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The adult in me is going to ask for a bit of context before he allows the child in me to start a tirade about George Lucas.

Is Lucas still nursing a grudge over the one movie that he exercised the least dictatorial control over, thanks to Gary Kurtz and Irvin Kershner - and changed the least in the Special Editions?

(And can we please dispense with the 'Episode Five' gunk?)

It was a bit of a throwaway line. So I don't know if it was 100% sincere. But it was rather pointed.

Lucas also pointed out that he never writes his speeches ahead of time. So it was off the cuff.

I suspect he was trying to be funny and whiffed. Lot of that going around lately.

However much I loved the first trilogy, the prequels were so beyond awful that Lucas has lost all credibility. Calling the best of the six films the worst is just beyond the pale. Crazy deluded man, too much time playing with toys.

First Mel Gibson, then Micheal Richards and now this!

He needs to go to rehab to repair his horrible taste in movies. Make him watch Brokeback Mountain!

Great to know what the megalomaniac thinks.

For my money, ESB is one of the best films ever made, not just for a Star Wars film.

"There have been few recent American movies worth lining up for... this year there is The Empire Strikes Back." -- Pauline Kael (1980)

At least he didn't tout The Ewok Adventure in the same breath.

"First Mel Gibson, then Micheal Richards and now this!"

Now that's funny!

If George Lucas had died in 1984, the world would be a much better place.

^ But you would still be a jackass.

"I suspect he was trying to be funny and whiffed."

I'm frankly amazed anyone can think any different. I have no idea what Lucas actually thinks about ESB but this struck me as even more obvious than Tom's "I'm going to eat the placenta" gag. We already have ample evidence of Lucas' incompetence and lousy sense of humor.

I don't doubt the 'trying to be funny' idea, but it seems like it must have come from some thought in his head buried down.

Empire was extremely trying for Lucas, it's worth remembering that getting the movie made almost bankrupted him and Lucasfilm. Gary Kurtz was a vacillating and indecisive producer, and Kershner, though respected by the actors, had a habit of being painstaking and laborious over every single shot and setup. so the movie ended up insanely over budget and over schedule. Personally i would rank the films as such - Star Wars, Empire, Revenge of the Sith, Jedi, Attack of the Clones and Phantom Menace last. Yet if George Lucas genuinely believes that Empire is the worst of the set, then it's worth remembering that very often a filmmaker's opinion of their own work does not necessarily jibe with that of the critics and the audience. There are other examples. Woody Allen can't stand Manhattan or Annie Hall and thinks The Purple Rose of Cairo is his best work. When Francis Ford Coppola was asked once if he genuinely thought that Godfather Part 3 could stand up with the first two, he responded with a look of puzzlement and replied 'Yeah. Why?'. Spielberg to this day doesn't know how good jaws is. And so on.

Empire was extremely trying for Lucas, it's worth remembering that getting the movie made almost bankrupted him and Lucasfilm. Gary Kurtz was a vacillating and indecisive producer, and Kershner, though respected by the actors, had a habit of being painstaking and laborious over every single shot and setup. so the movie ended up insanely over budget and over schedule. Personally i would rank the films as such - Star Wars, Empire, Revenge of the Sith, Jedi, Attack of the Clones and Phantom Menace last. Yet if George Lucas genuinely believes that Empire is the worst of the set, then it's worth remembering that very often a filmmaker's opinion of their own work does not necessarily jibe with that of the critics and the audience. There are other examples. Woody Allen can't stand Manhattan or Annie Hall and thinks The Purple Rose of Cairo is his best work. When Francis Ford Coppola was asked once if he genuinely thought that Godfather Part 3 could stand up with the first two, he responded with a look of puzzlement and replied 'Yeah. Why?'. Spielberg to this day doesn't know how good Jaws is. And so on.

Yeah, Spielberg hates Jaws because it was such a nightmare to make. He badmouths the mechanical shark every chance he gets.

Y'know, I know it is really cool and very AICN to bash George Lucas of late. But lets not forget, he is largely the reason why most people 40 and under even went into the film industry.

Is that an exaggeration? Probably not. This is a man whose contributions to film, culture and technology will be written about for centuries with regards to his impact on cinema, for better and worse.

People will say the name George Lucas long after the names Quentin who or Alfonso what, have been long forgotten.

I know he is not perfect and much criticism is warranted, but George Lucas has more genuine gift and talent in his little finger then most of the people who will be on stage at the Kodak theatre in two weeks.

Constructive criticism is cool...but lets give GL some props.

