Lucas And The Ultimate Bad Guy
Warning: imagecreatefromstring() [function.imagecreatefromstring]: Passed data is not in 'WBMP' format in /home/sammyray/public_html/therecshow/wp-content/plugins/Desktop/nuzzaciWidthWatcher.php on line 55
Warning: imagecreatefromstring() [function.imagecreatefromstring]: Couldn't create GD Image Stream out of Data in /home/sammyray/public_html/therecshow/wp-content/plugins/Desktop/nuzzaciWidthWatcher.php on line 55
Warning: imagejpeg(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/sammyray/public_html/therecshow/wp-content/plugins/Desktop/nuzzaciWidthWatcher.php on line 56
A few new pics have emerged from the new Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (whew!) film, as well as some interesting - and disturbing - news about its creation by the bearded overloard of production. No, not Spielberg … we mean Jar Jar’s Daddy himself, Mr. George Lucas.
A story in Vanity Fair to which Cinematical linked had a few fairly boring pictures besides that awesome one of Cate Blanchett as a Russian spy named Agent Spalko. It also contained some information about the ongoing creative process between Spielberg and Lucas as the film enters its second rough cut.
First the good news:
Spielberg says, “I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it,” he says. “I usually do about five cuts as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.”
The interview, however, is much more revealing about the mind whirring dispassionately inside the cranium of George Lucas. On one hand, Lucas comes off as a serious student of film as he dissects the fundamental building blocks of a film hero:
When he starts talking about Indiana Jones, a character he acknowledges is not dissimilar to Han Solo, his enthusiasm rises, breaking through his natural reserve. “It’s a classic movie archetype,” he says. “Clark Gable played that role forever, the same role, which is the freelance cynic who eventually comes around, whether he’s a newspaper reporter or a pirate. Humphrey Bogart would play it with a little bit more of an edge. Harrison plays that part really well and can play it with a certain amount of humor, which makes it really charming. And the idea originally for both Han Solo and Indiana Jones is he’s in over his head all the time and kind of treading water. In Solo, he’s got a lot more bravado and he’s actually better at what he does. He can actually handle it. Indiana Jones gets in over his head and he can’t handle it. It’s only by sheer, last-second skill, or luck, or whatever, that he actually gets himself out of it. You can’t create a character like that without knowing that someone like Harrison can have the right, befuddled, oh-my-God-I’m-gonna-die look. And you’re right there with him. He’s Everyman. He’s us. ‘That’s exactly what I would look like if I were in that situation.’ And it’s an honest look. It’s not contrived. A lot of those guys now try to copy that, the better-looking movie-star types who try to do it. In the end, Harrison is a movie star because he’s a character actor. He is like Clark Gable, who was also a character actor, and Humphrey Bogart, who was a character actor. Those people were not Adonis, superhero guys. But that’s why they’re so endearing. That’s why everybody loves them. That’s why they’re so much fun to watch on-screen, because they’re vulnerable.”
However, he is much less creative and collaborative when talking about the “MacGuffin” used to drive each story in the Indiana Jones series. Here he talks a little about a MacGuffin:
The term, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object or goal that kicks the story into action and drives it to the third act. Hitchcock held that the less specific the MacGuffin the better. In his 1959 suspense classic, North by Northwest, the men chasing Cary Grant are after microfilm containing “government secrets”—that’s all the audience learns about why the film’s villains cause the hero so much trouble—and Hitchcock considered that to be a perfect MacGuffin, because it was so wonderfully vague. While Lucas agrees with his predecessor on the importance of the MacGuffin, his conception of the device differs significantly from Hitchcock’s. Rather than seeing it as a gimmick with the function of getting things rolling, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen.
Here Lucas describes his views on the MacGuffins used in the series:
“I’m the one that has to come up with the story, and the MacGuffin, the supernatural object that everyone’s going after … ” Lucas’s voice trails off. He is seated in a favorite chair, its cushions lumpy and dented. “The Ark of the Covenant was perfect. The Shankara Stones were way too esoteric. The Holy Grail was sort of feeble—but, at the same time, we put the father in there to cover for it. I mean, the whole reason it became a dad movie was because I was scared to hell that there wasn’t enough power behind the Holy Grail to carry a movie. So we kept pushing to have it function on some level—and to make it function for a father and a son. To make it that kind of a movie was the big risk and the big challenge, but also the thing that pulled it out of the fire. So, at the end of it, I was like, No more of these, baby. We’re done. I can’t think of anything else. We barely got by on the last one!
“At that point I had kind of retired,” he continues. “I was raising my kids, I was running my companies. The last thing I wanted to do was go off and do another one of these things. And it stayed there for quite a while, until I was doing Young Indiana Jones, and I was actually with Harrison, shooting a little piece for it, and I was up in Wyoming, where he lives, and I came up with this MacGuffin, which was sitting there right in front of me, and I said, ‘Well, why didn’t I ever see this before?’?”
And what is this MacGuffin that Lucas invented to propel this eagerly-anticipated new film? While somewhat vague, he hints that this film will be quite a bit different from previous ones:
And then (spoiler warning) Lucas gets a little more (spoiler alert) specific: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will apparently nudge our hero away from his usual milieu of spooky archaeology and into the realm of (spoiler Code Red) science fiction. “What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit,” Lucas says. “So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing.”
That’s right, kids. We’re going to see aliens.
While I think the whole alien angle is a smart one - look at the top grossing films of all time for a verification on that idea - the fact that Lucas is manufacturing this from a product-design vantage point rather than a creative one disturbs me. Why does every fucking thing this guy creates need to be market researched and computer modeled?
Every time I hear Lucas talk or read something about his latest endeavor, I actually struggle to remember the inventive film student of the seventies who reinvented the entire moviemaking experience with a trifecta of brilliant productions that had little to do with manufactured product: THX-1138, American Graffitti, and Star Wars. In fact, most industry observers thought all three films were bad moves and doomed to failure.
Instead of returning to the world of small art films as he has long promised, Lucas has instead continued to churn out machine-welded product to further fill the overstuffed coffers at Skywalker Ranch.
Indiana Jones might still be safe from Lucas’ machinations thanks to the still-potent creative powers of Spielberg …. but only just. The only true MacGuffin with which Lucas should concern himself is his own career and legacy.
Comments
Leave a Reply
