One of the first things I remember is my parents taking me to see Star Wars at the Georgetown Drive-in. I’m still as big a Star Wars nerd as I ever was, and The Empire Strikes Back is probably in my top five of all time. Between those original Star Wars movies and the Indiana Jones flicks (which he produced), I owe a massive chunk of my childhood happiness to Mr. George Lucas.
These days I tend to give him a pretty hard time, because I thought the Star Wars prequel trilogy was flat, soulless and mostly ridiculous. (Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi was about the only thing worth the price of admission for me.) And then there’s his arrogance about what he thinks makes a good story, even though it seems to me that he’s tragically out of touch with the sense of wonder that once made his work so great.
Frank Darabont, whose Indiana Jones IV script (that director Steven Spielberg loved and wanted to make) got vetoed by Lucas, talks a little about how stubborn Lucas has gotten in this interview with MTV.
Moving on.
Lucas talked to a Fox News entertainment reporter on Tuesday night, and the resulting article makes about as much sense as you’d expect from a conversation between the creator of Jar Jar Binks and the “news” network that operates with the journalistic integrity of Snidely Whiplash.
In the article, Lucas says this of Spider-Man 3: “It’s silly. It’s a silly movie. There just isn’t much there. Once you take it all apart, there’s not much story, is there?”
While I agree that Spider-Man 3 is mostly garbage, I think such a comment is spectacularly hilarious (and more than a little hypocritical) coming from Lucas, who wrote and directed the Star Wars prequels with the general pizazz of a soggy old french fry. (I never thought it would be Lucas himself who’d introduce fart jokes into that long ago galaxy far, far away, but hey, whatever floats your boat.)
Later, the writer of the piece says, “Lucas tells me he will make two more live-action films based in the Star Wars era.”
Lucas adds, “But they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as characters. They will be other people of that milieu.”
Lucas also reportedly — though there’s no exact quote — told Fox’s genius reporter that the movies will “probably be an hour long each” and that they might debut on television.
An hour long? Does that even count as a movie?
I’m sensing a disturbance in the Force, but there it is, kids.
Lucas does lots of smiling and winking in the “interview” and also mentions that Sean Connery’s character is in the Indy IV script, even though Connery has yet to sign on. This worries me, because I’m afraid Lucas will try to replace him with a computerized Connery or some kind of Jones Jones Binks if he can’t get the real thing.
Though I’ll always be grateful to Lucas for creating the characters and movies that sparked my imagination as a kid, I can’t help but think he’s maybe lost his marbles.