Star Wars: The Force Awakens

[doug maverick]

hamil speaks....the nerds must listen!!

Mark Hamill weighs in on the future of 'Star Wars' -- EXCLUSIVE
by Josh Rottenberg
Tags: Disney, George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Star Wars

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Mark-Hamill.jpg

Image Credit: Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images

Tuesday’s news that George Lucas is giving the keys to the Star Wars universe to The Walt Disney Company in a $4.05 billion mega-deal surprised fans around the world, including some famous filmmakers who grew up on the franchise. It even caught a key figure in that universe — Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill — by surprise. Reached by EW, Hamill — who currently does voice work on no fewer than four animated series and will co-star in the upcoming crime thriller Sushi Girl — shared a few thoughts on where Star Wars and its fabled creator go from here now that Lucas is handing over the reins (and the light sabers and blasters and all the rest) to new custodians and the next generation of filmmakers.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What did you make of the big news yesterday?
MARK HAMILL: Oh my gosh, what a shock that was! I had no idea that George was going to sell to Disney until I read it online like everybody else. He did tell us last summer about wanting to go on and do [Episodes] VII, VIII, and IX, and that [newly appointed Lucasfilm president] Kathleen Kennedy would be doing them. He seems to be in a really good place. He’s really happy. And that’s nice because I know that when we were making the movies, he was not a jolly guy on set. [Laughs] I always felt badly for him because he agonizes over details, and I’m sure after imagining it in his head for so many years, to see it realized — he’d look up and just hang his head and groan. Harrison [Ford], Carrie [Fisher], and I were always trying to cheer him up and joke him out of his doom and gloom. I missed his call yesterday, but I spoke to him maybe three weeks ago. But until we know more, it’s hard to make any comment other than congratulations to George.

So you met with George this past summer and he told you about his plans to make another trilogy?
Yeah, last August, he asked Carrie and I to have lunch with him and we did. I thought he was going to talk about either his retirement or the Star Wars TV series that I’ve heard about — which I don’t think we were going to be involved in anyway, because that takes place between the prequels and the ones we were in and, if Luke were in them, he’d be anywhere from a toddler to a teenager so they’d get an age-appropriate actor — or the 3-D releases. So when he said, “We decided we’re going to do Episodes VII, VIII, and IX,” I was just gobsmacked. “What? Are you nuts?!” [Laughs] I can see both sides of it. Because in a way, there was a beginning, a middle, and an end and we all lived happily ever after and that’s the way it should be — and it’s great that people have fond memories, if they do have fond memories. But on the other hand, there’s this ravenous desire on the part of the true believers to have more and more and more material. It’s one of those things: people either just don’t care for it or are passionate about it. I guess that defines what cult movies are all about. We’ll see. I’m anxious to know what’s going on, but the main story [yesterday] was the sale to Disney. I have mixed feelings about that, but they haven’t done badly by Marvel and the Muppets and Pixar. It’s one of those big decisions that at first seems unusual but then the more you look at it, the more it makes sense.

When you had lunch with George, did he get into any details with you about where the story would go in the next three films, or whether you would have a part in them?
Well, no, he was just talking about writers and the fact that he wouldn’t be directing. I guess he wanted us to know before everybody else knew. He said, “Now you can’t tell anybody!” [Laughs] Even now I’m nervous about saying anything. I just don’t know!

[GeneChing]

At least he's donating a lot of it. BTW, speaking of Sushi Girl.

Oct 31 2012 10:03 AM EDT 57,647
George Lucas Says Disney's 'Star Wars' Could Last 100 Years
Lucas says talks are already underway with writers for the upcoming 2015 seventh film, with two more planned after that.
By Gil Kaufman


At this point, we don't know much about what the seventh "Star Wars"
 film will be about,
 but we certainly have some ideas about what we do and don't
 want to see.

Along with fans, we were thrown into a frenzy on Tuesday when it was announced that Disney had purchased George Lucas' Lucasfilm for more than $4 billion. The deal will not only bring Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Han and the gang into the Mouse house, but it will also serve to re-boot one of the most popular and highest-grossing film franchises of all time.

After five-decade career in filmmaking, in a YouTube video explaining the deal, Lucas said he's been contemplating retirement for a while and now seemed like the right time to hand over the keys to the Jedi kingdom.

"Obviously I've been talking about retiring for several years now," he said. "I wanted to get into sort of another stage of life where I'm not in the film business anymore, where I don't have to run a corporation. It occurred to me one day that the perfect person to run the company was [Lucasfilm co-chair] Kathy [Kennedy]. It's just such a perfect fit, and I felt that I really wanted to put the company somewhere in a larger entity that would protect it. Disney is a huge corporation; they have all kinds of capabilities and facilities. There's a lot of strength to be gained by this."

