Moviefone Editorial

Tag: george-lucas

  • ‘Star Wars’ Original Trilogy Stars: Where Are They Now?

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    Amid all the spaceships, blasters, and droids, it’s easy to forget that the “Star Wars” saga takes place in the distant past. But the appearances of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher in the new “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” serve as a potent reminder of the passage of time.

    After all, it’s been more than 38 years since we first saw them in the original trilogy. Here’s what the stars of the original trilogy have been up to since we first saw them a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

  • ‘Star Wars’: 15 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About the Original Trilogy

    We’re now only days away from the release of a little film called “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” The hype is real, but there’s not much fans can do but wait patiently until opening night finally arrives.

    Perhaps we can help pass the time a little. We’ve put together a list of 15 interesting facts about the original trilogy that even hardcore Star Wars geeks might not know. Whether they involve the troubled development of these films or some of the oddball minor characters that appear onscreen, these tidbits reveal just how unusual life is in a galaxy far, far away.

    “Star Wars” (1977)
    1. Peter Cushing (above) might have been intimidating as Grand Moff Tarkin, but only because his feet were never shown in the frame. Cushing found his boots uncomfortable and insisted on wearing slippers instead.

    2. Lucas pitched the project to United Artists, Universal and even Disney before finding a home at 20th Century Fox. Disney could have saved themselves $4 billion if they had just locked up the rights to the franchise from the beginning.

    3. The first film underwent extensive re-shoots and edits. According to the magazine Star Wars Insider, only 30-40% of the footage found in the final version was present in the original cut.
    4. Harrison Ford‘s one complaint about flying the Millennium Falcon? The cockpit switches. They didn’t stay in place when he flipped them, so, according to EW, the production designers took this note to heart when designing the new cockpit for Han Solo’s iconic ship, and they made sure quality switches were installed. During his first day inside the cockpit, Ford tested out each switch to make sure they stayed in place when flipped. (And they did.)

    5. Marvel began releasing a comic book adaptation of the film in May 1977, which eventually transitioned into showcasing the ongoing adventures of Luke, Han, Leia and the rest. The comic lasted many years and is largely credited with saving Marvel from financial ruin during a period of slumping sales.

    “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980)
    6. Rather than being an intricately designed puppet, the original plan was for Yoda to be played by a monkey wearing a mask.

    7. The reptilian bounty hunter Bossk wears a spacesuit that was actually borrowed from a 1966 episode of “Doctor Who” called “The Tenth Planet.”

    8. Fellow bounty hunter IG-88 (pictured) was also built from spare parts. His head is actually one of the drink dispensers seen in the Mos Eisley Cantina from the original film.
    9. Fox’s then-President Alan Ladd, Jr. was forced to resign after the studio discovered that he didn’t secure merchandising and sequel rights from Lucas. In retaliation, Lucas brought “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to rival studio Paramount.

    10. One of the many extras seen fleeing Cloud City is carrying what looks to be an ice cream maker. This minor character has become a source of fascination with fans, and he’s acquired a backstory of his own as a Rebel agent safeguarding an important data cache.

    “Return of the Jedi” (1983)
    11. Many fans know that this sequel was going to be called “Revenge of the Jedi” until Lucas changed his mind at the last minute. But did you know “Star Trek II’s” subtitle was changed from “The Revenge of Khan” to “The Wrath of Khan” to avoid confusing the two franchises?

    12. Three of the guards on Jabba’s sail barge are named Klaatu, Barada and Nikto. Those names are an homage to classic sci-fi film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

    13. This sequel was codenamed “Blue Harvest” during production to help maintain secrecy. The title was an homage to “Red Harvest,” a film that heavily inspired Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic “Yojimbo,” which itself heavily inspired the Star Wars films.
    14. Lucas originally had darker plans in mind for the ending of this sequel. Earlier script drafts featured Luke claiming the mantle of Darth Vader for himself, and Han and the Rebel troops perishing on Endor.

    15. Both David Lynch and David Cronenberg were approached to direct this sequel. Lynch wound up directing the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” instead — which clearly was the best call.
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  • George Lucas Explains Changing ‘Han Shot First’ Scene in ‘Star Wars’

    Star WarsWhen George Lucas re-released the original “Star Wars” trilogy in 1997, he altered some scenes, but it was a change to the cantina scene in “A New Hope” that really set fans howling.

    In the original version of the scene, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) shoots bounty hunter Greedo under the table with no warning. In the re-release, it’s Greedo who shoots first.

    In an interview with the Washington Post, Lucas defended the controversial change as keeping in line with the principles of “Star Wars.”

    “Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’” he explained.

    “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”

    Whatever, Han shot first.

