A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The new slipcover (and jewel box) art for the Multi-Screen Edition of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On September 22, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. reissued the 10 existing Star Wars live-action films in Multi-Screen Editions in Blu-ray and DVD along with codes for digital versions for streaming on Movies Anywhere and other Disney partners. Dubbed the "Multi-Screen Edition," this re-release came three months in advance of the theatrical premiere of the last Skywalker Saga film, Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which opens on December 20. This promotional photo shows nine of the 10 titles in the Multi-Screen Edition collection of Blu-ray/Digital Code sets released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm on September 22. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Although Buena Vista and Lucasfilm (both wholly-owned subsidiaries of The Walt...

Slipcover (and Blu-ray jewel box) art for the 2019 Multi-Screen reissue of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Twenty years after its initial theatrical release and nearly three months before the December 20 premiere of Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, the first installment of George Lucas's Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was reissued on Blu-ray disc (BD) as part of Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Limited's 10-film  Star Wars Multi-Screen Edition collection. This marks the first Disney-era reissue of Star Wars material that was originally distributed by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment since The Walt Disney Company acquired 21st Century Fox and the distribution rights to the first six  Star Wars films earlier this year . This promotional photo depicts the slipcover art for the Multi-Screen Edition reissues of the Skywalker Saga films. Rogue One and Solo (not shown here)   also ge...

Early poster design (based on a classic poster from Gone With the Wind ) for The Empire Strikes Back. Art by Ralph McQuarrie. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Who wrote The Empire Strikes Back? Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back  was written by three individuals: George Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan. George Lucas wrote the basic story treatment and created the new character of Yoda, although  his  version was different from what we see in the finished film. However, Lucas wanted to focus more on producing the movie and believed that his weakest skill was writing, so he decided to hire someone else to write the actual screenplay. Eventually, Lucas settled on novelist and screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who had written several successful science fiction novels and short stories, as well as scripts for  Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep,  and  The Long Goodbye.  She turned in the first draft of her screenplay to Lucasfilm,...

Why did Star Wars video games give a "Very Special Thanks" to George Lucas in the credits? George Lucas is the (now-retired) founder and CEO of Lucasfilm Ltd., the parent company of LucasArts Games, which was originally named Lucasfilm Games. Lucas also created the  Star Wars  movie and television franchise in the 1970s, starting with  Star Wars,  aka  Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,  in 1977. All of the  Star Wars  video games, whether they were published directly by Lucas Arts or by entities such as Atari (whose  Star Wars: The Arcade Game  was a personal favorite of mine when it was introduced in 1983) owed their existence to the films. Without Lucas’s space fantasy set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the programmers, game designers, graphics artists, salespeople, and composers might not have even gone into the video game industry in the first place. So it is natural that many of those individuals who playe...

© 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Will Kevin Feige's Star Wars film spell the end for the George Lucas era? No. The “George Lucas era” ended in the fall of 2012. In case you didn’t notice, George Lucas sold his company, Lucasfilm Ltd., to The Walt Disney Company, for $4 billion (half cash, half in Disney stock) in October of 2012. Lucas stopped making  Star Wars  live-action films in 2005 but continued to work in the franchise as creator and executive producer of the CGI animated series  Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  He did not micromanage that 2008–2014 show; he leaned on Dave Filoni, Catherine Winder, and others for that, although he signed off on all of the big storylines, such as the return of Darth Maul, the one-off appearance of Chewbacca, and the Mortis story arc. He also said many, many times that he had  no  plans to make any more  Star Wars  films set after  Return of the Jedi  and t...

Why does the writer of  Star Wars: The Last Jedi  think it is plausible for Princess Leia to survive the vacuum of space without a spacesuit? Let me ask you this: Why did George Lucas think it is plausible for starfighters to fly through the vacuum of space and maneuver  exactly  like jet fighters in atmospheric flight without all the complications of reaction control systems, complicated life support systems, and all of the known problems that space travel poses? Why did George Lucas think it was plausible for any civilization, even an advanced one with tech supposedly far more advanced than ours, to build a space station the size of a small moon? Why did George Lucas think it was plausible that a space station the size of a small moon could travel through hyperspace without creating a noticeable gravitational disturbance in its path and wake? Why do the crew and passengers of any starship, including the  Millennium Falcon,  fly in and out of ...

