I'd been waiting years for Episode I, i'd read many of the books that had come out of the success of the original trilogy (some good, most bad to poor) and i'd written a bunch of 'shorts' myself on various topics that could have made decent films. There was SO MUCH fertile ground to use just based on those three original films, so many great stories that could be made, and they had proven it could be done, by the simple fact the original trilogy exists.

I fell asleep for a very short time (maybe 5 mins max, my gf elbowed me to wake me up!)
sometime around the meeting with Amidala. I had been shocked into staying awake all through the Ja Ja stuff by just how incredibly bad it all was, but i guess the shock of it all and how boring some of the scenes were just finished me off. If i had not had company at the film i might have slept right through to the end. It was that bad. Years of waiting and anticipation for Jar Jar and fart jokes? And he was the 'key' figure according to Lucas from the behind the scenes footage? Just wow.

He he! This is my 'hot topic' but also i can perfectly accept other opinions, and no big fight coming from me, just some careful clarification :)

American Graffiti i really liked. It was a fantastic film that worked perfectly, and to be honest if you want to understand american culture in that time period it is one of the required films.

I also personally love THX 1138, it sits right in my 'Logan's Run' dystopian genre favourites.

Who can't enjoy Indiana Jones? And let's not forget Labyrinth or Willow in this man's resume.

Out of those maybe THX 1138 was the most 'only' Lucas of them (in that he was the main driving force behind it with little interference from others), although Marcia did help him improve the dialogue and character aspects.

But when you look at his work up until the end of the original trilogy and before the prequels, it was nearly always as collaborative works, and always with very talented people around him.

Now that is not actually a slight on him, he was able to contribute to some of the best films in this era and really i have nothing but respect for the man without whom Star Wars would not exist at all (even if that started out as an idea for a pulp-sci-fi flash gordon rip off!).

Yes to all of that. I 100% agree. By the time the prequels had to be made, not only was George so much more famous and rich and powerful in cinema, but as you said it was then he surrounded himself with 'yes men'. Just as i posted earlier.

And i'm 100% sure Mike regrets singing JJ's praises! But at that time who else was around that could have done that first New Star Wars? JJ was not on my list at all, but even people like James Cameron have slipped up over time (i would take him over JJ in a heart-beat).

(carried on from above as post too big!)

Some of the behind the scene film from 'The People vs George Lucas' is skin crawling, like when he emerges into a room to declare, "here it is, the script" and you see people jumping up and down and clapping like children while fawning over him. And Rick McCallum is the perfect corporate snake-oil man isn't he, you notice his influence in all those behind the scenes conversations. He covers his arse and spouts rubbish as per his 'type' usually do.

And there is some terrible irony in all of this for George and Star Wars (the real original Star Wars).

Here you have this obviously incredibly talented young director that wants to shake things up and break the mold a little and also one that strives for his own control over his works.

So just like Luke set out on his 'journey of discovery' as a slightly naive young man, so too did Lucas. Lucas like Luke wanted to do it 'right' (the Light side) as well, to avoid the traps of the Dark side and produce works both good and pure.

On that early journey he fell in love (and obviously loved Marcia very much, part of his naivety of youth perhaps?) and when that failed it changed him. I think it was very much his first 'dark side' moment and sadly went on to define him (and his work) more than it should have.

Meanwhile Star Wars became this huge success, the biggest in recent history (back in the 70's and 80's) and all that had it's own 'negative' effect on Lucas the man (as at the back of his mind he knew this success was down to others). All the wealth streaming in, all those early desires to be 'his own man' and not have others 'interfering' in his work. Well now he was in a position to make that happen, his success and wealth created this for him. But he had changed so much from that young idealist. He was now a more broken and twisted figure, his fall to the darkside more obvious. If he had a robotic hand, this would have been the time to look at it and ponder the danger he was in.

He struggled with the scripts for the prequels, over and over, and when he finally declared them finished, he must have known deep down their weakness, but i guess the weight of expectation needed to be dealt with, and he was beyond desperate to show the world that Star Wars (originals) being so good was not only because of the other people heavily involved in them, he was still the main man when it came to Star Wars. Ego and success, just like the darkside, can be powerful and difficult to step away from.

All the yes-men he had surrounded himself with during this stage of his career just compounded the problem of tone-deaf scripts and unlikable characters. The scripts were written by George Lucas, it will be good and we will follow what he wants, because this is George Lucas. All in-grained into the process of film production, any concerned voices silently moved away into out of the way jobs or joblessness.

That's my take on how the prequels happened. Lucas himself, after the originals, had fallen to the Darkside (well the version of that we have in this reality!).

