bronnt wrote:Independent George wrote:Different media, different rules - it's easy enough to add an appendix to the back of a 1,000+ pages of text. How do you add an appendix of supplementary materials to a film? The closest analogue I can come up with is a DVD extra, like the 'history of Westeros' shorts on the Game of Thrones Blu-Rays. Is there an equivalent of a showrunner's bible for film?
That's part of why I'm not sure what to make of it. I just wanted to point out that there's no fair comparison between Tolkien and Lucas because Tolkien was able to show all the work he did.The main problem with "The Phantom Menace" is that Lucas doesn't seem clear on what story he is trying to tell and how he's telling it. There's no single clear plot thread that carries the story from start to finish, nothing even close to Frodo's involvement with the ring and the quest to destroy it.
There's also the "narrative" integrity of the creation of Tolkien's work. He was always upfront in exactly how he created he world and used a historical thought process when he ran into problems. So much of that was maintaining the idea of rules to his world that he had to work within.
The best example of the is the problem with Glorfindel when he realized he'd used the name twice and his rule for Elves was that Elves used unique names, no two Elves used the same. Instead of changing either name, though, he took the situation as an opportunity to expand his world and introduced reincarnation into it when it occurred to him that he hadn't touched on it and there wasn't anything about reincarnation that could rule out adding it. Despite that it was incredibly rare and only Glorfindel is known to have been reincarnated, someone who is a background character.
Chuck's stuff on Star Wars shows that so much of what made Star Wars great came from a similar process of working within the bounds, something Lucas appears to have failed to realize thinking the same old assumption, that, if they could do something like the original trilogy within the technological, filming and writing limitations they faced, then doing so without any would result in an even better product.
Even when writing and production presented problems, like with Obi-Wans age and the overall timeline, Lucas seemed to try and work around them not work with them. So much of the problem I think is that part of Lucas that caused him to start claiming credit for things that didn't exist, like a laid out plan in the trilogy, but one that is hardly unique when the producers of Lost and other shows have thrown out the same BS and by now people should know that kind of thing will only bite you in the ass later on unless it's 100% true.
There's no single clear plot thread that carries the story from start to finish, nothing even close to Frodo's involvement with the ring and the quest to destroy it.
There can't be with the path he built where grown Anakin wouldn't be in the first movie at all, but he made things worse building too much of a grand epic that felt more like War and Peace than something marketed as Anakin's journey towards becoming Darth Vader.
It makes me wonder if there might have been some thing in the EU that Lucas could have drawn on for help, since much of that has the same grand feel and sense of history, but I'm not familiar with it beyond randomly wandering through Wookiepedia when dealing with insomnia, so I don't even know if the EU was well established enough by '97 to have been a help.
When it comes to the idea that he "planned it all from the start", Lucas *is* a massive egotist.
I wouldn't call him a massive egotist, at least as far as he was during the 70s and 80s. The problem was he made helped create something that caused a huge buzz, and everyone happened to look towards him to praise that eventually caused a snowball that led to Lucas wanting to think he did more than he did and could do more next time around.
Again, look at Lost and how it suffered the exact same problem. It was a huge hit if you're not familiar with it and the vague way it was originally made caused the same torrent of questions that ultimately led everyone to ask if the writers and producers had a plan. Afraid they might deflate the show by not saying "no" the producers nodded and went too far, saying EVERYTHING was going to be sorted out by the end that led them to scramble to do just that and not only failed, but ruined many of the shows most beloved questions.
The problem with Lost was that the likes of Damon Lindelof are good at creating mystery, but terrible at unveiling it, which alongside his penchant for having characters do incredibly stupid things is a big reason why the movie Prometheus was such mess.
All of that doesn't raise touch on if Lucas by the 90s was a massive egotist, and by then I'm not so sure, if only for the fact that he didn't place limitations upon himself and it seems he wanted the Prequels to everything he wanted in that he wanted to make the Prequels while at the same time having them be experimental movies to be a reason to fiddle with new tech failing to realize that you use tried and tested tech and practices where it matters, leaving experiments in an experimental environments in much the same way you do not press prototype aircraft into military service when they're simply too few and too bug to do much at all.
The the case of the Prequels, the tech worked well enough, but it was one too many things added to an already crowded plate.
There are elements of the prequels in the early drafts, so his claims aren't entirely false.
There are elements, but at the same time he wasn't honest. I wonder if part of the problem too was him not wanting to let down everyone thinking so highly of him as well that became a mutually escalating problem. He didn't want to say something like "Actually Darth Vader being Luke's father was a last minute thing when we got worked into a corner, I'm happy it worked out so well, but it definitely wasn't there from the start.... very little actually was, but enough for something great to be built from as we went" because it might let too many down (and thus damage the films and Prequels), while as he kept going along people kept expecting more and more that everything was under his control, which was exactly what happened to Lost in that the producers let hype go so far that fans expected every minor mystery and question to fit into a grand idea that they'd had from the beginning.
