From One Minute Movies to STAR WARS
His first film was one minute long, GEORGE LUCAS -- the man who gave us STAR WARS and INDIANA JONES -- told us at the PaleyFest tribute to him at the DGA last night. This was part of the two-week long celebration of the best and most innovative of new and vintage TV shows the Museum of Television and Radio puts on every year.
I love the PaleyFest's tribute evenings. Normally, I try to go to as many of the drama offerings as I can. But this year, time and work constraints are such that I can only manage the two weekend events. What's so great about the Paley Festival is that the MTR usually brings the entire cast and creative team together with us, the audience who watches the shows. And this audience is a great mixture, many of us are their colleagues in the industry and the rest are from the general public who are often able to watch their shows even more faithfully than we are. Hence, the questions reflect this mixture. You don’t get all ‘what was the budget?’ and ‘will you read my script?’ like often happens at a pure industry event. And you don’t get the often silly questions that can pop up among the good ones like you do at conventions.
This time there was a special treat on the hot seat, iconic George Lucas, who came dressed casually in black jacket, plaid shirt, and jeans.
The excerpt from the museum's archives that they showed for this occasion was Saturday Night Live's skit on the 20th anniversary of the Star Wars screen-test auditions. Not a big watcher of SNL myself, this was a first viewing for me. It was hilarious so I’m sure the segment went over big when it aired. Kevin Spacey pretended to be Christopher Walken auditioning for Han Solo. He also pretended to be Walter Matthau auditioning for Obi Wan and Jack Lemmon auditioning for Chewbacca. Kevin Spacey is an incredible actor no matter what role he’s in, and this is no exception.
Darrell Hammond pretended to be Richard Dreyfus screen-testing for C3PO. Norm MacDonald strutted onto the scene as Burt Reynolds for Darth Vader and Ana Gasteyer came out as Barbra Streisand screen-testing for Leia. That bun hairdo was not at all flattering to her.
My favorite line was delivered by Spacey’s Lemmon caricature for the Chewbacca screen test. Holding the furry headpiece, he groused, “You had me come all the way from Beverly Hills to play a fucking space ape?”
Since I didn’t know all the SNL actors, I had to look up a couple online. In perusing the net, I discovered that this screen-test skit can be seen online, in several places.
After this presentation, the Museum’s president, Pat Mitchell, introduced George Lucas to a standing ovation. The weird thing was that when she came out, she didn’t introduce herself. I had to ask an usher who she was. Of course, I suppose if I had looked in the program book, I would have noticed the resemblance to the president’s photo, but I started out life as a scientist – the last thing we do is read the instruction manual.
The best news that came out of this introduction was that there was a fourth INDIANA JONES movie on its way. And I could swear I heard them say that Sean Connery would be in it. If he is, then I’ll be waiting with bated breath for it. I only really cared for the father and son movie and the first adventure. I was always more taken with STAR WARS – or I should really qualify that, I was taken with the first three SW movies he made, not the last three. In fact, I’ve only bought the DVDs for the first three movies and while I’m sure my lack of purchase didn’t make much of a dent in his bottom line, he might want to take note. To that end, we also heard that he is planning both an animated and a live action SW series.
Then came the biggest surprise of the evening – in retrospect, it should have been obvious, but it wasn’t. Pat explained that since they were the Museum of Television and Radio, they were going to discuss George’s 1992-1993 series, “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” which had won 12 Emmy awards for technical innovation. Instead of watching one full episode, we were being treated to a montage of Indy’s encounters with historical figures -- excerpts from 11 of 44 episodes.
Through the eyes of Indy, we got to know such notables as TH Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Prince Faisal, Sidney Becket, Giacomo Puccini, George White, George Gershwin, and Lenin. In that sense, this series reminds me of the brilliant 1977 TV series, “Meeting of Minds,” done by the late Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, except that instead of sitting around the table talking, we’re taken to exotic locations with lots of special effects, where the hero Indy watches events unfold. Obviously on a far greater budget and technical advancements than Allen had at his fingertips back in 1977. But not necessarily as riveting.
Describing his series as “fanciful encounters with historical figures,” Lucas explained Indy “could not be a key player” for that would affect history. He could become friends with the historical figures and have conversations, but ultimately he had to be the proverbial “fly on the wall” when the historically significant events happened. Still, a history buff himself (reading things like the Landmark books of history), Lucas took pride in making the historical encounters as accurate as possible.