Are Star Wars animated series only placeholder canon until the movies decide what actually happened during that time frame? No.  Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels,  and  Star Wars: Resistance  are coequal in canon to the live-action films. Especially  Star Wars: The Clone Wars,  because that series was created and executive produced by George Lucas and was the last  Star Wars  content he personally oversaw. The only animated series that meets the “placeholder” criteria is the 2003–2005  Star Wars: Clone Wars  2-D micro-series created by Genndy Tartakovsky and co-produced by Lucasfilm and Cartoon Network. Intended as a means to bridge the three-year in-universe gap between  Attack of the Clones  and  Revenge of the Sith,  Tartakovsky’s series was just one of many elements in Lucasfilm’s multimedia Clone Wars campaign, as well as a backdoor pilot to George Lucas’s CGI animated series.  Star Wars...

Marvel Special Edition #3 Featuring Star Wars  collected issues 1-6 of the official Star Wars comics adaptation. Cover art by Ernie Chan. © 1977 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Is Star Wars part of the Marvel Universe? No. The  Star Wars  franchise (including films, animated and live-action TV series, and novels) properly belongs to Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company founded in 1971 by George Lucas, who ran it until October 2012. That’s when he sold Lucasfilm and all of its intellectual property to The Walt Disney Company for $2.2 billion in cash and $1.855 billion in stock. Marvel Comics, which itself is now also owned by The Walt Disney Company, has had a long relationship with  Star Wars,  starting as early as 1976. Back then, the comics publisher was one of the first companies to show interest in Lucas’s space-fantasy film set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Marvel artist Howard Chaykin created the very first...

Cover art: Early concept painting of Darth Vader facing off against "Deak Starkiller" by Ralph McQuarrie. © 2013 Henry N. Abrams (Abrams Books) and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On October 15, 2013, New York City-based Abrams Books (a subsidiary of France's La Martinière Groupe) published Star Wars Art: Concept, a 176-page hardcover volume dedicated to concept paintings created by Lucasfilm's artists for various Star Wars projects, including films, TV shows, and video games such as The Force Unleashed and the canceled Star Wars 1313.  In the tradition of Star Wars Art: Posters and Abrams ComicArts' Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series – Volume One, this coffee table art book is heavy on art (125 illustrations) that was used in the pre-production stage of many Lucasfilm Star Wars presentations, including the first six films, the animated segment of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special,  and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  Art for the Nelvana/Lucasf...

The Blu-ray packaging for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. © 2015 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Buena Vista Home Entertainment No. First of all, (and I’m tired of explaining this over and over),  The Walt Disney Company  does not, nor did it ever have, a plan “to have the audience focus on a new set of characters.” If anyone had such a plan, it would have been  Lucasfilm,  the Disney-owned subsidiary that is responsible for actually making  Indiana Jones  and  Star Wars. Second of all, creating a new set of characters for the Sequel Trilogy was always going to be in the cards, as the window for making a post- Return of the Jedi  trilogy closed sometime between 1983 and 1994, partly because of George Lucas’s divorce from Marcia Lucas and  Star Wars  burnout, and partly because when Lucas decided to go back to big-budget filmmaking, he chose to make the Prequel Trilogy instead. Meanwhile, as Steve Perry noted in his foreword to the  Shad...

On Quora, inquiring member Anthony Perez asks: Other than money, why did George Lucas sell the Star Wars franchise to Disney and make Kathleen Kennedy in charge of the franchise going forward? My reply: First of all, Lucas did not simply sell the  Star Wars  franchise, as your question erroneously states. He sold  Lucasfilm Ltd.,  the production company he founded in 1971 after leaving Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, which he also helped to create back in ‘69. This means that Lucas not only sold Lucasfilm and its various subsidiaries, including Skywalker Sound, THX Labs, and Industrial Light & Magic; he also sold Lucasfilm’s intellectual properties, including  Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Red Tails  and  Willow. Before the sale to The Walt Disney Company (TWDC), Lucas had pretty much decided to retire anyway, but he didn’t want Lucasfilm to die off or be purchased by just anyone. He was 68 years old and did not want to spend any...

Poster art by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp.  On Quora, member Kisty Arant asks: How did George Lucas finance a big-budget movie like Star Wars when he’d only directed two movies previously? George Lucas did not self-finance 1977’s  Star Wars.  He had to get a major studio to put up the money in order for Lucasfilm Ltd. to make the film, and it was no easy task. First of all, while Lucas had helmed two feature-length films ( THX-1138  for Warner Bros. and  American Graffiti  for Universal), only one was a box office smash. Second, even Universal’s Ned Tanen, who appreciated the success of 1973’s  American Graffiti,  was reluctant to invest the studio’s money into such an iffy proposition as a space fantasy film aimed at young people. In the 1970s, American moviegoers tended to eschew escapist fare in favor of more gritty and realistic films. Furthermore, science fiction and fantasy films tended to cater t...