Arvidland The Online Journal of Writer Arvid R. Nelson · Weapons of Mass Enlightenment

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.

OMG, Corey Haim is dead?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/corey-haim-actor-has-died/?hp

Much love, Corey. Thanks for making so many awesome movies, and sorry your adult life was so rough – you deserved better.

Updates, Updates, Updates.

I added (what I hope is) lots of useful information to "Breaking and Entering", and created a new section for updates on the Rex Mundi movie adaptation.

Yes, we're working on a Rex Mundi movie!

Click away, and happy reading.

—rvid