My favorite excerpt was the one on the Mexican revolution. Indy tries to explain to a peasant who has had his chickens taken by the army for food that the army is there to help him, to free him, to make his life better. But all the peasant can see is that the soldiers stole his chickens, as every army before them have done. The more Indy tries to defend the army he’s traveling with, the less the peasant buys it, saying, “They all steal your chickens. Only the name of the man who steals your chickens changes.”
Of special note was his segment on Lenin and the poetry of his speech: “Peace for our soldiers. Bread for our workers. Land for our peasants.” Even that little bit gives you a sense of Lenin.
In order for the series to fill in the blanks for film Indy’s background, Lucas chose to represent two time periods in young Indiana’s life -- 10 years old and the 16-20 years. In doing so, he also saw the potential of these adventures providing a useful tool for teaching history in schools. Towards that goal, he’s planning to put the series out on DVD where he’ll combine two episodes together for 90-minute special and then add documentary commentaries about the real historical people portrayed in the episodes. Lucas feels that kids would be more likely to remember important historical people if they can ‘meet’ them.
Lucas spent a fair amount of time telling us about writing and producing “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” series, which he shot in 16mm. Interestingly, Paramount begged him not to shoot in 16mm, reminding him that it had never been successfully done before. However, Lucas admits to being stubborn when he wants to do something a certain way. Nevertheless, Paramount was worried enough to get everybody who knew Lucas to call him and beg him not to work in 16mm. Nothing and nobody, however, changed Lucas’s mind, for he understood that eventually, computer technology would be sophisticated enough to clean up the 16mm and to blow it up larger. He admits, though, that he’s now spending more money on enhancing and cleaning up the original 16mm film than he originally did on producing the entire series.
Why the desire to go what he called ‘low budget Roger Corman filmmaking?’ 16mm film is cheaper than 35, so the tradeoff is that he got 13 shooting days rather than the 9 he would have had with 35. That is a huge tradeoff.
He used other techniques to keep costs down. He could travel with a small permanent crew because he hired locals in whatever country he was in. He used stock shots from movies and experimented with digital shooting. “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” boasts 100,000 special effects using digital technology that even ILM couldn’t do at the time. But Lucas felt that since he was working on a smaller canvas, he needed less for the smaller screen. He even had matt paintings painted electronically rather than on glass.
But the innovative way of producing this series actually started in the Writers Room, where he had all scripts done before he started any shooting. First, he laid out the stories for the various historical characters whose lives he wanted to visit. Then he had his seven writers sit together in and office and he pitched the stories to them. He let his writers ‘trash on them,’ telling him what was wrong with them. Then, they got down to business, hammering out one story treatment a day for 15 days. When all the treatments were done, he told each writer to choose which two the writer wanted to write. The writers then went off and wrote for two months. After two months, they read each other’s work and came together to ‘trash each other.’
By doing all the scripts first, he was able to do TV like he would a feature, that is, shoot the entire series as one unit. Hence, he was able to shoot things when they were financially feasible rather than when he had to. It also helped that actors wanted to do it and were willing to do it as a labor of love, working for scale.
ABC gave them whatever leeway they wanted. He felt that the network didn’t even read the scripts. Which was probably true – they probably just wanted to be in business with him. But what it meant for him was that he “only had to deal with Standards and Practices and most of the time, we ran over them.”
Unfortunately, it was not shown in a good time slot – it alternated with Monday Night Football on Monday nights. He was fortunate, though, that Bob Iger and ABC let them continue, even though the ratings were not good. He even expanded that to say that he’s always been fortunate to have people who loved his work enough to let him go for it. From the beginnings with Alan Ladd to Bob Iger.
Having said that, Lucas believes that Paramount will make money off the repackaged episodes for DVD. They may not make money like THE INCREDIBLES did for Paramount, but he’s hoping they will be “evergreen” for the studio – meaning, “go on and on.”
The most important lesson he learned from this was that he loved TV more than film. However, I think he realized that in the audience were many people who worked in the industry like me, who would be very skeptical of an answer like that, so he qualified it: he loved TV under the condition that he could do TV with no interference. That was an answer we could more understand. And all of us hope to one day be in that lofty position.
Lucas went on to talk about the enormous stress of doing movies -- that only 10% of produced movies ever break even and only 1% make money. For those odds, you are “staking everything on it – 3 years of your life. Whereas in television, if one show doesn’t work, you go on to the next one – it’s a week later.” He also feels that TV is still malleable enough to do interesting things, now even more so with cable.
