stay for the credits

January 21st
00:18

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"[Marcia] was instrumental in changing the ending of Raiders, in which Indiana delivers the ark to Washington. Marion is nowhere to be seen, presumably stranded on an island with a submarine and a lot of melted Nazis. Marcia watched the rough cut in silence and then levelled the boom. She said there was no emotional resolution to the ending, because the girl disappears. ‘Everyone was feeling really good until she said that,’ Dunham recalls. ‘It was one of those, “Oh no we lost sight of that.” ’ Spielberg reshot the scene in downtown San Francisco, having Marion wait for Indiana on the steps on the government building. Marcia, once again, had come to the rescue."

—

From In Tribute to Marcia Lucas, by Michael Kaminski, from a greater work called The Secret History of Star Wars - the book’s website is here.

It took me several days, but I quite enjoyed this long, not-new, but fascinating look into Marcia Lucas, George’s first wife whose legacy as one of Hollywood’s first female editors has faded largely into obscurity because of the power of the Lucasfilm PR machine that has all but removed Marcia from the grand story of the pre-and-post-Star-Wars years. Film fans may think of Marcia as little more than “the woman who left George, leading to the darker Indiana Jones tone of Temple of Doom”, but this article includes a lot of research and interview material in which Marcia’s role as George’s editor and storytelling muse shines through. To hear her and others tell it, George was always great with technical and visual details, but Marcia’s editing skills went far to give heart to American Graffiti, Star Wars, Empire, Jedi and (to a lesser extent, the quote above notwithstanding) Raiders.

George Lucas is weak on storytelling and character? I know, hard to believe.

Of note: George Lucas has never won an Oscar for any Star Wars movie. But Marcia did, for editing A New Hope.

If you don’t know much about Marcia Lucas, block out some time and read that article. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

(via burbanked)

February 8th
09:13

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“The cantina music is an anomaly, it sticks out entirely as an unrelated rib to the score. There’s a nice little story if you haven’t heard this, I’ll tell you briefly: When I looked at that scene there wasn’t any music in it and these little creatures were jumping up and down playing instruments and I didn’t have any idea what the sound should be. It could have been anything: electronic music, futuristic music, tribal music, whatever you like.

“And I said to George, “What do you think we should do?” And George said, “I don’t know” and sort of scratched his head. He said, “Well I have an idea. What if these little creatures on this planet way out someplace, came upon a rock and they lifted up the rock and underneath was sheet music from Benny Goodman’s great swing band of the 1930s on planet Earth? And they looked at this music and they kind of deciphered it, but they didn’t know quite how it should go, but they tried. And, uh, why don’t you try doing that? What would these space creatures, what would their imitation of Benny Goodman sound like?”

“So, I kind of giggled and I went to the piano and began writing the silliest little series of old-time swing band licks, kind of a little off and a little wrong and not quite matching. We recorded that and everyone seemed to love it. We didn’t have electronic instruments exactly in that period very much. They’re all little Trinidad steel drums and out- of-tuned kazoos and little reed instruments, you know. It was all done acoustically—it wasn’t an electronic preparation as it probably would have been done today.

“I think that may be also part of its success, because being acoustic it meant people had to blow the notes and make all the sounds, a little out of tune and a little behind there, a little ahead there: it had all the foibles of a not-very- good human performance.” - John Williams. (via)

08:42

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“The opening of the film was visually so stunning, with that lettering that comes out and the spaceships and so on, that it was clear that that music had to kind of smack you right in the eye and do something very strong. It’s in my mind a very simple, very direct tune that jumps an octave in a very dramatic way, and has a triplet placed in it that has a kind of grab.

“I tried to construct something that again would have this idealistic, uplifting but military flare to it. And set it in brass instruments, which I love anyway, which I used to play as a student, as a youngster. And try to get it so it’s set in the most brilliant register of the trumpets, horns and trombones so that we’d have a blazingly brilliant fanfare at the opening of the piece. And contrast that with the second theme that was lyrical and romantic and adventurous also. And give it all a kind of ceremonial… it’s not a march but very nearly that. So you almost kind of want to [laughs] patch your feet to it or stand up and salute when you hear it—I mean there’s a little bit of that ceremonial aspect. More than a little I think.

“The response of the audience that you ask about is something that I certainly can’t explain. I wish I could explain that. But maybe the combination of the audio and the visual hitting people in the way that it does must speak to some collective memory—we talked about that before—that we don’t quite understand. Some memory of Buck Rogers or King Arthur or something earlier in the cultural salts of our brains, memories of lives lived in the past, I don’t know. But it has that kind of resonance—it resonates within us in some past hero’s life that we’ve all lived.

“Now we’re into a kind of Hindu idea, but I think somehow that’s what happens musically. That’s what in performance one tries to get with orchestras, and we talk about that at orchestral rehearsals: that it isn’t only the notes, it’s this reaching back into the past. As creatures we don’t know if we have a future, but we certainly share a great past. We remember it, in language and in pre-language, and that’s where music lives—it’s to this area in our souls that it can speak. - John Williams, on the Star Wars Theme. (via)

December 9th
11:17

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heyoscarwilde:

Han Solo costume design by [John Mollo] (left) and concept art by [Ralph McQarrie] (right).

