Abandoned Magic: pt1
Here's that mythical Biggs footage we all grew up hearing rumors about...
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Salem's Lot 1979 and Salem's Lot 2024
Happy Halloween everybody! Julie's working late and the boy doesn't have school tomorrow so he's heading to one of those crazy f...
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(2007) * First of all let me say that as far as I could tell there are absolutely no dead teenagers in this entire film. Every year just ...
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What, no comments from anyone??? This is HUGE nerd stuff here.
Maybe the hugest.
According to the Dale Pollack Lucas biography it was Coppola who got out a red pen and helped Lucas re-write the opening crawl.
I've always suspected that the Biggs footage is better conceptually than it is actually watching it. I think I'm correct, now that I've looked at it. It's a great idea but you just don't need it, and it's visually not so great (except for the woman grabbing the binocs and stepping into the foreground as the camera tilts up) and the Biggs actor is pretty bad.
All this new stuff (like the other Biggs scene, now in ANH:SE) indicates the level of mid-Seventies nerdliness inside Lucas' mind as he wrote. I love all the "Hey buddy" colloquialisms interspersed with Isaac Asimov-level sociological detail.
"and the Biggs actor is pretty bad." Yeah no kidding! You're right about all the "Hey, buddy" stuff, it sounds so cheesy.
"Coppola who got out a red pen and helped Lucas re-write the opening crawl." Lucas could've used him for the Episode I opening crawl; to this day I can't follow it.
Is that new Williams music?
There should be a drinking game where you take a drink every time Biggs touches Luke in some way. I swear that guy can't keep his hands off him! Luke: "Uh, Biggs, how about working on that whole 'personal space' issue?"
Luke: "So what's with the cape?"
Anthony Lane in the New Yorker got off a great joke about the TPH opening crawl. He talks about how great the original is and then quotes the new one: "The taxation of outlying star systems is in dispute." Then Lane says, "Presumably there are those in the audience whose hearts leap like deer at this sentence" but goes on to say that most of them are fiduciary accountants and therefore it doesn't count.
The reason you can't follow the Episode I crawl is that, unlike in the original trilogy, Lucas uses words like "Federation," "Queen," "Senate," "Senator," "Ambassador" in ways that do not correspond to the actual, terrestrial meaning of those words. (The trade "Federation" has a "Senator"? The "Queen" was "elected"? etc.)
This, combined with the standard Star Wars "ridiculously high numbers everywhere" phenomenon ("hundreds" of star systems in dispute; the Republic has stood for "a thousand years," the Jedi for "a thousand generations," etc.) render the politics pretty incomprehensible.
(The problem is largely gone by "Sith," where the red pen belongs, not to Francis Coppola, but to Tom Stoppard.)
Jordan, your post is informative but also hilarious - I just laughed out loud and now my secretary thinks I'm nuts.
"The taxation of outlying star systems is in dispute." God, no kidding, what a way to kill a mood, huh? Why not just start off saying, "Obi Wan is patiently waiting for his name to be called at the DMV..."
It's like my Star Wars Storybook has come to life!
I found myself more interested in the backround characters and the interior of the bar than L & B's chat. The one moment of visual poetry is the one Jordan mentioned; that wistful look on the woman's face made me think "I could've been 'that other chick in Star Wars' these past 30 years."
Gotta love the red pen. I once read an early version of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that showed a bunch of extra lines that Ezra Pound red-penned. I couldn't believe how clunky it was.
Octo, is that sound used when the Treadmill droid malfunctions the same sound used when R5D4 similarly malfunctions? Come to think about it, those droids would be dangerous to have around if they malfunctioned in that manner. Imagine if your vacuum cleaner ever did that, there'd be lawsuits!
Ezra Pound = one of the greatest Red Pens of all time if not THE greatest.
Other great red pens (and their beneficiaries):
Friedrich Engels (Karl Marx)
Gordon Lish (Raymond Carver)
Max Perkins (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe)
That is the same sound effect of R5-D4 blowing his stack, at least it sounded the same to me. The soundtrack for that is from the radio drama, right? They must've just boosted the effect.
The real question is, if their droids were constantly doing that, why send R5-D4 back?
Maybe Treadmill is completely destroyed but Luke still says "Okay, well, then you stay there" the way that someone in a crowded room will say "Okay, goodbye" into a phone after the other person has already hung up.
It sounds like there needs to be a serious droid recall in the Star Wars universe.
"the way that someone in a crowded room will say "Okay, goodbye" into a phone after the other person has already hung up." God you're on fire today, Jordan!
is biggs supposed to be a good pilot? maybe it's the fact that he got iced in the death star attack while going "wh..wait...my..." not the most heroic last words ever uttered. or maybe it's just his stupid moustache although i'm trying really hard to remember that moustaches were "cool" at the time.
but watching this scene, i kept thinking of that guy that the protagonist in an undercover cop/mafia movie meets who says, "stick with me, noob. i pull tons of weight around here. i'm the guy to know." and then winds up getting disdainfully smacked across the mouth by the don's third in command ten minutes after you meet him.
"shhhh, luke! what i'm involved with is really important and i can't have someone as clearly not-in-the-know as you spoil it for me."
"but watching this scene, i kept thinking of that guy that the protagonist in an undercover cop/mafia movie meets who says, "stick with me, noob. i pull tons of weight around here. i'm the guy to know." and then winds up getting disdainfully smacked across the mouth by the don's third in command ten minutes after you meet him."
You guys are killing me today!
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