Asked what goes through his mind when watching Star Wars, his answer was, “It was a lot of work.” But he plans to bring it to TV in the form of The Clone Wars. He’s already tested 5-minute segments on the Cartoon Network and plans to do them in 3-D to make the animation more like movies.
Recognizing that there’s no money for TV animation, he plans to do it his way, even if it’s “breaking the rules.” He plans to make 100 episodes first, then try to make a deal with someone who wants to show them. It will have the smart-ass humor everyone loves, but he realized that for episodics, he doesn’t need to do the Skywalker story. A lot was going on during Clone Wars besides the Skywalker story, he said, and offered as an example an episode with only storm troopers in it.
When asked to give advice to a budding young director, he offered, “Persistence makes you a director if you have a picture in your mind and then work like hell to get that picture done.” He went on to say, “I’m very stubborn. And determined.” He finishes the projects he starts, even though the Indy movie took 15 years and RED TALES 18 years. He also revealed that he “can’t work on 16 different things at once.”
He went on to elaborate that if he was directing, then that’s all he can do – that one project – because a director is constantly busy. But as an executive producer, he can do many different things – for an EP works with scripts, writers, and actors. In fact, the job is a lot of reading of scripts and writing. “And lots of meetings.” But the trade-off is that an executive producer can work more regular hours, like 8am-6pm, rather than 4am to midnight.
Still, his favorite part of production is editing. He started out in the business as an editor, although in school, he started out as anthropology major. He didn’t watch even movies until he went to film school. He remarked that he “went to movies for other reasons.” We all laughed at that, since we’ve all gone to movies for those reasons at some time in our lives.
Asked then who inspired him, Lucas replied “The underground films in San Francisco where I’m from.” At school, he really liked at Kurisaki, Kubrick, Fellini, and Ford.
Asked about Joseph Campbell, Lucas admitted that he had read a lot of Joseph Campbell and attended many of his lectures. The best thing about Joseph Campbell, he claimed, is the underground tapes, adding that Campbell’s lectures are much better than his books.
He went on to explain that Bill Moyer is a friend who knew of his interest in Campbell. Moyer suggested they do a series of talks with Joseph Campbell. So every time Joe Campbell would come to town, Lucas would call Bill Moyer who would fly out for a chat. Later, the two of them pieced the talks together into a show.
This time there was a special treat on the hot seat, iconic George Lucas, who came dressed casually in black jacket, plaid shirt, and jeans.
The excerpt from the museum's archives that they showed for this occasion was Saturday Night Live's skit on the 20th anniversary of the Star Wars screen-test auditions. Not a big watcher of SNL myself, this was a first viewing for me. It was hilarious so I’m sure the segment went over big when it aired. Kevin Spacey pretended to be Christopher Walken auditioning for Han Solo. He also pretended to be Walter Matthau auditioning for Obi Wan and Jack Lemmon auditioning for Chewbacca. Kevin Spacey is an incredible actor no matter what role he’s in, and this is no exception.
Darrell Hammond pretended to be Richard Dreyfus screen-testing for C3PO. Norm MacDonald strutted onto the scene as Burt Reynolds for Darth Vader and Ana Gasteyer came out as Barbra Streisand screen-testing for Leia. That bun hairdo was not at all flattering to her.
My favorite line was delivered by Spacey’s Lemmon caricature for the Chewbacca screen test. Holding the furry headpiece, he groused, “You had me come all the way from Beverly Hills to play a fucking space ape?”
Since I didn’t know all the SNL actors, I had to look up a couple online. In perusing the net, I discovered that this screen-test skit can be seen online, in several places.
After this presentation, the Museum’s president, Pat Mitchell, introduced George Lucas to a standing ovation. The weird thing was that when she came out, she didn’t introduce herself. I had to ask an usher who she was. Of course, I suppose if I had looked in the program book, I would have noticed the resemblance to the president’s photo, but I started out life as a scientist – the last thing we do is read the instruction manual.
The best news that came out of this introduction was that there was a fourth INDIANA JONES movie on its way. And I could swear I heard them say that Sean Connery would be in it. If he is, then I’ll be waiting with bated breath for it. I only really cared for the father and son movie and the first adventure. I was always more taken with STAR WARS – or I should really qualify that, I was taken with the first three SW movies he made, not the last three. In fact, I’ve only bought the DVDs for the first three movies and while I’m sure my lack of purchase didn’t make much of a dent in his bottom line, he might want to take note. To that end, we also heard that he is planning both an animated and a live action SW series.