Scanned from The Art of Star Wars (Del Rey Books/1979).

November 29th
09:01

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“Well, when I took the job, I had never been a reader of science fiction. I read Asimov and Bradbury but I never really read all the other great stuff. So I decided that, instead of suddenly trying to make myself an expert on science fiction, I would do what I believed Star Wars was really all about — they’re fairy tales. They’re not science fiction, they’re fairy tales. So I got a hold of some books — a Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, a Jungian interpretation of fairy tales. I read foreign fairy tales, etc. The reason fairy tales are so effective for children is because they deal with the anxieties that children feel as they grow up: the anxiety of wondering whether their parents are really their parents, are their parents going to abandon them? They’re afraid of being lost, etc. All these fears are manifest with children. That’s what their nightmares are all about. And fairy tales are a sort of waking nightmare.

So I studied fairy tales and that’s why, when I got into the part that Luke Skywalker discovers he’s Darth Vader’s son, I found elements of that theme in fairy tales. But that story point was kept a secret. We didn’t even have that in the script. Nobody knew that, not even the actors. I had a page that I took when I was in California that was a substitute page for the scene when Luke is screaming at Vader and hanging on to that pole. Those words were put away in my book and when it came time to shoot, I explained it to Mark. But when he was saying, “No, no, I don’t believe it!” Darth Vader was saying totally different things than what you hear in the film. He wasn’t saying, “I am your father! We’ll rule the galaxy together!” He was saying, “You’re going to do what I say!” (Laughter)

So he had totally different lines. Then, when we went to put it together, we put the real words in. But Mark knew because I told him ahead of time. I told him he was Vader’s son and he thought it was great. And he acted it magnificently! He was hanging there by a nylon cord over 40 feet of nothing with wind blowing at him. I had fans and smoke aimed right at him. It was really quite dangerous — I worried about it. And I think he was worried about it, too, and that’s what made it so effective.” -Irvin Kershner

08:34

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“I loved the actors. I thought that they were very creative people. I thought that Carrie was going to have a terrific career. Harrison I adored because he was so creative and so much fun. We really had fun making the picture. We would try things. I would have an idea at the last minute and would go running up to Harrison and say, “Harrison, listen to this: instead of running down the steps, you just stand there and let them come at you. And then you’ll jump!” And he would say, “Yeah, yeah, let’s try it!”” - Irvin Kershner

08:31

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“I’ll tell you, Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, worked so hard. He kept fainting from the heat in his costume. But the whole cast and crew were just good people. And they cared. We worked hard — we shot for 6 months and people just kept getting sick and, at times, it really dragged. But, you know what? I couldn’t wait to come in every day. I got caught up in the film and I began to believe this world. I began to feel the real world was kind of boring. When I would walk onto one of these giant sets with these hangar doors opening and all these spaceships and such, I felt, “Boy, this is a much more interesting world than the real world.” I would have loved to have entered that world. It was exciting — things were happening. I think that the director has to believe in the world that’s being created. I don’t care if it’s a comedy, a drama, or about killers or whatever, you have to feel the same anxieties, the same passions that are being felt in that phony world you’re creating.” - Irvin Kershner

08:23

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Kershner, who taught film and photography at George Lucas’ alma mater, the University of Southern California, was selected by the “Star Wars” creator to helm the follow-up that would eventually lead to four other films in the series. He also directed the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again” and “Robocop 2.”

He said he was initially taken aback when Lucas, his former student, asked him to direct the sequel to “Star Wars,” his out-of-nowhere blockbuster.

“Of all the younger guys around, all the hot shots, why me?” he recalled asking. “I remember he said, ‘Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you’re not Hollywood.’ I liked that.”

(via Irvin Kershner, ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Director, Dies at 87 | TheWrap.com)

November 27th
11:01

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"R2D2: Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness."

— John Scalzi’s Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design (via bunch)

November 17th
13:16

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(via Behind-the-Scenes Photos of ILM’s Greats | Vanity Fair)

“Here, stop-motion master animator Phil Tippett [center], Mike Pangrazio [right], and I [VFX artist Dennis Muren] stand between two incredible matte paintings used to depict the windswept snowscape of Hoth. Pangrazio, a legendary I.L.M. artist, painted many such paintings during the production ofThe Empire Strike Back to allow for scenic vistas, practical sets to be extended, or, in this case, a stop-motion puppet of a Tauntaun and rider to be inserted for a story point.”

October 21st
18:42

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retrostarwars:

Letter from Steven Spielberg to Georgie Porgie to congratulate him for surpassing Jaws at the box office.

October 14th
11:40

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Via

unknownskywalker:

On Set: Empire Strikes Back

When Darth Vader (David Prowse) revealed his secret to Luke, Hamill was hanging onto a pinnacle above mattresses placed on cardboard boxes about 30 feet off the ground.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucasfilm is releasing a comprehensive history of the making of the groundbreaking film, aptly titled The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by author J.W. Rinzler. The book is packed with hundreds of rarely seen behind the scene photographs which you can preview here.

(via Vanity Fair)