Larry O

My apologies then. Not trying to be facetious either. I'm sorry. I'll leave you all to it.

The caption doesn't say it was a Rise of Skywalker Recording session, though. And yeah, people were arguing that it was faked. It's on the last page. You're just now saying it was "staged" which... You guys are trying to answer a question that isn't even a question, is all. Think about it - this article had to be prepped and put to bed how long ago? Which means the photos themselves were likely taken all at the same general time period in order to be put through the same production pipeline at the magazine so that they could hit the same deadline. If you can determine when that rough time period is (and you can) then... there you go. You already know he's written 25 minutes of music. You know he's recording some of it very soon. You know he's recorded music for Star Wars in the very recent past, too. You know all this stuff! It's a cool picture of a great composer. That's really all it is. There's nothing more to it than that. Enjoy it!

Annie Liebovitz isn't in the business of wholesale faking entire photos for the sake of... something (??) It's a real picture of real musicians at a real scoring stage. Is the image of Leia on the projection screen touched up? Probably. Maybe. But the idea there'd be a whole bunch of trouble undertaken to specifically to fake a recording session for one of 15 Vanity Fair images for a purpose nobody here's even investigated the utility of... I lurked before I came here (obviously) and I think it's worth mentioning that the collective's track record for spotting bullshit is shockingly low. You guys seem to most reliably believe in things that can't possibly true, and immediately and consistently dismiss legitimate information when it's openly and straightforwardly presented. John Williams is conducting something for musicians who are playing something in a studio where something's being recorded. There is a picture of Leia on the screen and on the monitor, and the sheet music pretty obviously says "Leia's Theme" on it. I don't know why there has to be anything more to it than that. Certainly don't understand why the veracity of what this very obviously is needs to be immediately questioned. Enjoy this stuff while you can, yunno?

Also, phones and/or computer monitors make for very expensive birdcage liner, and I would hope nobody's actually attempting that as a remedy for their pet's housekeeping routine. Birds as housepets has always seemed sorta cruel anyway. The whole point of them is to be in the air somewhere. Not trapped in a cage in a house, forced to poop on confused old people's electronics.

That's very '80s, though. It absolutely fits for the time in which it was made. Gale and Zemeckis poked fun at that yuppie-friendly mindset in the sequels (making Biff into Donald Trump) but there are a lot of movies made in that period where the subtext was essentially "if you're not driving this car, living in a house with this many bedrooms, and your wardrobe doesn't include this many polo pastels and sweaters to wrap around your shoulders, you're probably a bad American who deserves whatever they get." The Reagan Years were really mean-spirited and superficial as a rule.

The overwhelming majority of successful filmed narratives both theatrical and television were created without overarching plans in place. As the saying goes "If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans." A good, recent, prominent example of an overarching plan being adhered to despite the narrative obviously pointing in a different direction is "How I Met Your Mother."

The 80s kinda fucked up a whole generation. It was a pretty ugly decade overall. A whole lot of angry, repressed, socially accepted 'phobic behaviors were not just born, but promoted in that decade, especially for a generation of men who are very obviously having problems dealing with the progress of time now in the present day. It was an especially bad decade when it came to inappropriate "children's" entertainment. They made Saturday Morning Cartoons out of Rambo and Robocop, for example. People still think Ghostbusters is a kids movie to this day despite the fact nobody involved gave a single shit about "the kids" when they made it. Hence the blowjob joke, for one. There's not really any quantifiable difference between a 40 year old man having a desk full of Master of the Universe toys and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle statues (or, to be most obvious here, any amount of Star Wars collectibles) and another 40 year old man having Pocahontas, Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast merch visible at their workplace. You're discussing arrested development in either case. It just comes in different flavors, that's all. Also, a lot of grown adults probably like a lot of current kids movies because in many instances the people making children's entertainment are putting more thought, effort, and energy into the storytelling than the stuff intended solely for adults. Anyway, The Phantom Menace is a very poorly directed and edited film, and 20 years hasn't changed that fact.

the 2nd movie I ever saw in a theater was Superman III. I was very young (I think 5? Maybe 6) and I remember being profoundly disturbed by three things: 1) Clark Kent strangling Drunk Superman to death, so hard he actually disincorporated 2) Robot Lady 3) Straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa (seriously, I very distinctly remember being bothered by that) But the first movie I have ANY conscious memory of watching was Superman, as seen on ABC during its television premiere. You better believe I was front and center in my underoos all of 2 ft away from the 19" tv for both nights, when I wasn't running around the living room singing the theme at the top of my lungs and bouncing off the furniture with a towel around my neck.

