new things with The Godfather)... it's true, they should make the
movies they like, but I hope Lucas doesn't think to squeeze every last resource out of star wars until the fails and lets the fan down... Lucas Films
is gonna have to put some major effort in these 3-D series for them not only to succeed, but to become even better than they've done before or at
least as equally good...
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defstarsteve
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read it thanks
not that great an article actually....
nothing new was really mentioned, but lucas can only generate so much hype anymore.
I started watching a documentary the other night on san francisco filmmakers and the first 2 they started with were Coppola and Lucas...
they both started together at the same time and worked on a lot of the same projects just out of film school and neither of them have ever wanted to
in Hollywood
to me Lucas has every right to drain every red cent out of what he's created.
Yeah some of it has sucked, but let him do his thing...
he created an entire universe, and timeline....
shit the bible isn't even that deep...
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DaveMoral
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I'm looking forward to this movie, and I'm looking forward to taking my 2 year old to see the magic of Star Wars on the big screen. He loves
lightsabers and starfighters already. Chip off the ole block.
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DAK
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I too am a Star Wars nerd.
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xChino_Martinezx
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I went to the movies yesterdays and saw the trailer for the new 3D animated movie and it looks really, really good... I guess they did invested enough
to make it the right way.... I'm looking forward to see this...
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DaveMoral
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^The best part is... the movie's standard is being taken to the small screen in the fall for the entire Clone Wars tv series on Cartoon Network!
I definitely need to save for that 42" LCD HDTV my wife doesn't want me to have...
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