Chen G.

People hurtling verse at each other is not going to be for everyone... Wagnerians in a way have it easier because the through-composed nature of the works from Lohengrin on does mean you can sit back and enjoy it as a play, in a way that you really can't with Verdi, Mozart, Weber et al. Obviously it also depends on the coming together of a lot of things: stagecrafts, singing, performance in the pit, acting, etc...

It saved Williams some time!

Its a lovely film, although the quest takes a wee bit too long to get on its feet, and in the context of Lucas' filmography the story can feel a little overly recycled, both from his previous films (especially the original Star Wars) and some their antecedents, namely The Hobbit and Hidden Fortress. The quite carefree tone doesn't help sell the stakes of a story surrounding the intended sacrifice of a toddler, and I don't care for Jean Marsch's performance. Ron Howard is his usual workman-like self but captures a pretty nice tableaux, although the final confrontation is kind of a sham. Splendid score by Horner. On the whole, a perfectly pleasant motion picture. Whether calling it one of the better fantasy films of the 80s is a testament to its own merit to the subgenre's limitations is still an open question.

My own understanding of the situation is the following: March 1971-September 1975: Between Lucas first pursuing a space opera, and Star Wars taking the shape we know, Lucas keeps the prospect of multiple installments in the back of his mind. September 1975-August 1977: In spite of making his drafts increasingly standalone, Lucas plans to retcon the ending should the film prove a success, as predictions show. He signs several actors and crew-members for a trilogy, which would naturally end with the defeat of the Empire. He also entertains doing a prequel of Ben's younger days. August 1977- February 1978: Following the film's success, he starts gradually expanding his plans to "at least three or four more films." Cognizant of issues of actor availability, he still aims to start with a trilogy. February 1978-April 1978: Lucas' ambitions extend to a twelve-film series. Outside of the initial trilogy, it is not concieved in sets of three films, but as an anthology of standalone adventures. August 1978: Having turned Vader into Luke's father (Late March?), Lucas tries to fit the sequel into his twelve-film scheme, initially as Episode seven, alongside prequel trilogy about the Clone Wars (Episodes two-four) before deciding to scale down to either nine of six films. He labels the sequel "Episode Five." This is not announced publically until the release of the film. Early 1981: Whether Lucas actually meant to make nine films - or just six and spoke of making nine to avoid telling fans he's halving the series - by this point, when he was sketching the third film, he had surely dispensed with any notion of a sequel trilogy, although he kept talking about it through the 1980s, early 1990s and intermittently as late as 2004. 2012: Preparing to sell the company to Disney, Lucas decides to turn the idea of the sequel trilogy to a reality to bolster the deal.

Well, yeah, that's what Lucas said Star Wars would beginning in 1979 and through the 1980s and early 1990s. Even as late as 2004, he'd slip up and mention it being nine films, and then of course reverted to that version in 2012. For much of 1978 the official number was twelve episodes!

And about it being a nine-parter to begin with.

That interview smacks of the apocryphal.

I don't think its a coincidence. Its just that I see the connection as more generic or "poetic", rather than literal and plot-oriented, as Mattris sees it. Its just that they're both Sith music, and so OF COURSE they're going to be closely related. "Sith" here strictly in the sense of Dark Side Force-user.

This - Alberich's assumption of the Tarnhelm - is exactly the same music as this, Brunnhilde's awakening. Doesn't mean that Brunnhilde is the Tarnehlm... just means that both instances have an underlying magic to them. Kylo's music and the Emperor's sharing a similar vocabulary likewise just owes to the fact that they're both Sith.

They could be the same music and it still wouldn't prove your point: its called variations.

Well, I mean, they’re both bad guy/Sith music…they need to be similar. That’s the whole idea of the Don Juan ascetic/recluse type. In a lot of the conference meetings, Lucas speaks of Yoda not as a Jedi, but as a master that Jedi are then sent to. My memory was it crops up implicitly in the films themselves, but I can’t quite place it. It may have been more explicit in other drafts. Ben also, it was always clear to me, was a native of Tatooine.

Its a very clear line: I seek to prove things. Mattris assumes things are true until such time as they're proven wrong.