Ugh..Lucas' influence is large yes, but clearly for the worst for anyone that actually cares about real movies and people and not overwrought special effects and cartoon characters. The changes in the industry that Star Wars and Jaws brought on have done nothing but harm to most filmmakers bc it created the tentpole mentality. As for the filmmakers Lucas inspired, ugh ugh ugh... Lucas' influence is clear, but for people who love film, its a tragedy. If you love video games, I guess he's a hero. But to many, the dorks took over the asylum...and we miss the inmates...

Ugh..Lucas' influence is large yes, but clearly for the worst for anyone that actually cares about real movies and people and not overwrought special effects and cartoon characters. The changes in the industry that Star Wars and Jaws brought on have done nothing but harm to most filmmakers bc it created the tentpole mentality. As for the filmmakers Lucas inspired, ugh ugh ugh... Lucas' influence is clear, but for people who love film, its a tragedy. If you love video games, I guess he's a hero. But to many, the dorks took over the asylum...and we miss the inmates...

To be fair, anyone with his name on Raiders of the Lost Ark does deserve some respect.

I disagree. Yes, much of what he inspired is crap, but Lucas (and Spielberg) created visions that nobody thought were filmable. They were true visionaries and gave joy to millions. You can't discount that. Film is not just for critics and profs, it is for everyone.

Would you have an innovator like James Cameron without George Lucas?

Would film be able to achieve photo-realistic effects without him?

Yes he has inspired some dreck...but so has everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Michael Moore to John Ford to Frank Capra.

We must allow GL to be defined at least party on his own terms. If he is only defined by his immitators then not even Scorsese is safe.

"To be fair, anyone with his name on Raiders of the Lost Ark does deserve some respect."

Here Here! My favourite film of all time!

Trying to be funny? Lucas was dead serious. I've heard him argue that exact point before when he spoke at a class I had at USC.

He's a very smart, talented, articulate guy, but he has blinders on when it comes to Star Wars. My personal take is that he doesn't have any clue about why any of it worked or didn't. I think that's the main thing that stifled him after Return of the Jedi.

"Would you have an innovator like James Cameron without George Lucas?

Would film be able to achieve photo-realistic effects without him?"

Probably yes to both.

Thanks for your B&W film analysis as usual, Jeff. We appreciate you comin' out.

Every field has its innovators, Jeff. Even Cameron says Star Wars was a direct influence and inspiration to him in creating The Terminator.

For you to not see Lucas' influence does not make you seem enlightened. It makes you seem like a fanboy.

I'm being concise, Nicol, not binary. There's a big difference.

Plus, I would like to point out that I have not even expressed an opinion on the subject of George Lucas's influence, except the above: and neither of those are 'not seeing Lucas's influence'. I'm just stating that yes, digital effects would have eventually reached photorealistic quality with or without Lucas, sooner or later; and James Cameron is a talented enough filmmaker that he probably would have made his mark with or without Star Wars.

Stop assuming you're in a fight with everyone all the time.

Actually, Harlan Ellison and "Demon With A Glass Hand" were far more influential in TERMINATOR.

Anyway, I would say that in the future, Lucas will be considered alongside filmmakers like DeMille and Selznick: popular and innovative mainstream entertainers. But a notch down from the legacy of Spielberg, who will be next to Hitchcock and Coppola as popular mainstream entertainers with stronger individual artistic visions as well.

My view has always been that Lucas is more about how movies are made than he is about the movies themselves, so I don't think he will be remembered as a filmmaker. He'll be remembered primarily for two things: 1) the technological innovations he introduced into the film industry, and especially 2) Star Wars. Sure, he worked in film, but I don't think he's going to be remembered as a guy who made movies. I don't think people think of him that way now, so it's even less likely in the future. That he's turned out to be the most successful independent filmmaker (if you define filmmaker as someone who makes movies) in history is more an accident than anything else.

If you think Lucas' powers have waned after the '80's and the new Star Wars films compare poorly to the first, the best theory may be that a film-maker like Lucas, who emphasises visual, almost silent-movie storytelling in the Star Wars flicks, really does need a good editor. The editor of the original trilogy was his ex-wife Marcia, by all accounts one of the best around, whose timing and deft pacing lent those movies much of their exceitement, and she is not with him (or indeed the business) anymore. For example, forget the teddy-bear hatred and the last 45 minutes of Return of the Jedi still stand up as a tour de force of action/adventure editing. Compare that to the also triple-tiered but sloppily assembled and choppy climax to The Phantom Menace and you'll see what i mean....

Wally, though I appear to be one of the lone fans of the Prequel Trilogy around here, I do agree with your comments regarding the final half hour or so of The Phantom Menace. Lucas followed one storyline at the end of Star Wars, two in Empire, three in Jedi, and thought he could throw another one onto the mix. I don't know if it was the editing so much as it was the overload of having to follow four intercutting subplots (the Space battle, the ground battle, the lightsaber duel, and Padme's attempt to reclaim the palace).