A kid born on the same day as Revenge of the Sith's opening night would be a senior in high school when the first episode of Benioff/Weiss' new prequel trilogy comes out.

yeah, there's quite a few people who were like, 5-6 (basically little kids) when those things were first coming out, and so there's not really a frame of reference for what a weird madhouse the internet was when those movies were being made. They got online way later and only found out long after the fact that those goofy kids movies they liked were the center of some ridiculous hijinks for years on end. There's a lot of Star Wars fans now who only know of that era through second-or-third-hand stories. It doesn't make sense to them (and it probably shouldn't, it was crazy back then) why Star Wars was such a controversial thing. Now they're gonna live through their own prequel era courtesy of Benioff & Weiss. It's gonna be interesting.

The TIMING of this... https://variety.com/2019/film/news/star-wars-2022-movie-game-of-thrones-creators-1203214646/ The rumor is that Benioff & Weiss are going to be making prequel movies - specifically, Old Republic movies. It's essentially the "Game of Thrones" era for Star Wars, hence why they were tapped. People are going to have their prequel nostalgia tested really strongly by these guys, because if the last 2-3 seasons of their show are any indication, every plotting problem, character inconsistency, and general storytelling jank that the Prequels got raked for are coming back in full force. People wanted to know what it was like to live through that era, I think they're about to find out. Ramin's probably getting a Star Wars trilogy though, so that's good.

But his creative process is one of the single most documented things in film history, and it's not the most disciplined thing. He almost constantly would say "this is how the story is going to go" and then when he would sit down to write the thing it almost never went the way he previously said it would go. A really good example is Vader's fight with Obi-Wan. For DECADES it was along the lip of a volcano, and the injuries were incurred by his falling INTO it (it varied whether he actually hit the magma inside, or if he simply burned along a ledge inside the crater). And then when he sat down to write the thing, suddenly it's a sprawling biathlon across an industrial facility that ends on a hillside, the injuries incurred by a badly timed jump into spinning lightsaber blades. It's why the assumption that Star Wars would be better if there was an overarching plan has always seemed a weird assumption to make - George Lucas has basically never subscribed to that notion. All his biggest successes come from his making it up as he goes. His biggest failures, as well. But George Lucas is a guy who enjoys winging it. He enjoys the excitement of a new idea, which is why his storytelling is almost always a collection of whatever newest ideas occurred to him as he's shooting, and whatever even newer ideas occurred to him in the edit. Remember: He never planned for Vader to be Luke's dad until after Brackett's drafts, and his own first two cracks at the story once she was off the project. And he never planned for Leia to be Luke's sister until he needed a convenient way out of the love triangle before Jedi wrapped up. He just made it up as he went. Sometimes you win those. Sometimes you die of a broken heart post-childbirth. It varies.

I believe on Force Awakens Abrams had editors cutting sequences together as they came in? Partially because he likes working that way, and partially because the schedule on that film was compressed enough that they sorta had to in order to ensure it came in on time. It's probably the same thing in this case.

The TLJ end credits ended up being a really good representation of that film's story, didn't it? Luke's theme Luke's Island theme Leia's theme Force Theme Rey's Theme Yoda's theme Rose's theme Holdo's theme The Resistance theme The Rebel Fanfare TIE Fighter Attack Kylo Ren is probably the only major character who doesn't get any real representation in that closing. Yoda's probably over-represented, but the piece is so good and the movie gives Williams the excuse to indulge it, much like Leia only shows up for all of 10 seconds in Revenge of the Sith and that's enough for its end credits to lead directly to her concert suite at the top before Battle of the Heroes comes in. I think if Williams and Abrams have discussed what this score is supposed to sound like, I'd imagine he's been filled in on what characters are showing up, and considering the nature of this ending, if Abrams goes full crowd-pleaser on this (which is very much in his wheelhouse) you might end up with appearances from a whole bunch of characters, old and new, at which point their presence in the end titles becomes a big possibility, and you could end up with a Williams "victory" lap that is essentially a medley of most big Star Wars motifs ending with, yeah - an existing reprise of Luke's Theme, since it's the one that started it all. Either way, we don't have long to wait, do we?

Well yeah it's an assumption, but I don't think it's a particularly big one, especially with hindsight. The part about his possibly leaving film scoring altogether is a maybe, not an assumption, but it's a maybe to consider, especially since, as you put it at the end of your own post, he's at a very certain age. But he's been given the job to "end" Star Wars musically THREE times now. The first time on Return of the Jedi, the second time on Revenge of the Sith, and now. The major difference with this assignment is the age/time as we've both pointed out, and also the context. Everything about this movie is going to be sold as "THE END" much like Sith was - except that end was leading into another movie's beginning. This end is, as everyone involved is making very aware, THE END. He's being asked to put the period on that sentence that began "A long time ago..." back in 1977. I think if you're going to make an assumption as to what that end credits will sound like, an assumption that sounds more like the Revenge of the Sith end titles on the soundtrack is a safe one to make. Of course, any assumption helps allow for surprise when expectations are subverted, too. And I'm more than open to that.

