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krpalmerIt took a good long while arriving, as I had grouped it with another, pre-ordered book to get free shipping (actually, that other book still hasn't shipped yet, but amazon.ca took pity on me in the end and broke the order into pieces), but I finally have a copy of the new "The Making of Star Wars" book. My first thought was to be impressed by the size of the box the book shipped in. Once the box was open, I was impressed by the size of the book itself; it's a great slab of pages, and I ordered the paperback version. What's more, the print in it seems kind of fine to my eyes.
With all of that, it seems natural enough that there would be intriguing surprises in the book. One of the most interesting things to me in it was its coverage of the early drafts. I had already become a bit more excited than I perhaps should have been seeing, in an online preview, a clarification of a quote from the fragmentary "Journal of the Whills." Before even that, though, was a first list of names George Lucas jotted down, and I did happen to notice, among the more familiar (if minor) Star Wars names like "Lars" and "Mace" and "Biggs", "Ford" and "Hayden." (I did, though, wonder if anyone would try to turn that strange resonance into casting scandal...) It was also interesting to see Lucas worrying about how the second draft had reduced female characters to very minor roles, and to make a first effort to compensate for that by turning Luke into a girl, as illustrated in a Ralph McQuarrie painting or two. (Learning that one familiar painting showed the "female Luke" was a surprise to me.) A central heroine could have been interesting, although I do find myself wondering just how any romance in the movie could have shaped itself, and what reactions to it would have been...
In any case, Luke was changed back to the "farmboy" we all know, and Princess Leia returned... and when it's put that way, I can see how ideas of Leia "splitting from" Luke, of the two of them being twins, could have come to mind quite early on just as the book says. That does, though, manage to leave me wondering a little about the use of the vintage interviews that inform much of the book. "The Making of Revenge of the Sith" used present tense throughout, which gave a sense of immediacy. Here, it's just the quotes that are being delivered in the "present tense," which somehow feels a little more like an affectation to me. Perhaps I just found myself wishing for a proper list of endnotes at the back of the book, saying precisely when every quote was first given.
In between the second and the third drafts was, I discovered, a simple outline, and there were some fresh surprises there. I was interested to see the nameless seer who briefly appeared in the second draft join Luke's quest while still staying nameless, but more surprised at a description of the final battle where Luke really does land on the Death Star and get out to drop in a bomb by hand, only to have Darth Vader show up for a lightsabre duel... I first saw that mentioned in Jim Smith's "George Lucas" book from the Virgin Film series, but was perpetually skeptical about it, not having seen it mentioned in "The Annotated Screenplays." The idea may not have stayed around for as long as that other book seemed to imply, and I did note George Lucas mentioning how the idea interfered with the drive and speed of the space battle, but I've got to admit Jim Smith was right after all.
The book and "Empire of Dreams" seem to take slightly different views on the various crises of filming. Where "Empire of Dreams" talked about a sluggish first cut of the film that had to be punched up in the editing room by what seemed any means necessary, the book dwells more on the struggles in getting ILM up and running. What I hadn't known about that before was that there had been hopes of filming the shots looking out from the spaceship cockpits to space using "front projection," which had been put to good use in 2001. It may be that some of the outtakes in "Empire of Dreams" were of front projection tests (with leader stock preceding the appearance of star fields or sand dunes, although there the windscreen of Luke's landspeeder definitely didn't look right to me), and part of me, remembering that the optical compositing in the "Vintage Editions" looked quite washed out, may see the change as something of a loss.
One thing about the book that was striking me by the end was how George Lucas was quite clear at the time of release on his dissatisfaction with how things had turned out. That might have caught my attention, of course, just because I seem to be running into anti-Special Edition complaints even more often than I run into anti-prequel complaints right now; Lucas's comments were somehow a useful rebuttal for me to the more veiled sneers demanding "no changes ever!" and complaining that George Lucas decided out of nowhere in the mid-1990s to "mess with perfection" to mess with peoples' minds. In any case, the book ends not so much with a promise of leading into another, similar tome about "the making of The Empire Strikes Back" as a retrospective look back on Star Wars itself. That's still interesting to me.
