Something was happening, On May 25th, 1977 a movie was released which was sending shockwaves through popular culture. Star Wars, a science fantasy film by American Graffiti wunderkind George Lucas had set the film world on fire. I had decided to wait to see it with a group of friends. On the 25th I had started to receive frenzied phone calls from friends who had been at the opening and were all in a total froth of what they had seen.
The following Tuesday, I cut out of class early and made my way down to the Uptown Theatre in Calgary Alberta. The Uptown Theatre was built in 1951 by Jacob Barron, a Calgary lawyer and owner of National Theatres, a chain of local movie houses. It is the finest example of Art Deco architecture in the city. The theatre lobby has been likened to a Lapidus designed Miami Beach hotel lobby. It was and still is an amazing place to see movies. Thankfully it is still operating as a movie theatre today.
I sat down in the third row from the back, dumped some ice down a friends back and started munching on Red Twizzlers, and sipping on an ice cold Coke. The screen opened, there were no trailers, the Fox fanfare exploded, followed by two rather plain title cards. And then my life changed.
Some people have eureka moments when they first glimpse the eyes of their future life partner, others when they discover a passion or hold their child for the first time. I have had several of these…
I am very lucky but my very first OMG on May 27th, 1977 was furnished courtesy of an diabetic gangly, Northern California uber nerd. I knew who Lucas was because I really enjoyed American Graffiti. It was the first soundtrack album I bought and played it incessantly reliving the ballet of cars that Lucas choreograph dancing down the streets of Petaluma, Modesto and San Rafael. I thought the film touching, poetic and a aching portrayal of what it was to be young and hopeful in pre-Vietnam America.
I was stuffed by the imagery, the skill and the execution of the story. That cemented it for me I wanted to make movies….Yah. It lite the summer of 1977 on fire. Sweet summer nights dreaming of girls, TIE Fighters and Carrie Fisher.
I read everything I could on the boy genius from Modesto California. His humble beginning on a Walnut Ranch, a near fatal crash, his transfiguration at the University of Southern California, his tutelage by Francis Ford Coppola and his part in the founding of American Zoetrope. Wow…..What a guy. I was dogged. Al Gore had yet to invented the internet, information on film and filmmakers was often tough to come by,
Every word that Lucas uttered I hungrily consumed,
Words from Chairman George
“I came out of film school, what I refer to as pure cinema, non-story, non-character driven cinema, which is much more kinetic and of the silent era.”
“Yes. That’s still where my heart is, and I can’t get away from it. Even Star Wars and American Graffitti got a lot of criticism for the fact that they were so abstract-not made the way a normal movie is made. And they aren’t. “Empire” goes in even further than Star Wars in terms of moving through an idea as quickly as one can possibly deal with it.”
“I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional and I still do.”
“I don’t want to be a businessman. My ambition is to make movies, but all by myself, to shoot them, cut them, make stuff I want to, just for my own exploration, to see if I can combine images in a certain way.”
“My only interest in life is to make films, explore films and grow as a person.”
“I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.
“I’ve made what I consider the most conventional kind of movie[Star Wars] I can possibly make. I’ve learned my craft in the classic entertainment sense as well as I think I can learn it. What I want to do now is take my craft in the other direction, which is creating emotions without understanding what is going on in terms of purely visual and sound relationships. I think there is a whole world of film there that has never been explored. People have gotten so locked into the story film — the novel and the play have such a strong influence over film that it has sort of become the weak sister. And if the films work, I will try to get them out and get them distributed by whoever would be daring enough to pick them up. Maybe they will be entertaining, it’s hard to know at this point. It is in an area that I have absolutely no way of knowing what would happen and that is what excites me. And I have reached the point now that I can say, well, I am retiring. Because I can really retire now.”
“It’s something that I’ve wanted to do ever since I was in film school. My friends who are making those kinds of movies struggle along on grants, and it’s very difficult because they have very limited resources. You cant’ make a living that way and I realized that years ago, so I went into “regular filmmaking.” I happened to fall into it with Francis. If I hadn’t met him and he hadn’t sent me down that line, I would have moved to San Francisco from SC, and I would have been up here doing films like that-but struggling with them.”
“I was always coming from pure cinema – I was using the grammar of film to create content. I think graphically, not linearly.”
I loved what he was saying, this was created, Hollywood would fall to its knees in the glow of the ultimate visual story-teller, but I was wrong.
I was charged and was even buoyed by the fact that George got a lot of his inspiration of the French Language Unit of the National Film Board of Canada. I had spent a few afternoons screening these films at the local branch of the National Film Board and was impressed by their freedom and sense of vision.
I waited and was impressed with the darkness of the “Empire Strikes Back”, the deft sense of pathos and story helmed by Irvin Kirshner, a former professor of Lucas. I saw “Return of The Jedi” and began to see something else, a move towards loss of story, an movement of towards spectactle.
Lucas gave me a lot, he gave me the curiousity and passion to learn about something, I discovered a legion of great films and great filmmakers. I expanded my vision and saw that maybe Grafitti had more to do with the artistry of the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler and the editorial brilliance of Verna Fields. I firmly rejected the idea of the “Auteur Theory” that any feature film that had any scope was the result of a singular vision.
Film is at its apex a uniquely collaborative art form.
The problem is that because of the success of his vision George had the resources and the ability to re-shape film in his own vision. Like the Emperor in Star Wars, he began to rely on technological to guide and shape his vision and is suspect became a lead technological cultist. Humanity started to drip slowly away from his vision. In his workshop he developed new sound technologies, non-linear editing, 3D modeling….all visual impressive and in some ways liberating technology sets.
But Lucas and his hate of story and plot, as attested to in this quote,
“I hated scripting writing. I hated stories, and I hated plot, and I wanted to make visual films that had nothing to do with telling a story. I didn’t want to know about stories and plot and characters and all that sort of stuff. And that’s what I did. My first films were very abstract – tone poems, visual.”
Have moved him to push the industry towards the world of the computer and not of story structure. He started to produce film which at best were momentary marvels, like the last Star Wars films or the unfortunate last installment of the Indiana Jones series.
He has rejected story, and imposed that rejection on an industry that hangs on his every word. He has set in motion a trend that diminishes story, plot and character. As a result film is becoming more and more less interesting.
In 1902 British author William Jacobs published his story, “The Monkey’s Paw”. Three wishes are granted the possessor of the paw of a dead monkey. The paw grants three wishes, but each wish has tied to it a huge price for interfering with your destiny.
At the recent Cinemacon, Lucas sat on a panel with Jeffrey Katzenberg and James Cameron. The subject was “The Future of Digital Cinema”. Lucas made the following comments;
“So now when you’re watching a movie and it’s not in 3D, it’s like watching in black and white,” he told cinema owners at their CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas.”
“It’s a better way of looking at a film. … I totally believe now that 3D will completely take over just like colour did.”
“We have our third generation now of kids who are under 12 years old who have never seen Star Wars on the big screen,” Lucas said. “And I am betting a lot of people will go see a movie that they have seen on television a million times and they have the video at home, and they will go and see it because they want to see it in the theatre in a social experience.”
I think he’s wrong and in the words of his own creation.
“Don’t overestimate the power of this technological marvel. Its power is insignificant when compared to the power of the Force” Darth Vader Star Wars Episode 4 “A NEW HOPE”
I think storytelling, good storytelling is the constant of great film. Sorry George….