Pointing to the success Disney has had with Marvel and Pixar, Kennedy said the family-friendly company with its legendary theme parks and merchandising power was the logical choice for Lucasfilm.

The good news for fans is that they will not only get an episode seven, but, in fact, an entire new trilogy. "I always said I wasn't going to do any more, and that's true, I'm not going to do any more," said Lucas, who will not write or direct the upcoming films, but whose iconic imprint will be all over them. "But that doesn't mean I'm unwilling to turn it over to Kathy [Kennedy] to do more. I have story treatments of 7, 8 and 9 and a bunch of other movies, and obviously, we have hundreds of books and comics and everything you could possibly imagine. So I sort of moved that treasure trove of stories and various things to Kathy, and I have complete confidence that she's gonna take them and make great movies."

Kennedy revealed that meetings have already begun with prospective writers for the new movies. "I'm doing this so that the films will have a longer life," Lucas said. "So more fans and people can enjoy them in the future. It's a very big universe I've created and there's a lot of stories sitting in there."

In a separate video announcing the deal, Disney CEO Bob Iger had nothing but praise for Lucas' vision for the "Star Wars" universe, which he noted now includes 17,000 characters inhabiting several thousand planets spanning 20,000 years. "George Lucas is a true visionary and an innovative, epic storyteller who has defined modern filmmaking with unforgettable characters and amazing stories," said Iger.

The pact will also spin off new TV shows, games and theme park attractions and Iger said the company fully understands the responsibility that comes with stewardship of such iconic, beloved characters. In the same video, Lucas said he's been a fan of Disney all his life and that the deal will allow him to move into more philanthropic efforts as well as work on more experimental films that don't fit into the Lucasfilm universe.

"It was a perfect match of two companies that are constructed similarly," Lucas said. "It will give me a chance to go off and explore my own interests [and] at the same time feel completely confident that Disney will take good care of the franchise that I've built."

The best news of all? "We have a large group of ideas and characters and books and all kinds of things," Lucas said. "We could go on making 'Star Wars' for the next 100 years."

[doug maverick]

he donated all of it... like he really needs the money. lol..

[GeneChing]

Brad Bird For Star Wars Director - Give It To Brad Bird

Who here remembers the Xmas special?

[doug maverick]

matthew vaughn is up for the directors chair. hope he takes it.

[MightyB]

Brad Bird For Star Wars Director - Give It To Brad Bird

Who here remembers the Xmas special?

The 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special!!! You mean the solid hour of Wookie talk with no subtitles of awesomeness in celebration of Life Day - complete with a song sung by Princess Leia! You mean that awesome Holiday Special?

It's actually tolerable if you watch it with this: http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/sta...oliday-special

[GeneChing]

That holiday special is great on it's own. Give me a case of beer and a few of my buddies and we could come up with far more amusing comments. But that special is so outrageously awful that it doesn't really need comments. It's funnier just on its own.

Meanwhile, back OT:

Today at 3:44 PM
Star Wars: Episode VII May Have Found Its Writer
By Claude Brodesser-Akner

Informed sources tell Vulture that Star Wars: Episode VII has found a leading candidate to write the film’s screenplay: Michael Arndt, the Pixar favorite who was nominated for an Oscar for Toy Story 3, won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, and wrote The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which is currently shooting. Insiders confirm that Arndt has written a 40- to 50-page treatment for the film and is likely to be at least one of the writers when the Disney/Lucasfilm project begins shooting in 2014.

The merger between George Lucas’s brainchild and Disney, announced October 30, caught the town by surprise. And talent agents were similarly astonished to learn that Arndt had been at work on the treatment long before the deal was announced, catching them flat-footed and cutting off any chance they’d have to proffer their own many eager candidates for the coveted job.

Sources also tell Vulture that the studio’s brass want to bring back the three central characters of the original Star Wars: a much older Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo. No deals are in place with any of the original actors, though our source did say it had high ambitions to sign up Mark Hamill, and EW recently reported that Harrison Ford was open to the idea of returning. We're told that Arndt's 40-something page treatment will soon be crossing the desks of top directors, including Brad Bird, Steven Spielberg (Lucasfilm’s co-chair, Kathleen Kennedy's former producing partner), and J.J. Abrams. Whether they’d be interested is unknown (Star Wars is a lot of baggage for an established director), but Disney wants to make sure they’ve at least tried the biggest names.

A representative for Arndt declined to comment, referring all calls to Kennedy, who did not return a call seeking comment at deadline. A Lucasfilm spokeswoman declined to comment, saying, "We have no news to report at this time."