With all of that, it seems natural enough that there would be intriguing surprises in the book. One of the most interesting things to me in it was its coverage of the early drafts. I had already become a bit more excited than I perhaps should have been seeing, in an online preview, a clarification of a quote from the fragmentary "Journal of the Whills." Before even that, though, was a first list of names George Lucas jotted down, and I did happen to notice, among the more familiar (if minor) Star Wars names like "Lars" and "Mace" and "Biggs", "Ford" and "Hayden." (I did, though, wonder if anyone would try to turn that strange resonance into casting scandal...) It was also interesting to see Lucas worrying about how the second draft had reduced female characters to very minor roles, and to make a first effort to compensate for that by turning Luke into a girl, as illustrated in a Ralph McQuarrie painting or two. (Learning that one familiar painting showed the "female Luke" was a surprise to me.) A central heroine could have been interesting, although I do find myself wondering just how any romance in the movie could have shaped itself, and what reactions to it would have been...
In any case, Luke was changed back to the "farmboy" we all know, and Princess Leia returned... and when it's put that way, I can see how ideas of Leia "splitting from" Luke, of the two of them being twins, could have come to mind quite early on just as the book says. That does, though, manage to leave me wondering a little about the use of the vintage interviews that inform much of the book. "The Making of Revenge of the Sith" used present tense throughout, which gave a sense of immediacy. Here, it's just the quotes that are being delivered in the "present tense," which somehow feels a little more like an affectation to me. Perhaps I just found myself wishing for a proper list of endnotes at the back of the book, saying precisely when every quote was first given.
In between the second and the third drafts was, I discovered, a simple outline, and there were some fresh surprises there. I was interested to see the nameless seer who briefly appeared in the second draft join Luke's quest while still staying nameless, but more surprised at a description of the final battle where Luke really does land on the Death Star and get out to drop in a bomb by hand, only to have Darth Vader show up for a lightsabre duel... I first saw that mentioned in Jim Smith's "George Lucas" book from the Virgin Film series, but was perpetually skeptical about it, not having seen it mentioned in "The Annotated Screenplays." The idea may not have stayed around for as long as that other book seemed to imply, and I did note George Lucas mentioning how the idea interfered with the drive and speed of the space battle, but I've got to admit Jim Smith was right after all.
The book and "Empire of Dreams" seem to take slightly different views on the various crises of filming. Where "Empire of Dreams" talked about a sluggish first cut of the film that had to be punched up in the editing room by what seemed any means necessary, the book dwells more on the struggles in getting ILM up and running. What I hadn't known about that before was that there had been hopes of filming the shots looking out from the spaceship cockpits to space using "front projection," which had been put to good use in 2001. It may be that some of the outtakes in "Empire of Dreams" were of front projection tests (with leader stock preceding the appearance of star fields or sand dunes, although there the windscreen of Luke's landspeeder definitely didn't look right to me), and part of me, remembering that the optical compositing in the "Vintage Editions" looked quite washed out, may see the change as something of a loss.
One thing about the book that was striking me by the end was how George Lucas was quite clear at the time of release on his dissatisfaction with how things had turned out. That might have caught my attention, of course, just because I seem to be running into anti-Special Edition complaints even more often than I run into anti-prequel complaints right now; Lucas's comments were somehow a useful rebuttal for me to the more veiled sneers demanding "no changes ever!" and complaining that George Lucas decided out of nowhere in the mid-1990s to "mess with perfection" to mess with peoples' minds. In any case, the book ends not so much with a promise of leading into another, similar tome about "the making of The Empire Strikes Back" as a retrospective look back on Star Wars itself. That's still interesting to me.
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Date: 2007-07-11 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-12 12:09 am (UTC)The book may perhaps support peoples' preconceptions more than anything. (Its cover flap even seems a little weasely that way, saying "No matter how you view the spectrum of this thirty-year phenomenon," the book's still worth buying.) I suppose I finished it with the thought that George Lucas was clearly the one in charge, and nobody could imply from what the book said that Gary Kurtz or Marcia Lucas had been talking him out of all his bad ideas... then I went back and started trying to figure out where and when Kurtz was mentioned.
I suppose, though, that when I saw a special section about the matte paintings, I felt a little ambiguous remembering how many of them (but not all) were replaced in the Special Edition.