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  • See Ron Howard’s Epic Selfie With George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola

    No big deal, just three iconic film directors hangin’ out takin’ selfies. Not the droids you’re looking for. Move along. Except it is kind of awesome to see “Star Wars” king George Lucas, the “Godfather” himself, Francis Ford Coppola, and Opie, aka Ron Howard, in one very casual-looking photo. Maybe they just gather every so often in a director’s version of Jimmy Kimmel’s Handsome Men’s Club. (Spielberg was probably in the bathroom.)

    The “Apollo 13” director shared the photo in question when tweeting images from a recent “Weekend with Charlie Rose” conference in Aspen. Here’s Ron Howard, so excited to share the moment that he misspelled George Lucas’s name:



    One fan joked that it was confirmation of “Willow 2,” referencing the 1988 movie directed by Howard from a story by Lucas. Coppola appears to be gesturing for some reason, maybe he’s trying to direct Howard.

    Howard also had a fanboy moment when Usher performed during the conference:


    That’s cool too, but it would’ve been nice to see and hear more from the directors. If only they had taped whatever conversation they had before and after taking the photo.

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  • ‘Star Wars’: Michael Jackson Wanted to Play Jar Jar Binks, George Lucas Said No

    Michael Jackson, like most fans, wanted to be in a “Star Wars” movie. The King of Pop campaigned for a role in “Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace”; he hoped to play Jar Jar Binks, an unfortunate choice for several reasons, one being that George Lucas didn’t want to go in that direction. MJ may have found Lucas’s lack of faith disturbing, but — in hindsight — *not* playing Jar Jar Binks is something we should all feature on our resumés. So who really won in this deal?

    Ahmed Best was the guy who ended up playing the much-derided character and he recently talked to Vice about meeting the late pop star who wanted his job.

    In a Reddit interview, you mentioned that Michael Jackson originally wanted to play the role of Jar Jar Binks. Was that a joke?
    That’s what George told me. Me, Natalie Portman, and George’s kids—we were at Wembley arena at Michael Jackson’s concert. We were taken backstage and we met Michael. There was Michael and Lisa Marie [Presley]. George introduced me as “Jar Jar” and I was like, That’s kind of weird. Michael was like, “Oh. OK.” I thought, What is going on? After Michael had driven off, we all go back up to a big afterparty. I’m having a drink with George and I said, “Why did you introduce me as Jar Jar?” He said, “Well, Michael wanted to do the part but he wanted to do it in prosthetics and makeup like ‘Thriller.’” George wanted to do it in CGI. My guess is ultimately Michael Jackson would have been bigger than the movie, and I don’t think he wanted that.”

    It was probably for the best, all considered. “Phantom Menace” came out in 1999, and Michael Jackson would be gone just 10 years later, leaving a legacy that would not include Jar Jar. Ahmed talked about how poorly Jar Jar was received and his reaction to his co-star and the movie being criticized:

    When was the first time you can remember being genuinely hurt by the negative reactions to Jar Jar Binks?
    It didn’t happen until the New York press junkets. The first person who kind of gave me an idea of where it was going was a writer from The New York Post. I didn’t really think much about it because I always felt like the The New York Post was a paper that fed off of that type of energy, that type of negativity. Growing up in New York you know which papers give you the news and which papers give you the gossip and the Post was definitely heavier on the gossip side than anything else. But I was really surprised that everyone picked up on that afterwards. It’s a very American thing to take somebody down when they’re at the top and a lot if it had to with that; people really wanted to see George crash and burn. Unfortunately, this character was so new, so experimental; he became a lightning rod for all that. It was me, and it was [original Anakin Skywalker] Jake Lloyd who took a lot of the heat for the movie. Fortunately, I was in my 20s. I wasn’t eight years-old like Jake, who I think took it worse. Jake had it far worse than me. I’m a 20-year-old from from the Bronx; I’ve seen and I’ve done things that were a lot harder than criticism in that newspaper. Although it hurt me emotionally and it was hard to take at the time, it wasn’t debilitating for me. I just put my shoes on and went back to work. But Jake had a difficult time.

    Did you find yourself ever having to jump in and defend him like a big brother?
    I did. Earlier I did. Say what you want to say, but leave the kid alone, let him grow up. The amount of vitriol he took as an eight-year-old was just wrong, and it affected him.

    Kinda feel bad now… but it’s fair to have a negative opinion of a character, especially when there was SO much expectation and hype and excitement for a return to “Star Wars” and many fans were left disappointed by Episode 1. It’s definitely not about wanting to see George Lucas crash and burn. However, there are still many Jar Jar fans and defenders out there, and hopefully Ahmed thinks of them and not the critics.

