George "Fatbeard" Lucas is being called out by his former Producer for basically shitting the bed on the Return of The Jedi. If anyone has seen the ending you know what he is being called out for. I didn't expect a buncha badasses to be partying with teddy bears either but that's what happened.
“We had an outline [for RotJ] and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”
The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.
Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.
Kurtz ideas were great, he even came up with the "Empire Strikes Back" title for the second film. I think we can all agree that it was better than Lucas' idea of "Are You Gonna Eat That?" title.
Looking at the original ideas of Star Wars before more creative people came in to help out makes me wonder what the original Star Wars would have looked like. I'm guessing something like the prequels. Holy shit, have you seen those? If I wanted to see ships taking off and landing id pull a lawn chair up to an airport runway. No, wait, that would probably be fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment