{"id":19109,"date":"2013-02-20T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19109"},"modified":"2013-02-20T13:30:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T18:30:00","slug":"rare-praise-for-obscure-movie-director-of-the-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/rare-praise-for-obscure-movie-director-of-the-1970s\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare praise for obscure movie director of the 1970’s"},"content":{"rendered":"

He apparently goes by the same name as one of the most reviled movie figures<\/a> of the last 20 years:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine now, but the original Star Wars<\/em> movie was more than just a star-spanning, kid-pleasing action flick. It was also a rule-breaking, expectation-thwarting one-film rebel alliance.<\/p>\n

For instance, remember how the movie starts with a blare of trumpets and the title, followed the text crawl, followed by the actual movie? Notice how there aren\u2019t three minutes of \u201cDoopdy Doo Pictures and Skippity-Skip Entertainment Present \u2026 A Furfty Fur\/Yonker Boo Production \u2026 A Glarpton Spitcake Film \u2026 Elwee Groodicle \u2026 Robbles Pancake \u2026 Spankster Carmont \u2026 and Bliss Underham \u2026 Casting by Arhop Maser, C.S.A \u2026 Music by Hambone Jury \u2026 Cheese Table Relocation by Hollywood Dairy Movement L.L.C.\u201d and so forth? Lucas was fined $250,000 for that. Specifically, he was fined by the Director\u2019s Guild for not having an opening director credit. That\u2019s right, he was fined for not giving himself credit before the film even starts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Or take the fact that there are two<\/em> main characters who not only don\u2019t speak English, but whose growlings and bleepings aren\u2019t even translated into subtitles.<\/p>\n

Oh, and one more thing. It\u2019s science fiction. These days you can\u2019t swing a large popcorn without hitting a science-fiction blockbuster right in the hyperdrive, but at the time there hadn\u2019t been a really successful science fiction movie in nearly a decade. Just by setting his film in a galaxy far, far away \u2014 not to mention long, long ago \u2014 Lucas was defying the conventional movie-making wisdom of the time.<\/p>\n

The point is that while Star Wars<\/em> is the spaceship that launched a thousand clich\u00e9s, it achieved its success by being something profoundly original. So here\u2019s my unsolicited advice to Abrams, and moreover to the hundreds of entertainment bureaucrats who are going to want to have their meddling incorporated into the upcoming Star Wars VII: Action of the Noun<\/em>: Don\u2019t give into the Dark Side. Don\u2019t incorporate the following clich\u00e9s that have increasingly infested sequels for the past 35 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He apparently goes by the same name as one of the most reviled movie figures of the last 20 years: It\u2019s hard to imagine now, but the original Star Wars movie was more than just a star-spanning, kid-pleasing action flick. It was also a rule-breaking, expectation-thwarting one-film rebel alliance. For instance, remember how the movie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28],"tags":[263,122,193],"class_list":["post-19109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-movies","tag-starwars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Yd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19110,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19109\/revisions\/19110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}