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  • George Lucas: 25 Things You Didn’t Know About the ‘Star Wars’ Guru

    Director George LucasGeorge Lucas didn’t just create the “Star Wars” universe. The filmmaker, who turns 71 on May 14, pretty much created the cinematic universe we live in now, the ones whose cornerstones include the THX sound system at your multiplex, the Pixar movies that have dominated animation for the past 20 years, and the Industrial Light & Magic special-effects house, whose aesthetic has ruled the Hollywood blockbuster for nearly four decades. He’s the pioneer of the effects-driven action spectacle and the conversion from celluloid to digital, the two trends that, for better and worse, have defined Hollywood’s output for nearly 20 years.

    As ubiquitous as Lucas and his creations loom in our cinematic dreamscapes, there’s still a lot that most people don’t know about him, from how he got his start to the famous folks who mentored him or were mentored by him, from the size of his fortune to what he plans to do now that he’s all but out of the “Star Wars” business.

    Here are 25 pieces of little-known Lucas lore, Enjoy, and May the 14th be with you.

    1. George Lucas’s full name is George Walton Lucas Jr.

    2. Like Luke Skywalker, Lucas was a speed demon as a youth. In fact, he dreamed of being a race car driver until, as a teen, he was involved in a near-fatal crash. Nonetheless, his interest in racing persisted, but only as a subject for films, from some of his student shorts to the drag race at the climax of “American Graffiti” to the pod race in “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.”

    3. Lucas transferred from Modesto Junior College in his California hometown to the University of Southern California’s film school. His roommate there was future “Grease” director Randal Kleiser. His classmates included future “Apocalypse Now” and “Red Dawn” screenwriter John Milius and future editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who would one day be best known for his work on “Apocalypse Now,” and who also would co-wrote Lucas’s first studio feature, dystopian sci-fi drama “THX 1138,” as well as creating its innovative soundscape.

    4. After graduation, Lucas, again like Luke Skywalker, sought to become a pilot. He tried to join the Air Force, but he was turned down because of all his speeding tickets. The Army drafted him to fight in Vietnam, but then it rejected him because he was found to be diabetic. So he re-enrolled at USC as a graduate student.

    5. Lucas’s biggest mentor and collaborator in his early years was none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas’s first Hollywood job was as a student intern on one of the first major features Coppola directed, the 1968 musical “Finian’s Rainbow.” In 1969, the year Lucas served as a jack-of-all-trades on the shoot of Coppola’s drama “The Rain People,” the two men founded American Zoetrope, a San Francisco-based independent studio meant to make avant-garde features. One of the company’s first films was Lucas’s “THX 1138,” which flopped in 1971 but proved an influence on later futuristic sci-fi films and TV shows. After Coppola’s success with “The Godfather,” he urged Lucas to write and direct something more commercial. The result was the smash nostalgia piece “American Graffiti,” which Coppola produced and made a fortune from as an investor. Despite all but imploding after the cost overruns from Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “One From the Heart” (1982), the studio survives today and is run by Francis’ filmmaker children, Sofia and Roman Coppola.

    6. Another early professional filmmaking job for Lucas: camera operator on the Maysles brothers’ legendary Rolling Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter,” which chronicled the free 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California where the Hell’s Angels the Stones had hired to do security stabbed a concertgoer to death.

    7. Lucas nearly directed “Apocalypse Now,” according to early Zoetrope principal Murch. He said Milius wrote the script for the nightmarish Vietnam War drama back in 1969, at the height of the war, when no studio would have dared release it. Instead, Murch has said said, Lucas took the script’s central plot element — guerrilla rebels fighting a lumbering empire — and turned it into “Star Wars.”

    8. As prolific as Lucas has been as a producer (26 features over the last 45 years), he’s received script credit as a writer on just 16 and has directed only six.

    9. The most notorious piece of “Star Wars” lore is the 1978 CBS “Star Wars Holiday Special,” a hilariously bad piece of variety TV that includes song-and-dance numbers (including Carrie Fisher singing lyrics to John Williams famous “Star Wars” theme music), long stretches of Wookiee grunt-and-groan conversations that go untranslated into any human language, and a ten-minute cartoon that marks the first appearance of Boba Fett. Lucas has long since disavowed any involvement with the show, which aired only once but has circulated in homemade VHS recordings and on file-sharing sites ever since. Lucas has said he refuses to release the show on home video, though the Boba Fett sequence does show up as an Easter egg on the 2011 “Star Wars: The Complete Saga” Blu-ray set.