If you look at Attack of the Clones, however, Lucas fell back to cutting between only the massive ground battle and the lightsaber duel, and I'd put to you that the final 40-45 minutes of this film starting at the coliseum are as thrilling as any section of the entire saga.

Despite his usually terrible sense of humor and inability to write consistently decent dialogue, I still think Lucas is a fantastic visualist with a great eye for composition and action directing, and shouldn't be dismissed as a has-been in the filmmaking department. And the dense plotting of the prequels may have come off as too cluttered and boring to some, but I found the intricate machinations of Palpatine largely intriguing, and the rise and fall of the trilogy's hero was certainly in line with Shakespearean tragedy.

I'm one of those people who at least respects Phantom Menace as the movie Lucas really wanted to make. I was put off by all the elements in Attack of the Clones that felt like misguided pandering to the fanboys who hated the first movie-- and yes, I'm talking about the Yoda fight.

If it was me, I would have crammed the events of Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones into a single movie, and split Revenge of the Sith into two movies, ending one with a cliffhanger as Anakin makes his fateful decision to join the dark side.

Better yet, the story of Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones could have been jettisoned altogether, and Revenge of the Sith should have been the story the prequel trilogy.

Obviously those last two ideas of yours and jeff's would be playing right into that fanboy pandering, Eric. Lucas did not want to make it a "cool" story for teenagers or aged geeks desperate to reignite their childhood passions. It was about how an gifted and innocent child can grow to an adult who will choose to go down the darkest path imagineable, due to a combination of having already formed personal relationships in a following that forbids it and the seduction of the darker power's representative.

The hubris that leads to Anakin's downfall is something that could easily be blamed on the Jedi themselves, and his initial motive to protect those close to him was pure. The tragedy is made so much more so from having seen him at such a young age.

And I don't buy your suggestion, Eric, that Yoda was fighting in Clones simply because Lucas was giving the people what they wanted. Obviously Yoda wasn't going to be hobbling on the sidelines with the action that was to follow. You'd do much better by pointing out the Jango Fett character, which was certainly an atonement of sorts to fans for killing off Boba so unceremoniously in Return of the Jedi. However, Lucas did a very interesting thing with the character linked to the development of the clones, and for that I'm willing to overlook the "cool" factor.

The whole Obi-Wan as detective subplot of Clones worked very well for me, and I think the film gets so much shit for the romance scenes that its similarites to Empire are ignored. On a purely entertainment level, I find Clones to be the most enjoyable in the series and the most rewatchable (along with the original film).

I don't know how my idea is 'fanboy pandering' since I was thinking strictly in terms of a more classical narrative cleanness that's missing in the movies. But I don't have children like Lucas does so I don't feel a need to make a movie to rake in their dollars too a la Phantom Menace. I also don't know how one can say that Lucas 'did not wat to make it a "cool" story'...they're all still Star Wars movies. There really is nothing that we learn in the first movie except that Anakin is a talented youngster taken away from his mother and that the Force comes from tiny microbes in your blood. The first of those could be covered in one dialogue scene and the second is never recalled in any other movie.

And I totally agree that Yoda's fights were something for the fans - again, they serve no other narrative purpose except that they're fun to watch.

Please, we are losing the point, which is that GL made these remarks, false, misunderstood, or a lame joke, about the genius who brought us:

The Master of Disguise (2002) (producer)
Mr. Deeds (2002) (producer) (as Sid Ganis)

Big Daddy (1999/I) (producer) (as Sid Ganis)
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999) (producer) (as Sid Ganis)

Here's what I know: Anakin's turn to the dark side in Sith was so sudden and silly that it undermined the whole reason the prequel trilogy was made. He just looked like a sucker.

The content of the first two movies could have been covered in fifteen minutes. The third one was so abbreviated that its characters were forced into completely unbelievable behavior and Lucas was clearly in a rush to tie up loose ends.

Hi George Lucas me and some of my friends would like to make our own Star Wars mini series called Star Wars His War. We would like to start our mini series with out you or some of your creaters of Star Wars to sue us for copy write.

PLEASE PLEASE let us do this for we are determined 12 year olds. Please send us an email at jamescopley1@hotmail.co.uk hope to get your email sone.

Hi George Lucas me and some of my friends would like to make our own Star Wars movie called Star Wars His War, we would like to start this project, but we would like to do it with your primision so you do not sue us for copy write,
PLEASE,PLEASE will you let us start for we are very egger 12 year olds. Can you live a message on jamescopley1@hotmail.co.uk
singed Nev

As important as Star Wars is to the history of film, Lucas' main contribution to the industry is ILM, Skywalker Sound, and his passionate embrace of digital filmmaking.

The shift to digital makes a direct line through Lucas.

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