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krpalmerAfter quite a while thinking about it, I asked for the “compact edition” of the “Star Wars Archives” book retelling the story of the making of the three oldest movies in the franchise for a Christmas present. I then took six months getting around to mentioning that here, but one other thing did get in the way too. As I picked my way through the Archives (reading it with just a little awkwardness after discovering part of the endpapers is extended and folded around to “make the closed volume more solid” or something), I did happen on a notice of a brief publisher sale on its follow-up, which told the story of the making of the George Lucas trilogy for which I couldn’t tell myself “oh, I’ve already got J.W. Rinzler’s making-of books; I don’t need another expensive, hard-to-handle tome.” Deciding not to wait on the off chance of another “compact edition,” I ordered the “1999-2005” Archives.
The book is a “coffee table book” in the sense that you could build a coffee table out of it; it always took a bit of work turning back to the envelope I was using as a bookmark even though I did at last dare reading it from my lap rather than the floor. As with the previous Archives the illustrations work through each movie in a sort of visual order, offering evolving production designs, set photos, and post-production work for specific moments, while the quotations proceed more in the sequence of production. Significant bits of Paul Duncan’s discussions with George Lucas about certain deep conceptions and his own ideas for how to continue the story were already familiar from the comments of others, but I was intrigued early on by a comment from Lucas that “I told people at Lucasfilm that they’re going to have to face the reality that I’m making a movie that nobody wants to see.” From the context that seems to come from his recent interviews with Duncan, but it at least begins to counter certain smug assumptions about “Lucas being blithely disconnected from reality” (although, of course, there’s an ambiguity to his apparent anticipations too). Duncan does specifically ask Lucas at one point “You were willing to accept ideas and comments?”, and Lucas replies “As long as I could say no.”
The Attack of the Clones section went into some detail about the switch to digital cameras, but I was intrigued by a comment from Rob Coleman that there had been four different Yoda puppets in The Empire Strikes Back, which just might account for why I’ve been drifting towards a standout heresy of considering the computer-animated Yoda “the standard.” As the Revenge of the Sith section starts wrapping up Paul Duncan does comment about how particular movies echo each other that has me thinking of the “Star Wars Ring Theory,” and George Lucas doesn’t react with “where’d you hear that?”
The one thing about having the big artwork reproductions in this big volume, I suppose, is that it gets me wondering about whether it’s still possible to move up from the compact edition of the other Archives to its original edition. I am at least aware the text in the compact edition is also a condensation. That other large volume seems to be vanishing from online bookstores, if not from online used bookstores.
The book is a “coffee table book” in the sense that you could build a coffee table out of it; it always took a bit of work turning back to the envelope I was using as a bookmark even though I did at last dare reading it from my lap rather than the floor. As with the previous Archives the illustrations work through each movie in a sort of visual order, offering evolving production designs, set photos, and post-production work for specific moments, while the quotations proceed more in the sequence of production. Significant bits of Paul Duncan’s discussions with George Lucas about certain deep conceptions and his own ideas for how to continue the story were already familiar from the comments of others, but I was intrigued early on by a comment from Lucas that “I told people at Lucasfilm that they’re going to have to face the reality that I’m making a movie that nobody wants to see.” From the context that seems to come from his recent interviews with Duncan, but it at least begins to counter certain smug assumptions about “Lucas being blithely disconnected from reality” (although, of course, there’s an ambiguity to his apparent anticipations too). Duncan does specifically ask Lucas at one point “You were willing to accept ideas and comments?”, and Lucas replies “As long as I could say no.”
The Attack of the Clones section went into some detail about the switch to digital cameras, but I was intrigued by a comment from Rob Coleman that there had been four different Yoda puppets in The Empire Strikes Back, which just might account for why I’ve been drifting towards a standout heresy of considering the computer-animated Yoda “the standard.” As the Revenge of the Sith section starts wrapping up Paul Duncan does comment about how particular movies echo each other that has me thinking of the “Star Wars Ring Theory,” and George Lucas doesn’t react with “where’d you hear that?”
The one thing about having the big artwork reproductions in this big volume, I suppose, is that it gets me wondering about whether it’s still possible to move up from the compact edition of the other Archives to its original edition. I am at least aware the text in the compact edition is also a condensation. That other large volume seems to be vanishing from online bookstores, if not from online used bookstores.
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Date: 2022-06-29 02:47 pm (UTC)And I want to read it more thoroughly at some point.
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Date: 2022-06-29 09:53 pm (UTC)