    10. Lucas was a big fan of legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa; indeed, many critics have found similarities between “Star Wars” and Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress.” When Kurosawa was in a career slump, Lucas and Coppola helped get him funding to make “Kagemusha,” earning a producer credit for themselves. The 1980 classic resulted in a comeback for the 70-year-old director, who went on to follow it up with “Ran,” one of his greatest successes.

    11. Lucas helped protege Lawrence Kasdan, a screenwriter on “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” get his start as a director. He served as an uncredited producer on “Body Heat,” the steamy 1981 thriller that launched the “Big Chill” filmmaker’s directing career and made an instant star out of Kathleen Turner.

    12. Lucas has blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em cameos in six movies, two of his own (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith“) and four by others (“Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird,” pal Steven Spielberg‘s “Hook,” “Beverly Hills Cop III,” and “Men in Black”). He’s also appeared as himself on the TV shows “Just Shoot Me” and “The O.C.”

    13. Lucas has been married twice: to editor Marcia Griffin (who won an Oscar for “Star Wars”) from 1969 to 1983 and to DreamWorks Animation board chair Mellody Hobson since 2013. He has four children.

    14. In the mid 1980s, singer Linda Ronstadt stopped dating then-unknown comic Jim Carrey (who, at 22, was 16 years her junior) and briefly dated Lucas, then 39, who had recently separated from his first wife.

    15. During his split from Griffin, Lucas sold off the computer graphics research division of Industrial Light & Magic in order to pay the divorce settlement. The division, which had done the pioneering computer-generated animation for the Genesis planet sequence in 1982’s “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” was sold to Steve Jobs, who renamed the company Pixar. Within a few years, Pixar was releasing award-winning animated shorts, and eventually, the first full-length computer-animated feature, 1995’s “Toy Story.” And the rest is animation history.

    16. After President Ronald Reagan began referring to the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative as “Star Wars,” Lucas filed suit to prevent lobbyists from using his creation’s name for the proposed weapons system, but he was unsuccessful.

    17. Lucas sold Lucasfilm, the owner of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” franchises, and the parent company of Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts (Lucas’s video game division), to Disney in 2012. The deal was worth $4 billion, making Lucas the biggest shareholder in Disney aside from the estate of Steve Jobs.

    18. According to Forbes, Lucas’s current net worth is $5.2 billion.

    19. For more than 30 years, Lucas has been brewing story ideas for “Star Wars: Episode VII,” but he has said that the makers of the forthcoming film, due in December, chose not to use them.

    20. Lucas has signed the Giving Pledge (along with other billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett), promising to give away half of his fortune to charity.

    21. One of his philanthropic endeavors is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open in Chicago in 2018.

    22. His other charitable donations include $1 million toward building the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, D.C. in 2005 and $175 million to his alma mater, the USC film school, in 2006.

    23. According to Skywalker Ranch lore, the Marin County, California compound was a monastery 150 years ago. Today, of course, it’s the site of Lucas’s archives and Skywalker Sound recording studio. There’s also a man-made pond there called Lake Ewok.

    24. Lucas has never won a competitive Oscar, but in 1991, the Academy gave him an honorary one, the Irving Thalberg award.

    25. Lucas has long said that he sought commercial success only to enable him to make the kind of small-scale, experimental, cutting-edge movies he made in film school. The sale of Lucasfilm was supposed to get him out of the blockbuster business so that he could work on these less commercial projects. So far, they have yet to materialize.
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  • The 10 Weirdest Non-‘Star Wars’ George Lucas Projects

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    This week, the George Lucas-produced animated film “Strange Magic” hits theaters nationwide and, really, it cannot be overstated just how weird it is. This is an animated movie set in a kind of fairy tale kingdom of fairies and goblins and other mystical beings. It’s also a jukebox musical, featuring pop songs from the last forty years (everything from the titular ELO track to Kelly Clarkson to everything in between). And it’s been rendered, by the talented people at Industrial Light & Magic (and their Singapore off-shoot) with a kind of hyper-real texture that is both incredibly realistic and undeniably trippy.

    And it could have been even weirder. In a recent press conference that I attended, Lucas said that he originally wanted to push things even further. “At first I wanted it to be an opera, all music, with no talking. When we got to that phase, everybody beat on me real hard and said that’s not going to work,” the “Star Wars” creator confided. So, yes, “Strange Magic” could have been even stranger.

    It got us thinking about how odd Lucas’s non-“Star Wars” projects really are, so we decided to rundown the 10 weirdest non-“Star Wars”-related George Lucas projects, which unfortunately meant that we couldn’t do a deep dive into the infamous “Star Wars Christmas Special” or the pair of Ewok-centered feature-length movies. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of left-field material here, each one conjuring its own undeniably strange magic.george lucas movies