I Love You, George.
I’m going to San Diego in July, for the über-con that’s held there every year. I’ll be doing some signings. Maybe I’ll see you there!
I got to thinking about Star Wars, the eternal piñata for most of us comic book types. Invariably, at some point during the all-night nerd-a-thons that take place at the hotel bars after the con gets out, the conversation veers towards Star Wars. And it stays there. It’s always about how much the prequels sucked. Why they sucked. Why they could have been better. Why they should been better, godammit!
But something the great Billy Wilder once said puts things into perspective for me: “you’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done”. Maybe it’s time we all gave George Lucas a collective break.
However much the prequels did or did not suck, nothing can take away from the brilliance of the first three movies. Some of the things I object to about the prequels were already swirling around in Return of the Jedi, but Jedi is still a great ending to the series.
And consider what Lucas had to overcome just to make Star Wars. If I understand his story correctly, he had big hopes for THX 1138, he thought it was going to make him bigger than Godzilla. It didn’t. THX 1138 is a great movie, but it didn’t do very well at the box office.
That must have been crushing, but Lucas came back with Star Wars, which must have sounded very strange to Hollywood producers at the time. Movies in the late 70s were all about gritty realism, not fantasy. Before Star Wars, what did people even have to go on when it came to sci-fi except for Star Trek re-runs? The reason Lucas is so powerful today is because he was able to retain virtually all the rights to Star Wars. It wasn’t because 20th Century Fox was being nice -- they just thought those rights were worthless.
It took him six years to get it to the screen, but he did it. That is pure, iron determination.
And then he came out with Empire Strikes Back, one of the greatest movies ever made, as far as I’m concerned. If Billy Wilder is right, and I think he his, then George Lucas deserves to be judged on that basis, and that basis alone.
I’ve never seen Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith. I don’t think I ever will. There’s a poem by Keats that perfectly sums up how I feel:
http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/keats/urn.text.html
The perfect prequels are the ones in my mind. They cannot fade, like the unattained girl in the poem. The stories you don’t write are always better than the ones you do.
So thank you, George. Not just for the stories you told, but for the ones you didn’t. I am forever in your debt.
I love you. Platonically.
Arvid Nelson (me!) is a comic book writer, responsible for Rex Mundi and Zero Killer, among other things. I live in Northampton, Massachusetts with my lovely wife. more...Coming Up
- Feb. 15: Dejah Thoris #10
May 5th, 2010 - 16:09
Hmm, if I can find a hotel to stay in, I might be in San Diego as well. I’ll have to drop by, say hi, and get Zero Killer signed.
I don’t think the prequels were terrible per se, but the original films are great. Lucas is a shrewd businessman, and his creative hits (Raiders, Empire) show that he’s very good at coming up with ideas.
May 5th, 2010 - 18:39
Hear hear, Nick. He always succeeds as a businessman.
May 11th, 2010 - 19:47
After a performance of the One Man Star Wars Show down here last year, some of us went back to Charlie Ross’ room (he’s the one man in the show’s title), and we had an EPIC discussion on how the prequels could have been written instead. Charlie had some flat out amazing ideas — and I’ve heard a lot of ideas in my time, being a total SW geek — that I thought were ground breaking. It’s such a fun football to kick around. On the topic of Lucas himself, I will say this: I think George is a great visionary and ideas man and, in his younger days, was an intriguing director. I think he got away with Star Wars because it was so new and different — and his vision ensured the effects blew people’s minds. Empire succeeded because he didn’t direct it, and he had serious help on the screenplay, too. Jedi succeeded because the juggernaut just couldn’t be stopped at that stage, even if it wasn’t as good as the first two movies in some ways. I think the prequels would have been better if George had sketched down his ideas and then handed it to a screenwriter and director and then worked intensively with them in a producer role. I reckon that would have made brilliant films.
May 14th, 2010 - 13:29
What were some of his ideas, Rob?
Matt Camp, the artist for Zero Killer, has some great ideas about what could have been. For instance, what if Obi-wan had had an affair with Luke’s mother? That would be a much more convincing reason for Darth to turn to the Dark Side. It would give their duel in the original movie a very powerful, new meaning.
And it also accounts for Leia’s comment about how her mother seemed “sad” in one of the original movies. Anaaad it would also mean Obi-wan might, just might, be Luke’s real father…
For me, the best stories aren’t about “good versus evil”, they’re about people who make tragic mistakes that result in tragic, irreconcilable differences. That was the big thing missing from the prequels, for me, the intense inter-personal drama.
EDIT: and you are so right, Rob, Lucas is a great delegator. So much of what made the first Star Wars great was the production art — the great Ralph McQuarrie — and the fantastic music. It really was a group effort. I guess the prequels were too, but they felt like more a “corporate group effort” than a “rugby game group effort”, if you know what I mean.
May 15th, 2010 - 04:31
That night was so addled in beer and scotch and all manner of tasty things in glasses, it would really do a disservice to Charlie to try and remember it all. But the big, over-arching concept that he strung everything on was the concept of families and, surprisingly, love. There were a million and one plot points hung off that which made so much sense. I really wish we’d recorded the conversation actually, because I’d like to relive it again.
May 15th, 2010 - 08:27
I can totally see that. For me, the family drama of Luke, Leia and Darth, and the orbital concerns of Yoda, Han and Obi-wan, is what made the first movies so interesting.