And Disney, well not much good comes out of Disney (except Moana!), but they did understand that Star Wars can only need to mean waving lots of light sabers around and plenty of fan service.

All the other complex corporation politics junk is just part of the base wider issue on the fact no one at Disney actually cares about Star Wars beyond it being a vehicle to make money. And that is appropriate because that is all i feel it had come to mean for Lucas himself. And that is all it clearly is now, nothing of the soul and character of the original films is left anymore. Star Wars is well and truly more dead than the Dodo.

How Lucas (with the prequels) and now Disney can so effectively artistically destroy such a great franchise is beyond me. If you asked me 20 years ago if the future of Star Wars would look like it now does, i would have laughed in your face as if you were a crazy person high on drugs! How can Star Wars scripts and films be this bad and carry on making money so they keep getting worse? It's one of the great mysteries of the universe to me now ;)

Wet streets cause rain.

Look at it this way: If you judge Kennedy's work purely from the perspective of using Star Wars as her own personal christmas turkey, stuffing the thing full of as much feminitzm and idpol grandstanding as possible - coherence and storytelling be damned - then her tenure as a producer was a resounding success. NuStar Wars is nothing if not stuffed chock-full of current-year identity politics. To the point where their lead character starts out as female Wesley Crusher who knows better than Han how to repair his spaceship (despite never having set foot in a spaceship before, lol) and ends up as literal Space Jesus who can heal the sick and dying. Even to the point where an established character -a suave, smooth-talkin' black guy - is retconned into being a weirdo who puts his dick into walking tin cans. Because progress!

It's not that she didn't have plans for these films, it's just that she had different priorities. Because she sure stuck to her guns when it came to shoving wokeness down the audience's throat.

I personally have no issue with 'strong' female leads in films, but honestly when you can't spot a terrible script and have no idea how to allow talented people to make something decent out of tripe (or double down on the illogical and broken because of some 'idealistic crusade' or some such), then you should be doing a different job imho.

Disney Star Wars are like car-wrecks as much as the prequels, just for completely different (but sometimes related) reasons. 4 Billion dollars down the drain, except it isn't is it? Because as RLM's 'Nerd Crew' 100% accurately shows, you simply need to put 'Star Wars' on stuff and people will buy it. ALL the Disney Star Wars films have made shed tons of cash.

"Hey, look here is some 'Star Wars' guys shit in a can. Just $50 for you!" - wave some lightsabers around and lots of people will queue to buy it.

Disney understands that part of Star Wars only too well. And to be frank if it wasn't Kennedy throwing out the shit to see what sticks to the wall, it would just be some other suit from Disney. Star wars would not suddenly be great again, as i don't think the corporate culture at Disney has people that could 'understand' Star Wars (beyond the cash cow aspect) and bring it's potential and creative and artistic strengths back?

Maybe one of the spin off series (The Mandalorian perhaps?) can strike gold and then Disney will have a blue-print to follow and make some decent Star Wars stuff from it's 4 billion plus so far invested?

And no one in their right mind does. For instance, has there ever been anyone in history who went "Gah, I really hate those Alien films because the chick gets to be the hero!"? No one who isn't a complete dimwit would say that. But there's a world of difference between having a strong female lead and having an empty vessel that only serves the purpose to cram down the audience's throats just how awesome said empty vessel is.

Instead of going through the pain of giving her a name, they should have gone meta and just called her "Badass Chick". And every time she did something badass (which is all the time), they'd have John Boyega turn to her and say "Dayum, Badass Chick! You so badass!" Instead, they just kinda expected the audience would react the same way, when most of them probably reacted with pained groans at the silliness of it all.

Star Wars kinda reminds me of the Gothic series now :>!

Disneys Star Wars is unfortunately a disjointed mess. All three movies are. I also think all three movies are pretty bland and I don't like them to the same degree. For instance, the first movie was basically a retelling of the very first classic Star Wars. If it wasn't blatantly obvious, didn't Starkiller Base remind anybody about it being like a Death Star 2.0 for instance. The Last Jedi was The Last Jedi and the third movie seems to be inspired by Anime? At any case I'm glad its over.

All three movies missed their gravitas so much. For instance, back during The Force Awakens, in that one scene when Starkiller destroyed that one Ecumonopolis planet, nobody knows what that planet was. We don't realy know the people, we don't know its importance within the universe, we don't have any further reference material within all the movies itself. The planet itself maybe had 15 seconds of screentime at most. Thats IMHO the largest problem within the new movies. New scenes are shown but nobody cares because the directors seldom establish anything.

