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jobloffski -> RE: RE: (10/11/2012 8:30:56 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cerebusboy
quote:
ORIGINAL: grucl
There is is in fact no evidence (other than George Lucas' word *cough*) that Jabba in ANH was gonna be anything else than a human actor in a costume. Quite to the contrary:
Right. George wanted a Jabba scene. Financially, they could only afford a guy in a suit (remember that the Cantina scene has dudes in wolf masks due to budgetary constraints). The guy in the suit looked rubbish. Years later, when George has oodles of cash and creative control, he puts Jabba back in with the best available technology. Surely that's a case of technology catching up with the original vision? I know people think George is not exactly honest when it comes to claiming what was in his original vision but surely the fact that they tried to film Jabba in ANH at the time shows that it definitely is part of the original vision?
Sorry, but that's being willing to swallow whatever Lucas says to a ludicrous degree. The dialogue in the Jabba/Han scene, in terms of the information it conveys adds NOTHING that wasn't already conveyed by the scene between Han and Greedo, including reuse of the lines about even I get boarded sometimes, do you think I had a choice? It was, applying a little logic to the situation, an alternative scene to convey story information that became unnecessary, and if it was in any way necessary to the film it would have been in the film in it's original form. Stuff is tried, what works is kept, what doesn't work is jettisoned. That's a natural part of the creative process, and if things are necessary to the whole, they don't get jettisoned in the first place. That's a comment on creativity itself, not limited to Lucas.
Not only does the scene being added to the film add nothing to the film, it kills the big reveal of who Jabba is and what he looks like in ROTJ stone dead (as well as looking worse than the puppet by a very long way), it has a fucking useless attempt to get round the fact Jabba has a tail (which in itself would be the equivalent of Michael Corleone being cuffed round the chops in Godfather Part two by someone he wanted to intimidate and doing nothing about it, just carrying on a conversation as if it didn't happen, even if it looked any good, which it doesn't).
And if I recall correctly, it also has a Boba Fett cameo added that is so 'Ladies and Gentleman...Mr Boba Fett!!' stupid that it is clearly just there for the sake of it.
Lucas and his protestations of his 'original vision' are suspect, at best. He seems to simply have used the special editions of the OT to test out the feasibility of the CGI led approach (as well as re-releasing the films to raise the cash to make the sequels_, without any real sense of why he was doing what he was doing in terms of the effect on the storytelling, for example, by adding 'hilarious background slapstick' to ANH in Mos Eisely that distracts attention from what is happening in the foreground and because of the relative disparity between the CGI and real elements stands out like a dog's arse on a duck.
Rather than make a whole new film to test out the technology, he used the love of work he had already done to make it possible to try things out and be able to estimate a certain level of income from the results. That's not such an evil thing to do, it;s good business sense.
You can still love a film, despite the excesses of it's creator, without swallowing whole every single word he says.
What you don't seem to realise about Lucas's 'original vision' comments is this: every 'creative person' has a process via which there are things they intend to do in their work, and there is what the work ends up being. WHATEVER the original kick off point and intent was, however things are rationalised by the writer, there is a degree of more luck than judgement to how something ends up. And they end up how they end up.
The 'original vision' stage is where all options are open and every idea you have seems equally valid. But every idea is NOT equally valid, and once you have the finalised form of the result of this vision with a beginning, a middle and an end, and you try to go back to it and add things that you wanted to put in but couldn't, you (with varying degrees of potential fatality) kill some of what you originally achieved because it if worked anyway, what you attempt to add is simply not necessary and because the relevance of the 'original vision' to how that vision ended up being expressed is simply not there, it is almost impossible to add something and make it look like it was always meant to be there.
You don't attempt to improve the seasoning of a meal you've already eaten. you just add it next time you cook. And in the case of storytelling, you explore the idea next time out, if it is something you are so desperate to say that it simply has to be said.
Cards on the table, I've had ideas for long stories, but once time and opportunity (ie lack thereof) boiled them down to short stories that got across the main points of what I had intended to say anyway, attempts to take them back to a longer form, 'as originally envisaged' just killed them.
I suppose the pitfall of being a billionaire with only your paid employees to tell you where you might be going off the road into horesehit territory is that employees do not tell you such things, Every artist needs someone who will argue with them over whether what they are doing is necessary or indulgence, because sometimes, maybe more than half the time, ideas just aren''t as great as the person who has the idea thinks they are. If you are never made to fight for your ideas right to be part of what you are doing, you will never get any kind of objectivity over what are your better, and your stupider ideas. If nothing else was highlighted by Lucas finding himself in the position, absolutely as a result of his own work of course, to fund his films entirely out of his own pocket, it's the extent to which people will not argue with the boss.
Even if the ego of the boss means he has to have the final say, he would do very well to employ someone to tell him things he might not want to hear, with a contract stipulating the words 'you're fired' in response to creative headbanging away from the rest of the team are meaningless unless after a cooling off period of reflection comments made are stood by.
Shit, even when directing little silent comedy shorts with some mates, I can can safely say I've had the hump when my 'vision' has been challenged, said, okay let's try it your way and then subsequently said you were right, I was wrong, the same point was made, it;s stronger than it would have been if I'd had my way. What applies to a situation with no money still applies to situations where hundreds of millions of dollars are involved. Creativity is ego led, it has to be, because otherwise you'd create nothing. But when, having reached a certain level of success, you have only the people you pay offering you opinon, and you AREN'T allowing yourself to be open to question (it doesn;t always have to be negative criticism, it can equally be a process of clarification of the reason for an idea that actually clarifies it's actual worth) you don't get the best out of yourself, you just get whatever occurs to you at any given moment, without resistance. And that leads to a lack of self critique that is ultimately damaging to what you seek to achieve. Russell T Davies and to an extent Steven Moffat in their Doctor Who tenures have both fallen into 'The Lucas Trap' of being feted for their good ideas and then not always having the perspective to critique themselves anymore, once the critique they might have previously received stops. I mention the other simultaneously loved and hated Sci-fi behemoth simply to reaffirm the point my comments are not Lucascentric, but comments on creativity in general.
Everybody who is creatively minded knows this about themselves: Looking back I was a dick about situation x, but in the moment my ego felt threatened and I reacted as if under attack (and it's a part of being a human being not necessarily limited to 'a creative process'). Nobody wants to feel that feeling, but its very important to know it's natural, unavoidable and beneficial in the end. Lucas had the level of success to effectively insulate himself from criticism during his creative process and that is the sole seed of the criticism of the results of his creative process of late, coming after the fact because it didn't come before the fact. And were he to search his feelings, I'm sure he'd know it;s true. [;)]
No single creative mind is infallible.
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