A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The cover art for the 2019 Multi-Screen Edition Blu-ray release of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is based on a classic poster from 1983. © 2019 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On September 22, 2019, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm  released all 10 existing live-action films in the Star Wars film franchise, almost three months before Star Wars -Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker' s premiere on December 20. Though both wholly-owned subsidiaries of The Walt Disney Company have issued home media releases of Star Wars films and television shows produced in 2015 and after, this is the first time they have dropped both the Classic and Prequel Trilogies on physical media since George Lucas retired in 2012 and sold Lucasfilm to Disney. Publicity photo of nine Star Wars Multi-Screen Blu-ray/Digital Copy home media sets. Note that Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is not shown, but the two Anthology films ( Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A ...

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...

Was Coruscant intended to appear in the original trilogy of Star Wars? No. According to various sources, including Laurent Bouzerau’s  The Star Wars Trilogy: The Annotated Screenplays,  and the director’s audio commentary on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of  Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,  depicting a city planet such as Coruscant on screen at the time (1977–1983) was beyond the ability of Industrial Light and Magic to pull off. It would have required extensive (and expensive) miniature work to create even a portion of the ecumenopolis which, at the time of  Return of the Jedi,  was tentatively named Had Abbedon. In an early draft of  Return of the Jedi,  George Lucas tried to come up with a way to show the Imperial capital, but none of the techniques needed to pull it off (matte paintings and miniatures) would have rendered a city planet in a photorealistic way, which is what  Star Wars  fans were accustomed to by the early 1...

Photo Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd. © 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Is it true that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, they used Ewoks because they would be cheaper than Wookiees? There are three reasons why Ewoks were used in  Return of the Jedi  instead of Wookiees for the Battle of Endor, and the expense of outfitting a large number of extras was certainly one of them. The Empire Strikes Back,  unlike the film that came before -  Star Wars -  was financed by George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Ltd. It cost $25 million in 1980 dollars, a princely sum in those days, and even though director Irvin Kershner and producer Gary Kurtz did a good job at getting the movie made on time, it still went over budget. Say what you will about Lucas as a director, but the man is an extremely conservative person when it comes to the business end of filmmaking, so sticking as closely to a projected budget was a big deal for him. Even more so because it was his money on the line, not 20th...

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...

What was known about Padme, Luke and Leia’s mother, prior to the release of the prequel trilogy? Before the run-up to  Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace’s  release in May of 1999? Certainly not much. And what little we  did  know was either wrong or was learned from tidbits in action figure packages in late 1998, when Hasbro added a  Flashback  line of  Star Wars  figures from the Classic Trilogy but with Lucasfilm-supplied nuggets of information about major characters from the upcoming film. For instance, a  Power of the Force  figure of Princess Leia Organa with  Flashback  packaging was my first inkling that Luke and Leia’s mother was Queen Amidala of Naboo and that Leia was not just royalty by adoption, but she was also royalty - of sorts - by heredity. Hasbro’s writer did not divulge the fact that on Naboo “royalty” was elected and wasn’t necessarily  hereditary,  but Lucasfilm kept a lot of pesky ...

Ralph McQuarrie production painting for Return of the Jedi. © 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Michael Justin, a Quora member, asks: Why did George Lucas decide on Ewoks instead of Wookies for the battle in Return of the Jedi? My reply: There were two reasons why George Lucas changed his original concept of showing the Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Wookiees at the Battle of Endor to the version we see in  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. The reason Lucas gives in the audio commentary track on the  Jedi  DVD and Blu-ray is that when he was writing the story for the film, he was making an allusion to the Vietnam War, a conflict that witnessed a technologically superior superpower being handed a humiliating defeat by a bunch of fierce but technologically unsophisticated peasants. Remember, Lucas was a young man who came of age in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination and the tragedy of Vietnam. Like many of the college-age kids of that time, he...

Concept art from The Empire Strikes Back by Ralph McQuarrie. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) No. Going strictly by what we see in  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,  it is obvious that Yoda is  not  referring to Rey from  Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Yoda’s last words to Luke before crossing over to the other side of the Force are: “There is…another…Sky…walk…er.” In the  very next scene,  which is what writers sometimes call an “exposition dump,” we find out who  the other  is: LUKE I can't kill my own father. BEN Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope. LUKE Yoda spoke of another. BEN The other he spoke of is your twin sister. LUKE But I have no sister. BEN Hmm. To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the re...

© 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 ...

Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker. Photo Credit and © 1999 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) I am not normally in the habit of second-guessing the storytelling abilities of writers or filmmakers whose work I admire. This is partly because I usually enjoy most of the books or movies that I consume, even though my many years of writing reviews have taught me that you can like, even love, a book, a musical work, a television series, or a film and yet be able to see imperfections in them. For the most part, I enjoy  Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace  and the rest of the Prequel Trilogy. Not as much as I do the Original Trilogy that introduced my generation of fans to that great adventure that took place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” but enough to sit through all three films and not feel like I could have spent my time something more worthwhile, such as working on a novel or a screenplay or playing  Order of Battle: World War II.  I am, after all, a ...

The Galactic Empire's Death Star 1 battle station in its final stages of construction. © 2016 Lucasfilm Ltd. Why wasn’t the Death Star re-engineered after the Rebels exploited the flaw with the thermal exhaust port? Actually, the Death Star  was  modified heavily after the destruction of Grand Moff Tarkin’s DS-1 at the Battle of Yavin. Although the movies don’t address this - there’s a three-year time jump between  A New Hope  and  The Empire Strikes Back -  it’s extremely likely that the Emperor called his most senior advisors and formed an Imperial Death Star Investigative Committee to discover how a single Incom T-65 X-wing fighter was able to destroy the Empire’s ultimate weapon with two proton torpedoes. Such an investigative body would have had access to archival copies of the DS-1 plans, perhaps provided by the Emperor himself. The original plans were destroyed along with the Imperial Citadel on Scarif shortly before the Battle of Yavi...

When Yoda says 'there is another Skywalker' in Return of the Jedi, is he referring to Rey from the Force Awakens? No. Going strictly by what we see in  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,  it is obvious that Yoda is  not  referring to Rey from  Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Yoda’s last words to Luke before crossing over to the other side of the Force are: “There is…another…Sky…walk…er.” In the  very next scene,  which is what writers sometimes call an “exposition dump,” we find out who  the other  is: LUKE I can't kill my own father. BEN Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope. LUKE Yoda spoke of another. BEN The other he spoke of is your twin sister. LUKE But I have no sister. BEN Hmm. To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a thre...