They should've reinvented Star Wars instead, but kept the basic storytelling that made the classic Star Wars movies. The only "new" movie I've liked was Rogue One, at least that one was quite the Rollercoaster and it reminded me a lot about A New Hope and Return of the Jedi without directly copying it and losing part of its soul.

EDIT: Hopefully my post doesn't read like an argument. If people enjoyed the new Star Wars movies thats good stuff as well. Disney needs to gain some soul, though. From what I can tell they're close to becoming the Electronic Arts of movies, so to speak. Don't get me wrong, it seems that modern Electronic Arts is about to understand the nature of "being actually not bad" by releasing games such as Jedi Fallen Order, lets just hope that Disney gets its "mojo" back as well!

I have no problem with strong female characters actually I quite like them: Ahsoka, Ventress just to cite a few.
But here the point is totally different: these new characters are yes strong but surrounded by pathetic, good-to-nothing, clumsy imbeciles (males).
That inevitably hurts the female characters themselves.

Did anyone notice that we needed a woman to kill Palpatine?

On the subject of the creative process that led to ceh creation of the OT, well, it is hard to disagree on that.

Are you claiming Leia Organa isn't a strong female character?

If you read up on the Lucasfilm Story Group and the mission of some of its most "vocal" members, I think you will see things differently.

I have worked as a Screenwriter, Story Editor, and a Director of Development (I only share this so you can understand the context of my experiences on this subject... not particularly to under-cut your opinion and certainly not to demean you) and can assure you there are "weird" conversations like these all the time in development... but over time they have changed from one pole to the opposite. The over-correction is crazy. I'd share but not in posts on the forum.

As to Star Wars and politics...

... Star Wars has always been about absolutes -- good versus evil. When the NAACP complained that Darth Vader was black (and voiced by James Earl Jones), Lucas said that James had a great voice... and as for Darth Vader being black... Lucas said Star Wars was white hats vs black hats (not White people vs Black people). That is the political depth of Star Wars. Basic.

(and that situation was the impetus for Lucas creating Lando BTW)

Why?

Because everyone and anyone can understand good vs evil. There is no politics to it... nothing to remove the story from the mythic and lower it to the mundane modern. There is nothing wrong with dealing with modern issues in art, but if the DNA of the work isn't built on that premise, it just creates a schism in your audience and dates your work.

TBH this is the major difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. Both could easily be classified as space fantsies (yes, most will argue it's science fiction, but Star Trek uses a lot of fantastical elements as well)... but Star Wars is a mythic fantasy while Star Trek is a social fantasy (most would say "true" science fiction); Star Trek was created to ask sociological and political questions. Star Wars was created to be a myhtic fantasy story about overcoming evil.

Agree 100%

Much like Bioware's games that took place far in the past, if Disney would have set their movies far in the future, there would have been no issues certainly with their treatment of the messaging in the OT and the respect (or lack thereof) of the OT characters. They lived long, long ago... and now only in myth...

But...

... Disney didn't trust their new Star Wars movies making tons of money without milking the old cast and trying to shoe-horn Rey and co. into the Skywalker storyline (which really did feel final in Return of the Jedi).

It's just so strange that Disney would actively resent the OT characters so much and undermine their own Star Wars efforts... well... strange until you see Lucas still owns part of the old characters and Kennedy had themes she desperately wanted front-and-center.

Just sad.

Star Wars and Raiders are the reason I became a filmmaker.

I could claim that, yes.

Everyone and anyone thinks they understand good vs evil. Fixed that for you.

Personally, Star Wars with its mystical mumbo jumbo can work with most politically "left" options (unless you are my type of hardcore left which has more in common with Sith worldview). I've found that Star Worse That Fucking Abomination (only Disney SW film I watched) suffers from low cinematographic skill overall, it felt more like b-movie version of Marvel movie than SW. Politics have nothing to do with it.

thanx for your kind words towards my project, but look for a second series soon as well, it should be quite good, and it is a throwback type thing as well.

I work for "Project Huckleberry". you can google that if you are curious as to what that is, little more i can say, legal agreements and all.

Please feel free to explain your claim. I'd love to hear it.

Weird reply to what I said.

I'm not part of your culture war dude. There are some eyeroll moments in TLJ sure, but there are eyeroll moments in other things from the opposite end too. I don't participate in any of it, I don't get butthurt and take offense at such things. TLJ is a bad movie because of its dialog writing, plot and tonal inconsistencies with the two around it and it actively denying what fans wanted with a grin on its face. It has nothing to do with how "feminist" you think it is.