Portman was going to get work and be what she is now whether she took Phantom Menace or not. Also, this is pretty interesting as a quote: The bolded is my emphasis. That's someone very familiar with politics very subtly removing themselves from a situation in which they'd have to admit that as movies on their own they probably do not work for her. The perspective she's lacking is of that "avid group of people" who are using a frame of reference that is honestly, self-marginalized. Not that it honestly matters what the people who make the movies think of the movies they made once they've finished their obligation to the production. But Natalie Portman isn't really speaking about whether she thinks the movies are good. What she's saying is that it sucked being looped into what was considered a disappointing series of films at the time, at such a young age, and that was how she learned that the cycle of over-hype/disappointment exists, on a giant scale to boot. Also, I disagree with the idea that the Prequels seem/feel "cohesive" in a way the other movies don't. Lucas was making these up as he went just as much, if not moreso. Certainly from the writing perspective, he spent much less time working on the screenplays and stories than he did in the 70s and 80s. IIRC, the Episode II script had Jonathan Hales brought on because he basically started production without having finished his first draft. It also explains why the story as he'd been describing it in the intervening years was so different every time he added a new chapter to it: He wasn't really checking his "notes" or any larger outline. He just kinda sat down and made it up. And that's a valid form of creation! Perfectly okay, and very often successful as a way to tell a story. But it's not necessarily "cohesive." If anything, I'd argue that the Sequel trilogy (and to an extent, the Clone Wars tv series) is doing a better job making those six movies feel coherent than anything, because the sequel trilogy's vantage point allows for them to occupy the same space in "the past" and that backwards-looking POV tends to smooth out the discrepancies as a larger narrative is wrestled with.

He's not actually quoted as saying he doesn't like movies - that's the writer's line, not his. What he said is that he's not an "avid" moviegoer, and that he doesn't go to the movies. Then again, why would he? They come to him. Any movie he'd probably want to see over the last 40+ years is a movie he's worked on. And considering how much he works, when would he have time to be an avid moviegoer anyway? He likes movies, obviously. He just doesn't need to go out and see them. He's too busy making them better. Re: The Revenge of the Sith end credits - I don't know that I thought it was lazy, but I definitely thought it was a victory lap. They all took Lucas at his word that this was THE END and so he added Battle of the Heroes to the Throne Room/Finale concert suite he wrote (and Gerhardt was first to record, IIRC?) and the LSO put their all into it. It felt appropriate as a John Williams goodbye to Star Wars (dodgy transitions and all - Star Wars was always, despite its creators best efforts, sort of charmingly janky) and I think it's probably best—if you're going to make assumptions—to assume a similar approach here. This is absolutely goodbye, not just to Star Wars, but maybe to film scoring. If his first instinct back in 2005 was to take the victory lap, it's probably a safe bet that he'll do it again. What big, oft-heard, iconic themes/motifs will he return to? What pieces will end up representing the biggest, strongest, musical ideas of what "Star Wars" is? Those are probably the ones he'll revisit. I'm hoping to hear some Yub-Yub, myself.

Isn't Tron: Legacy essentially Trapanese's too? He did a lot of work on that score under Daft Punk's name.

I'm very, very much hoping that by the time this thing hits theaters we're going to start getting rumors or (feeling really optimistic here) a straight-up press release regarding "Skywalker Saga" collections, including the scores. The full scores. It is really weird that the only two films to have had any sort of isolated score release are Phantom Menace and The Last Jedi. I understand some of the behind-the-scenes reasoning behind it, but considering what a splash the announcement of Last Jedi's isolated score made relative to most soundtrack news, I'm hoping there was some sort of message sent about there being some sort of market for a saga-spanning release of all the music. Or at least, enough of a market to make giving Michael Matessino & Co. a call...

Gonna listen to the soundtrack the second it drops Gonna listen to it again after I'm done listening the first time. Gonna listen to it again one more time after that. I'm of the mind listening to a score before you see the movie isn't a negative, it's an overall positive, because the emotion of the music itself, as music, tends to only be amplified when you recognize it in the film proper. I've never really had a moment in a movie deflated or ruined by recognizing (and emotionally reacting to) a piece of music in a scene. It's only ever been enhanced. The score to a film can't really "spoil" a film for me. Or rather, if the music is good, familiarity with the music will only increase its emotional power when I see it in context. If the music is bad, well... I don't have to really worry about that when it comes to John Williams, do I