Then came the biggest surprise of the evening – in retrospect, it should have been obvious, but it wasn’t. Pat explained that since they were the Museum of Television and Radio, they were going to discuss George’s 1992-1993 series, “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” which had won 12 Emmy awards for technical innovation. Instead of watching one full episode, we were being treated to a montage of Indy’s encounters with historical figures -- excerpts from 11 of 44 episodes.
Through the eyes of Indy, we got to know such notables as TH Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Prince Faisal, Sidney Becket, Giacomo Puccini, George White, George Gershwin, and Lenin. In that sense, this series reminds me of the brilliant 1977 TV series, “Meeting of Minds,” done by the late Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, except that instead of sitting around the table talking, we’re taken to exotic locations with lots of special effects, where the hero Indy watches events unfold. Obviously on a far greater budget and technical advancements than Allen had at his fingertips back in 1977. But not necessarily as riveting.
Describing his series as “fanciful encounters with historical figures,” Lucas explained Indy “could not be a key player” for that would affect history. He could become friends with the historical figures and have conversations, but ultimately he had to be the proverbial “fly on the wall” when the historically significant events happened. Still, a history buff himself (reading things like the Landmark books of history), Lucas took pride in making the historical encounters as accurate as possible.
My favorite excerpt was the one on the Mexican revolution. Indy tries to explain to a peasant who has had his chickens taken by the army for food that the army is there to help him, to free him, to make his life better. But all the peasant can see is that the soldiers stole his chickens, as every army before them have done. The more Indy tries to defend the army he’s traveling with, the less the peasant buys it, saying, “They all steal your chickens. Only the name of the man who steals your chickens changes.”
Of special note was his segment on Lenin and the poetry of his speech: “Peace for our soldiers. Bread for our workers. Land for our peasants.” Even that little bit gives you a sense of Lenin.
In order for the series to fill in the blanks for film Indy’s background, Lucas chose to represent two time periods in young Indiana’s life -- 10 years old and the 16-20 years. In doing so, he also saw the potential of these adventures providing a useful tool for teaching history in schools. Towards that goal, he’s planning to put the series out on DVD where he’ll combine two episodes together for 90-minute special and then add documentary commentaries about the real historical people portrayed in the episodes. Lucas feels that kids would be more likely to remember important historical people if they can ‘meet’ them.
Lucas spent a fair amount of time telling us about writing and producing “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” series, which he shot in 16mm. Interestingly, Paramount begged him not to shoot in 16mm, reminding him that it had never been successfully done before. However, Lucas admits to being stubborn when he wants to do something a certain way. Nevertheless, Paramount was worried enough to get everybody who knew Lucas to call him and beg him not to work in 16mm. Nothing and nobody, however, changed Lucas’s mind, for he understood that eventually, computer technology would be sophisticated enough to clean up the 16mm and to blow it up larger. He admits, though, that he’s now spending more money on enhancing and cleaning up the original 16mm film than he originally did on producing the entire series.
Why the desire to go what he called ‘low budget Roger Corman filmmaking?’ 16mm film is cheaper than 35, so the tradeoff is that he got 13 shooting days rather than the 9 he would have had with 35. That is a huge tradeoff.
He used other techniques to keep costs down. He could travel with a small permanent crew because he hired locals in whatever country he was in. He used stock shots from movies and experimented with digital shooting. “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” boasts 100,000 special effects using digital technology that even ILM couldn’t do at the time. But Lucas felt that since he was working on a smaller canvas, he needed less for the smaller screen. He even had matt paintings painted electronically rather than on glass.
But the innovative way of producing this series actually started in the Writers Room, where he had all scripts done before he started any shooting. First, he laid out the stories for the various historical characters whose lives he wanted to visit. Then he had his seven writers sit together in and office and he pitched the stories to them. He let his writers ‘trash on them,’ telling him what was wrong with them. Then, they got down to business, hammering out one story treatment a day for 15 days. When all the treatments were done, he told each writer to choose which two the writer wanted to write. The writers then went off and wrote for two months. After two months, they read each other’s work and came together to ‘trash each other.’
By doing all the scripts first, he was able to do TV like he would a feature, that is, shoot the entire series as one unit. Hence, he was able to shoot things when they were financially feasible rather than when he had to. It also helped that actors wanted to do it and were willing to do it as a labor of love, working for scale.