The choice of Arndt to pen a treatment makes perfect sense, given both his prestige as a screenwriter and his close relationship with Disney’s equally secretive Pixar — he’s the screenwriter of the cheekily titled Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind for Up director Pete Docter, currently in preproduction — but there’s one more reason still that Arndt would be so appealing to Disney and Lucasfilm: He’s a Star Wars expert.

Since winning the Oscar for Sunshine, Arndt has lectured extensively on the art of storytelling at numerous writers’ retreats, like the Hawaii Writers Conference in Maui and the Austin Film Festival, always featuring a lengthy and detailed explanation of why the original Star Wars’ ending is so creatively satisfying.

At these talks, Arndt always tells attendees that Star Wars’ enduring appeal has to do with resolving its protagonists goals’ nearly simultaneously, at the climax of the movie. In the comments section of a discussion about a Star Wars talk Arndt gave at the Austin Film Festival in 2010, one attendee of the seminar notes, "Arndt stated that if a writer could resolve the story's arcs (internal, external, philosophical) immediately after the Moment of Despair at the climax, he or she would deliver the Insanely Great Ending and put the audience in a euphoric state. The faster it could happen, the better. By [Arndt’s] reckoning, George Lucas hit those three marks at the climax of Star Wars within a space of 22 seconds."

Indeed, in the third act of Star Wars, as Arndt explained to his young screenwriting Padawans at the 2009 Hawaii Writers Conference, its central characters' main goals all are met on pages 89 through 91 of the original Lucas script: At the crescendo of Star Wars, a spectral Obi Wan urges, “Use the Force, Luke,” and he does, thus reaching his inner goal (fighting self-doubt to become a hero). Han Solo reappears (meeting the philosophical goal of overcoming selfishness with altruism) to shoot down Darth Vader, which allows Luke to use the Force to mentally guide his shot and blow up the Death Star (outer goal and inner goals simultaneously met).

So while it remains to be seen whether Arndt will forge ahead with an entire script for Episode VII, clearly, as Vader might say, “The Force is strong with this one.”

[MightyB]

That holiday special is great on it's own. Give me a case of beer and a few of my buddies and we could come up with far more amusing comments. But that special is so outrageously awful that it doesn't really need comments. It's funnier just on its own.

I'll have to burn you a dub of my copy. My friends and I used to challenge each other to sit though it - the record was 11 minutes.

[@PLUGO]

From the folks at the AV Club.

As it must until the day it is officially handed to someone, the list of directors to helm the next Star Wars film must be whittled down from all the possibilities in the galaxy, as each day some famous filmmaker will back away from the awesome responsibility of assuming the franchise and being prematurely hated by its fans with thermal-detonator intensity. Already Zack Snyder took himself out of the running he was never actually in, and today it's Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino who are preemptively backing away from the job no one has officially offered them yet. Everything is proceeding as we have foreseen.

Spielberg—whose name was on that mythical "short list" from yesterday, for what it's worth—told Access Hollywood, "No! No! It's not my genre. It's my best friend George's genre," vehemently refusing any science-fiction stories where aliens are already an accepted reality, thus negating the need to stare at them in awe. And Entertainment Weekly, no doubt presaging weeks of stories like this, randomly asked Tarantino about Star Wars, because he was there, to which Tarantino replied, "I could so care less." Despite this meaning he therefore cares some, and is thus duty-bound by the rules of grammatical pedantry to do it, Tarantino continued, "No, sorry. Especially if Disney’s going to do it. I’m not interested in the Simon West version of Star Wars," causing Con Air director Simon West to get a little unexplained headache. ("What the hell was that?" Simon West wondered. "I felt a disturbance, as though a million manic voices suddenly started talking **** about me for no reason, then were suddenly silenced.")

Anyway, suspend all hopes for this ever becoming a reality, and prepare to hear some version of these sorts of refusals from directors every day, until someone finally takes it. Please, someone ask Werner Herzog.

[doug maverick]

i hate when people make up stories from small things, just to get buzz...tarrintino..would have NEVER done a star wars film..ever..doesnt matter who...he didnt say he wasnt interested in directing. he said he wasnt interested in seeing it. Matthew vaughn is the front runner to direct the next star wars.

[GeneChing]

True that, but a Tarantino directed Star Wars...just imagine what he could do with Mace Windu.

Everyone dissing the notion of Disney Star Wars as some sort of sell out is so out of the loop. Star Wars sold out long ago. Come on now....Lego Star Wars? Seriously? That being said, it's still Star Wars, so I'll probably see the new film when it comes out.

I'll have to burn you a dub of my copy. My friends and I used to challenge each other to sit though it - the record was 11 minutes.

Um, thanks, but no need. I made it all the way through with my buddies several years ago. There was a lot of beer. I got a friend who has it on VHS.

