Quote:
Originally Posted by Martoto
But you did use Lucas having the idea to adapt already proven, successful material to uphold his storytelling credentials. You can't use it to endorse Lucas then dismiss it for others because of their perceived motivation for doing so.
It's moot anyway since having an idea to adapt already successful material is no proof of your storytelling skills at all. No matter who you are. The proof is in how successful you are at telling a story.
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You're conflating two or three things here, all at the same time. Let's go one at a time.
First of all, on the art vs commerce deal, I think there's no question that a certain kind of filmmaker coming out of film school in the late 1960s would have wanted independence from a system that, at that time in particular, had grown increasingly stale and lacking in innovation and originality. And yeah, Lucas himself was a part of that new school of filmmaking. He also was willing to take material in new directions that wouldn't have occurred to anyone else at the time. His idea for a wall-to-wall soundtrack for American Graffiti, say. And so there's this part about taking some elements that were already familiar to audiences, and mixing things up in some new way that hadn't been done yet, but that once done, would prove irresistible to moviegoers.
Now, you cannot, and I mean, simply cannot, have this kind or originality in a filmmaker and still expect them to hit a home run each and every time. Not all their ideas are bound to be quite as spectacularly successful, even though a few of them will. And the Hollywood that Lucas first started working in was notoriously risk averse, at a time when younger audiences wanted fresh things, like The Graduate and Easy Rider.
I mean, you can downplay things by saying he was just going to copy something that was proven and successful already, but it's actually far more complicated than that. He really wanted to take old things and make them anew, and in so doing was the complete antithesis of old, formulaic Hollywood making a lot of old movies that younger people didn't necessarily want to watch anymore.
And in making Star Wars, he didn't just recreate the old Saturday matinee movie serials, he took that concept and added a lot of interesting stuff, like cutting-edge special effects, which at that point had been missing from features, as well as a whole lot of the stuff he loved as a film student, like references to Kurosawa, etc. etc.
And so the whole thing about Lucas is that he doesn't want to be a conventional storyteller, and a lot of the time he might succeed wildly and at other times he may come up short in the opinion of mainstream audiences, but not necessarily of all of his fans.
The alternative to that is safe, very boring filmmakers who will be happy to repeat proven story beats with slightly different characters than the ones you've seen before. Like, most obviously JJ Abrams. Which is why to me personally, TFA was a huge disappointment, and certainly a lot less fun than something that Lucas might have come up with on his own.
You either like it safe and predictable, or you're willing to try something new and totally unpredictable, that may or may not live up to your expectations. I'd almost always prefer to go with the latter.
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And now you're whining about Abrams when not long ago you were claiming that Star Wars movies are just theme parks and it's pointless to demand such high standards such as those who..... criticise the PT, funnily enough. (who either don't exist in real life or have cleverly avoided you in the past twenty years.Apparently)
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