ABC gave them whatever leeway they wanted. He felt that the network didn’t even read the scripts. Which was probably true – they probably just wanted to be in business with him. But what it meant for him was that he “only had to deal with Standards and Practices and most of the time, we ran over them.”
Unfortunately, it was not shown in a good time slot – it alternated with Monday Night Football on Monday nights. He was fortunate, though, that Bob Iger and ABC let them continue, even though the ratings were not good. He even expanded that to say that he’s always been fortunate to have people who loved his work enough to let him go for it. From the beginnings with Alan Ladd to Bob Iger.
Having said that, Lucas believes that Paramount will make money off the repackaged episodes for DVD. They may not make money like THE INCREDIBLES did for Paramount, but he’s hoping they will be “evergreen” for the studio – meaning, “go on and on.”
The most important lesson he learned from this was that he loved TV more than film. However, I think he realized that in the audience were many people who worked in the industry like me, who would be very skeptical of an answer like that, so he qualified it: he loved TV under the condition that he could do TV with no interference. That was an answer we could more understand. And all of us hope to one day be in that lofty position.
Lucas went on to talk about the enormous stress of doing movies -- that only 10% of produced movies ever break even and only 1% make money. For those odds, you are “staking everything on it – 3 years of your life. Whereas in television, if one show doesn’t work, you go on to the next one – it’s a week later.” He also feels that TV is still malleable enough to do interesting things, now even more so with cable.
Asked what goes through his mind when watching Star Wars, his answer was, “It was a lot of work.” But he plans to bring it to TV in the form of The Clone Wars. He’s already tested 5-minute segments on the Cartoon Network and plans to do them in 3-D to make the animation more like movies.
Recognizing that there’s no money for TV animation, he plans to do it his way, even if it’s “breaking the rules.” He plans to make 100 episodes first, then try to make a deal with someone who wants to show them. It will have the smart-ass humor everyone loves, but he realized that for episodics, he doesn’t need to do the Skywalker story. A lot was going on during Clone Wars besides the Skywalker story, he said, and offered as an example an episode with only storm troopers in it.
When asked to give advice to a budding young director, he offered, “Persistence makes you a director if you have a picture in your mind and then work like hell to get that picture done.” He went on to say, “I’m very stubborn. And determined.” He finishes the projects he starts, even though the Indy movie took 15 years and RED TALES 18 years. He also revealed that he “can’t work on 16 different things at once.”
He went on to elaborate that if he was directing, then that’s all he can do – that one project – because a director is constantly busy. But as an executive producer, he can do many different things – for an EP works with scripts, writers, and actors. In fact, the job is a lot of reading of scripts and writing. “And lots of meetings.” But the trade-off is that an executive producer can work more regular hours, like 8am-6pm, rather than 4am to midnight.
Still, his favorite part of production is editing. He started out in the business as an editor, although in school, he started out as anthropology major. He didn’t watch even movies until he went to film school. He remarked that he “went to movies for other reasons.” We all laughed at that, since we’ve all gone to movies for those reasons at some time in our lives.
Asked then who inspired him, Lucas replied “The underground films in San Francisco where I’m from.” At school, he really liked at Kurisaki, Kubrick, Fellini, and Ford.
Asked about Joseph Campbell, Lucas admitted that he had read a lot of Joseph Campbell and attended many of his lectures. The best thing about Joseph Campbell, he claimed, is the underground tapes, adding that Campbell’s lectures are much better than his books.
He went on to explain that Bill Moyer is a friend who knew of his interest in Campbell. Moyer suggested they do a series of talks with Joseph Campbell. So every time Joe Campbell would come to town, Lucas would call Bill Moyer who would fly out for a chat. Later, the two of them pieced the talks together into a show.
In his final words, Lucas said that ultimately talent is the measure. He felt he's been successful because he broke the cardinal rule of filmmaking, which is “never put your own money in it.” But he likes making movies more than he likes making money. So he never cared if he lost it. Studios have to make money. His first film was one minute long and he didn’t care because he was making a movie. In the end, he said, he’s the same as a storyteller going from town to town to get a meal – the tap dancer who hopes to get somebody to throw nickels into the hat. With a smile, he reminded us that entertaining is the second oldest profession in the world.
For more of what Lucas discussed at this PaleyFest event, see my article in "Fireside Chats from Hollywood" at TVGuide.com at http://community.tvguide.com/forum.jspa?userID=700039129&type=blog
Labels: directing, George Lucas, Indiana Jones, Paley Festival, Star Wars
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