A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The packaging for the 2019 "Multi-Screen"  re-issue of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back  blends elements of Roger Kastel's classic 1980 "Gone With the Wind"-style poster art with new elements depicting iconic characters and vehicles from Irvin Kershner's classic follow-on to Star Wars: A New Hope. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On September 22, 2019, in anticipation of the December 20 premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) re-issued the existing Star Wars Saga and Anthology films on Blu-ray. This re-release features all-new cover art loosely based on poster art from the 1970s, '80s, '90s, 2000s, and the current Disney/Lucasfilm era. It's also dubbed the "Multi-Screen" Edition because each Blu-ray package comes with both the physical Blu-ray disc (BD) and a code for the Movies Anywhere/iTunes/Google Play/Vudu digital copy.  Publi...

A publicity illustration depicting the new covers of the 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment Re-Issues of the Star Wars films on Blu-ray. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Hello, everybody. Welcome to another installment of Bloggin' On, my blog-within-a-blog section of A Certain Point of View, which is where I write posts that are neither reviews nor commentary on today's crazy and often depressing political scene. It's Thursday (What, already?), and here in my corner of Florida, it's already early evening. Right now it's already getting dark, and it's chilly! The temperature outside is 62℉ (16℃) under mostly clear skies, and the sun's already beneath the western horizon, so it's dark and nippy - and it's going to get nippier  because the low tonight is expected to go down to 45℉ (7℃). As the old Meredith Wilson song says, "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." And apparently, it's beginnin...

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,...

On May 19, 1980, fans saw the first use of the numbered episode/subtitle format in a Star Wars Saga film. By then, Lucasfilm had already decided to rename the original 1977  Star Wars film as Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, but the new title would not be seen on screen until 1981. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd.  On Quora, Henry Hunter recently asked: When did the Original Trilogy of Star Wars movies adopt the Episode IV, V and VI subtitles? Was this met with confusion at the time? My reply: In November 1979, Ballantine Books published the original edition of The Art of Star Wars. In Part One: The Script, readers discovered the new Episode number and subtitle scheme for the first time. I remember buying this book a few weeks after seeing The Empire Strikes Back. Oddly enough, even though I went to bookstores as often as I could as a teenager, I did not see any copies of Titelman's book in stores until the Summer of 1980.  © 1979 Ballantine Books and Lucasfilm Ltd...

Owen Lars, Luke Skywalker, and Beru Lars. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. In the original Star Wars films (before Return of the Jedi ) were there any clues given that Darth Vader was Luke's father? In  Star Wars  (aka  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ) there were no clues that Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, was the father of either Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia Organa. All of the available evidence (story treatments, film outlines, internal memos, and various drafts of the screenplay) points to Vader being a separate and distinct individual from “Luke’s father.” Now, it’s possible, however unlikely, that  in his mind  George Lucas decided that Vader and Luke’s father were one and the same during principal photography, thus explaining why Uncle Owen is so reluctant to talk about the subject of his supposedly dead father and his connection to the mysterious “Obi-Wan Kenobi” in the dinner table scene in Act One of  Star Wars....

Was it Irvin Kershner who came up with the "Vader is Luke's father" plotline in The Empire Strikes Back? No. It was George Lucas’s idea. Lawrence Kasdan incorporated Lucas’s concept into his draft of  The Empire Strikes Back’s  screenplay. Irvin Kershner did not have any say into how the screenplay was written. His job as a director was to  interpret  visually what Lucas and Kasdan wrote (in Courier font and proper screenplay format) on paper.

In Quora, Bryce Howell asks: Why has George Lucas made so many changes to the original trilogy? My answer: Because as the filmmaker who conceived, created, and - in the case of  The Empire Strikes Back  and  Return of the Jedi -  financed the  Star Wars  films, George Lucas was entitled to make changes. It is a matter of historical record that  Star Wars,  aka  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope  underwent a series of alterations even before 1981, which was the year that Lucasfilm convinced 20th Century Fox to reissue the film with its  Episode IV  subtitle. Before that, Lucasfilm had had to fix the audio mix, make sure that all the prints (both the 35 mm and the 70 mm) matched, missing lines of dialogue restored, and other minor adjustments that were needed at the time. Followers of  Star Wars  history, as well as viewers who listen to Lucas’s audio commentary tracks on the DVDs and Blu-ray home medi...

© 2007 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) How did George Lucas envision the Star Wars franchise while making the first movie? To be honest, I don’t believe that Lucas had a grand blueprint for a “franchise.” When he was writing and directing  Star Wars,  aka  Star Wars -Episode IV: A New Hope,  he had a vague outline for the Prequels (proof of which is the prologue to the novelization of  Star Wars ), the four drafts of  Star Wars,  and ideas (not a complete screenplay that he pared down into thirds, as he has claimed) for possible sequels. That’s it. No more, no less, as a certain Jedi Master that sounds suspiciously like Fozzie Bear as a Zen master might have said.  Between 1973 and 1976, and especially when he was shooting Star Wars, Lucas didn’t have a grand scheme to make a nine-part Saga with secondary Expanded Universes all over the media. He had  hopes  that  Star Wars  would be a decent enough ...

Cover art by Marvel Comics artist Bob Larkin. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In May of 1980, a few weeks before 20th Century Fox released Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in theaters, Marvel's official comics adaptation hit the shelves at bookstores, newsstands and comic book shops in the U.S. and Canada. There were various iterations of writer Archie Goodwin and artists Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon's take on the story written by George Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan, including five monthly issues ( Star Wars #39-44, labeled as Star Wars but featuring a  cover "blurb" featuring the logo for The Empire Strikes Back ), a large-format "Treasury" edition, and The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back, which was the size of a mass-market paperback (4 1/8" X 7" size) and featured cover art by Bob Larkin. Of all these, The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back was the first to reach cons...

Cover art by Larry Rostant (C) 2015 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On March 3, 2015, Del Rey Books, the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Random House, published the hardcover edition of Kevin Hearne's Star Wars: Heir to the Jedi. Set shortly after the events of the 1977 movie Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, Hearne's story focuses on the early adventures of a young Luke Skywalker in the aftermath of the Battle of Yavin and his decision to join the Rebel Alliance. Originally planned - in 2012 - as the third and final volume in an Expanded Universe (EU) trilogy titled Empire and Rebellion , it became a standalone canonical novel (one of four such works) after The Walt Disney Company-owned Lucasfilm and its Story Group declared that the EU was being relegated to "Legends" status and that all of the post-2014 novels would be part of the Star Wars canon. This means that Heir to the Jedi (the title is a tip of the hat to Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Heir...