Posted 12 November 2003 - 11:32 PM
"I'd like some background into his relationship with Palpatine. Out of nowhere, he's talking with this big important person. This would be like me suddenly chatting with the Prime Minister of Canada."
Hang on .. I thought you said somebody *inportant* !!! Hyuck hyuck.
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Anyway, why I'm posting here, apart from that lame smart-ass crack, is to reply to another post about REVENGE OF THE JEDI. I'm sure you've all seen the poster, right? That's how far the concept went; everyone knew the title was going to be REVENGE, for like a year or so. The ad guys went as far as to produce and even release posters. I'm sure what happened was some twelve-year-old child, too young and innocent to fear a big insane man, pulled upon the hem of Lucas's mighty garment and whispered "But Santa, don't the Jedi decry Revenge? Or at least, don't they eschew it? I was sure that at the very least they held it in low favour." And then Lucas's eyes were opened (for like, fifteen minutes), and after a swift round of sackings, he settled the matter and worked the official spin.
The OFFICIAL story, from God's own lips, is that the title was a clever ruse. "We had many false titles, to fool the press," Lucas is quoted saying in THE STAR WARS ANNOTATED SCREENPLAYS. "I guess there was a communication error and that one was unknown to the advertising people, and so they made those posters." uh-huhn. I was 14 at the time JEDI came out, and I was following the STAR WARS gossip as closely as anyone else who has a friend working in a comic book store. ***There were no other titles!!!*** REVENGE, lie I said, was the title everyone knew for about a year. And I won't buy that the ad guys were actually printing posters without Lucas's final approval. Even "Hey, what do you think of this one?" in the middle of a meeting about distribution and potential toy and food tie-ins should have caught that problem. *** Add to which: there is no reason to "fool the press" with false titles. The sooner you get the brand name out there, the better for the box office. I would think. And that's why we all knew, for so long ... yadda yadda yadda.
Right up there with the legendary TIME magazine article where Lucas revealed that he had always had, from day one, nine fully articulated story treatments for a series of three trilogies, the REVENGE OF THE JEDI poster "accident" ranks up there with "lies that would not fool a child."
Mike.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).