A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp.  Recently, someone asked this question on Quora: Is Star Wars based on a comic book? I, of course, replied: What? Holy Mother of Skywalker, of course not. Star Wars  was not based on an eponymous pre-existing literary work that a 30-something George Lucas happened to come across at a used book store whilst trying to come up with a follow-up film to his 1973 hit  American Grafitti. Rather,  Star Wars  as we know and love it (?) was created by Lucas himself, starting in 1971 with some early (and bizarre) story ideas for a space-fantasy film that would be the antithesis to his dystopian (and unsuccessful) sci-fi film  THX-1138,  which his friend Francis Ford Coppola produced and Warner Bros. released that same year. Considering how large   a shadow  Star Wars  casts upon modern pop culture over 40 years after the original movie premiered on May 25, 1977, it’s hard to believe that Lucas’s o...

Although the average film-goer may not be aware of this, some of Hollywood’s best films are often inspired by movies made in other countries, such as those directed by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, whose  Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress  and  Yojimbo  inspired American films such as  The Outrage, Star Wars  and  Last Man Standing.  (Kurosawa’s  Yojimbo,  in particular, was also the somewhat controversial template for Sergio Leone’s  A Fistful of Dollars , but  Last Man Standing  is an officially sanctioned remake.)  Perhaps one of the most popular Americanized remakes of a Kurosawa “Easterner” is 1960’s  The Magnificent Seven,  a Western written by William Roberts and officially acknowledged (in the main title sequence) as being inspired by Toho Films’  Seven Samurai  (1954)   .  That  Seven Samurai  could be adapted fairly easily from a film set in a medieval Japanese setting ...