[Fa Xing]

True that, but a Tarantino directed Star Wars...just imagine what he could do with Mace Windu.

Everyone dissing the notion of Disney Star Wars as some sort of sell out is so out of the loop. Star Wars sold out long ago. Come on now....Lego Star Wars? Seriously? That being said, it's still Star Wars, so I'll probably see the new film when it comes out.

Um, thanks, but no need. I made it all the way through with my buddies several years ago. There was a lot of beer. I got a friend who has it on VHS.

Gene's right, and no matter how many of us ***** and complain about it, in the end we'll all go and see it.

Afterwards, we'll ***** and complain so more because we're nerds and that's what we do.

[GeneChing]

Clever title...too bad as Abrams could've rocked it.

J.J. Abrams: 'Star Wars' won't be my next enterprise
by Geoff Boucher

Back in 1977, Star Wars was the ideal North Star influence for a future filmmaker named J.J. Abrams. But now, 35 years later, he says the Jedi universe isn’t the right direction for his career.

Disney’s new acquired Lucasfilm is moving fast on the now-public plan to have a new Star Wars film in theaters in 2015 to launch a new trilogy. Sources say Lucasfilm sent a treatment last week to three filmmakers — Abrams and Oscar winners Brad Bird and Steven Spielberg. But Abrams told EW this morning that as much as he loves the Jedi universe, it won’t be his next destination.

“I have some original stuff I am working on next,” said Abrams, who is now in post-production on Star Trek Into Darkness, the follow-up to his 2009 hit Star Trek. Then of course there’s Revolution the latest addition to his considerable television pursuits, which have included Lost, Fringe, and Alias.

Abrams also told EW that the 1977 tale of mystic knights, a kidnapped princess, an evil empire and eccentric robots was a life-changing adventure for a youngster who was soon to be obsessed with film and film-making.

“As a kid I was always a fan of special effects,” Abrams said. “Watching movies I was constantly trying to figure out how they did it, whatever the effect was. Star Wars was the first movie that blew my mind in that way; it didn’t matter how they did any of it because it was all so overwhelmingly and entirely great. It was funny and romantic and scary and compelling and the visual effects just served the characters and story. It galvanized for me; not for what was exciting about how movies were made, but rather for what movies were capable of.”

Fans of Starfleet and of the Jedi have long viewed the brands as rivals of a sort and Abrams was clearly on the side of the Force as a kid. His disinterest in Star Trek as fan has served him well, he has said on a number of occasions, because he wasn’t distressed when it came time to set aside certain aspects of the mythology for the reboot. That memory has a flip side — he knows he wouldn’t have that same detached decisiveness if he was directing, say, Harrison Ford as in a return to the Han Solo role.

Abrams said back in 2009 that one of his great challenges was helping the Enterprise catch up to the Death Star in cinema’s Space Race.

“As a kid, Star Wars was much more my thing than Star Trek was,” told Hero Complex back in 2009. “If you look at the last three Star Wars films and what technology allowed them to do, they covered so much terrain in terms of design, locations, characters, aliens, ships — so much of the spectacle has been done and it seems like every aspect has been covered, whether it’s geography or design of culture or weather system or character or ship type. Everything has been tapped in those movies. The challenge of doing Star Trek — despite the fact that it existed before Star Wars — is that we are clearly in the shadow of what George Lucas has done.”

That rules out two of three known candidates. On Thursday night, at the premiere of his new film Lincoln, Spielberg said the galaxy-spanning Jedi saga created by his buddy George Lucas just isn’t a good fit for him. “It’s not my genre,” the director explained. “It’s my best friend George’s genre.”

Spielberg has made three films with alien life — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds — but all of those films were set on contemporary Earth and in a grounded reality. That said, the future visions presented in Minority Report and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence certainly present environments that aren’t far removed from prequel trilogy settings like Coruscant and Kamino.

With Spielberg and Abrams out of the picture, it’s now all eyes on Bird, now, who has been traveling abroad in recent days while doing location scouting for his upcoming project, 1952, a sci-fi project for Disney (co-written by EW senior writer Jeff Jensen and Lost scribe Damon Lindelof). As for the new Star Wars story, the hiring of Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) was announced on Friday.

Afterwards, we'll ***** and complain so more because we're nerds and that's what we do.

Dude, speak for yourself. We're CMA practitioners. These are nerds.

[Fa Xing]

Clever title...too bad as Abrams could've rocked it.



Dude, speak for yourself. We're CMA practitioners. These are nerds.

Are you sure?

[GeneChing]

Are you sure?

I just discovered femtroopers. Dayum. Why the heck have I been wasting my time with Star Wars Legos?








Star Wars is bigger than any of us.