I wasn't speaking to the quality of the film (I think it got a bum rap for the most part, it's in the upper tier of the Godzilla filmography easily, and is better than "Shin Godzilla" despite that movie almost uniformly being used to denigrate Edwards' film) but the fact the project itself was troubled and while it was good and profitable enough to catch Kathleen Kennedy's eye, the overall feeling is that he didn't really bring the project in the way anyone involved wanted, hence Gilroy being paid to fix it in post. What I'm saying is that Edwards was obfuscating as to the depth of what Gilroy helped him with, much like he did on Rogue One (see how he's calling what was happening on Rogue One "pickups" when it later came out it was full-blown reshoots, and Gilroy was doing most of it himself). Basically, both of Edwards' big budget forays had to be bailed out by Tony Gilroy at a not-too-small financial expenditure. The reason Kennedy even knew to go get Gilroy to fix Rogue One was due to the precedent of Gilroy's having done that same thing once before. Edwards was PR-finessing the story of how both Rogue One and Godzilla got finished in those interviews, and Gilroy came out later and basically laid it all out in that linked podcast.

I really like this show, and I'm very interested to hear how he breaks this score down. hoping he gets Doug Adams for a guest spot at some point, too.

"A lot has been written about the reshoots that were done on this film, and it’s rumored that Tony Gilroy came in and shot some of the new material himself. What really happened?Tony is a great writer and he had done a few days’ work on Godzilla. We had always planned to do these pickup shoots, and in this day and age when everything has gone digital, you don’t have to be so literal about preproduction, production, and postproduction — the whole thing blurs together." https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/gareth-edwards-on-rogue-one-diversity-reshoots.html The extent of Gilroy's work on Godzilla really only came to the fore later, after he spilled the beans on just how much work he ended up doing on Rogue One. At the time I think it was reported as just script polish (which is how Edwards is describing it in that pre-release interview) but it was more than just rewriting some scenes.

Shortly after it's introduction (maybe 2010-2011) it became known within the industry as a "tax," more or less. Shooting in 3D (the ideal) became abandoned for post-processing it (the norm - it's basically entirely post-processed anymore, almost nobody shoots it natively) because the cost to post-process was cheaper than shooting natively and the ticket bump stayed the same. Hence: "Tax." 3D is going to stick around because if they can tax a percentage of the audience they will, but I believe the market has evened out. In the immediate post-Avatar heyday 3D screenings of big blockbusters outnumbered 2D by something like 3-1? It's much closer to a 50/50 mix now, and anecdotally, my local Regals/AMCs have reversed the 3D ratio entirely: There's almost always twice as many 2D screenings as 3D. They haven't removed the 3D screenings, but they're no longer prioritized. But then again, theater owners have figured out other methods to apply steeper "taxes" to the ticket. IMAX, Atmos, IMAX 3D, D-Box, Luxury Seats, Luxury + Dinner, so on and so forth. I think that unless Cameron can not only crack glasses-free 3D but get theater owners to absorb the cost of installing projectors that can do it on a massive scale, we're not going to see any sort of resurgence or appreciation of 3D (and definitely not HFR, which audiences have pretty thoroughly rejected at every turn) that will help bolster the film at the box-office. For the first time since 1997, he's gonna have to rely on the strength of his story and the quality of his craftsmanship to keep people coming back to the theater. Technological advancements have proceeded to the point where photorealistic depictions of fantastical creatures are more or less just accepted. These characters will NEED to occupy space in the public consciousness in order for the sequels to stick. Avatar was an event. The Avatar sequels need to be a lot more than just that. I'm not saying he's not capable of that, either. Before Avatar and the deep sea took primary control of his fancy, that was almost exactly what he WAS known for: putting very memorable characters smack in the middle of adventure stories that were some of the most technically impressive things you'd seen. He can do it, he's done it before. And he'll have to do it again to make up for whatever 3D novelty aspect helped him the first time around.

Yes it is. Godzilla (2014) Skull Island (2017) King of the Monsters (2019) Godzilla vs Kong (2020) Legendary Pictures owns Pacific Rim as well if they wanted to reboot that (I'm not sure if that's really feasible) they could probably include Jaeger's and such into further sequels. I don't think that'll happen though for multiple reasons. Anyway, aside from both Skull Island and Godzilla sharing a shadowy secret organization dedicated to investigating monsters (Monarch) Skull Island had a post-credits scene that featured Rodan/Mothra/Ghidorah as well as the Godzilla roar. Essentially it was Legendary/WB's "Have you heard of the Avengers Initiative" stinger. Tying Godzilla and Star Wars together: I don't think Gareth Edwards has made anything since Rogue One, and was more or less removed from that picture when Gilroy came on to fix it (as he did with Godzilla). I wonder if he'll come back or if he realizes maybe he should be something other than a director. VFX supervisor, or cinematographer. Aside from Monsters (which was not a good movie at all) none of his adventures in filmmaking have ended well. Although I'd imagine jumping from making a movie for less than six figures to making GODZILLA, and then following that up with STAR WARS would warp you a little, too.