Ridley Scott is absolutely and without a doubt one of the great masters of the screen. Just making a film like Gladiator or Alien would buy him a place on the pantheon. The fact that he made both, as well as Thelma and Louise and Bladerunner pretty much puts him amidst the titans of the field. The issue with Ridley is he has a lousy taste in screenplays. When you're a director that doesn't write, even if you are involved in the shaping of the story with the writers and able to rejig the story somewhere in the cutting room, you're still left somewhat at the mercy of what's on the page, and that's an issue that dogs quite a few directors, including the likes of Spielberg. But Ridley really just has a truly lousy taste in scripts. I think he reads them seeing chances for arresting pictures, but in terms of the story sticking together they often just don't. Even some of his great movies aren't really great scripts: would anyone reading the script of Alien think it would turn out the way it did? The success of the movie is in the craftsmanship of the set and creature design, the earnestness of the performances and the atmosphere Ridley imbues it all with. Gladiator is not a great script, either: poorly structured and with thin characterisation. Kingdom of Heaven is even worst. But in all those cases, the script is good enough to not stand in the way, as it were. Which is not the case in a movie like, say, Legend, where Ridley's craft is again as immpecable as ever, but ensnared by a truly ghastly screenplay. But the craft is absolutely always on the level of a David Lean.

Mind you, in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, all the indication is Yoda is a native of Dagobah. In this, he's like Don Juan Mathos from Carlos Castaneda's books, which damn straight being that he quotes Don Juan verbatim. But otherwise, he's really a kind of 1970s version of Gandalf: back then, they loved their Gandalfs quirky and eccentric.

Right. And even if it were it would hardly improve Star Wars’ standing with the intelligentsia, being that Campbell’s book itself is pretty much hackwork.

You know, I didn’t delve into the influences on Star Wars to show that’s it’s derivative and, having done it, I still don’t think it is. Certainly with the elements it took from The Hobbit, it seems to me they were sublimated into the story pretty unobtrusively and certainly in terms of the scope of influence on Star Wars, it’s one of decidedly secondary importance. That’s not to consecrate it a-la Mattris.

Not just Obi Wan, but also Yoda and to some extent Qui Gon, Noa and even the Emperor, to the extent that he was concieved as an evil Obi Wan. Yoda, in particular, like the earliest iterations of Obi Wan, does however resemble the more quirky Gandalf of The Hobbit than the one in The Lord of the Rings. But Luke - in the context of the original film - has far more in common with Bilbo than with Frodo. And its certainly no coincidence that Luke, Anakin and Yoda all live in round halls in the ground: Bag-End is described in far greater detail in The Hobbit than in The Lord of the Rings. There's other stuff, too: there may well be something of the Great Goblin to the later version of Jabba the Hutt, but that's a little more tenuous. But you'll note that's still from quite early on in the course of the book.

Less The Lord of the Rings, more The Hobbit. I've seen no evidence that Lucas read The Lord of the Rings while working on the films. 1200-page books, fashioned as Medieval English romances, are frankly less his line of country. The Hobbit was much more suitable for him in terms of both the tone of it, and being far more digestible to a person who by all accounts is anything but a book-worm. Virtually everything in these films (and in Lucas' larger filmography, e.g. Willow) that can be construed as coming from Tolkien, comes from The Hobbit, not from its big brother. Furthermore, those elements that ARE taken from the Hobbit, are overwhelmingly from the first few chapters at most. We also have a paper-trail leading Lucas to The Hobbit - but not to The Lord of the Rings. Circa March 1975, George Lucas reads Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (Third Edition). In it, author Richard Lupoff quotes from a correspondence he had with Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, which Lucas is subsequently inspired to pick up at some point before August that year, when he inserts close paraphrases off of that book into his next draft.

No thanks. That book's main raison d'etre is that merely reading out its name (usually to ladies) makes one seem suave and sophisticated.

Not to disprove your point - to the contrary, actually - but that's like saying: "Here are all the words in Proust's À la recherche that use the syllable "la"...

Academic establishments the world over give thanks to you…

Oh, by far!

Food?

That was actually a reference to his blogs.

That is correct. Those elements were, however, almost entirely in Episode VII.